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The global medical device standard IEC 60601-1-8, first published in 2006, specifies safety and performance requirements for auditory alarms in medical electrical equipment and systems used in hospitals and other health-care facilities around the world. Despite widespread use of these alarm sets, research has shown that clinicians have difficulty learning and distinguishing between them even after repeated exposure, which can lead to time-critical delays or errors in patient care.

Future climate warming could lead to a re-greening of the southernmost Sahara (Sahel), with decreased dust emissions and changes in land cover. In a recent study, researchers at the Department of Meteorology have found that tropical cyclone activity may have increased during past warm climates in connection with a greening of the Sahara.

Students at the University of Windsor can now measure the stress levels of a pickerel swimming against a strong current, the turbidity of hazy tributaries feeding into the Great Lakes, and the behaviour of the invasive sea lamprey without wading into remote and distant waters.

The Freshwater Restoration Ecology Centre in LaSalle is the only research facility of its kind in the Great Lakes Basin and provides students with state-of-the-art technology to study the restoration of damaged ecosystems, invasive species biology and water quality.

If you think self-driving cars can’t get here soon enough, you’re not alone. But programming computers to recognize objects is very technically challenging, especially since scientists don’t fully understand how our own brains do it.

Now, Salk Institute researchers have analyzed how neurons in a critical part of the brain, called V2, respond to natural scenes, providing a better understanding of vision processing. The work is described in Nature Communications on June 8, 2017.

“Understanding how the brain recognizes visual objects is important not only for the sake of vision, but also because it provides a window on how the brain works in general,” says Tatyana Sharpee, an associate professor in Salk’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and senior author of the paper. “Much of our brain is composed of a repeated computational unit, called a cortical column. In vision especially we can control inputs to the brain with exquisite precision, which makes it possible to quantitatively analyze how signals are transformed in the brain.”

Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, Taronga Conservation Society Australia, The National Trust of Fiji and NatureFiji-MareqetiViti have discovered a new species of banded iguana.

The new species of lizard, Brachylophus gau, is one of only four living species of South Pacific iguana, and is restricted to the island of Gau, Republic of Fiji. The scientists describe this new addition in an article released with the journal Zootaxa.