Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rock magnetism and palaeomagnetism of the Montalbano Jonico section (Italy): evidence for late diagenetic growth of greigite and implications for magnetostratigraphy

SUMMARY The Montalbano Jonico (MJ) section, cropping out in Southern Italy, represents a potential candidate to define the Lower/Middle Pleistocene boundary and it has been proposed as a suitable Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) of the Ionian Stage (Middle Pleistocene). The MJ section is the only continuous benthic and planktonic δ18O on-land reference in the Mediterranean area for the Mid-Pleistocene transition, spanning an interval between about 1240 and 645 ka. Combined biostratigraphy and sapropel chronology, tephra stratigraphy and complete high-resolution benthic and planktonic foraminiferal stable oxygen isotope records already provide a firm chronostratigraphic framework for the MJ section. However, magnetostratigraphy was still required to precisely locate the Brunhes-Matuyama transition and to mark the GSSP for the Ionian stage. We carried out a palaeomagnetic study of a subsection (Ideale section) of the MJ composite section, sampling 61 oriented cores from 56 stratigraphic levels spread over a ca. 80-m-thick stratigraphic interval that correlates to the oxygen isotopic stage 19 and should therefore include the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. The palaeomagnetic data indicate a stable and almost single-component natural remanent magnetization (NRM). A characteristic remanent magnetization (ChRM) was clearly identified by stepwise demagnetization of the NRM. The ChRM declination values vary around 0° and the ChRM inclination around the expected value (59°) for a geocentric axial dipole field at the sampling locality. This result indicates that the section has been remagnetized during the Brunhes Chron. A preliminary study of 27 additional not azimuthally oriented hand samples, collected at various levels from other parts of the MJ composite section, indicates that all the samples are of normal polarity and demonstrates that the remagnetization is widespread across the whole exposed stratigraphic sequence. A series of specific rock magnetic techniques were then applied to investigate the nature of the main magnetic carrier in the study sediments, and they suggest that the main magnetic mineral in the MJ section is the iron sulphide greigite (Fe3S4). Scanning electron microscope observations and elemental microanalysis reveal that greigite occurs both as individual euhedral crystals and in iron sulphides aggregates filling voids in the clay matrix. Therefore, we infer that the remagnetization of the section is due to the late-diagenetic growth of greigite under reducing conditions, most likely resulting in the almost complete dissolution of the original magnetic minerals. Iron sulphide formation in the MJ section can be linked to migration of mineralized fluids. Our inferred timing of the remagnetization associated with greigite growth represents the longest remanence acquisition delay documented in greigite-bearing clays of the Italian peninsula so far.
New geochronological data on Palaeozoic igneous activity and deformation in the Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago, Russia, and implications for the development of the Eurasian Arctic margin

The Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago, located close to the continental edge of the Kara Shelf in the Russian high Arctic, represents, together with northern Tajmyr, the exposed Neoproterozoic and Palaeozoic part of the North Kara Terrane. This terrane has been interpreted as an independent microcontinent or part of a larger entity, such as Arctida or Baltica, prior to collision with Siberia in Late Carboniferous time. A major stratigraphic break, the Kan'on (canyon) River Unconformity, separates folded Late Cambrian from Early Ordovician successions in one area, October Revolution Island. New geochronological U–Th–Pb ion-microprobe data on volcanic and intrusive rocks from this island constrain the age of an important magmatic episode in the earliest Ordovician. A tuff, in association with Tremadocian fossils, overlying the Kan'on River Unconformity, has been dated to 489.5 ± 2.7 Ma. The youngest rocks beneath the unconformity are of the Peltura minor Zone, and the latter has been dated previously, in western Avalonia, to 490.1+1.7−0.9 Ma. Thus, little time is available for the tectonic episode recorded by the unconformity, and the similarities in radiometric dates may indicate problems with the correlation of faunal markers for the Cambrian–Ordovician boundary across palaeo-continents. The other extrusive and intrusive rocks which have been related to Early Ordovician rifting in the Severnaya Zemlya area yield ages from 489 Ma to 475 Ma. An undeformed granite, cutting folded Neoproterozoic successions on neighbouring Bol'shevik Island has been dated to 342 ± 3.6 Ma and 343.5 ± 4.1 Ma (Early Carboniferous), in accord with evidence elsewhere of Carboniferous strata unconformably overlying the folded older successions. This evidence conflicts with the common interpretation that the structure of the Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago originated during the collision of the North Kara Terrane with Siberia in Late Carboniferous time. An alternative interpretation is that Severnaya Zemlya was located in the Baltica foreland of the Caledonide Orogen and that the eastward-migrating deformation of the foreland basin reached the area of the archipelago in latest Devonian to Early Carboniferous time. This affinity of the North Kara Terrane to Baltica is further supported by 540–560 Ma xenocrysts in Ordovician intrusions on October Revolution Island, an age which is characteristic of the Timanide margin of Baltica.
The Entropic Linkage between Equity and Bond Market Dynamics

