The ability of dairy cows to discriminate between floors with a smooth epoxy resin surface or with surface-applied bauxite aggregates of mean diameters 0.5 mm, 1.2 mm or 2.5 mm (having coefficients of static friction of 0.35, 0.42, 0.49 and 0.74, respectively) was recorded when they were offered the opportunity to walk down paired floor surfaces to receive a food reward. Following training, one half of the cows were rewarded when they selected the floor with the greater friction and the other half were rewarded when they selected the floor with the least friction. The cows were able to distinguish between the different floor surfaces — even between surfaces with 0.5 mm and 1.2 mm aggregates, which humans found difficult to distinguish. Eight similar cows were then offered a choice of walking down passageways of paired floors with an equal reward at the end of each passageway. There were no consistent preferences for floor type, and when the reward was offered only on the side least favoured by each cow in the initial test, the random pattern of selection was still evident. A final choice test offered the cows the opportunity to traverse passageways of either wet concrete or concrete covered with excreta. All cows avoided the passageway with excreta completely, even when the reward was increased in this passageway and removed from the wet concrete passageway. This avoidance was attributed to the cows’ lack of contact with slurry, as they were at pasture for most of the day, in contrast to the cows used in previous work, which were housed in buildings with passageways covered in excreta and showed little avoidance behaviour of such passageways.

Guidelines for the housing of dairy cows do not address the provision of supplementary lighting in passageways, other than for inspection of the animals. Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether lighting passageways to various intensities influenced the locomotion of dairy cows. The first experiment compared the locomotion of dairy cows in a dark or lighted passageway as they walked back to their accommodation from milking. When the passageway was dark, the cows took shorter but more rapid steps - which probably increased their stability. In the second experiment, cows walked down a cubicle passageway to receive a food reward, with the light intensity in the building varying from 0-250 lux. Step length and stepping rate were recorded, as well as the angles of the cows’ leg joints (which were measured from video recordings). Once again, the cows increased their stepping rate in the dark, and this resulted in an increased walking rate, perhaps because they wished to return more rapidly to other members of their group and found the darkness aversive. In addition, the arcs of travel of the metacarpophalangeal joint and of the fore- and hindfeet angles to the floor were reduced in the dark, probably increasing the cows’ stability, and were greatest at 119 lux. The slowest walking rate was observed at 39 lux. Hence, the optimum illumination for dairy cow locomotion may lie approximately between 39 and 119 lux, as measured by our technique.

We conclude that during locomotion in dark passageways cows have to modify their walking behaviour significantly, so that the provision of at least a low level of lighting is desirable at night.

In this paper, we describe the system design and capabilities of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope at the conclusion of its construction project and commencement of science operations. ASKAP is one of the first radio telescopes to deploy phased array feed (PAF) technology on a large scale, giving it an instantaneous field of view that covers $31\,\textrm{deg}^{2}$ at $800\,\textrm{MHz}$. As a two-dimensional array of 36$\times$12 m antennas, with baselines ranging from 22 m to 6 km, ASKAP also has excellent snapshot imaging capability and 10 arcsec resolution. This, combined with 288 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth and a unique third axis of rotation on each antenna, gives ASKAP the capability to create high dynamic range images of large sky areas very quickly. It is an excellent telescope for surveys between 700 and $1800\,\textrm{MHz}$ and is expected to facilitate great advances in our understanding of galaxy formation, cosmology, and radio transients while opening new parameter space for discovery of the unknown.

We investigated intestinal trichomonads in western lowland gorillas, central chimpanzees and humans cohabiting the forest ecosystem of Dzanga-Sangha Protected Area in Central African Republic, using the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region and SSU rRNA gene sequences. Trichomonads belonging to the genus Tetratrichomonas were detected in 23% of the faecal samples and in all host species. Different hosts were infected with different genotypes of Tetratrichomonas. In chimpanzees, we detected tetratrichomonads from ‘novel lineage 2’, which was previously reported mostly in captive and wild chimpanzees. In gorillas, we found two different genotypes of Tetratrichomonas. The ITS region sequences of the more frequent genotype were identical to the sequence found in a faecal sample of a wild western lowland gorilla from Cameroon. Sequences of the second genotype from gorillas were almost identical to sequences previously obtained from an anorexic French woman. We provide the first report of the presence of intestinal tetratrichomonads in asymptomatic, apparently healthy humans. Human tetratrichomonads belonged to the lineage 7, which was previously reported in domestic and wild pigs and a domestic horse. Our findings suggest that the ecology and spatial overlap among hominids in the tropical forest ecosystem has not resulted in exchange of intestinal trichomonads among these hosts.

