Global S&T Development Trend Analysis Platform of Resources and Environment
Neurons in the canary premotor cortex homologue encode past song phrases and transitions, carrying information relevant to future choice of phrases as '
Coordinated skills such as speech or dance involve sequences of actions that follow syntactic rules in which transitions between elements depend on the identities and order of past actions. Canary songs consist of repeated syllables called phrases, and the ordering of these phrases follows long-range rules(1)in which the choice of what to sing depends on the song structure many seconds prior. The neural substrates that support these long-range correlations are unknown. Here, using miniature head-mounted microscopes and cell-type-specific genetic tools, we observed neural activity in the premotor nucleus HVC(2-4)as canaries explored various phrase sequences in their repertoire. We identified neurons that encode past transitions, extending over four phrases and spanning up to four seconds and forty syllables. These neurons preferentially encode past actions rather than future actions, can reflect more than one song history, and are active mostly during the rare phrases that involve history-dependent transitions in song. These findings demonstrate that the dynamics of HVC include '
Pottery is one of the most commonly recovered artefacts from archaeological sites. Despite more than a century of relative dating based on typology and seriation(1), accurate dating of pottery using the radiocarbon dating method has proven extremely challenging owing to the limited survival of organic temper and unreliability of visible residues(2-4). Here we report a method to directly date archaeological pottery based on accelerator mass spectrometry analysis of C-14 in absorbed food residues using palmitic (C-16:0) and stearic (C-18:0) fatty acids purified by preparative gas chromatography(5-8). We present accurate compound-specific radiocarbon determinations of lipids extracted from pottery vessels, which were rigorously evaluated by comparison with dendrochronological dates(9,10) and inclusion in site and regional chronologies that contained previously determined radiocarbon dates on other materials(11-15). Notably, the compound-specific dates from each of the C-16:0 and C-18:0 fatty acids in pottery vessels provide an internal quality control of the results(6) and are entirely compatible with dates for other commonly dated materials. Accurate radiocarbon dating of pottery vessels can reveal: (1) the period of use of pottery
Using lipid residues absorbed in potsherds, the ages of pottery from various archaeological sites are determined and validated using sites for which the dates are well known from other methods.