The sneaker and streetwear retailer Snipes has opened a new flagship store on Frankfurt's Zeil With a sales area of ​​1.065 square meters spread over three floors the new flagship store is one of the largest Snipes locations in Europe The men's outfitter Eckerle most recently used the building "The Zeil has always been a strategically important location for retail With our seven existing stores in Frankfurt and the surrounding area we are setting new standards in terms of both design and size," explains Amir Youssefi The highlight of the new location is a sound booth – an integrated recording studio within the store that will offer up-and-coming talents from the community the opportunity to record their own songs for free founded in 1998 and now part of the Deichmann Group operates a total of 750 stores in Europe and the USA other sports retailers are moving to the Zeil Sportscheck wants to open a store in the "Bienenkorbhaus" It has also been known for some time that the sports and sneaker retailer JD Sports will use the former Bershka space in the My Zeil shopping center We always keep you up to date: with our free newsletter SHOEZ compact You will regularly receive all information from the shoe industry in a clear form when a new magazine is published US Managing Director Peter Sachs hands over to Lance Taylor Alchemy plans to take over almost half of the Austrian shoe retailer Second best financial year in the company's history Creditors' meeting decides against P&C's takeover offer Sanela Krisat becomes International Sales Director sales representatives and business partners throughout the DACH association Telephone: +49 (0) 6 41 / 7 95 08 – 0Fax: +49 (0) 6 41 / 7 95 08 – 15Email: info@shoez.biz Designed by willsch-media.de Drei Angreifer sollen Stichverletzungen verursacht haben Die Polizei ermittelt zum Tatwerkzeug und den Hintergründen.","url":"https://www.fnp.de/frankfurt/und-suche-nach-trio-zwei-schwerverletzte-an-frankfurter-zeil-stichverletzungen-93705468.html"};c&&a.navigator.canShare(d)&&(c.style.display="",c.addEventListener("click",b=>{b.preventDefault(),a.setTimeout(function(){a.navigator.share(d)},0)}))}})(window,document); Eine körperliche Auseinandersetzung an der Frankfurter Zeil endet mit zwei Schwerverletzten Die Polizei ermittelt zu den Hintergründen 15.22 Uhr: Die drei Tatverdächtigen der Messerattacke auf zwei 24-jährige Männer in Frankfurt sind noch immer auf der Flucht schreibt die Nachrichtenagentur 5.Vision.News April) auf der Frankfurter Zeil (siehe Erstmeldung) 08.07 Uhr: Frankfurt – Polizeieinsatz im Herzen von Frankfurt: In der Frankfurter Brönnerstraße nahe der Einmündung zur Einkaufsmeile Zeil April) gegen 20.20 Uhr zu einer körperlichen Auseinandersetzung mit mehreren Beteiligten Nach ersten Informationen waren fünf Menschen involviert Während des Vorfalls haben nach Polizeiangaben vom späten Abend drei Angreifer den beiden Opfern Stichverletzungen zugefügt war von der Polizei zunächst noch nicht abschließend bestätigt worden Später war von einem „messerähnlichen Gegenstand“ die Rede Beide Verletzte wurden mit schweren Verletzungen in Krankenhäuser gebracht Der Tatortbereich direkt an der Frankfurter Einkaufsmeile Zeil wurde von der Polizei abgesperrt Die Spurensicherung begann mit ihrer Arbeit Zum Aufenthaltsort der Angreifer konnte die Polizei noch keine Informationen geben und verwies auf die laufenden Ermittlungen Auch zum Hintergrund der Tat – etwa der Frage nach dem Auslöser des Streits – gibt es bislang keine Angaben dass die Zahl der Messerangriffe in den vergangenen beiden Jahren etwa gleich geblieben sei Sie bewegte sich demnach sowohl 2023 als auch 2024 bei rund 2200 Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,wir bitten um Verständnis dass es im Unterschied zu vielen anderen Artikeln auf unserem Portal unter diesem Artikel keine Kommentarfunktion gibt Bei einzelnen Themen behält sich die Redaktion vor die Kommentarmöglichkeiten einzuschränken.Die Redaktion Dieser Inhalt"+t(a)+"kann aufgrund Ihrer Datenschutz-Einstellungen nicht geladen werden A job ad for a Kiwi sex toy brand is offering a very interesting perk We’ve all heard of a lunch break, but have you heard of an “O Break?” That’s one of the advertised perks female-owned Kiwi sexual wellness brand Girls Get Off is offering a new recruit In a job advertisement posted to Zeil on Wednesday, co-founders Viv Conway and Jo Cummins said they were looking for a full-time “customer service queen” to help answer customer queries and manage wholesale accounts and a paid hour-a-week “O Break” to “pamper yourself” a moment of private pleasure (sex toys encouraged!) or to book in that much needed D (or V!) appointment,” the ad elaborates Product knowledge is the only “hard” skill required for the role while “soft” skills include the ability to work in a team Responsibilities include answering customer queries via calls and emails with “warmth empathy and certainly no shaming”; managing wholesale accounts with “care and precision”; handling live chat enquiries and follow-ups with “keen attention to detail”; and using computer literacy and organisational skills to “keep things running smoothly” Conway told the Herald the O Break reflected the brand’s values “Practising what we preach is super important to us and that means normalising pleasure and incorporating it into our everyday lives as much as we can,” Conway said “Our O Break is just another way to adhere by our brand’s values can increase relaxation and mental clarity ultimately making us all happier and more productive both at work and in life.” She and Cummins had received countless confessions on Instagram from women admitting they self-pleasured during their lunch breaks with the co-owners hoping to help set a new standard for workplaces “Normalising pleasure is something not only we and the O Break is just one way of making it easier for employees to prioritise this amid the hustle and bustle of their everyday lives,” Conway added had humble beginnings - evolving from a conversation over socially distanced driveway drinks during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown to an internationally recognised brand we like to have a nice experience and be marketed to You don’t necessarily know what you like,” Conway told the Bay of Plenty Times in 2022 “So we decided to make all the choice out of it and create something that is as normal as buying skincare.” In 2016, a sex-pert made headlines after urging all women to orgasm at least three times a week US physician and meditation teacher Andrea Pennington told British chat show This Morning that “90%” of an orgasm is achieved in a woman’s mind If in her head she is worried about what she didn’t finish today or what will the kids eat tomorrow or how she looks and smells and tastes then it will be much harder,” Pennington said “Things going on in a woman’s mind can stop her reaching the big O.” Pennington, the author of the Orgasm Prescription for Women, added that women should be having a minimum of three orgasms a week to reap the benefits The health benefits of sex and the female orgasm have been well-documented and author of Why Good Sex Matters told Glamour earlier this month that advantages of regular orgasms can include improved sleep In 2021, Girls Get Off won People’s Choice at the Tauranga Business Awards, and were a finalist for the Emerging Business Award. 'The team have nailed it – it’s a strategy that everyone can understand.' Volume 14 - 2020 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.599374 This article is part of the Research TopicModern Methods in NeuroethologyView all 22 articles We constructed a large projection device (the Antarium) with 20,000 UV-Blue-Green LEDs that allows us to present tethered ants with views of their natural foraging environment The ants walk on an air-cushioned trackball their movements are registered and can be fed back to the visual panorama Views are generated in a 3D model of the ants’ environment so that they experience the changing visual world in the same way as they do when foraging naturally The Antarium is a biscribed pentakis dodecahedron with 55 facets of identical isosceles triangles The length of the base of the triangles is 368 mm resulting in a device that is roughly 1 m in diameter Each triangle contains 361 blue/green LEDs and nine UV LEDs The 55 triangles of the Antarium have 19,855 Green and Blue pixels and 495 UV pixels covering 360° azimuth and elevation from −50° below the horizon to +90° above the horizon The angular resolution is 1.5° for Green and Blue LEDs and 6.7° for UV LEDs offering 65,536 intensity levels at a flicker frequency of more than 9,000 Hz and a framerate of 190 fps the direction and degree of polarisation of the UV LEDs can be adjusted through polarisers mounted on the axles of rotary actuators We build 3D models of the natural foraging environment of ants using purely camera-based methods We reconstruct panoramic scenes at any point within these models by projecting panoramic images onto six virtual cameras which capture a cube-map of images to be projected by the LEDs of the Antarium The Antarium is a unique instrument to investigate visual navigation in ants it allows us to provide ants with familiar and unfamiliar views or with scenes that are altered in spatial or spectral composition we can study the behavior of ants that are virtually displaced within their natural foraging environment the Antarium can also be used to investigate the dynamics of navigational guidance and the neurophysiological basis of ant navigation in natural visual environments It is thus likely that the neural machinery underlying navigation is heavily state- requiring closed-loop control of the visual scene by the insect and control by the experimenter over the experience (What has been learned?) the motivation (What is the navigational goal?) and the state of the animal (Whether it holds information from path integration or not) Parametric comparison of existing insect research VR systems and the Antarium which we now can use to render panoramic views at any location within the foraging range of the ants and project them in the Antarium delivering full-color video of a 3D modeled landscape The Antarium project aimed to design a projection system for experiments on ant navigation which must be capable of presenting panoramic views of the natural foraging habitat of ants in a way that addresses their spectral and polarization sensitivities while also allowing the ants to interact with the scene and the experimenter to modify it in arbitrary ways None of the existing projection systems could deliver on all these points The following constraints were considered at the outset: • Since ants have a panoramic vision (e.g., Zollikofer et al., 1995; Schwarz et al., 2011) the arena must cover 360° azimuth and the whole celestial hemisphere the arena must be able to project ground features down to −45° elevation • At the time the Antarium was designed, the spectral sensitivities of Myrmecia ants were not known, but scattered reports made it likely that ants, in general, possess UV, blue and green receptors (see references in Ogawa et al., 2015) • The Antarium must be able to deliver light of sufficient intensities at these wavelengths the brightness in a natural scene can vary by 5 log units The Antarium should be able to deliver a similar intensity range ants possess a dorsal eye region with UV and polarization-sensitive receptors that feed into the skylight polarization compass system would need to provide adjustable polarization covering the celestial hemisphere • We work with Australian bull ants. One of the largest bull ants (Myrmecia pyriformis) has around 3,500 ommatidia per eye (Narendra et al., 2011) the number of pixels must be at least 20 000 • The critical flicker fusion frequency (CFFF) has been determined for two Myrmecia species, for the nocturnal M. midas at 84.6 ± 3.2 Hz and the diurnal-crepuscular M. tarsata at 154.0 ± 8.5 Hz (for review see Ogawa et al., 2019) we opted for a minimum flicker rate of 300 Hz The minimum frame rate for ants to observe continuous motion is not known but it cannot be higher than the critical fusion frequency a frame rate close to 200 fps should be sufficient • We decided to use the trackball system designed by Dahmen et al. (2017) that records the rotations of a hollowed-out air-supported Styrofoam sphere using optical mouse sensors the advantages of this system are that it can be used in two ways: with the tethered animal free to rotate around the yaw axis and the trackball recording the animal’s translational movements only and with the tethered animal fixed so that the trackball movements reflect both the yaw rotations and the translational movements of the animal we had to operate within tight budgetary constraints The Antarium offers unique and crucial opportunities to investigate visual navigation in ants and to test models of visual navigation It allows us to confront ants in both open and closed-loop with familiar and unfamiliar views of their natural environment but also with completely featureless visual scenes or with scenes in which dominant objects have been removed or displaced or that are altered in spatial or spectral composition the Antarium can also be used in the future to investigate the neurophysiological basis of ant navigation in natural visual environments Although an ideal projector would be spherical, several practical constraints make this untenable. For example, if LEDs were drilled and glued to the inside surface of a sphere, the optics would be ideal (see e.g., Koenig et al., 2016) hand-soldering thousands of LEDs to their driver is error-prone and extremely labor-intensive A faster and cheaper alternative is to have machine printed circuit boards (PCB) which constrains the projector to be a polyhedral approximation of a sphere Since PCB manufacturing has a large NRE (non-recurrent engineering) cost it is significantly cheaper if the polyhedron can be built from identical facets Facet number is then a trade-off between optical properties and cost with larger numbers leading to a better approximation of the sphere To guarantee that each facet has identical properties that the LED arrangement can be identical on them all