A series of ice cores from sites with different snow-accumulation rates across Law Dome, East Antarctica, was investigated for methanesulphonic acid (MSA) movement. the precipitation at these sites (up to 35 km apart) is influenced by the same air masses, the principal difference being the accumulation rate. At the low-accumulation-rate W20k site (0.17m ice equivalent), MSAwas completely relocated from the summer to winter layer. Moderate movement was observed at the intermediate-accumulation-rate site (0.7m ice equivalent), Dome Summit South (DSS), while there was no evidence of movement at the high-accumulation-rate DE08 site (1.4m ice equivalent). the main DSS record of MSA covered the epoch AD 1727–2000 and was used to investigate temporal post-depositional changes. Co-deposition of MSA and sea-salt ions was observed in the surface layers, outside of the main summer MSA peak,which complicates interpretation of these peaks as evidence of movement in deeper layers. A seasonal study of the 273 year DSS record revealed MSA migration predominantly from summer into autumn (in the up-core direction), but this migration was suppressed during the Tambora (1815) and unknown (1809) volcanic eruption period, and enhanced during an epoch (1770–1800) with high summer nitrate levels. A complex interaction between the gradients in nss-sulphate, nitrate and sea salts (which are influenced by accumulation rate) is believed to control the rate and extent of movement of MSA.

The extinct Harrington's mountain goat (Oreamnos harringtoni Stock) is predominantly known from dry cave localities in the Grand Canyon, Arizona, in addition to two sites in the Great Basin, Nevada, and from San Josecito Cave, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. A dry shelter in Natural Bridges National Monument, on the central Colorado Plateau, southeastern Utah, preserves numerous remains of the extinct mountain goat in addition to pack rat middens. Remains from a 100-cm stratigraphic profile indicate that O. harringtoni lived on the plateau >39,800 yr B.P., the oldest directly dated find of extinct mountain goat. Plant macrofossils indicate that Engelmann's spruce (Picea engelmannii), limber pine (Pinus flexilis), rose (Rosa cf. woodsii), and Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) grew during the late Pleistocene where a riparian and a pinyon-juniper (Pinus edulis-Juniperus osteosperma) community now predominates; Douglas fir are found only in mesic, protected, north-facing areas. Limber pine, Douglas fir, bark, and grasses were the major dietary components in the dung. A springtime diet of birch (Betula) is determined from pollen clumps in dung pellets.

In 1969, David Barker, his wife and four children moved to Uganda to work at Makerere Medical School in the capital Kampala. During the 1960s, Makerere had become a research and teaching centre with an international reputation based on the work of Trowell, Burkitt, Hutt and many others who had pioneered studies explaining the disease patterns in the West Nile area on the basis of the local climate, nutrition and lifestyle. David Barker was funded by the Medical Research Council to carry out research on a poorly understood disease, Buruli ulcer, joining Scottish surgeon Wilson Carswell, who was later to achieve fame as the role model for Dr Garrigan in Giles Foden’s novel The Last King of Scotland.

This paper describes the system architecture of a newly constructed radio telescope – the Boolardy engineering test array, which is a prototype of the Australian square kilometre array pathfinder telescope. Phased array feed technology is used to form multiple simultaneous beams per antenna, providing astronomers with unprecedented survey speed. The test array described here is a six-antenna interferometer, fitted with prototype signal processing hardware capable of forming at least nine dual-polarisation beams simultaneously, allowing several square degrees to be imaged in a single pointed observation. The main purpose of the test array is to develop beamforming and wide-field calibration methods for use with the full telescope, but it will also be capable of limited early science demonstrations.

DX Cha (HD 104237) is a southern, optically bright Herbig Ae star with an infrared excess, that is part of a small stellar group younger than 5 Myr. We used the APEX and ASTE submillimeter telescopes in Chile to search for continuum and gas emission around this system. Using LABOCA on APEX we detect strong continuum emission around HD104237-A and system component HD104237-E. Our ASTE spectrum detects a double-peaked 12CO(3-2) line profile towards the system, typical of a rotating disk. The new data are used as constraints with MCFOST to produce a disk model that fits the entire SED as well as the observed CO line profile.

The future of centimetre and metre-wave astronomy lies with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a telescope under development by a consortium of 17 countries that will be 50 times more sensitive than any existing radio facility. Most of the key science for the SKA will be addressed through large-area imaging of the Universe at frequencies from a few hundred MHz to a few GHz. The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a technology demonstrator aimed in the mid-frequency range, and achieves instantaneous wide-area imaging through the development and deployment of phased-array feed systems on parabolic reflectors. The large field-of-view makes ASKAP an unprecedented synoptic telescope that will make substantial advances in SKA key science. ASKAP will be located at the Murchison Radio Observatory in inland Western Australia, one of the most radio-quiet locations on the Earth and one of two sites selected by the international community as a potential location for the SKA. In this paper, we outline an ambitious science program for ASKAP, examining key science such as understanding the evolution, formation and population of galaxies including our own, understanding the magnetic Universe, revealing the transient radio sky and searching for gravitational waves.

We are developing a purely commensal survey experiment for fast (<5 s) transient radio sources. Short-timescale transients are associated with the most energetic and brightest single events in the Universe. Our objective is to cover the enormous volume of transients parameter space made available by ASKAP, with an unprecedented combination of sensitivity and field of view. Fast timescale transients open new vistas on the physics of high brightness temperature emission, extreme states of matter and the physics of strong gravitational fields. In addition, the detection of extragalactic objects affords us an entirely new and extremely sensitive probe on the huge reservoir of baryons present in the IGM. We outline here our approach to the considerable challenge involved in detecting fast transients, particularly the development of hardware fast enough to dedisperse and search the ASKAP data stream at or near real-time rates. Through CRAFT, ASKAP will provide the testbed of many of the key technologies and survey modes proposed for high time resolution science with the SKA.