A total of eight foxhound packs in England and Wales were screened for Echinococcus species using a genus-specific coproantigen ELISA and for Echinococcus granulosus sensu lato and Echinococcus equinus by coproPCR. Main screening (n = 364 hounds) occurred during 2010–2011 wherein a quarter (25.6%) of the foxhound fecal samples tested were Echinococcus coproantigen-positive (93/364). In total, five of eight (62.5%) hunts screened had coproantigen-positive hounds; coproantigen prevalence for individual foxhound packs ranged from 0 to 61.2% and was shown to be >30% in three hunts (in counties of Powys, Wales and Northumberland, England). Foxhound fecal samples from six of the eight tested hunts (four Welsh and two English hunts) were positive by coproPCR for E. granulosus s.l (including one sequence confirmation of E. granulosus sensu stricto) and E. equinus DNA. Analysis of hunt questionnaire data suggested that there was an association between poor foxhound husbandry, especially feeding practices and Echinococcus coproantigen prevalence. Clearer guidelines regarding the risk of canine echinococcosis are required for safe management of foxhound hunts in England and Wales.

Conodonts were mostly small, elongate, eel-shaped marine animals that inhabited a variety of environments in Paleozoic and Triassic seas. Although long enigmatic, conodonts are now regarded as vertebrates and their closely controlled fossil record is not only the most extensive of all vertebrates, but it also makes conodonts the fossils of choice in upper Cambrian through Triassic biostratigraphy. Conodonts were soft-bodied except for a variety of phosphatic elements that formed a distinctive feeding apparatus. Post-mortal dissociation of the apparatus and subsequent jumbling of its elements on the sea floor led, from 1856 to about 1966, to development of an artificial, form-based taxonomy that was utilitarian, but clearly unsatisfactory as a vehicle for understanding the group in biologic terms. Natural assemblages of elements, discovered between 1879 and 1952, have been interpreted as undisturbed skeletal apparatuses, and in the mid-1960s it was determined that original composition of the apparatuses of many species could be reconstructed and statistically evaluated from collections of disjunct elements by various grouping procedures. These determinations led to an emphasis on multielement taxonomy by most (but not all) students of conodonts. Even so, only about a third of the approximately 550 valid conodont genera, have been established (or re-interpreted) in multielement terms and this makes any of the several extant schemes of suprageneric classification phylogenetically suspect. We comment on a recent scheme that recognizes 41 families assigned to some 7 orders, and suggest how it might be modified so as to square with principles of phylogenetic systematics.

Mass losses originating from supraglacial ice cliffs at the lower tongues of debris-covered glaciers are a potentially large component of the mass balance, but have rarely been quantified. In this study, we develop a method to estimate ice cliff volume losses based on high-resolution topographic data derived from terrestrial and aerial photogrammetry. We apply our method to six cliffs monitored in May and October 2013 and 2014 using four different topographic datasets collected over the debris-covered Lirung Glacier of the Nepalese Himalayas. During the monsoon, the cliff mean backwasting rate was relatively consistent in 2013 (3.8 ± 0.3 cm w.e. d−1) and more heterogeneous among cliffs in 2014 (3.1 ± 0.7 cm w.e. d−1), and the geometric variations between cliffs are larger. Their mean backwasting rate is significantly lower in winter (October 2013–May 2014), at 1.0 ± 0.3 cm w.e. d−1. These results are consistent with estimates of cliff ablation from an energy-balance model developed in a previous study. The ice cliffs lose mass at rates six times higher than estimates of glacier-wide melt under debris, which seems to confirm that ice cliffs provide a large contribution to total glacier melt.

Debris-covered glaciers play an important role in the high-altitude water cycle in the Himalaya, yet their dynamics are poorly understood, partly because of the difficult fieldwork conditions. In this study we therefore deploy an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) three times (May 2013, October 2013 and May 2014) over the debris-covered Lirung Glacier in Nepal. The acquired data are processed into orthomosaics and elevation models by a Structure from Motion workflow, and seasonal surface velocity is derived using frequency cross-correlation. In order to obtain optimal surface velocity products, the effects of different input data and correlator configurations are evaluated, which reveals that the orthomosaic as input paired with moderate correlator settings provides the best results. The glacier has considerable spatial and seasonal differences in surface velocity, with maximum summer and winter velocities 6 and 2.5 m a-1, respectively, in the upper part of the tongue, while the lower part is nearly stagnant. It is hypothesized that the higher velocities during summer are caused by basal sliding due to increased lubrication of the bed. We conclude that UAVs have great potential to quantify seasonal and annual variations in flow and can help to further our understanding of debris-covered glaciers.

Turtles have served as a model system for molecular divergence dating studies using fossil calibrations. However, because some parts of the fossil record of turtles are very well known, divergence age estimates from molecular phylogenies often do not differ greatly from those observed directly from the fossil record alone. Also, the phylogenetic position and age of turtle fossil calibrations used in previous studies have not been adequately justified. We provide the first explicitly justified minimum and soft maximum age constraints on 22 clades of turtles following best practice protocols. Using these data we undertook a Bayesian relaxed molecular clock analysis establishing a timescale for the evolution of crown Testudines that we exploit in attempting to address evolutionary questions that cannot be resolved with fossils alone. Some of these questions, such as whether the turtle crown originated in the Triassic or Jurassic, cannot be resolved by our analysis. However, our results generate novel age-of-origination estimates for clades within crown Testudines. Finally, we compare our fossil calibrations and posterior age estimates to those from other studies, revealing substantial differences in results and interpretation.

In this paper, a novel set of macros with line/space width from 128nm/128nm, 64nm/64nm to 32nm/32nm was designed and installed on 20nm technology-node hardware. The pitch-dependent pad erosion post Cu CMP was studied by atomic-force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) quantitatively on these macros. Two methods were investigated to reduce the difference between pitch- and density-induced CMP non-uniformity. The first is using new scheme of partial Cu plating process followed by SiCNH insulator deposition and then CMP. The second is through the selection of slurries and pads. Both results are discussed in this paper.