An alternative derivation of the yield curve based on entropy or the loss of information as it is communicated through time is introduced. Given this focus on entropy growth in communication the Shannon entropy will be utilized. Additionally, Shannon entropy’s close relationship to the Kullback–Leibler divergence is used to provide a more precise understanding of this new yield curve. The derivation of the entropic yield curve is completed with the use of the Burnashev reliability function which serves as a weighting between the true and error distributions. The deep connections between the entropic yield curve and the popular Nelson–Siegel specification are also examined. Finally, this entropically derived yield curve is used to provide an estimate of the economy’s implied information processing ratio. This information theoretic ratio offers a new causal link between bond and equity markets, and is a valuable new tool for the modeling and prediction of stock market behavior.
Differential expression in SAGE: accounting for normal between-library variation

MOTIVATION In contrasting levels of gene expression between groups of SAGE libraries, the libraries within each group are often combined and the counts for the tag of interest summed, and inference is made on the basis of these larger 'pseudolibraries'. While this captures the sampling variability inherent in the procedure, it fails to allow for normal variation in levels of the gene between individuals within the same group, and can consequently overstate the significance of the results. The effect is not slight: between-library variation can be hundreds of times the within-library variation. RESULTS We introduce a beta-binomial sampling model that correctly incorporates both sources of variation. We show how to fit the parameters of this model, and introduce a test statistic for differential expression similar to a two-sample t-test.
Evaluating aerosol nucleation parameterizations in a global atmospheric model

Numerically efficient parameterizations based on theories of binary, ternary and ion‐induced aerosol nucleation (BN, TN and IN) enable online calculations of new particle formation in high resolution atmospheric models. These parameterizations are evaluated interactively in a 3D global chemical transport model that simulates gaseous sulfuric acid, ammonia and the ion‐pair production rate. The BN and IN parameterizations produce new particles only in the cold upper troposphere, with IN giving relatively lower nucleation rates due to parameterization errors. In contrast, the TN parameterization predicts new particle formation throughout the troposphere, but gives unrealistically high nucleation rates. New and revised TN theories from recent studies instead give much lower rates and indicate that TN is not likely in the lower troposphere. Nucleation parameterizations can be useful for global modeling applications, but the current schemes should be used cautiously given their large uncertainties.
Determining the Influence of Seascape Structure on Coral Reef Fishes in Hawaii Using a Geospatial Approach

We assessed the utility of several LIDAR-derived seascape metrics (e.g. depth, rugosity, slope, variance in depth) to determine which measures of the seascape demonstrated important relationships with fish assemblage structure and would ultimately serve as the best ecological criteria to advance predictive modeling of fish assemblages using remote sensing and GIS analysis. Variance in depth (within a 75 m radius) was the seascape metric that had the strongest relationships with most fish assemblage metrics, followed by depth and slope. Our results demonstrate the potential for using remotely sensed measures of the seascape to support predictive mapping and modeling of fish assemblages.
A Domain-specific Risk-taking (dospert) Scale for Adult Populations

This paper proposes a revised version of the original Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) scale developed by Weber, Blais, and Betz (2002) that is shorter and applicable to a broader range of ages, cultures, and educational levels. It also provides a French translation of the revised scale. Using multilevel modeling, we investigated the risk-return relationship between apparent risk taking and risk perception in 5 risk domains. The results replicate previously noted differences in reported degree of risk taking and risk perception at the mean level of analysis. The multilevel modeling shows, more interestingly, that within-participants variation in risk taking across the 5 content domains of the scale was about 7 times as large as between-participants variation. We discuss the implications of our findings in terms of the person-situation debate related to risk attitude as a stable trait.
Isotopic evidence for a Martian regolith component in shergottite meteorites