of the polyhedron’s vertices should lie on a sphere We chose the biscribed pentakis dodecahedron (Figure 1A) as our spherical approximation for the Antarium It has 60 facets of identical isosceles triangles Five triangles form a pentagonal pyramid and 12 of such pyramids comprise the solid For the Antarium one such pyramid is removed at the bottom providing an opening where a trackball with the tethered animal can be inserted (A) Concept schematics of the biscribed pentakis dodecahedron with 55 facets of identical isosceles triangles carrying LEDs and control electronics and the trackball device (B) Tethered ant on an air-cushioned trackball The ants are free to rotate around the yaw axis but its translational movements are registered by monitoring the rotations of the Styrofoam ball (C) The tethered ant as seen by the Antarium camera (E) The landscape panorama projected by the Antarium LEDs seen at 1.5° resolution about twice the average resolution of ants The physical size of the Antarium is constrained by electronic circuit board density, mechanical limitations, and the need for the opening at the bottom to be sufficiently large for the insertion of the trackball apparatus. With all those factors considered, the length of the base of the triangle was chosen to be 368 mm. All other dimensions are determined by the geometry of the pentakis dodecahedron, resulting in a roughly 1 m diameter device (Figure 1D) the LEDs should be as evenly distributed on the surface of the polyhedron as possible because the pattern continuity between adjacent panels needs to be addressed A pattern was found where the LEDs are on the vertex points of a hexagonal lattice A computer program was written that calculated the pixel positions and minimized the inter-pixel angle variation while taking the technological constraints of manufacturing into account one for the GB (green/blue) pixels and another for the UV pixels The angular acceptance functions are much wider and the spacing of ommatidia in the dorsal rim area is much higher than in the rest of the eye It was decided that the UV LED pattern therefore should be made significantly sparser than the BG pattern especially because of the high cost of UV LEDs and the need for their adjustable polarization This problem will be fixed in Antarium Mark II which is currently under construction (see “Outlook” section below) Dotted lines: emission spectra of the LEDs used in the current version of the Antarium as per manufacturer specifications (D) Schematic of how light polarization is achieved Preliminary experiments revealed substantial internal reflections within the Antarium which were subsequently minimized by fitting a low reflection black cardboard cover to its internal surface We measured the reflectance of the black cardboard with a USB-4000 Ocean Optics spectrometer against a certified reflectance standard reference from LabSphere illuminated by natural light the cardboard intensity was divided by the reflectance standard’s intensity the cardboard reflects between 5 and 7% of the light The adjustable polarization of the UV LEDs is based on each UV pixel being composed of two UV LEDs (Figure 2D) The other one is placed behind a linear polarizer The polarizer is a small disc mounted on an axle of a rotary actuator The actuator can rotate the disc and therefore its plane of polarization can be at any angle By varying the relative intensities of the polarized and unpolarized LEDs the polarization depth can also be controlled The actuator needs to be fast as it must to be able to follow scene changes comprising of a small permanent magnet rotor and a stator with two coils arranged orthogonally The combined magnetic fields of the two coils can have constant strength but set in any direction by driving one coil with a current that is proportional to the sine of the desired angular position while the other with its cosine The permanent magnet rotor will always align with the magnetic field direction an aircore can be driven into a new position quite fast It has a tendency of oscillations while it settles but manufacturers also offer devices with a small droplet of silicone oil in the rotor bearing The oil acts as a damper and the time constant of the damping depends on the viscosity of the oil used the settling can approach the theoretical optimum Limited was tested in the laboratory and it was fast settling A 180° rotation can be achieved in less than 200 ms To guarantee constant brightness the LEDs must be driven by a constant current source The brightness of an LED is a function of the current flowing over it LEDs are semiconductor diodes with nonlinear I–V characteristics the characteristics are dependent on the temperature of the chip Although a laboratory is usually an air-conditioned room LEDs generate waste heat which warms them up An LED that was bright for a while will be significantly warmer than one that ran at low intensity the intensity range of the arena should span close to 5 log units A 16-bit linearly spaced intensity regime (65,536 levels) corresponds to 4.8 log units We used a commercially available LED driver chip the MBI5040 from Macroblock which satisfies all these criteria It can drive 16 LEDs with a constant current It uses a 16-bit pulse-width modulation (PWM) scheme to set the intensity of each LED individually It can also apply a correction scheme to compensate for LED brightness variation The correction scheme can vary the drive current from 0 to the nominal maximum in 1% steps for each LED separately it can detect and report short circuit and open circuit LED failures the chip can operate with only a 0.5 V drop across its driving circuitry an important feature from a power consumption point of view The maximum drive current is 30 mA per LED; the LEDs used in the Antarium use only 20 mA drive current There are 361 BG and 9 UV pixels on a triangle and the MBI5040 can drive 16 LEDs (i.e. Using PWM to set the LED brightness introduces flicker PWM works by turning the LED full brightness for a short time then completely dark for some other time; the average intensity is the ratio of the ON time and the PWM period (the sum of the ON and OFF times) the number of levels that can be displayed is the number of increments per PWM period the Antarium needs a flicker frequency of 300 Hz or more the PWM period needs to be no more than 3.33 ms which with 65,536 levels gives an elementary time increment of 50.86 ns even though the MBI5040 chip could run on up to 30 MHz another method allows us to reach a much higher flicker frequency far beyond what would be detectable by any biological system The MBI5040 implements what is called scrambled PWM a scheme designed to increase the flicker frequency above the PWM period Instead of turning the LED on for the ON time then extinguishing it for the OFF time the scheme spreads those times around within the PWM period if the period is 10-time units and the LED has a brightness of 30% a simple PWM will turn it on for 3 units then off for 7 units a scrambled PWM system might turn the LED on for 1 unit Since the LED was on for 3 units and off for 7 the average brightness is still 30% but now the LED blinked three times during the period instead of once There are various ways to perform spreading The MBI5040’s method becomes active when the brightness level increases above 32 units out of the 65,536 thus if the LED brightness is higher than 0.05% of full scale the flicker frequency will be more than 9 kHz Photodiode tests using an oscilloscope confirmed flicker at 9 kHz Since the Antarium’s LED array is simply a display device the method of data delivery from the rendering computer must be defined to understand all of the Antarium’s LED information All together the Antarium has 20,350 pixels each of which needs 2 × 16 bits of data to set the brightness giving a total of 651,200 bits per video frame The most common communication links on a computer are USB and Ethernet the fastest USB was 450 Mbps (USB-2.0 full speed) the next step down was 12 Mbps (USB-2.0 high speed) The most common Ethernet interface was the so-called 100BASE-TX delivering 100 Mbps over the ubiquitous "blue cable" (officially named Category-5 twisted pair cable) Full-speed USB interface chips were not readily available at the time and the high-speed USB was simply not fast enough chose the 100 Mbps Ethernet link as the delivery medium for the video stream then the 100 Mbps link has a theoretical limit of 153 frames per second That does not meet our goal of 200 fps and so we needed to find ways to compress the video stream The compression scheme must be relatively simple so that the panels of the Antarium can decode it and so that any computer can encode it without special hardware The solution we chose is to subsample the color information Instead of delivering 16-bit resolution green and blue values for a pixel independently a 16-bit luminance value and an 8-bit chromaticity value can be delivered That saves 25% of the video bandwidth (24 bits per pixel instead of 32) It does not compromise the 4.8 log unit brightness range it does limit each pixel to 256 available hues The simplest way of sending data from a computer over an Ethernet link is by using a standard protocol that is supported by any operating system One of those is UDP (user datagram protocol) where blocks of data (packets) are sent from one machine to another UDP is advantageous in that it has a smaller overhead than other protocols it does not guarantee delivery and gives no feedback on whether the packet ever arrived UDP is often used in situations where the occasional loss of a packet is acceptable but the unpredictable delays arising from confirming the reception of every packet and re-sending lost ones are not These strengths and limitations are well suited for video streaming since if a single video frame gets lost most of the time the observer will not even notice Whereas if the streaming stopped while the sender and receiver negotiate the retransmission of a single packet with a dedicated Ethernet link to ensure that packet loss is rare An Ethernet frame contains up to 1,500 bytes of actual data (usually called the payload) and a further 38 bytes of addressing synchronization UDP adds 24 bytes of protocol information to the data portion of the packet The protocol overhead is thus 62 bytes for each Ethernet frame with a UDP packet in it a single Antarium triangle is represented by 1,110 bytes If each packet contains one triangle’s worth of video information then 1,174 bytes need to be transferred per triangle A video frame contains 55 such Ethernet frames resulting in a maximum theoretical video rate of 194 fps over a dedicated Ethernet link the Antarium sustains around 190 frames per second Driving the nine polarisation actuators exceeds the capacity of available microcontrollers so the Antarium’s panels are equipped with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) instead The processing unit of each triangle must receive video frames and send the brightness data to the 47 LED driver chips it must control the drive current of the nine actuators for the polarisers which each have two coils (18 total drive lines) Using pulse-width modulation (PWM) to set the current necessitates a device with 18 PWM units which no commercially available microcontroller can support An FPGA is just a large collection of simple digital logic building blocks which then can be connected inside the chip to form a digital circuit that performs a specific function Microcontrollers are well suited for tasks that work on fewer hardware signals at a time and where the decision making logic or calculations are complex For tasks where there are many hardware signals and the calculations and decision making are relatively simple but must be performed at high speed and with precise timing A large number of PWM signals make the FPGA a better solution for the Antarium each triangle panel contains an XC3S50AN chip from Xilinx The chip has 50,000 logic gate’s worth of resources and can handle more than 80 input/output digital signals at high speed send the decoded data to the LED driver chips and run 18 PWM controllers for the actuators The remaining 40% is not sufficient to also run Ethernet and UDP protocols as a logic circuit While we could have used a more powerful chip the added cost for every 55 panels would have been a significant expense We instead chose to design a single interface board that receives the video feed from the computer and distributes it to the triangles in a simpler way When the FPGA on each triangle panel receives a frame it decodes the chromaticity encoding and collects the 16-bit intensity values for each LED in a buffer the buffer is sent to the LED driver chips The drivers have an SPI (serial peripheral interconnect) interface The LED driver chips are designed to be daisy-chained Since very long SPI chains are technically problematic we divided the LED drivers into four chains The FPGA delivers the video data to the chips on the four SPI chains simultaneously which allows us to use a lower speed on the buses We use an H-bridge design for the PWM controller of the polariser’s actuators which provides a large reduction in energy usage when the actuators are idle To drive a single H-bridge the FPGA needs to produce two signals so for the two coils of nine actuators each This design allows energy to be saved since the FPGA reduces the current on both coils by the same factor (thus keeping their ratio and therefore the angle of the actuator intact) when the actuator is stationary This holding current is one-quarter of the current used for moving the actuator the FPGA switches the drive current back to nominal and when the position has not changed for a while it slowly reduces the current to the one quarter holding value we placed thermal sensors on each triangular panel which are also controlled by the FPGA The data from these sensors can be sent back across the network which is important given the large amount of heat that can be produced when the full device is running at maximum brightness Since the Antarium consumes a significant amount of power ensuring adequate power supply was integral A typical blue or UV LED has a voltage drop of around 3.4 V resulting