Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins

As predicted by Darwin, bipedal posture and locomotion are key distinguishing features of the earliest known hominins. Hominin axial skeletons show many derived adaptations for bipedalism, including an elongated lumbar region, both in the number of vertebrae and their lengths, as well as a marked posterior concavity of wedged lumbar vertebrae, known as a lordosis. The lordosis stabilizes the upper body over the lower limbs in bipeds by positioning the trunk's centre of mass (COM) above the hips. However, bipedalism poses a unique challenge to pregnant females because the changing body shape and the extra mass associated with pregnancy shift the trunk's COM anterior to the hips. Here we show that human females have evolved a derived curvature and reinforcement of the lumbar vertebrae to compensate for this bipedal obstetric load. Similarly dimorphic morphologies in fossil vertebrae of Australopithecus suggest that this adaptation to fetal load preceded the evolution of Homo.     

Further evidence for small-bodied hominins from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia

Homo floresiensis was recovered from Late Pleistocene deposits on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia, but has the stature, limb proportions and endocranial volume of African Pliocene Australopithecus. The holotype of the species (LB1), excavated in 2003 from Liang Bua, consisted of a partial skeleton minus the arms. Here we describe additional H. floresiensis remains excavated from the cave in 2004. These include arm bones belonging to the holotype skeleton, a second adult mandible, and postcranial material from other individuals. We can now reconstruct the body proportions of H. floresiensis with some certainty. The finds further demonstrate that LB1 is not just an aberrant or pathological individual, but is representative of a long-term population that was present during the interval 95-74 to 12 thousand years ago. The excavation also yielded more evidence for the depositional history of the cave and for the behavioural capabilities of H. floresiensis, including the butchery of Stegodon and use of fire.     

语境与翻译

“语境”即语言所处的环境，是人们理解和解释话语意义的依据。翻译中对上下文及更广泛的语言环境所确定的语境意义的研究是绝对不可忽视的，本文从狭义和广义两个角度探讨了语境困境在翻译中的作用，认为语境研究是正确翻译的基础。     

The evolutionary origin of flatfish asymmetry

All adult flatfishes (Pleuronectiformes), including the gastronomically familiar plaice, sole, turbot and halibut, have highly asymmetrical skulls, with both eyes placed on one side of the head. This arrangement, one of the most extraordinary anatomical specializations among vertebrates, arises through migration of one eye during late larval development. Although the transformation of symmetrical larvae into asymmetrical juveniles is well documented, the evolutionary origins of flatfish asymmetry are uncertain because there are no transitional forms linking flatfishes with their symmetrical relatives. The supposed inviability of such intermediates gave pleuronectiforms a prominent role in evolutionary debates, leading to attacks on natural selection and arguments for saltatory change. Here I show that Amphistium and the new genus Heteronectes, both extinct spiny-finned fishes from the Eocene epoch of Europe, are the most primitive pleuronectiforms known. The orbital region of the skull in both taxa is strongly asymmetrical, as in living flatfishes, but these genera retain many primitive characters unknown in extant forms. Most remarkably, orbital migration was incomplete in Amphistium and Heteronectes, with eyes remaining on opposite sides of the head in post-metamorphic individuals. This condition is intermediate between that in living pleuronectiforms and the arrangement found in other fishes. Amphistium and Heteronectes indicate that the evolution of the profound cranial asymmetry of extant flatfishes was gradual in nature.     

The evolutionary origin of complex features

A long-standing challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it can explain the origin of complex organismal features. We examined this issue using digital organisms--computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve. Populations of digital organisms often evolved the ability to perform complex logic functions requiring the coordinated execution of many genomic instructions. Complex functions evolved by building on simpler functions that had evolved earlier, provided that these were also selectively favoured. However, no particular intermediate stage was essential for evolving complex functions. The first genotypes able to perform complex functions differed from their non-performing parents by only one or two mutations, but differed from the ancestor by many mutations that were also crucial to the new functions. In some cases, mutations that were deleterious when they appeared served as stepping-stones in the evolution of complex features. These findings show how complex functions can originate by random mutation and natural selection.     

