Integrated information increases with fitness in the evolution of animats

One of the hallmarks of biological organisms is their ability to integrate disparate information sources to optimize their behavior in complex environments. How this capability can be quantified and related to the functional complexity of an organism remains a challenging problem, in particular since organismal functional complexity is not well-defined. We present here several candidate measures that quantify information and integration, and study their dependence on fitness as an artificial agent ("animat") evolves over thousands of generations to solve a navigation task in a simple, simulated environment. We compare the ability of these measures to predict high fitness with more conventional information-theoretic processing measures. As the animat adapts by increasing its "fit" to the world, information integration and processing increase commensurately along the evolutionary line of descent. We suggest that the correlation of fitness with information integration and with processing measures implies that high fitness requires both information processing as well as integration, but that information integration may be a better measure when the task requires memory. A correlation of measures of information integration (but also information processing) and fitness strongly suggests that these measures reflect the functional complexity of the animat, and that such measures can be used to quantify functional complexity even in the absence of fitness data.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, one supplementary figure. Three supplementary video files available on request. Version commensurate with published text in PLoS Comput. Bio

Novel process of coating Al on graphene involving organic aluminum accompanying microstructure evolution

A novel chemical reduction of organic aluminum for coating Al on the graphene surface is proposed. During the process, Al powder reacted with the (C2H5)2Br solution to produce (C2H5)3Al solution, followed by gradual decomposition of (C2H5)3Al into Al atoms. Al atoms gradually deposited on the surface of graphene, nucleated, grew up, until Al coating was formed on the surface of graphene. With the increase of reaction temperature, the decomposition rate of (C2H5)3Al increased, which was beneficial to the formation of Al atoms and Al coating. The reducing agent, NaH, promoted the reaction and formation of Al coating. When the reaction temperature was optimized to 100 °C, and the reaction time was 1.5 h, with NaH added to the solution, high quality Al-coated graphene was obtained.acceptedVersion© 2018. This is the authors’ accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. Locked until 7.08.2020 due to copyright restrictions. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Growth rate, extinction and survival amongst late Cenozoic bivalves of the North Atlantic

Late Cenozoic bivalve extinction in the North Atlantic and adjacent areas has been attributed to environmental change (declines in temperature and primary production). Within scallops and oysters—bivalve groups with a high growth rate—certain taxa which grew exceptionally fast became extinct, while others which grew slower survived. The taxa which grew exceptionally fast would have obtained protection from predators thereby, so their extinction may have been due to the detrimental effect of environmental change on growth rate and ability to avoid predation, rather than environmental change per se. We investigated some glycymeridid and carditid bivalves—groups with a much lower growth rate than scallops and oysters—to see whether extinct forms from the late Cenozoic of the North Atlantic grew faster than extant forms, and hence whether their extinction may also have been mediated by increased mortality due to predation. Growth rate was determined from the cumulative width of annual increments in the hinge area; measurements were scaled up to overall shell size for the purposes of comparison with data from living species. Growth of the extinct glycymeridid Glycymeris subovata was at about the same rate as the slowest-growing living glycymeridid and much slower than in late Cenozoic samples of extant G. americana, in which growth was at about the same rate as the fastest-growing living glycymeridid. Growth of extinct G. obovata was also slower than G. americana, and that of the extinct carditid Cardites squamulosa ampla similarly slow (evidently slower than in the one living carditid species for which data are available). These findings indicate that within bivalve groups whose growth is much slower than scallops and oysters, extinction or survival of taxa through the late Cenozoic was not influenced by whether they were relatively fast or slow growers. By implication, environmental change acted directly to cause extinctions in slow-growing groups, rather than by increasing susceptibility to predation.University of Derby: URSS 2017-028, URSS 2017-02

Randomized controlled trial on the effects of a supervised high intensity exercise program in patients with a hematologic malignancy treated with autologous stem cell transplantation: Results from the EXIST study

This single blind, multicenter randomized controlled trial aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a supervised high intensity exercise program on physical fitness and fatigue in patients with multiple myeloma or lymphoma recently treated with autologous stem cell transplantation.109 patients were randomly assigned to the 18-week exercise intervention or the usual care control group. The primary outcomes included physical fitness (VO2peak and Wpeak determined using a cardiopulmonary exercise test; grip strength and the 30s chair stand test) and fatigue (Multidimensional Fatigue Inventory) and were assessed prior to randomization and after completion of the intervention or at similar time points for the control group. Multivariable multilevel linear regression analyses were performed to assess intervention effects.Patients in the intervention group attended 86% of the prescribed exercise sessions. Of the patients in the control group, 47% reported ≥10 physiotherapy sessions, which most likely included supervised exercise, suggesting a high rate of contamination. Median improvements in physical fitness ranged between 16 and 25% in the intervention group and between 12 and 19% in the control group. Fatigue decreased in both groups. There were no significant differences between the intervention and control group.We found no significant beneficial effects of the supervised high intensity exercise program on physical fitness and fatigue when compared to usual care. We hypothesized that the lack of significant intervention effects may relate to suboptimal timing of intervention delivery, contamination in the control group and/or suboptimal compliance to the prescribed exercise intervention.Netherlands Trial Register-NTR2341