Book
Орнитология в Северной Евразии. Материалы XIII международной орнитологической конференции Северной Евразии. Тезисы докладов (Оренбург, 30 апреля - 6 мая 2010 г.)
The book contains abstracts of the Xlllth Internationa! Ornithological Conference of Northern Eurasia held at the Orenburg State Pedagogical University (30 April -6 May 2010). It includes more than 400 abstracts of t he plenary lectures and symposia reports, as well as the poster presentations and materials from the round-table discussions. Papers are devoted to general ornithology, conservation of birds and applied ornithological research, as well as issues related to wider ornithological understanding and education. It is of interest to zoologists, educators and nature lovers in general.

Many environmental stimuli present a quasi-rhythmic structure at different timescales that the brain needs to decompose and integrate. Cortical oscillations have been proposed as instruments of sensory de-multiplexing, i.e., the parallel processing of different frequency streams in sensory signals. Yet their causal role in such a process has never been demonstrated. Here, we used a neural microcircuit model to address whether coupled theta–gamma oscillations, as observed in human auditory cortex, could underpin the multiscale sensory analysis of speech. We show that, in continuous speech, theta oscillations can flexibly track the syllabic rhythm and temporally organize the phoneme-level response of gamma neurons into a code that enables syllable identification. The tracking of slow speech fluctuations by theta oscillations, and its coupling to gamma-spiking activity both appeared as critical features for accurate speech encoding. These results demonstrate that cortical oscillations can be a key instrument of speech de-multiplexing, parsing, and encoding.
The area of green zones of Tver out of the list of Specially Protected Natural Areas has significantly shrunk due to the human activities. There is a wetland patch on the southern border of the city, which is inhabited by more than 30 species of animals and plants, included in the Red Data Book of Tver Region. The protection of this area could be achieved via organizing there the Wetland Ecological and Educational Centre «Avian Eldorado»
Data on avifaunas of the industrial wetlands located in forest and forest-steppe zones of the European part of Russia is provided. Similarities and differences in avian composition of such wetlands in the cities of Tver, Saransk, Ruzaevka and Krasnoslobodsk are revealed. The importance of industrial wetlands for preservation of avian rare species is underlined
One of the key advances in genome assembly that has led to a significant improvement in contig lengths has been improved algorithms for utilization of paired reads (mate-pairs). While in most assemblers, mate-pair information is used in a post-processing step, the recently proposed Paired de Bruijn Graph (PDBG) approach incorporates the mate-pair information directly in the assembly graph structure. However, the PDBG approach faces difficulties when the variation in the insert sizes is high. To address this problem, we first transform mate-pairs into edge-pair histograms that allow one to better estimate the distance between edges in the assembly graph that represent regions linked by multiple mate-pairs. Further, we combine the ideas of mate-pair transformation and PDBGs to construct new data structures for genome assembly: pathsets and pathset graphs.