[1] The 80Kr excesses determined in the gas-rich impact-melt (GRIM) glasses in EET79001 and Shergotty correlate poorly with the 129XeM (Martian atmosphere) suggesting that the majority of the neutron-capture 80Krn was not shock-implanted along with 129XeM into these glasses during impact. This inference is consistent with the variations in δ80Krn excesses observed in these samples. The results reported here indicate that the 80Krn excesses in these glasses were produced in the same way as the 149Sm isotopic deficits, i.e., by thermal neutron (n) capture on Br and Sm occurring in the glass-precursor regolith materials on Mars. The thermal neutron fluences calculated from 80Krn excesses (∼0.3–1.0 × 1015 n/cm2) and from 149Sm deficits (1.0 ± 0.4 × 1015 n/cm2) agree with each other confirming that 80Krn was mostly produced in situ. In the Martian regolith, thermal (n) and fast (N) neutrons occur together. Also, in the GRIM glasses, the 83Kr/86Kr ratios correlate positively with 84Kr/86Kr indicating that the cosmogenic Kr contains a fast neutron-produced component in addition to Kr produced by galactic cosmic and solar cosmic irradiation. Using 83KrN and 84KrN excesses produced by fast neutron reactions on Rb and Sr targets in some of these glasses, we determine fast neutron fluences of ∼3–47 × 1015 N/cm2. The integrated fluences of thermal and fast neutrons in GRIM glasses suggest that the glass-precursor materials were irradiated at different depths in the top few meters of the water-ice-bearing regolith near the shergottite source regions on Mars.
Unsupervised change detection methods for remote sensing images

An unsupervised change detection problem can be viewed as a classification problem with only two classes corresponding to the change and no-change areas, respectively. Due to its simplicity, image differencing represents a popular approach for change detection. It is based on the idea to generate a difference image that represents the modulus of the spectral change vector associated to each pixel in the study area. To separate the change and no-change classes in the difference image, a simple thresholding-based procedure can be applied. However, the selection of the best threshold value is not a trivial problem. In the present work, several simple thresholding methods are investigated and compared. The combination of the Expectation-Maximization algorithm with a thresholding method is also considered with the aim of achieving a better estimation of the optimal threshold value. For experimental purpose, a study area affected by a forest fire is considered. Two Landsat TM images of the area acquired before and after the event are utilized to reveal the burned zones and to assess and compare the above mentioned unsupervised change detection methods.
New Zealand hailstorms

Abstract From an analysis of reports of hail at climatological stations, return periods of various hail frequencies are derived. From this data set it is shown that in most parts of New Zealand there is a winter or spring maximum in the frequency of hail occurrences, and that there are generally more occurrences in the west than the east and in the south than in the north. An analysis of the occurrence of hail in hourly weather reports reveals little diurnal variability. There is a likelihood that these data sets include, at least at some sites, reports of ice particles that are strictly too small to be classified as hail. A previous climatology based on reports of hail in the press is extended and reanalysed in terms of diurnal and seasonal frequencies in 11 regions. The eastern coastal regions have more than 60% of reported hail in spring and summer afternoons; regions exposed to the north have more than 50% of their hail events at these times. An examination is made of the characteristics of 14 severe .
ULIP: Learning Unified Representation of Language, Image and Point Cloud for 3D Understanding

The understanding capabilities of current state-of-the-art 3D models are limited by datasets with a small number of annotated data and a pre-deﬁned set of categories. In its 2D counterpart, recent advances have shown that similar problems can be signiﬁcantly alleviated by employing knowledge from other modalities, such as language. Inspired by this, leveraging multimodal information for 3D modality could be promising to improve 3D understanding under the restricted data regime, but this line of research is not well studied. Therefore, we introduce ULIP to learn a uniﬁed representation of image, text, and 3D point cloud by pre-training with object triplets from the three modalities. To overcome the shortage of training triplets, ULIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model that has already learned a common visual and textual space by training with massive image-text pairs. Then, ULIP learns a 3D representation space aligned with the common image-text space, using a small number of automatically synthesized triplets. ULIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks and can easily be integrated into any 3D architecture. Experiments show that ULIP effectively improves the performance of multiple recent 3D backbones by simply pre-training them on ShapeNet55 using our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both standard 3D classiﬁcation and zero-shot 3D classiﬁcation on ModelNet40 and ScanOb-jectNN. ULIP also improves the performance of PointMLP by around 3% in 3D classiﬁcation on ScanObjectNN, and outperforms PointCLIP by 28.8% on top-1 accuracy for zero-shot 3D classiﬁcation on ModelNet40.
Climate change projections over South America in the late 21st century with the 20 and 60 km mesh Meteorological Research Institute atmospheric general circulation model (MRI‐AGCM)

