Temporal Change in Iron Content of Vegetables and Legumes in Australia: A Scoping Review

Studies in UK and US have reported a temporal decline in the iron content of plant-based foods. Limited research on this topic has been conducted in Australia. The aim of this scoping review was to provide a comprehensive evaluation on the temporal change in iron content of Australian vegetables and legumes from 1900 onward. A systematic search of electronic databases, websites, backward reference searching, and Australian food composition tables was conducted. A total of 34 articles and six versions of Australian food composition databases published between 1930s to 2021, were included in this review. Overall, iron content of vegetables and legumes were assessed at limited time points and geographical origin, cultivars, sampling and analytical techniques varied across studies. The majority of vegetables had similar iron content between two or more timepoints but decreases of 30–50% were noted for sweet corn, red-skinned potatoes, cauliflower and green beans while increases of 150–300% were seen for Hass avocadoes, mushrooms and silverbeet. More pronounced reductions in iron content were observed for legumes, with higher and more variable values reported pre-2000 compared to recent years. Due to limited data and variations in sampling and analytical techniques, no definitive conclusions could be established. As plant-based diets are becoming more popular, consistent monitoring of the nutrient composition of staple plant-based foods is strongly recommended.

INVESTIGATION OF TEMPORAL CHANGE OF LAND USE IN ELMALI BASIN USING REMOTE SENSING AND GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS

The sustainable use of water and soil, which are indispensable for living things, is closely related to the concept of land use. While land use is becoming gradually modern as a necessity of the age, urbanization and industrialization are also gaining great importance. So much so that, in Turkey, where agriculture-based economy was emphasized until the 1980s, interest in exports of industrial products has increased in recent years and industrial investments especially in the Marmara region have increased considerably. This situation has increased job opportunities due to the industrialization developing in the region and has led to an increase in the population in parallel. The structure process has accelerated in order to meet the needs of the increasing population.Basin areas, which contain a wide variety of classes, are among the regions that are highly affected by these changes. Within the scope of the study, Elmalı Basin, which is used to supply potable and utility water to the province of Istanbul, was chosen as the study area. Within the scope of the research, the temporal change of the land use in Elmalı Basin has been investigated by using Landsat-8 satellite with a spatial resolution of 30 meters for the years 2013, 2015, 2018 and 2020 taking advantage of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) technologies. Classification was made with support vector machines, one of the controlled classification methods on satellite images, and the changes in land use were evaluated by comparing the images of working years.

A Supplementary Module to Improve Accuracy of the Quality Assessment Band in Landsat Cloud Images

Cloud contamination is a serious obstacle for the application of Landsat data. To popularize the applications of Landsat data, each Landsat image includes the corresponding Quality Assessment (QA) band, in which cloud and cloud shadow pixels have been flagged. However, previous studies suggested that Landsat QA band still needs to be modified to fulfill the requirement of Landsat data applications. In this study, we developed a Supplementary Module to improve the original QA band (called QA_SM). On one hand, QA_SM extracts spectral and geometrical features in the target Landsat cloud image from the original QA band. On the other, QA_SM incorporates the temporal change characteristics of clouds and cloud shadows between the target and reference images. We tested the new method at four local sites with different land covers and the Landsat-8 cloud cover validation dataset (“L8_Biome”). The experimental results show that QA_SM performs better than the original QA band and the multi-temporal method ATSA (Automatic Time-Series Analyses). QA_SM decreases omission errors of clouds and shadows in the original QA band effectively but meanwhile does not increase commission errors. Besides, the better performance of QA_SM is less affected by the selections of reference images because QA_SM considers the temporal change of land surface reflectance that is not caused by cloud contamination. By further designing a quantitative assessment experiment, we found that the QA band generated by QA_SM improves cloud-removal performance on Landsat cloud images, suggesting the benefits of the new method to advance the applications of Landsat data.

A Computational Model of Stereoscopic Prey Capture in Praying Mantises”

We present a simple model which can account for the stereoscopic sensitivity of praying mantis predatory strikes. The model consists of a single “disparity sensor”: a binocular neuron sensitive to stereoscopic disparity and thus to distance from the animal. The model is based closely on the known behavioural and neurophysiological properties of mantis stereopsis. The monocular inputs to the neuron reflect temporal change and are insensitive to contrast sign, making the sensor insensitive to interocular correlation. The monocular receptive fields have a excitatory centre and inhibitory surround, making them tuned to size. The disparity sensor combines inputs from the two eyes linearly, applies a threshold and then an exponent output nonlinearity. The activity of the sensor represents the model mantis’s instantaneous probability of striking. We integrate this over the stimulus duration to obtain the expected number of strikes in response to moving targets with different stereoscopic distance, size and vertical disparity. We optimised the parameters of the model so as to bring its predictions into agreement with our empirical data on mean strike rate as a function of stimulus size and distance. The model proves capable of reproducing the relatively broad tuning to size and narrow tuning to stereoscopic distance seen in mantis striking behaviour. The model also displays realistic responses to vertical disparity. Most surprisingly, although the model has only a single centre-surround receptive field in each eye, it displays qualitatively the same interaction between size and distance as we observed in real mantids: the preferred size increases as prey distance increases beyond the preferred distance. We show that this occurs because of a stereoscopic “false match” between the leading edge of the stimulus in one eye and its trailing edge in the other; further work will be required to find whether such false matches occur in real mantises. This is the first image-computable model of insect stereopsis, and reproduces key features of both neurophysiology and striking behaviour.

Human Culture and Cognition

<p>Human behaviour is largely influenced by culture. Culture evolves cumulatively over time. The origins of culture in our lineage necessitated the evolution of psychological biases so humans could tractably navigate the emerging information environment. I examine the nature of these biases and conclude that they are unlikely to be genetically coded to any significant degree. This is because of the flexibility such biases needed to possess in the face of fluid cultural environments and because of the developmental mechanisms of the brain. I further outline three possible views on what the nature of the information these biases act upon might be. First there is the view that cultural information is constructed and held in individual minds but does not flow in any meaningful replicative fashion between minds. Second is the view that culture is information distributed in a population and cultural evolution is the temporal change of this populationlevel information as a result of low fidelity individual copying events. Finally, I argue that meme theory, which asserts that culture is usefully seen as bits of information that replicate in transmission, is a fruitful model of cultural evolution. Keywords Cognition, cultural evolution, culture, evolutionary psychology, memes, neuroconstructivism, psychological biases.</p>

Human Culture and Cognition

<p>Human behaviour is largely influenced by culture. Culture evolves cumulatively over time. The origins of culture in our lineage necessitated the evolution of psychological biases so humans could tractably navigate the emerging information environment. I examine the nature of these biases and conclude that they are unlikely to be genetically coded to any significant degree. This is because of the flexibility such biases needed to possess in the face of fluid cultural environments and because of the developmental mechanisms of the brain. I further outline three possible views on what the nature of the information these biases act upon might be. First there is the view that cultural information is constructed and held in individual minds but does not flow in any meaningful replicative fashion between minds. Second is the view that culture is information distributed in a population and cultural evolution is the temporal change of this populationlevel information as a result of low fidelity individual copying events. Finally, I argue that meme theory, which asserts that culture is usefully seen as bits of information that replicate in transmission, is a fruitful model of cultural evolution. Keywords Cognition, cultural evolution, culture, evolutionary psychology, memes, neuroconstructivism, psychological biases.</p>