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Although intense research effort is seeking to address which brain areas fire and connect to each other to produce complex behaviors in a few living primates, little is known about their evolution, and which brain areas or facets of cognition were favored by natural selection. By developing statistical tools to study the evolution of the brain cortex at the fine scale, we found that rapid cortical expansion in the prefrontal region took place early on during the evolution of primates. In anthropoids, fast-expanding cortical areas extended to the posterior parietal cortex. In Homo, further expansion affected the medial temporal lobe and the posteroinferior region of the parietal lobe. Collectively, the fast-expanding cortical areas in anthropoids are known to form a brain network producing mind reading abilities and other higher-order cognitive functions. These results indicate that pursuing complex cognition drove the evolution of Primate brains.

We present a new database, EutherianCoP, of fossil mammals which lived globally from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene. The database includes 13,972 fossil occurrences of 786 extant or recently extinct placental mammal species, plus 155,198 current occurrences for those of them which survived to the present. The occurrences are correlated with radiometric age information. For all species, we provide 32 different traits, inclusive of taxonomic, phenotypic, life history, biogeographic and phylogenetic information. Differently from any other compilation, the occurrences are complemented with estimates of past climatic conditions, including site-interpolated monthly and annual precipitation and temperature, leaf area index, megabiome type and net primary productivity, which are derived from transient paleo model simulations conducted with the Community Earth System Model 1.2 and the BIOME4 vegetation model. All data are further downloadable for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tissue regeneration can be achieved by providing endogenous cells with a biomaterial scaffold that supports their adhesion and proliferation, as well as the synthesis and deposition of an extracellular matrix (ECM). In this work, silk fibroin protein foams were formed by lyophilization to generate tissue engineering scaffolds. Three types of medically relevant nanoparticles (NPs) (iron oxide, gold and silver) were added to this biomaterial to assess the ability of silk foams to be functionalized with these NPs. The structural and mechanical properties of the foams with and without the NPs were suitable for tissue support. The in vitro cytocompatibility of the scaffolds was confirmed according to the ISO 10993 guidelines. The biocompatibility of the scaffolds was investigated by assessing inflammation and endogenous cell colonization in a mouse subcutaneous model These in vivo experiments demonstrated a loss of acute inflammation and the absence of chronic inflammation in the grafted animals. The obtained results show that silk foams are good candidates for supporting soft tissue regeneration with the additional possibility of functionalization with NPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controlling the cooling rate experienced by a material during a manufacturing process is a challenge and a major issue. Industrial processing techniques are very diverse and may involve a whole range of cooling rates, which are sometimes extremely high for small and/or thin manufactured parts. For polymers, the cooling rate has consequences on both the microstructure and the time-dependent properties. The common cooling rates associated with conventional calorimetric measurements are generally limited to a few tens of degrees per minute. This work combines several calorimetric techniques (DSC, modulated-temperature DSC, stochastically-modulated DSC and Fast Scanning Calorimetry) to estimate the critical cooling rate required to melt-quench fast-crystallizing polyesters to their fully amorphous state, based on the example of a series of poly(alkylene trans-1,4-cyclohexanedicarboxylate) (PCHs) with a number of methylene groups in the main structure of the repeating unit n C H 2 varying from 3 to 6. The even-numbered ones require faster cooling rates (about 3000 K s−1 for n C H 2 = 4, between 500 and 1000 K s−1 for n C H 2 = 6) compared to the odd-numbered ones (between 50 K min−1 and 100 K s−1 for n C H 2 = 3, between 10 and 30 K min−1 for n C H 2 = 5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with how research ethics is evolving along with emerging online research methods and settings. In particular, it focuses on ethics issues implied in a hypothetical virtual ethnography study aiming to gain insights on participants' experience in an emergent context of networked learning, namely a MOOC--Massive Online Open Course. A MOOC is a popular type of online open course, that provides free content and expertise to anyone in the world who wishes to enroll. The purposes of this article are to briefly outline recent debates on online research ethics approaches and then to explore competing views on ethical decision-making when researching in a globalized, online and open learning setting. Considering the challenges of this new elearning inquiry context, issues as the underlying research ethics models, the roles of researcher and participants and the integrity of the research process are discussed in their interplay with the evolving ethos of the ethnographical methodology being adopted to investigate participants' views. Elements drawn from a hypothetical design of a qualitative study are here utilized to identify an empirical instance that shapes and is being shaped by research ethics decisions. The study aims to answer the following question: what are the affordances (opportunities and challenges) of online open courses as they emerge from the participants' perspectives? This paper considers the potential operationalization of the above research question and discusses both theoretical and methodological issues arising from applying research ethics to this specific case of Internet inquiry. In this sense, ethical approaches in online research contexts as well as main ethical decisions are discussed and justified, envisioning a submission to an institutional ethics review board before undertaking the ethnographical study. Topics such as privacy concerns in a public online setting, choice between overt and covert research, researcher as observer or participant, narrow or loosely defined application of the informed consent and anonymity are outlined, presenting a range of different options. This article intends to show that ethical decisions are an iterative procedure and an integral part of the research design process. Moreover, it endorses the opportunity to produce localized and contextualized ethical decision-making. To this end, it takes into account the guidance available (research ethics literature; narratives of ethics procedures applied to empirical cases); the ethics debates within the ethnographical tradition and the nature of the setting being researched (the specific format of the networked learning instance being examined). The discussion here proposed orientates ethical decision-making towards an overt and participant research approach, an informed consent intended as a "public notice" and a consideration of participants both as authors in the online setting and as human subjects embedding unexpected privacy sensitiveness. However, such decisions are considered as many starting points to build a research ethics protocol intended to a degree as a work in progress, in a problem-solving approach guided by the practical wisdom of participants emerging over time.