in a minimum power supply voltage of 3.9 V To cater for variations and to provide a safety margin the LED driver circuitry operates from a 4.2 V supply Due to the use of the intensity/chromaticity encoding a triangle panel’s 370 pixels draw 7.4 A the driver chips themselves also consume approximately 30 mA from the same supply With 47 driver chips per panel that add 1.4 A to the load The FPGA and its support circuitry need to be supplied as well although that supply current is negligible compared to that of the LEDs and the drivers The actuators run from 12 V and the nominal coil current is 54 mA the two coils of an actuator together have a maximum current consumption of 77 mA All together the board needs about 9 A from 4.2 V and 0.7 A from 12 V The boards have two high-efficiency switch-mode power supplies that generate the 12 V and 4.2 V from a 24 V supply The efficiency of these supplies is close to 90% thus the board draws a maximum of 2.13 A from 24 V Since under no circumstances will all LEDs of all triangles be on full power while all actuators being also set to their most power-hungry position it was decided that a commercially available 24 V 10 A power supply unit from MeanWell can safely power five triangles forming a pentagon Power losses on the cabling are minimized by using sufficiently thick wires The Antarium’s maximum power consumption is 2.5 kW making its heat generation roughly equivalent to a portable oil radiator enough to warm a small room with a volume of 16 m3 If that thermal energy were concentrated inside the Antarium’s less than 1 m3 volume the temperature would rise to uncomfortably high levels for any subject very quickly There are three ways to mitigate that risk: reducing the dissipated power and ensuring convection between interior and exterior spaces Consumption is minimized due to our use of natural scenes, which are highly varied and contain many dark objects, such as trees trunks, buildings, and shadows on the ground (see Figure 1E) to compensate for the intensity variation due to parallax arising out of the Antarium’s geometry the central area LEDs of each panel are artificially darkened Together these two factors more than halve the overall power consumption To minimize the amount of heat inside the Antarium we made use of the fact that each LED is connected to a solid copper plane near the outer surface of the PCB While normally the thickness of copper in PCBs is 35 μm we used 70 μm copper for the Antarium to improve heat conductance To further augment each panel’s heat conduction we added a large exposed copper square to the exterior of each panel which is thermally connected to the inner plane This allows us to attach a Peltier cooling element with a heatsink and a fan which can even more effectively suck the heat out and dissipate it after testing the Antarium in its final form it turned out that there was no need for such additional cooling of the panels The lack of the need for a cooling element was perhaps facilitated by ensuring good airflow between the interior and exterior of the Antarium This convection is assisted by a small table fan placed under the Antarium when it is operational which supplies fresh air into the internal volume and forces the warm air out an air-conditioned room helps to keep the internal temperatures at comfortable levels and also ensures comfortable working temperatures for operators when set to 19°C Figure 1D shows the fully assembled Antarium The distributor board, as its name implies, distributes the video signal to the triangles (Figures 2E, 3) It contains an LPC1788 microcontroller from NXP The microcontroller has an ARM Cortex-M3 core running at 120 MHz augmented with an external media access controller (TLK110 Texas Instruments) provides the 100 Mbps Ethernet interface (A) The distributor board and its major electronics (B) The block diagram of the LED panel Field-Programmable Gate Array The microcontroller shares its work with an XC3S500E (Xilinx Inc.) FPGA containing half a million gates worth of logic there is a 128 KB dual-port static RAM chip (IDT70V28L All received Ethernet frames are written into the dual-port RAM Then the microcontroller decodes the protocol and analyses the packets Packets related to connection maintenance are processed and responded to by the microcontroller then the microcontroller sends a message to the FPGA that the data should be delivered to a triangle and queues it for transmission on one of its 11 output links to the pentagons After delivering the packet to the triangle the FPGA sends a message to the microcontroller informing it that the data are out and the given dual-port RAM region can be released then the FPGA holds the message in temporary internal storage and after signaling the microcontroller that a message is available When the microcontroller indicates that it is ready the message is passed to it through the dual-port RAM The communication between the FPGA on the distributor board and the FPGAs on the triangles uses differential signaling The data rate is 10 Mbps and the signal is subjected to the so-called Manchester encoding That data speed and encoding are used by the 10BASE-T Ethernet standard which facilitates the use of low-cost Ethernet connectors While the data speed and encoding method are the same the protocol which the Antarium uses is much simpler than Ethernet followed by a byte that indicates the type of the packet and its destination (or source) triangle within the pentagon The next byte contains additional information about the packet content The data follow and the packet is finished with a two-byte long data integrity check That protocol is simple enough so that even the resource-limited FPGAs on the panels can handle it The configuration bitstream of the distributor board’s FPGA is stored on a micro-SD card The board has an SD card socket and the microcontroller drives it The controller implements the SD card protocol as well as the Microsoft FAT file-system thus the FPGA bitstream can be written to the card using any computer it first reads the SD card and loads the bitstream into the FPGA the firmware of the microcontroller also implements the UDP (user datagram protocol) Those are the necessary and sufficient components to be able to communicate with a machine with a standard network stack regardless of the operating system it runs The distributor board also has a secondary function: to program the FPGAs on the triangles The FPGA on the distributor board forgets its configuration when it is powered down the microcontroller needs to load the configuration from the SD card The FPGA on the triangle has built-in non-volatile storage to hold its configuration the configuration first needs to be programmed into the non-volatile storage the programming algorithm could be reconstructed from various application notes (engineering advisory articles) We then created our implementation of the algorithm on the distributor board and it can program the triangle’s FPGAs in a few seconds The distributor board is powered from a commercially available 12 V power module (plug-pack) The actual supply voltages for the electronics are generated from that 12 V using an LT3824 (Linear Technology) dual switch-mode regulator To aid software development and the initial programming of the board also contains an RS-232 serial port All design work was performed on a computer running the open-source GNU/Linux operating system several programs were written in-house to calculate or optimize certain parameters These programs were all written either in the C or in the Tcl language interpreted scripting language with graphical capabilities C programs were compiled using the open-source gcc toolchain Building the final binary image or bitstream was controlled by the open-source gmake tool The open-source Fossil distributed version control system was used to keep track of changes during development The schematic entry and the PCB design for the triangles and the distributor board were done using the commercial Eagle EDA package from CadSoft GmbH (recently taken over by Autodesk) The PCB manufacturing files were visually checked using the gebv open-source Gerber viewer tool The code for the FPGAs was written in the Verilog hardware description language The logic simulations utilized the Icarus Verilog open-source simulator and the GtkWave open-source waveform viewer programs and bitstream generation were performed by the ISE 14.7 toolchain from Xilinx The tool is closed source but Xilinx provides it free of charge The firmware for the microcontroller on the distributor board was written in the C language The code was compiled using gcc in a cross-compiler configuration The open-source Armlib library from Bendor Research Pty Limited was used for most low-level functions and the task scheduler and the FAT filesystem utilized routines donated by Arthur Digital Solutions Kft (Hungary) and assembly were ordered from Albacom Kft (Hungary) Quality control and thorough testing of the boards before shipment to Australia was performed The mechanical design and the manufacturing of the scaffolding were done by the ANU workshop The power cables were manufactured by hand; the Ethernet cables and sundry electronics items were purchased from Jaycar The software that generates the video stream for the projector makes use of the commercially available three-dimensional (3D) rendering engine Unity (Unity Technologies) running in Microsoft Windows@ The primary market for the engine is computer games and as such it is best suited for planar projections The Antarium has a low pixel count compared to most commercial video games and it is possible to render six or more game views simultaneously at a high frame rate The six views have the same camera position in the 3D virtual world but the cameras look in six orthogonal directions (up essentially creating a projection onto a cube A custom shader uses a spherical transformation known as cube-mapping to map the pixels of our rendered cube onto any arbitrary 3D model By applying this shader to a 3D model that represents each LED in the Antarium as an individual face with the same azimuth and elevation as the LED’s real-world coordinates we can render the scene as it would appear if projected onto the Antarium We then use a compute shader to sample each face of our virtual Antarium using its normal as a lookup into the now spherical cubmap (using DirectX SampleLevel function) we encode and package these as pixel data to send over UDP to the distributor board The Antarium aims to display views of the natural habitat of the animals (Figure 1E). We, therefore, constructed a 3D model of that habitat using camera-based reconstruction methods (see Stürzl et al., 2015; Murray and Zeil, 2017) Thousands of photographs were taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200 camera at 4,000 × 3,000 pixel resolution while walking around in the area surrounding the nests of the experimental ants Multiple voxel clouds were created from these photographs with the software Pix4D (Pix4D SA) and exported as 3D models before being combined into a single unified and aligned 3D reconstruction of the ants’ foraging environment Since the very distant panorama does not have enough parallax to be processed by the 3D reconstruction software we added the distant panorama later as a static background image at 1 km (approximately infinite) distance We captured this panorama with a Ricoh Theta S panorama camera (Ricoh Company Limited allowing us to move the foraging tree to any arbitrary location or bearing in the model/photograph as an ant is viewing the scene inside the Antarium whether the ants treat trees as individual landmark beacons or get their bearing from the whole landmark panorama Since the trackball is connected to the computer running the 3D engine we can use the movement data it generates to update the position of our virtual cameras in the 3D world thus providing our ant subjects with closed-loop control of the visual scene 3D scenes or panoramas can be presented either statically or in sequence we use Kernel32 to share a file in shared memory between the trackball program and the game engine we write the current offset of the trackball from its starting location and accept commands to reset the starting location can arbitrarily change the ant’s virtual position and heading at any time this trackball offset can be used to update the position of the six cameras inside the 3D model thus updating the view that is presented to the ant subject It should be noted that due to the complexity of this setup significant care must be taken to ensure all real-world and virtual objects are rotationally aligned so that the visual consequences of the ant’s movements are accurately represented To record in addition to the ants’ intended paths also the scanning movements of their head, we mounted a Raspberry-Pi V1 camera at the apex of the Antarium. The camera is connected to a Raspberry-Pi single-board computer (Raspberry Pi Foundation, UK). It records a 1,280 × 960 pixel video at 30 fps to an external USB disk (Figure 1C) The recording format cannot be played back with commercially available software on Windows thus the recorded footage is transcoded to MP4 format using the open-source ffmpeg package on a Linux computer (A) Four panoramic views from the ants’ foraging habitat Familiar is located on the ants’ foraging corridor half-way toward their foraging tree; Nest is the view from the ants’ nest entrance; Unfamiliar if the view from a location about 5 m to the side of the foraging corridor and Unstructured is a synthetic view without landmark panorama (B) Two examples (left and right) of ants responding to familiar scene rotations Instances of rotations are marked by blue dots in the time course of path direction (top) panels and of speed (bottom panels) Fifteen seconds segments before (red) and after rotations (blue) are also marked on the intended paths of the ants (shown on the left) and on the time course of path direction (top panels) Paths are shown in the trackball coordinate system but in the presence of the unstructured scene Note the difference in path direction oscillations in (B,C) Figure 5. Proof of concept experiments. (A) The path (left), the time