[1] Two 25 year time-slice experiments were conducted using a 20 km mesh global atmospheric model, one for the present (1979–2003) and the other for the future (2075–2099). To assess the uncertainty of climate change projections, we performed ensemble simulations with the 60 km mesh model combining 4 different sea surface temperatures and 3 atmospheric initial conditions. Horizontal resolution of these global models is higher than or comparable to that of regional climate models applied to South American climate change projections. Both the 20 km mesh model and 60 km mesh model reproduce sufficiently well the observed seasonal precipitation patterns. These models project an increase in wet-season precipitation and a decrease in dry-season precipitation over most of South America. In the future, almost all over South America, precipitation intensity will increase. In particular, precipitation intensity is largest over the southeast South America in the present-day simulation, where future change is also large, implying an increasing risk of flooding in this region including the Parana River. At the same time a large increase of consecutive dry days is projected over the western part of the Amazon, where the amplitude of the seasonal hydrograph is projected to increase in the Amazon River, implying more floods in wet season and droughts in dry season.
Microbial colonization and dissolution of mercury sulfide minerals

Mercury (Hg) is a toxic heavy metal that poses significant human and environmental health risks. Mineral-associated Hg is the largest reservoir of Hg in the environment where it can account for nearly 60% of the global Hg mass inventory. A large fraction of this pool is comprised of mercury sulfide (HgS) minerals, including metacinnabar (beta-HgS). HgS minerals have long been considered insignificant sources of Hg to aqueous or atmospheric pools in all but severely acidic environments due to their low solubility and slow abiotic dissolution kinetics. Little previous work has been conducted investigating the bacterial colonization of HgS minerals and the potential role of these mineral-associated communities in impacting the mobility of mineral-hosted Hg. To address this gap in knowledge, the studies within this dissertation employed a combination of fieldand laboratory-based methods. Using culture-independent techniques, this work revealed that sulfur-oxidizing bacteria can extensively colonize metacinnabar within aerobic, near neutral pH, creek sediments, suggesting a potential role for chemolithotrophic bacteria in metacinnabar weathering. Within laboratory incubations, the dominant bacterial colonizer (Thiobacillus thioparus), induced extensive release and volatilization of metacinnabar-hosted Hg. These findings expose a new pathway for metacinnabar dissolution and point to mineral-hosted Hg as an underappreciated source of elemental Hg that may contribute to global atmospheric Hg budgets. In addition, this work
The Spanish population during the twentieth century and beyond

Mapping of population change enables study of the demographic dynamics of a country, as the rate of change is one of the major variables affecting the society and development. In this study we mapped population change in Spain over the period 1900–2011. The resulting map provides a very useful tool for spatial planning because it shows the main patterns of the population. The map is highly detailed, representing municipalities at a scale of 1:3,200,000, and includes a series of seven provincial maps at a scale of 1:15,000,000. All are proportional symbol maps representing two real variables: population change (which is represented by color hue and lightness), and total population by size. The use of a comparable diverging color scheme to represent population change and volume, and a double-constriction system to represent population size, has resulted in development of an easily accessible map from a quite complicated process of design.
E-portfolios: an assessment tool for online courses

This article considers the various uses of e-portfolios in an educational context and looks at the particular characteristics of the electronic version of portfolios. It then focuses on the application of the e-portfolio as an assessment method. A case is made for the use of the e-portfolio as an appropriate end of course assessment process where learning objects are the basis of the course design. Evaluation data from such a course is presented. This is a post-graduate online course run by the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. Conclusions are drawn from the evaluation about the appropriateness of eportfolios as an end of course assessment method.
View‐angle consistency in reflectance, optical thickness and spherical albedo of marine water‐clouds over the northeastern Pacific through MISR‐MODIS fusion

View‐angle consistency in bidirectional reflectance factor (BRF), optical thickness and spherical albedo is examined for marine water clouds over a region of the northeastern Pacific using six years of fused Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Multiangle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) data. Consistency is quantified by the root‐mean‐square of relative differences between MISR‐measured BRF and their plane‐parallel values and variation of plane‐parallel retrieved optical thickness and spherical albedo across multiple view‐angles. Probability distribution functions of consistency show that, for example, these clouds are angularly consistent within 5% in BRF, optical thickness and spherical albedo 72.2%, 39.0% and 81.1% of the time, respectively. We relate angular consistency to the spatial variability of nadir‐BRF, thus allowing us to potentially identify, with a prescribed confidence level, which MODIS microphysical retrievals within the MISR swath meet the plane‐parallel assumption to within any desired range in view‐angle consistency.