文化语境与文化专有项的翻译

从文化与翻译的角度出发,引入了文化专有项的含义,结合实例探讨了文化专有项翻译时要考虑的五种文化语境——生态文化语境、物质文化语境、社会文化语境、宗教文化语境和语言文化语境。     

The Phaeodactylum genome reveals the evolutionary history of diatom genomes

Diatoms are photosynthetic secondary endosymbionts found throughout marine and freshwater environments, and are believed to be responsible for around one-fifth of the primary productivity on Earth. The genome sequence of the marine centric diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana was recently reported, revealing a wealth of information about diatom biology. Here we report the complete genome sequence of the pennate diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum and compare it with that of T. pseudonana to clarify evolutionary origins, functional significance and ubiquity of these features throughout diatoms. In spite of the fact that the pennate and centric lineages have only been diverging for 90 million years, their genome structures are dramatically different and a substantial fraction of genes ( approximately 40%) are not shared by these representatives of the two lineages. Analysis of molecular divergence compared with yeasts and metazoans reveals rapid rates of gene diversification in diatoms. Contributing factors include selective gene family expansions, differential losses and gains of genes and introns, and differential mobilization of transposable elements. Most significantly, we document the presence of hundreds of genes from bacteria. More than 300 of these gene transfers are found in both diatoms, attesting to their ancient origins, and many are likely to provide novel possibilities for metabolite management and for perception of environmental signals. These findings go a long way towards explaining the incredible diversity and success of the diatoms in contemporary oceans.     

论现代语境中河南乡土文学的流变

河南乡土文学的流变实质上是在彰显着传统文化与现代化的冲突及融合过程。从强力追步西方现代潮流到注重消融现代浪潮和追求地方色彩，再到树立起民族化的目标，这不仅是新文学发展的一种趋势，同时也是现实主义文学走向成熟的一种表现。河南乡土文学经历了从觉醒到崛起的系列过程，姚雪垠、李准、张一弓、刘震云和李佩甫等个案能很好地解析出不同阶段的进展轨迹。由此，探讨了解决乡土关怀缺失和苦难失真造作的途径，提出作家除了应保持民间立场和底层体验的内省精神外，更应拓展乡土文学的表现空间。     

语境对语用研究的影响

从语用学的定 义、研究内容、范围及衡量语用成功的标准等方面，阐述了语境对语用研究的影响。     

The emerging conceptual framework of evolutionary developmental biology

Over the last twenty years, there has been rapid growth of a new approach to understanding the evolution of organismic form. This evolutionary developmental biology, or 'evo-devo', is focused on the developmental genetic machinery that lies behind embryological phenotypes, which were all that could be studied in the past. Are there any general concepts emerging from this new approach, and if so, how do they impact on the conceptual structure of traditional evolutionary biology? In providing answers to these questions, this review assesses whether evo-devo is merely filling in some missing details, or whether it will cause a large-scale change in our thinking about the evolutionary process.     

The applications of evolutionary computation in software reliability

Software reliability models(SRMs) are the theoretic foundation of software reliability. However, the existence of intrinsic limitation of the preposition in traditional model building confirnes the applications of SRMs. In this paper, a new method evolutionary computation, is used to estimate parameters of SRMs. At the same time, new algorithms are also proposed and employed to build SRMs. As the experiment results demonstrate, evolutionary computation method is poweful and effective.     

The first hominin of Europe

The earliest hominin occupation of Europe is one of the most debated topics in palaeoanthropology. However, the purportedly oldest of the Early Pleistocene sites in Eurasia lack precise age control and contain stone tools rather than human fossil remains. Here we report the discovery of a human mandible associated with an assemblage of Mode 1 lithic tools and faunal remains bearing traces of hominin processing, in stratigraphic level TE9 at the site of the Sima del Elefante, Atapuerca, Spain. Level TE9 has been dated to the Early Pleistocene (approximately 1.2-1.1 Myr), based on a combination of palaeomagnetism, cosmogenic nuclides and biostratigraphy. The Sima del Elefante site thus emerges as the oldest, most accurately dated record of human occupation in Europe, to our knowledge. The study of the human mandible suggests that the first settlement of Western Europe could be related to an early demographic expansion out of Africa. The new evidence, with previous findings in other Atapuerca sites (level TD6 from Gran Dolina), also suggests that a speciation event occurred in this extreme area of the Eurasian continent during the Early Pleistocene, initiating the hominin lineage represented by the TE9 and TD6 hominins.     