course of path direction (right-top), and time course of speed (right bottom) for an ant in the presence of the familiar view. Successive instances of scene rotation are marked by blue dots and numbered. Otherwise conventions as in Figure 4 orange) and longitudinal body orientation (blue) over time from 15 s before and 15 s after rotation 2–4 Bottom row: head orientation relative to longitudinal body axis for the same segments The vertical black line marks the moment of rotation We see the ability to present natural views that are familiar to an insect as an important condition for answering many questions about the neural mechanisms underlying visual navigation The Antarium not only allows us to compare responses to familiar and unfamiliar natural scenes set up conflicts between different visual information (i.e. or the spatial frequency composition of scenes we can investigate the dynamics of visual navigation such as the relationship between navigational decisions and scanning movements or the frequency with which ants check and update their heading direction The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors For design share and construction options contact ZK (zoltan@bendor.com.au) electronics and software; supervised manufacturing; conducted tests and behavioral experiments; and wrote the first draft of the manuscript TM: conducted 3D modeling and developed rendering software and interface pipeline to the Antarium; conducted tests and behavioral experiments HD: provided trackball system and training AN: conducted initial experiments with a trackball system and provided funding JZ: project supervision and provision of funding All authors contributed to several revisions of the manuscript All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version We acknowledge financial support from Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project Grants (DP150101172 and DP150102699) the Australian National University Endowment Fund We are grateful to Ken Cheng for providing initial funding during the start phase of this project TM was supported for part of the work by the Australian Government via grant AUSMURIB000001 associated with ONR MURI grant N00014-19-1-2571 the company’s existing contacts were utilized in the component sourcing and manufacturing of the Antarium and its test equipment was used during development Bendor Research has not charged any fees for its services and had no gain The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest We are grateful to the mechanial workshop of the Research School of Biology for constructing the housing for the trackball contraption and the scaffold for the Antarium panels and to Jesse Wallace for providing the raspberry camera Using an insect mushroom body circuit to encode route memory in complex natural environments A model of ant route navigation driven by scene familiarity Responses of blowfly motion-sensitive neurons to reconstructed optic flow along outdoor flight paths Desert ants use olfactory scenes for 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August 2020; Accepted: 12 October 2020; Published: 10 November 2020 Copyright © 2020 Kócsi, Murray, Dahmen, Narendra and Zeil. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited in accordance with accepted academic practice distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms *Correspondence: Zoltán Kócsi, em9sdGFuQGJlbmRvci5jb20uYXU= Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher 94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or goodLearn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish Zoltán Kócsi is the owner and director of Bendor Research in Canberra and a PhD student in neuroethology at the Australian National University in Canberra I have designed electronic control systems for more than 30 years and I had expected to do so until I retired Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00949-z This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. 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UNIL is a leading international teaching and research institution with over 5,000 employees and 17,000 students split between its Dorigny campus Department of Energy and Environmental Materials and advance cancer research in a leading translational institute Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news You are receiving this pop-up because this is the first time you are visiting our site You are using software which is blocking our advertisements (adblocker) we are relying on revenues from our banners So please disable your adblocker and reload the page to continue using this site.Thanks it was time for a grand opening of the new project Gartenbaubetrieb A&S Knaup with over 400 people attending the opening which was well catered for by local parties the Knaup family was finally able to show this beautiful project to the outside world Knaup: "We started making beautiful new plans several years ago Owner Andreas Knaup and daughter Sina works together with brothers and more family members Sina: "My father told me that our current business was too old to make money for the next 30 years I decided to go to school and joined my father in looking for a piece of land for a new business" In 2017 Sina started her dual education in Freising (Hochschule Weihenstephan Triesdorf) they found an area of an old sugar factory and plans went forward to start construction on May 6 we continued with the interior design of the greenhouse with the delivery of the cultivation containers as a programmer with a lot of technical knowledge We would like to thank HAWE very much for the pleasant cooperation and the personal level" was built for the cultivation of various potted plants The more than 5 ha greenhouse and processing area are equipped with a high-tech mobile container system with an Ebb & Flow system from HAWE The mobile container system includes 3500 container tables These cranes are designed to cope with the high capacities during the production season the greenhouse is equipped with a fully automated cultivation system with a manual picking zone All HAWE systems are controlled by SDF Horti Software the company also has new offices with a social wing and several staff flats For more information:Jelmer HuizingHAWE Cultivation SystemsTel.: +31 6 - 20707653[email protected] hawe.nl FreshPublishers © 2005-2025 HortiDaily.com Looking for your dream job will now be literally in the palm of your own hands - and it begins with a simple swipe right This is the promise of data-led job marketplace ZEIL a career application that adapts various features of social media platforms and dating apps to bring employers and jobseekers together in a familiar environment it's really a modern-day career app," said Anna Mowbray The application allows jobseekers to swipe right on their target organisation and use innovative tools like video cover letters "So, it's about visualization, storytelling... and really empowering talent to come into organisations and to find their dream jobs," Mowbray said in Stuff. The application also has an algorithm that matches its users' soft skills It also aims to increase jobseekers' exposure organisations and provide them with job recommendations For employers, ZEIL aims to provide them with perfect-fit talent more effectively. Through the app, businesses can optimise their recruitment strategies to improve candidate quality and reduce hiring time The new application comes as the use of smartphones become widespread and more digital natives like Gen Zs and Millennials join the workforce "With 92% of New Zealanders using a smartphone, we saw a gap in the market for a convenient app-based experience that would visually and culturally appeal to our growing digital-native workforce through intuitive human design and modern marketing tactics," Mowbray said in Stuff "Our users will not only find jobs they're actively looking for they'll be served jobs they didn't even know existed." The app launched with over 150 brands and roles and the company plans to expand globally after launching in New Zealand "I don't really just want to go straight to Australia I don't want to become another Australasian business it's really about being able to go global," the founder said ‘mab zeil’ in frankfurt, germany designed by massimiliano fuksas will open on february 28th the building which took approximately  5 years to construct is comprised of  a 4 star hotel with conference centre fluent in form the building is connected by 2 major poles one at the zeil side and the other at the TT side where entrances are located for the hotel and offices the hotel’s lobby is located in the reconstructed TT building next to an art gallery and the more luxurious shops that form the end of the shopping mall the lobby is connected with the rooms via elevators in between there are connections on the 3rd and 4th floor with the conference centre and sport facilities escalators bring employees up to the fourth floor in a 27.5 meter entrance hall construction of ‘mab zeil’ image courtesy massimiliano fuksas construction of ‘mab zeil’ image courtesy massimiliano fuksas construction of ‘mab zeil’ image courtesy massimiliano fuksas construction of ‘mab zeil’ image courtesy massimiliano fuksas construction of ‘mab zeil’ image courtesy massimiliano fuksas AXOR presents three bathroom concepts that are not merely places of function but destinations in themselves — sanctuaries of style This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Metrics details Recent oncological studies identified beneficial properties of radiation applied at ultrahigh dose rates several orders of magnitude higher than the clinical standard of the order of Gy min–1 Sources capable of providing these ultrahigh dose rates are under investigation compact laser-driven proton source with energies greater than 60 MeV enables radiobiological in vivo studies We performed a pilot irradiation study on human tumours in a mouse model showing the concerted preparation of mice and laser accelerator tumour-conform irradiation using a laser-driven as well as a clinical reference proton source and the radiobiological evaluation of irradiated and unirradiated mice for radiation-induced tumour growth delay The prescribed homogeneous dose of 4 Gy was precisely delivered at the laser-driven source The results demonstrate a complete laser-driven proton research platform for diverse user-specific small animal models able to deliver tunable single-shot doses up to around 20 Gy to millimetre-scale volumes on nanosecond timescales spatially homogenized and tailored to the sample The platform provides a unique infrastructure for translational research with protons at ultrahigh dose rates Model-compliant dose delivery: the delivery of variable prescribed homogeneous volumetric dose distributions within the percent-level margins determined by radiobiological protocols, mitigating LPA-inherent spectral intensity fluctuations correlated with variations in the laser or target parameters Accelerator readiness and stability: stable daily accelerator performance over weeks, benchmarked via machine parameters defined by the intended application, as a precondition for beam availability following a schedule determined by in vivo sample preparation Radiobiological pilot study: the emulation of a full-scale radiobiological study at a reduced number of samples benchmarked via meaningful dose–effect data, showcasing the concerted operation of on-demand proton LPA-source operation, precise dose delivery and dosimetry, together with complex in vivo sample preparation, irradiation and follow up A selected spectral part of the protons is transported using a pulsed two-solenoid beamline The ESA is inserted for spectral shaping and scatterers for lateral homogenization The protons traverse the beam monitors and dosimeters installed downstream in air before delivering the dose to the PTV behind the final beam aperture of the mouse bedding unit Kinetic energy (Ekin) proton-source spectra at the Draco PW laser measured by stacked RCFs for two laser energies (Elaser) on target (Methods) Np,dose represents the fraction of the orange-source spectrum required for dose delivery TOF-measured kinetic energy (Ekin) of the proton-source spectra at the PTV position with and without ESA of 15 mm (2 × NP,ESA (solid blue line) and NP,No ESA (dashed blue line)) The green data represent the mean proton bunch energy EMean Integral depth–dose distribution measured via the RCF stack compared with the TOF prediction (blue) The dose in the dRCF is highlighted in dark orange and the dose in the PTV is shown by the dashed line (PTV RCFs) Pseudo-colour images show the lateral dose distributions at selected RCF stack layers within the PTV The observed radiation-induced tumour growth delay in a mouse model (sample size examined at a single-dose point ((4.0 ± 0.4) Gy) proves the achievement of the unique interplay of long-term stable proton LPA-source operation at the highest performance and precise dose delivery and dosimetry adapted to the ultrahigh bunch dose rate at millimetre-scale irradiation fields with the complex requirements of a radiobiological study ~108 particles are needed to meet the prescribed dose over the 80 mm3 PTV considering a mean proton energy of 20 MeV The requirements pose major challenges for a laser-driven dose delivery system beam tailoring and dedicated diagnostics for guidance and monitoring overcoming these challenges opens up unique possibilities for single-shot tumour-conform irradiation Lateral beam confinement and homogeneity are achieved with the final beam aperture and scatterers downstream of the second solenoid This TOF spectrum represents all the protons required at the source level for dose delivery to the PTV and therefore was scaled accounting for particle loss (apertures) and energy shifts (scatterers) during transport The established research platform enables the delivery of three-dimensional tumour-conform dose distributions in agreement with all the specifications for quantitative in vivo radiobiological experiments by making perfect use of the broadband proton spectrum uniquely available at an LPA source Daily LPA-source performance over a two-year period demonstrated via the highest recorded