Monthly Archives: August 2017

Behind the Image: A turn of turtles

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The BMC Ecology Image Competition is back and in celebration, we kick off our ‘Behind the image’ blog series with the overall winner, Ana Carolina Lima. These young giant South American turtles will one day weigh up to 90kg and reach almost 110cm in shell length. Ana, a Ph.D. student from the University of Aveiro, Portugal, has captured a moment in which these juveniles were being counted, measured and weighed.

Biology

Is that a peanut or a landmine? Experiences when dining out with food hypersensitive children

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Many families look forward to dining out as a way of both lessening parent and caregiver workload while also engineering an often rare opportunity for families to catch up with one another in a leisure setting. Admittedly, dining out with young children can sometimes prove to be a difficult task; for some parents there is an added level of difficulty. In a qualitative study recently published in BMC Public Health, Fiona M Begen et al. examined the experiences and behaviors of caregivers’ when eating out with their food hypersensitive children. Through a series of interviews, parents describe the impact of their child’s food hypersensitivity on both their families as well as the children themselves

Health

Let’s leverage herbaria impact through Deep Learning

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Across the world, museums and institutions maintain herbaria containing millions of plant specimens collected over hundreds of years. Yet this treasure trove of data is relatively un-tapped because of the difficulty of identifying and classifying specimens. In this guest blog, José Carranza-Rojas, Erick Mata-Montero and Pierre Bonnet discuss their new research, published today in BMC Evolutionary Biology, that uses deep learning computer vision techniques to automate specimen identification and unlock the potential of the worlds’ herbaria.

Biology Technology