The mechanism for the self-adaptation behavior in the evolutionary minority game model

In this paper, we shall present our studies of a generalized evolutionary minority game model in which the agents are divided into several groups. The performance of the individual agent is averaged in each group. We find that there are three different effects in this generalized model, i.e.(1) group averaging effect, (2) left-right asymmetric effect, and (3) self-interaction effect. The former two effects favor the cautious agents, while the last one favors the extreme agents. In most cases, both the analytic results and the numericul simulations demonstrate that the group averaging effect is dominantly important and therefore the performance of the cautious agents is better than that of the extreme agents. However, when the number of groups is sufficiently large, the generalized model can be somehow reduced to the conventional evolutionary minority game model. As the parameters vary in the generalized model, the importance of the above three effects is exchangeable and different types of population distribution emerge.     

Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language

Human language is based on grammatical rules. Cultural evolution allows these rules to change over time. Rules compete with each other: as new rules rise to prominence, old ones die away. To quantify the dynamics of language evolution, we studied the regularization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Although an elaborate system of productive conjugations existed in English's proto-Germanic ancestor, Modern English uses the dental suffix, '-ed', to signify past tense. Here we describe the emergence of this linguistic rule amidst the evolutionary decay of its exceptions, known to us as irregular verbs. We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English irregular verbs. Of these irregular verbs, 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are still irregular today. We study how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast. Our study provides a quantitative analysis of the regularization process by which ancestral forms gradually yield to an emerging linguistic rule.     

认知语境在隐喻理解过程中的作用

在隐喻理解过程中,认知语境起着不可或缺的作用,没有它的参与,隐喻理解无法进行。听话者首先根据认知语境对隐喻涉及的两个概念的知识草案和心理图示进行辨认和比较,发现二者相异后,作出需对其进行隐喻性理解的判断。然后,在隐喻本体和喻体的知识草案和心理图示中进行深入查寻和反复比较直至找到二者的相似之处,从而对隐喻的意义进行推断,完成对隐喻的理解。     

科技期刊稿件的初审

科技期刊审稿是保证刊物学术质量的重要措施,为提高稿件的评审质量,通常采用三审制,其中专家的评审是核心,但编辑的初审是专家评审和主编终审的基础,是对科技期刊稿件的首次把关。这样既可减少复审的数量,又可提高复审的质量。     

The evolutionary foundation of genomic imprinting in lower vertebrates

In mammals,genomic imprinting confers developmental asymmetry and complementation on the parental genomes and makes both parental genomes essential for complete development.Genomic imprinting is,therefore,the first regulatory step of genome-wide gene expression of embryogenesis and thought to be the epigenetic foundation of bisexual reproduction.However,how the genomic imprinting is originated,established and maintained during vertebrate evolution remains unknown.Because no endogenous imprinting gene has be...     

The evolutionary inheritance of elemental stoichiometry in marine phytoplankton

Phytoplankton is a nineteenth century ecological construct for a biologically diverse group of pelagic photoautotrophs that share common metabolic functions but not evolutionary histories. In contrast to terrestrial plants, a major schism occurred in the evolution of the eukaryotic phytoplankton that gave rise to two major plastid superfamilies. The green superfamily appropriated chlorophyll b, whereas the red superfamily uses chlorophyll c as an accessory photosynthetic pigment. Fossil evidence suggests that the green superfamily dominated Palaeozoic oceans. However, after the end-Permian extinction, members of the red superfamily rose to ecological prominence. The processes responsible for this shift are obscure. Here we present an analysis of major nutrients and trace elements in 15 species of marine phytoplankton from the two superfamilies. Our results indicate that there are systematic phylogenetic differences in the two plastid types where macronutrient (carbon:nitrogen:phosphorus) stoichiometries primarily reflect ancestral pre-symbiotic host cell phenotypes, but trace element composition reflects differences in the acquired plastids. The compositional differences between the two plastid superfamilies suggest that changes in ocean redox state strongly influenced the evolution and selection of eukaryotic phytoplankton since the Proterozoic era.     

二十一世纪是绿色世纪

从风靡全球的绿色浪潮，绿色革命及适应绿色革命的对策三个方面阐述了“绿色工程”的兴起、意义和实施中的有关问题