proton cut-off energy Ep,max from the Thomson parabola spectrometer (TPS bars) and RCF stack (diamonds); the horizontal line at Ep,max = 60 MeV acts as a guide for the eye The green bars correspond to the data in b and the blue bar Small animal irradiation days are highlighted by the dashed bars Daily average of the dose delivery parameters (mean dose per shot \({\bar{D}}_{{{{\rm{shot}}}}}\) with 2σ standard deviation mean depth \({{\Delta }}{\bar{H}}_{{{{\rm{depth}}}}}\) and lateral dose inhomogeneity \({{\Delta }}{\bar{H}}_{{{{\rm{lat}}}}}\)) and targeted parameter ranges (grey) The blue data points correspond to the data in c Verification of the stability of all (consecutive) shots during a representative day of mouse irradiation measured by the transported kinetic-energy spectrum Ekin with Np,norm as normalized proton number relative mean bunch energy fluctuation ΔEmean and dose delivery parameters (dose per shot Dshot and depth–dose inhomogeneity per shot ΔHdepth) all lying within the targeted parameter ranges (grey) Simultaneously meeting all the prescribed parameter ranges (Fig. 2 grey bars) represents a breakthrough in every aspect: the demonstration of laser-driven proton-beam generation at this high-energy level over two years dose delivery at radiobiologically relevant quality and high-precision dosimetry over many weeks and for every shot of each required day A total of 61 out of 92 animals were allocated to the experiment They were divided into two cohorts for the different irradiation sites and each cohort was divided into five treatment groups (number of animals in Draco PW/number of animals in UPTD): proton irradiated (8/7) The sham-treated groups were identically treated to the irradiation groups In combination with the control groups that remained in the housing facility without treatment the sham-treated groups are used to uncover influences of the experimental procedures on tumour growth that are not induced by radiation Examples of irradiation timescales; the continuous irradiation of the UPTD cyclotron is indicated in green and pulsed irradiation of three selected mice at Draco PW The inset shows a rapid dose application by the LPA proton bunch Proton tumour doses of all the mice including 2σ uncertainties at the cyclotron (\({D}_{{{{\rm{PTV}}}}}^{{{{\rm{UPTD}}}}}\)) and laser accelerator (\({D}_{{{{\rm{PTV}}}}}^{{{{\rm{Draco}}}}}\)) The final dose values at Draco PW as the weighted mean of two independent absolute dosimetry methods (IC and dRCF; light blue) The mean values for all the animals are given by dashed lines Individual tumour growth curves as the relative tumour volume increases after allocation/treatment for growth control (light grey) sham (dark grey) and proton-irradiated (green/blue) mice at the respective facilities which run in parallel to the irradiated ones indicate the influence of the respective treatment conditions Unaffected tumour growth is shown by the control mice that remain in the corresponding animal facilities The asterisks indicate mice with fast-growing secondary tumours and the plus signs indicates tumour volume reduction due to scabbing The number of animals per group is given in the parentheses The x axis is interrupted to display a longer period of time with no substantial change in tumour volume X-ray irradiation remains essential in a full-scale study to identify and correct for deviations in the biological response arising from biological diversity between the mouse cohorts at both facilities conducted at a cyclotron and an LPA source no indications for influences of environmental conditions and experimental procedures were found which is an important precondition for all future studies a total of 22 analysed animals per group are required to detect a disparity of the radiobiological effect of laser-driven and conventional protons with a level of significance of α = 0.05 and a power of 80% assuming a difference of four days in the tumour growth delay Accounting for a certain safety margin (~30%) a full-scale experiment would comprise a total of almost 300 mice RCF-measured kinetic energy (Ekin) proton-source spectrum at the maximum laser energy Elaser = 18 J on the target (black) and proton spectrum contributing to the delivery of a single-shot dose of 22.6 Gy (mean of the depth–dose distribution measured via the RCF stack) after shot-dose-optimized transport (Np,dose; blue) Respective depth–dose profile with a homogeneity margin of 10% (blue) Exemplary pseudo-colour images show lateral dose distributions at selected RCF stack layers within the PTV The achievement of the previously inaccessible combination of dose delivery parameters in this study and the demonstrated ability to provide radiobiological data comparable to a clinical reference show that LPA research facilities not only extend the portfolio of proton sources for translational research in general but also carry the potential to contribute to proton FLASH RT research The final beam aperture (lead and aluminium; 7 mm diameter) defines the irradiation field Solenoid 1 (magnetic flux density B1 ≈ 13.6 T at the solenoid centre solenoid 2 (B2 = 3.5 T at the solenoid centre TOF detector and transmission IC (14 mm diameter at 2,082 mm) and final beam aperture (lead and aluminium; 7 mm diameter Solenoid 1 was equipped with a dedicated cooling system that allowed continuous operation at three pulses per minute The use of apertures and scatterers was therefore kept to a minimum The spectral distribution of the transported proton bunch was measured by the TOF spectrometer and compared with the reference spectra beam transport was readjusted by tuning the magnetic-field strength (typical changes of <4%) of the solenoids The alignment of the (motorized) final beam aperture with respect to the beam axis was performed via online scintillator measurements The beam transport setup offers a direct line of sight from the source to the sample making it necessary to consider the contamination of the transported proton beam at the irradiation site with other ionizing radiation generated in the LPA process or via secondary interaction are transported like protons considering identical magnetic rigidity; however they are stopped by the scatterers and do not contribute to the delivered dose Electrons are deflected and dispersed in the solenoid fringe fields The flux of neutral particles at the irradiation site such as gamma radiation or (secondary) neutrons is strongly supressed by the ~2 m distance to the source following the inverse-square law Measurements via RCFs at the irradiation site verified the negligible dose contribution of the radiation background Each sample irradiation was followed by QA RCF stack measurement The RCFs were digitized in accordance with the calibration protocol the films were digitized with a flatbed scanner and analysed on the basis of the calibration enabled the use of the Markus IC at Draco PW and thus IC cross-calibration The beam stability of the clinical accelerator at the UPTD enables to deduce the absolute volumetric dose information from the calibrated transmission IC rendering complementary dosimeters unnecessary Proton-beam size and divergence at multiple positions during transport were measured via the RCF stack and the derived data were fed into the Fluka model The predicted depth–dose distribution at the PTV was regularly verified via the RCF stack measurement for QA purposes no statistical methods were used to predetermine the sample sizes but accepted/typical numbers from approved animal studies were applied Here 92 animals—47 at the laser-driven proton facility Draco PW and 45 at the proton reference facility UPTD—were applied targeting seven animals per treatment group or 70 animals in total in the analysis including backup animals to balance for the missing tumour growth not matching the allocation criteria and exclusion due to health status or radiation failure 61 out of the 92 animals were allocated in both cohorts whereas 19 animals did not develop a tumour 11 animals did not meet the allocation criteria and one animal was prematurely euthanized due to general health conditions One animal was excluded from the analysis after irradiation because of underdosage at Draco PW due to a technical failure A common workflow for mouse irradiation was applied to minimize external influences the animals were transported to the respective treatment site and anaesthetized shortly before their respective (sham) irradiation The animals were prone positioned in the prewarmed bedding unit with the tumour-bearing ear fixed with Leukosilk (BSN Medical) on a PMMA block attached on the right side of the bedding unit where it was tilted by −90° to position the tumour within the radiation field Camera-based tumour-positioning control assures congruence of the tumour volume and PTV The final beam aperture assures radiation protection of the mouse the bedding units were positioned horizontally superimposing the tumour-bearing ears on the PMMA block with the collimator openings the bedding units were heated during irradiation to circumvent a drop in the body temperature of the anaesthetized mice Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article All other data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request The code written for use in this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request Radiation oncology in the era of precision medicine The translational research chain: is it delivering the goods Ultrahigh dose-rate FLASH irradiation increases the differential response between normal and tumor tissue in mice Clinical translation of FLASH radiotherapy: why and how Biological benefits of ultra-high dose rate FLASH radiotherapy: sleeping beauty awoken Ultra-high dose rate (FLASH) radiotherapy: silver bullet or fool’s gold Diffenderfer, E. S. et al. The current status of preclinical proton FLASH radiation and future directions. Med. Phys. https://doi.org/10.1002/mp.15276 (2021) Irradiation at ultra-high (FLASH) dose rates reduces acute normal tissue toxicity in the mouse gastrointestinal system Hypo-fractionated FLASH-RT as an effective treatment against glioblastoma that reduces neurocognitive side effects in mice All irradiations that are ultra-high dose rate may not be FLASH: the critical importance of beam parameter characterization and in vivo validation of the FLASH effect Physics and biology of ultrahigh dose-rate (FLASH) radiotherapy: a topical review FLASH radiotherapy: current knowledge and future insights using proton-beam therapy Feasibility of proton FLASH effect tested by zebrafish embryo irradiation and in vivo validation of a novel proton FLASH radiation therapy system Technical challenges for FLASH proton therapy FLASH proton pencil beam scanning irradiation minimizes radiation-induced leg contracture and skin toxicity in mice LhARA: the laser-hybrid accelerator for radiobiological applications ELIMED-ELIMAIA: the first open user irradiation beamline for laser-plasma-accelerated ion beams Application of laser-accelerated protons to the demonstration of DNA double-strand breaks in human cancer cells Dose-controlled irradiation of cancer cells with laser-accelerated proton pulses DNA DSB repair dynamics following irradiation with laser-driven protons at ultra-high dose rates Fast dose fractionation using ultra-short laser accelerated proton pulses can increase cancer cell mortality Radiation pressure acceleration of protons to 93 MeV with circularly polarized petawatt laser pulses Proton beam quality enhancement by spectral phase control of a PW-class laser system Radiobiology experiments with ultra-high dose rate laser-driven protons: methodology and state-of-the-art Spectral and spatial shaping of laser-driven proton beams using a pulsed high-field magnet beamline A feasibility study of zebrafish embryo irradiation with laser-accelerated protons A compact solution for ion beam therapy with laser accelerated protons The ELIMED transport and dosimetry beamline for laser-driven ion beams Demonstration of tailored energy deposition in a laser proton accelerator Research facility for radiobiological studies at the University Proton Therapy Dresden Comparison study of in vivo dose response to laser-driven versus conventional electron beam Establishment of a small animal tumour model for in vivo studies with low energy laser accelerated particles An optimized small animal tumour model for experimentation with low energy protons First results with the novel petawatt laser acceleration facility in Dresden The dose-rate effect revisited: radiobiological considerations of importance in radiotherapy Electron dose rate and oxygen depletion protect zebrafish embryos from radiation damage Ultrafast pulse radiolysis using a terawatt laser wakefield accelerator Design and implementation of a robust and cost-effective double-scattering system at a horizontal proton beamline Dose rate dependence for different dosimeters and detectors: TLD The European Joint Research Project UHDpulse—metrology for advanced radiotherapy using particle beams with ultra-high pulse dose rates A new model for volume recombination in plane-parallel chambers in pulsed fields of high dose-per-pulse The FLUKA code: developments and challenges for high energy and medical applications Kroll, F. et al. Source data repository. Zenodo https://doi.org/10.14278/rodare.1128 (2021) Download references Zherlitsyn and the workshop of the Dresden High Magnetic Field Laboratory for advice and magnet manufacturing Pfeifer of the Institut of Forensic Medicine (TU Dresden) and W Eicheler of OncoRay for verification of the tumour model and thank the animal husbandry staff at OncoRay and HZDR We recognize the support of the Weizmann-Helmholtz Laboratory for Laser Matter Interaction (WHELMI) We are very grateful for the long-lasting support of R The work was supported by Laserlab Europe V (PRISES The research infrastructure at the University Proton Therapy Dresden (UPTD) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no Open access funding provided by Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden - Rossendorf e OncoRay—National Center for Radiation Research in Oncology Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus Partner Site Dresden: German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) Helmholtz Association/Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) Department of Radiotherapy and Radiation Oncology Department for Radiotherapy and Radiooncology Beyreuther prepared and/or conducted the experiments Beyreuther contributed to animal handling and care contributed to laser operation and maintenance All the authors reviewed the manuscript and contributed to discussions The authors declare no competing interests Nature Physics thanks Marie-Catherine Vozenin reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations sham (dark gray) and X-ray irradiated (green/blue) mice at respective facilities: a UPTD The plus indicates tumour volume reduction due to scabbing Number of animals per group given in parentheses The x-axis is interrupted to display a longer period of time with no substantial tumour volume change Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01520-3 Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: a shareable link is not currently available for this article Australia has a long history of encounters with unexplained aerial objects stretching from indigenous stories to modern mysteries And why is discussion of UFOs seen as the preserve of crackpots and conspiracists Celebrated journalist ROSS COULTHART probes the phenomenon both Down Under and overseas in his new book In Plain Sight – and in this edited extract demonstrates why it can be such a chilling topic About 2.30 on a pitch-black morning on Australia's remote North West Cape Annie Farinaccio walked out of a late-night party at the United States Naval Communication Station Harold E Holt shortly before the US was due to hand over the site to Australia The handover was happening amid mounting concern about the base's covert role as one of the cornerstones of America's submarine-launched nuclear missile defence launch orders from the US would be sent out by the station's powerful transmitters to submarines across the adjacent Indian Ocean Exmouth locals had no idea their sleepy town would likely be obliterated in a nuclear exchange; they just valued what the "Yanks" brought to the local economy in this isolated community and were sad to be seeing them go The party at the base that night was to farewell some American friends who were returning home because of the handover she had no way of getting home – the few local taxis in this remote part of Australia had stopped for the night So when two Australian Federal Protective Service police officers kindly offered to give her a ride back into Exmouth Annie squeezed in between the two men on the bench seat of their four-wheel Toyota drive security vehicle and the three set off for town A few minutes into the journey along the barren cape's empty coast road Grab the camera," Annie recalled him saying Then Alan began to fire off photographs through the windscreen at something overhead that Annie could not yet see A long diamond-shaped craft hovering overhead with the rear edge chopped off rows of lights running towards the craft's tip It was a dark grey colour but not as dark as the night sky but that the same object had followed them the previous night the craft shot straight up from the right-hand side of the moving vehicle before dropping down almost instantaneously on the left hand-side of the car Annie screamed as they hurtled down the road Then it shot up into the sky and appeared to land in the scrub a few hundred metres off the road Kevin wanted to stop and take pictures of it on the ground The two police officers agreed and drove as fast as they could to the edge of Exmouth where they dropped Annie off before rushing back to get their pictures "I ran to my home on the other side of town and I ran into the house and locked the doors Annie is in no doubt that what was hovering above them that night was a craft moving at incomprehensible speed She does not care if people think her account sounds crazy "It moved so fast my eyes couldn't follow it," she says two American military policemen walked into Annie's workplace in town and asked her to come with them "I didn't at that stage relate it to what we saw," she says "I thought I was in trouble for being on the base drinking at night." The taciturn policemen drove Annie straight into what she knew was the top-secret section of the US base 'I must have done something really bad,'" she laughs Sitting in front of a group of Americans in uniform were the two police officers Annie knew most of the Americans on base but here she recognised only one – the American commander The others had clearly flown in from somewhere else There were also three or four men in civilian suits They got me to draw it and asked me more questions about it 'You do realise that what you saw was a weather balloon?' I laughed at that," Annie said Annie had lived on a station outside Exmouth and her father frequently launched weather balloons "Weather balloons don't look like what I saw," she recalled telling the man "Then one of the APS policemen sitting next to me – they both had their heads down – said: 'Please shut up … Shut up before you get us all killed'." It was clear the two Australian policemen had been there a lot longer – they appeared scared and dejected from the hours of questioning Annie admits that she arced up at the Americans for trying to bully her into saying what they wanted her to say Annie is an intelligent university graduate who previously ran her own businesses she was working at the nearby Roebourne Regional Prison counselling prisoners to help them find work The Americans clearly had no idea what to do with an uncooperative Australian local and The first thing Annie did was ring her cousin who had long been inquisitive about what was really going on at the base He drove to Exmouth and they both visited Alan at his home Alan admitted the photographs of "the craft" were printed at a printing shop inside the base and the two officers had shown them to colleagues Alan told her the photographs clearly showed an intelligently guided craft not physically landed but hovering just above the ground he was seriously rattled by the experience and told her and her cousin never to come back Annie's elderly mother in Exmouth also confirmed part of the story She clearly remembers the two military policemen first came to the family home where her colleagues watched her being escorted away Recorded sightings of strange objects in Antipodean skies can be found right back to the 19th-century period of early European settlement indigenous Australian Aboriginal rock art and dreamtime stories described the eerie alien faces of the Wandjina cloud and rain spirits and also what are known today as the Min Min lights Australia also has one of the most compelling UFO cases of all time teachers and locals in Victoria witnessed three metallic disc-shaped craft hovering over the school football field in broad daylight Witnesses to strange objects in our skies have told stories like Annie's for decades And yet they are rarely investigated or taken seriously by the press The default position for mainstream media has long been to dismiss such accounts such tales are most often spiked before the public gets to hear about them overwhelming evidence shows that many governments take such unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings very seriously indeed declassified government reports and well-corroborated witness sightings show that military and intelligence services are well aware of a persistent pattern of strange unidentified objects seen at and around sensitive military facilities such as Australia's North West Cape naval communication station Declassified files held in the Australian government's National Archives reveal that anomalous sightings of unexplained objects at North West Cape have been officially reported to the Australian Air Force for decades by soldiers Annette's disturbing sighting report is not an isolated incident at all there is a huge disconnect between the public ridicule automatically directed at claims of unidentified aerial phenomena and the long-concealed secrets now emerging of a new reality More recent reports of UAP sightings are increasingly being verified on radar and other sensor systems and these events are often corroborated by multiple witnesses The sightings also feature something that even the US military now admits it cannot prosaically explain US government and military insiders I have interviewed for this book admit they have knowledge of technology operating in our skies oceans and orbit that far exceeds known human science It often appears to be intelligently controlled presenting to those who recorded it on video and tracked it on radar as a "craft" of some kind I'm generally reluctant to believe in cover-ups or conspiracies But I believe that governments are not telling the public the full story about UAPs even able to explain this high strangeness Microsoft has closed Skype to focus on its Teams service this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read Anna Mowbray has built start-up Zeil with AI tech and support from Google Anna Mowbray staged something of an AI beauty contest as she prepared to launch her latest project - Zeil a Gen Z-friendly app pitched as the “Tinder for recruitment” all software development is in-house via 28-all local staff and counting “My goal behind this project is to build another unicorn from New Zealand using all-New Zealand talent to power it up,” Mowbray says “Unicorn” is start-up-speak for a private firm that hits a $1 billion valuation Often such ambitions have to be taken with a pinch of salt but Mowbray created Zuru Toys with her brothers Mat and Nick; the NBR put the siblings’ collective worth at $3.2 billion on its 2023 rich list 100 per cent owned and funded by Anna Mowbray most of the workforce will soon be the so-called digital natives: Millennials or “We need to talk to that demographic,” Mowbray says Applicants can swipe left on a picture-heavy job list if it’s not for them She also wants to help the emerging workforce talk to employers AI-assisted cover letters and CV-builders will be added to Zeil later this year The aim is to help applicants communicate well Zeil has consulted with the Blue Light programme in South Auckland and Le Va a Pasifika-led non-profit that offers youth and community support “One of my most important goals through this platform was to look at how you could democratise the path to employment for our youth and those who are underprivileged.” that will be through using AI to help candidates find their voice and present themselves well when creating a CV and cover letter “That’s a really challenging aspect for a lot of people,” Mowbray said “I talk about the privileged upbringing that I had and one of those privileges was that I had parents that were able to support me to build and to put together my personal brand and profile “We’ve found that around 15 per cent of profiles on the platform don’t necessarily follow best-in-class practices,” Mowbray adds The Zeil crew is experimenting with various conversational prompts to help users write a good application and help them articulate the skills they have for any given role - without it becoming cookie cutter “I want to be very careful and considerate about how we approach this because I think it’s important a candidate’s profile is authentic.” Mowbray is targeting 250,000 downloads and 25 per cent market share in 18 months there were around 2500 jobs on the platform Les Mills to hospitality outfits like Savor and Mitre 10 to hot start-ups like Tend and Partly Freebie campaigns are offered as a taster) Mowbray puts that at around 10 per cent market share allowing for crossover with rival platforms Seek said it had 20,990 New Zealand listings everything from Facebook’s Llama to Amazon’s Titan We built out use cases in the HR [human resource] space - CV prompts candidate matching -and we really tested every platform to see which had the best output for us I was very happy that we settled on Google because they have got an incredible team down here in New Zealand; some of the best engineers and technical people.” Mowbray said: “Our first foray into AI was utilising it for job descriptions A general job description will take an HR manager one to two hours from scratch We wanted to look at how we could do that 10 times faster and reduce costs “You prompt the model with some basic insights around job title And then that gets coupled with intel from our platform around your organsation’s background then presents them in your organisation’s tone-of-voice Zeil started building support for salary recommendations “One of the big things for us is to encourage that transparency We know that candidates are 70 per cent more likely to apply for a job if they see the salary on it That’s what our data is telling us,” Mowbray said creating a new business from scratch has been an opportunity to incorporate AI from the ground up “We’re really driven to ensure we’re exploring AI technology in every function of our business,” Mowbray said “So we’ve also set up an AI marketing assistant using Google’s Gemini model but also the RAG framework - so looking at retrieval augmented generation and how we can use that to build creative assets build creative copy for us and layer over our own tone-of-voice and have that fully on-demand.” It’s a framework designed to make large language models like ChatGPT Gemini - which can sometimes “hallucinate” incorrect facts or go rogue with an inappropriate image - more reliable by pulling in relevant up-to-date data directly related to a user’s query plus another Google tool that’s in Zeil’s mix which is used for rapidly prototyping and testing generative AI models It can help an organisation put its own parameters around how the AI will respond to user queries “We’ve also built - again using Google and Gemini - an AI-powered data insights tool We’ve reconstructed our data warehouse to ensure that we can use conversational search over the top of that ‘What does user acquisition look like for the last four weeks And what were the key inputs that drove that success?” very closely with Caro [Google NZ country manager Caroline Rainsford] and her team which is incredible because to partner with an organisation that’s so collaborative and really wants to bring novelty and an edge to a category - which is really important for us because if we want to stand out above and beyond the competition we’ve got to be constantly thinking differently,” Mowbray said “We’ve also worked with Google on understanding the competitive landscape and figuring out where we can go next.” And then we’ll be looking further afield from there.” Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer A forecast 140 jobs are to be created over 30 years if plans are allowed to proceed By Sandrine Ceurstemont These reconstructions of how the insects see the world are revealing how they find their way home so they rely on visual cues and a photographic memory for navigation they embark on information-gathering missions when they first leave their nests to help guide them home later but what they learn about their environment has been a mystery To try and figure this out, Jochen Zeil of the Australian National University in Canberra and his team used high-speed cameras to track the head movements of ground-nesting wasps (Cerceris australis) during these flights The camera views allowed the team to monitor changes in a wasp’s gaze and recreate its flight path and what it sees This enabled them to build virtual 3D models of their panoramic views “We knew that the insects perfectly control the orientation of their heads,” says Zeil they turn to face the entrance rather than their destination They then fly in a semicircle in front of it while watching the entrance and quickly looking from side to side and gradually back away by moving along increasingly wide arcs (see video) This behaviour may help them to remember features on the ground such as distinctive stones or fallen leaves so they can find the direction of their nest when they return close to home “We were surprised by how precise the choreography of learning flights was,” says Zeil the wasps can predict whether they need to head to the left or right to reach their nest Zeil suspects that the strategies they use could apply to other insects “We rely on the ability of insects to find their way around but we are just beginning to understand what makes them so competent,” he says Reconstructing a wasp’s-eye view of their natural environment is a major step forward, says Paul Graham of the University of Sussex who studies how ants use vision for navigation “What has eluded us is an understanding of how the learning flight relates to subsequent navigation,” he says “Zeil and his team were able to evaluate the information available to the wasp at all points during the learning flight and the return journey.” the team hopes to record wasp flights and views over a much wider area around their nests and monitor how their homing abilities develop during their lifetime Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.052 Read more: Long haul: How butterflies and moths go the distance Vor allem Thronfolgerin Amalia sah bei ihrer Ankunft in der Pfarrkirche St Karl in ihrem königsblauen Kleid mit extravaganten Ärmeln sehr elegant aus.Samstag Zeil founder Anna Mowbray on her recruitment startup's partnership with Google MetService National Weather Update: May 7 - May 9 Police said emergency services were called to a Mahia Rd property just before 10am after a report of a person seriously injured Mairehau house fire: Firefighters battle two-storey house blaze 10 patients were assessed and treated by our crews in total Auckland commuters face a chaotic morning after two highways leading into the central city have been majorly disrupted by crashes NZ film industry faces uncertainty over US tariff ongoing decline in livestock numbers and questions over longer sentences reducing reoffending Reporter Sierra is at Magnificent Moa Day where experts are revealing their incredible 3.6 million year-old find Emergency services are attending the fire at a McDonald's on Pakuranga Rd A video of a dog abuse incident is circulating on social media showing a dog swinging in the air and slamming into the ground on a walk in Manurewa A memorial tree has been planted at the entrance of St John’s bush in honour of slain American entomology student Kyle Whorrall Victim of abuse is wanting a judicial review Goodman Group is upgrading Highbrook Crossing to add retail dining and public space to New Zealand’s largest business park in East Tāmaki where hip hop crews from all over the world are battling to see who’s the best and Parliament tackles alcohol and mental health The Coleman family has been melting down precious metals for more than 40 years This is the first time they've shared inside their multi-million dollar gold and silver operation The Prime Minister joins Mike Hosking in the Newstalk ZB studio to talk all the big politicial issues Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was joined by Deputy PM Winston Peters and Minister of defence Judith Collins to make a pre-budget defence announcement and 3D-printed limbs help child amputees in Gaza Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is expected to be joined by Defence Minister Judith Collins and deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters make a pre-Budget defence announcement Neighbours heard explosions as a fire ripped through a Mt Roskill house Mum pays tribute after Auckland bus stop killing Australians vote early and insurance companies brace for claims Megyn Cordner and Lucas Prince started their business from the back of a van in 2022 Andrew Che lost his life savings after sending it to the wrong account Barclays Bank has refunded his money after a prolonged battle for compensation Aerial footage reveals the scale of flooding across areas of Canterbury after a destructive weather system hit the region and prompted a state of emergency North Shore real estate agency chief responds to a Real Estate Disciplinary Tribunal decision Mark Mitchell provides an update on the state of emergency in Christchurch and Selwyn A possible mini tornado was spotted about Auckland Harbour as the latest band of wild weather hits the city Fire and Emergency NZ said it responded to more than 30 callouts overnight more Kiwis turning to methamphetamine and Drs are back at the negotiating table NZSA chief executive Oliver Mander speaks about CEO pay in 2024 Waiwhetu woman Julie Paterson heard 'a loud cracking' and saw a tree branch falling towards her during Wednesday's storm Heather Keats updates the powerful system battering New Zealand breaks down why Wellington is under a rare red warning with extreme winds and Local MP Hon Nicola Grigg speak to the media on the local state of emergency in Selwyn Gisborne locals and health workers marched to Heipipi Park where speakers highlighted what they say is a regional health crisis NZ Herald Live: Simeon Brown talks to media News in Science Fiddler crabs with blue shells are vulnerable they turn muddy brown (Image: Jochen Zeil) Tiny blue-shelled fiddler crabs change their colour to avoid being eaten by predatory birds Scientists have long been intrigued by the crabs' ability to change the colour of their top shell from bright blue to a more subdued But exactly why the crabs change their colour hasn't been clear "When you catch them, for instance, they go dull," says Dr Jochen Zeil from the Australian National University, whose research appears in the Journal of Experimental Biology Zeil and his colleagues studied a particular species of fiddler crab on the mud flats of Australia's northeast coast "Some populations of these crabs are all very dull but in other places they are very colourful," Zeil says "We wanted to understand how this happens." The scientists looked at variations between crabs from three different areas: one group was dull coloured another was colourful and a third group mixed They found differences in the numbers of crab-eating birds near the dull coloured populations "In the places where the crabs were colourful "But in the others there were more birds actively hunting crabs." the scientists set up an experimental model to test whether the crabs changed their shell colour in direct response to the threat of being eaten They found two very colourful crabs living close together and set up a kind of wooden screen between them One crab was left to go about its life as normal But the other was subjected every couple of minutes to the attentions of a pretend bird it was a small foam ball suspended on fishing wire so the approach of the black ball was enough to convince it a bird was coming that crab had changed its colour to the muddy shade "We could observe that over a couple of days the crabs did change their colour when they are confronted with this dummy bird," the researcher says Scientists suspect the blue colour of the crabs is normally used to help them identify others living close by The next step in his research will be to see whether staying dull all the time has any effect on neighbourly relations Tags: environment, biology, zoology Email the editor Use these social-bookmarking links to share Crabs change colour to escape hungry birds By clicking 'Send to a friend' you agree ABC Online is not responsible for the content contained in your email message Get ABC Science’s weekly newsletter Science Updates Frankfurt looks set to shake off its negative image with FrankfurtHochVier FHV is an innovative multi-use development t FHV is an innovative multi-use development that will provide much-needed offices While Germany’s financial capital may be one of the nation’s most prosperous cities it has never been seen as an especially stylish place A 2004 report by Frankfurt’s Chamber of Industry and Commerce found they had a negative image of the city centre as a shopping destination The city is hitting back against these preconceptions with FrankfurtHochVier (FHV) a massive multi-use development in the heart of the city centre The development will take up a surprisingly small area thanks to an innovative use of vertical space; in all the 17,400m² site will provide 115,000m² of floor space While residential and office developments have long taken advantage of high-rise buildings it is still rare for shopping centres to reach for the skies there is Roppongi Hills in Tokyo and Osaka’s Namba Parks while New York boasts the seven-storey Time Warner Center very few examples in Europe; the closest examples to FHV are the KaDeWe in Berlin and the flagship Zara store in London This vertical emphasis gives the former Zeil Project its name while ‘Vier’ stands for the number that plays such an important role in its design and the fourth floor is the project’s key level around which all its other functions revolve FHV also aims to bring together the best traditions of city life This can be seen in the number of places where people can meet which as well as being a shopping area allows people to walk from one part of the city to another FHV also breathes new life into one of Frankfurt’s most beautiful buildings The development was originally undertaken by the Netherlands-based firm MAB Group BV which merged with Bouwfonds Property Development in July 2004 From this union came MAB/BPF Forum Zeil GmbH an independent project development company responsible for the Zeil’s completion FHV is located between two shopping centres It has two main frontages that allow access to the complex but the busier of the two will be the one facing the Zeil This pedestrianised street ranks as one of the top three most frequented shopping streets in Germany FHV is being constructed on a brownfield site once occupied by Deutsche Telekom a plot local retailers have been eyeing since cars were banned from the Zeil back in the 1960s FHV’s gross floor space of 115,000m² is made possible by a landscape that features vertical as well as horizontal connections open-air areas and public spaces on numerous levels The space is divided into 42,000m² for shops and 17,000m² for the hotel and residential areas FHV’s four elements are the Zeil Forum two sculpted towers for offices and a hotel These elements are linked by what is set to be Frankfurt’s biggest inner-city underground car park with space for almost 1,400 vehicles directly under the site Each of FHV’s functional areas can be reached from the car park by lift With the combination of functional amenities and a cleverly designed system of escalators and lifts MAB aims to significantly reduce the time it takes to reach your destination and get things done “That’s why many things will take much less time and not cause any stress,” explains Holger Hagge the company’s managing director for Germany “FrankfurtHochVier stands for efficiency – the ability to get everything you set out to do accomplished within an hour.” with direct access to the Hauptwache underground and commuter train stations the best place to experience the vertical landscape is in the shopping and leisure mall designed by Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas FHV’s main shopping space features the most fluid design of the four elements with a space-age glazed roof that rises above a transparent facade facing the Zeil This includes a glass funnel that draws pedestrians into the retail area It was important to Fuksas that the sky should be visible even from the ground floor to encourage people’s circulation around the space “The glass roof connects the sky and ground floor,” he says “The visitor’s perception of the space is not bound to the floor where he lingers The vistas through the wide and open spaces include him in a much broader context of urban activity.” Fluidity also extends to communication within the Zeil Forum visitors can access its other levels and the rest of the site’s buildings functioning as the terminus between the Zeil and the Palais on Grosse Eschenheimer Strasse interaction is as important as purchases: “Mono-functional retail centres in the periphery have eradicated parts of city centre activity We have designed a scheme that revives the attraction of inner-city life.” Fuksas has found space to include a series of relaxation and regeneration rooms to provide respite from this pulsating urban landscape “These areas will serve the same function as oases,” he explains “rewarding users with moments of relaxation and contemplation – which are very welcome after they have saved time shopping.” Shops are located on the first three of seven floors Higher storeys are home to a 6,000m² mix of high-class dining and leisure areas the developers want Fuksas’s building to become an 18-hours-a-day attraction that draws in the public long after normal shopping hours the fourth floor area of the Zeil Forum can be directly accessed from the ground floor via what will be Germany’s longest escalator – the 46.5m expressway office users can walk directly to the food court via the fourth floor central junction area Hotel guests can use a private lift that takes them directly to the fitness centre The original Thurn und Taxis Palais was one of Germany’s most beautiful urban palaces architect and founder of KSP Engel and Zimmermann went back to the residence’s original designs to restore the building to its former glory who based his design on the classic Parisian Hotel de Ville the Palais’s facades are to be restored in the Baroque style with the decor of interior rooms based on original fittings the Palais is set to benefit from advanced technology Its room plan wraps around the inner courtyard to meet modern demands The ground floor features shops and dining while the first level has space for dining The developers want this space to provide a venue for concerts and conferences The Palais’s second floor provides more office space the gates have been dismantled by specialist firm Sachsische Sandsteinwerke These are in the process of being reconditioned and are being stored until conditions at the site are right for their return FHV is just one of a number of ongoing developments in Frankfurt that include skyscrapers Six projects with heights up to 228m are planned or under construction in the city’s banking district alone With their rhomboid shapes pushed back from surrounding streets Zeil HochHaus I and II are expected to be among the most distinctive additions to Frankfurt’s skyline Engel’s towers are inspired by Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column with a futuristic design in intentionally marked contrast to the Baroque facade of the Palais The high-rise buildings are intended not to be random vertically extruded sections but sculptural edifices with their own distinct identity Two towers of different heights give the complex a well-proportioned structure with the building mass broken down into slender individual structures The form also mirrors the city’s cathedral nearby FHV’s towers were intended not to exceed its 96m height the height of the office tower had to be extended to compensate for the resulting space losses Skyscrapers are a touchy subject in Germany and they have been banned from Munich so as not to obstruct views of its cathedral the towers will not seek to upstage the historic cathedral Use of glass and anodised aluminium gives the towers a contemporary light and refined appearance that helps them blend in with their surroundings though because of their shape these crystalline structures have inclined facades that also reflect light in eye-catching ways This unique design is enhanced by three rhomboid windows that form glass prisms over Frankfurt KSP has also created a dynamic coexistence between varying double and single facades high transparency surfaces to semitransparent or closed facades Another interesting external feature is the usable exterior spaces that stand out on the 4th and 25th storeys These are designed to function as horizontal roofs with their own gardens outer supporting structures run parallel to the inclined facade The resultant wider spans between the inclined supporting structure on the outside and the inner vertical core are compensated for by crosswise Another structural challenge is the way in which FHV’s south-east tower juts out 15m to give the plaza at the Thurn und Taxis Palais a more generous feel Composite steel supports on the inside share the enormous load of the building Zeil HochHaus I and II are 90m and 124m high The taller building is located on Grosse Eschenheimer Strasse with shops and a conference centre on the first three floors Floor-to-ceiling windows and a roof garden provide views of the Frankfurt skyline KSP’s second tower also features shops and a conference area though the bulk of its 17,000m² of floor space is divided between a hotel and apartments the planned hotel consists of 200 rooms in the four- to five-star category the 20th and 23rd storeys are given over to flats but MAP is confident there is a market for FHV’s offer The developers believe Germany will be out of its current recession by the time the complex opens Even if the country remains in economic difficulties Its citizens’ purchasing power is 12% above the average for the country at large and with a recent bid for the London Stock Exchange the city’s own financial institution is in good health the area is home to the third-biggest passenger airport in Europe Give your business an edge with our leading industry insights View all newsletters from across the GlobalData Media network The great Street Food Festival returns to Frankfurt's Zeil again this year a real hot spot for all foodies will be created for three days At numerous stands and food trucks you will find delicious food from all over the world chopping and deep-frying for all it's worth which makes the stomachs of the visitors growl Here you have the opportunity to go on a culinary world tour through the USA The Street Food Festival thrives on culinary versatility But also the relaxed atmosphere makes a visit absolutely recommendable - even if you have to queue a little longer at some stands Here is presented what has long been part of everyday culinary life in San Francisco Paris or London: delicious food from hand to mouth Santiago Latino Grill or Strudelhaus Poushe will be there and on Friday and Saturday they will start at 12 noon You can also find more info at: https://street-food-festival.de/frankfurt Home   News   Article Staff and pupils at a newly-merged school are celebrating after receiving a positive inspection from the education watchdog The ‘Good’ rating from Ofsted comes after the joining of two former schools Runcton Holme Primary and Wormegay Primary School based at the site of the former Runcton building on School Road Under its previous name of Runcton Holme CofE Primary the school had been deemed to require improvement – but inspectors now say that leaders have worked with “skill and determination” to turn things around During an official visit during the summer Ofsted inspectors saw evidence of the success of the merger describing the school as a place where “everyone is proud to be part of the school community” They said: “Leaders and the trust have brought significant improvements in curriculum development and building the leadership capacity of the school.” The report also described the happiness of pupils and the pride they take in receiving awards It said: “Pupils of all ages learn and play together happily older pupils include the youngest in all they do “Many pupils have joined the school recently Many pupils strive to be ‘star learner’ of the week “They delight in receiving this award in assembly sharing their achievement with the wider school community.” Significant improvements were seen at the new school which is part of the Diocese of Ely Multi-Academy Trust (DEMAT) – with the curriculum found to be “ambitious” and leaders demonstrating “clarity in their vision” Ofsted added: “Since the previous inspection leaders have worked with skill and determination to merge two school communities into one They have established a clear and shared vision Everyone is proud to be part of the school community.” The curriculum was found to be having a positive impact on pupils pupils develop “a broad and deep understanding” Children in the early years also go through a similarly ambitious curriculum and develop independence and social skills they need as they move through the school said: “We are all delighted with this latest Ofsted outcome and are looking forward to continuing to grow and develop as a school “The result highlights the hard work by all of the staff here as well as the pupils Our whole school community is committed to offering the very best educational experience to our students and to ensuring that Holy Cross is an inspiring Other findings showed that the school has effective safeguarding measures in place that staff are supported and feel proud to work in the school and that pupils with Special Educational Needs (SEND) “receive much additional support” Ms Zeil added: “Our Autumn term has gotten off to a great start and we’re ambitious for the future keen to learn where we can and build upon this result.” Click here to read Your Local Paper & Lynn News e-editions Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof GmbH had recently announced that 62 of its 170 stores in Germany would be closed which was already struggling even before the Corona crisis could only save itself from final bankruptcy by closing down Now it has also been announced in which stores in Hesse the lights are to go out as well as the branch in the Main-Taunus-Zentrum in Sulzbach the Kaufhof stores in the Hessen Center in Frankfurt-Bergen-Enkheim and in Fulda will be closed The Verdi trade union fears that around 6,000 employees nationwide will lose their jobs as a result of the closures The Corona crisis had cost the group around 500 million euros This has exacerbated the already existing financial problems Even if the clear-cutting is not quite as extreme as initially feared when it was said that 80 branches of the department store chain would have to close the loss of these traditional houses for city centres and shopping centres is still enormous the closure of the Karstadt branch will create a hole that will first have to be filled This could also affect the attractiveness of the Zeil as a whole - if only because a vacancy of this magnitude simply does not look nice the closure is a disaster for all employees who are already suffering from the effects of the crisis Verdi has expressed hope that the number of store closures might be further reduced A minimal glimmer of hope - but for far too few of the employees affected The IQOS boutique in Frankfurt am Main is moving from Salzhaus 2 to one of Germany's most famous shopping streets Adult smokers can now find out more about the tobacco heater from Philip Morris in the new location on Zeil 123 on two floors Not only many interested visitors came to the grand opening ceremony last week Sophia Thomalla and presenter Ulla Kock am Brink added a little glamor to the party There was a particular reason to celebrate because this is no ordinary store that was opened here the former Frankfurt IQOS store has become the world's largest IQOS boutique with its relocation The space was more than doubled from 97 to 243 square meters and an additional floor was added adult smokers have been able to find out about the alternative to cigarettes and purchase the popular tobacco heater in the previous IQOS store Philip Morris stands for a smoke-free future," says Markus Essing "The great popularity of our product has prompted us to open the world's largest IQOS store to date in an absolute premium location in Frankfurt am Main." In addition to the IQOS boutique in Frankfurt there are 52 other IQOS stores and corners across Germany But only Frankfurt can boast of having the world's largest store Hal Puthoff talked about the alleged "UFO base" supposedly located in Australia's Mount Zeil in a leaked clip from The Joe Rogan Experience podcast which was uploaded on YouTube on May 1 by the channel Psicoactivo Podcast Hal also passed on the alleged information to his "CIA contract monitor." Talking about the same is an American electrical engineer and parapsychologist The 88-year-old is well-known for his studies in laser physics Since October 2017, Dr. Hal Puthoff has been the vice president and co-founder of the Science & Technology division of To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science he was the CEO and president of EarthTech International and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin Puthoff also developed an interest in the Church of Scientology Hal Puthoff claimed to have developed "remote viewing" skills in an article for a Scientology magazine Puthoff also contributed to Scientology's Celebrity magazine in 1974 Hal Puthoff broke off all ties to Scientology in the latter part of the 1970s as part of what they called the Stargate Project Puthoff oversaw a program at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the 1970s and 1980s to look into paranormal abilities despite the fact that the experiment's controls were reportedly flawed Hal Puthoff and his colleagues also developed the zero-point field in the late 1980s and early 1990s using the stochastic electrodynamics model It is a model of inertia as an electromagnetic drag force on accelerating particles created by contact Hal Puthoff is seemingly currently working with the CIA he is an expert in parapsychology and paraphysical phenomena where he is working on laser-related projects and studies in biofeedback and biofield measurements Puthoff has also overseen research for Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Stanford and is a patent holder in the fields of lasers and optical devices His publications include more than 25 papers in professional journals and a textbook on lasers which is extensively used at institutions in the United States and other countries he worked as a lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering and as a research associate at the Microwave Lab before joining the SRI team and designed a tunable Raman laser that emits high-power radiation over the infrared spectrum the Chicago native earned a master's degree from the University of Florida in 1960 Dr. Hal Puthoff is currently working on promoting the documentary Age of Disclosure It tells the story of an alleged 80-year cover-up of the presence of non-human sentient life and a covert conflict between major nations to reverse engineer technologies of non-human origin which reportedly features 34 senior US Government insiders Your perspective matters!Start the conversation