Pennsylvanian (Carboniferous) brachiopods from the Itaituba Formation of the Amazon Basin, Brazil

A new brachiopod fauna is described from the lower Itaituba Formation at the Caima Quarry 2 section in the Itaituba area, Amazon Basin, Brazil. The Amazonoproductus amazonensis-Anthracospirifer oliveirai Assemblage is proposed for this fauna, which is considered early Pennsylvanian (Morrowan) as constrained by associated conodont and fusulinacean faunas. Nine brachiopod taxa are described herein, including Amazonoproductus amazonensis gen. et sp. nov., and Buxtonioides itaitubensis sp. nov. and Linoproductus caima sp. nov. The new tribe Marginovatini of the Linoproductoidea (the Productida) is also proposed.

Uppermost Mississippian Brachiopods from the Basal Itaituba formation of the Amazon Basin, Brazil

This paper describes 19 brachiopod species (including six indeterminate species) in 15 genera and one indeterminate genus from the basal Itaituba Formation at the Caima Quarry 1 section of Itaituba, Amazon Basin, Brazil. The faunal correlations of the brachiopods and the associated fusulinids and conodonts indicate a late Chesterian (late Serpukhovian) age for the described fauna, therefore confirming for the first time the presence of uppermost Mississippian rocks in the Amazon Basin. A new species, Composita caimaensis, is created, and two species, Inflatia cf. gracilis and Marginovatia cf. catinulus, are described for the first time from the Amazon Basin. The Amazon brachiopods appear to be of strong affinity with coeval faunas of the North American midcontinent.

Andean pre-historical urban planning tradition

Urban design features that formed an Andean urban planning tradition through continual use across successive periods of time, civilizations and extensive, varied geography are identified. Some Andean urban features were also mirrored or pre-date similar ideas that occurred in other parts of the world, particularly ideas used by Spanish colonialism.

A VMD plugin for NAMD simulations on Amazon EC2

VMD and NAMD are two major molecular dynamics simulation software packages, which can work together for mining structural information of bio-molecules. Carrying out such molecular dynamics simulations can help researchers to understand the roles and functions of various bio-molecules in life science research. Recently, clouds have provided HPC clusters on demand that allow users to benefit from their flexibility, elasticity, and lower costs. Although cloud computing promises to provide seamless access to HPC clusters through the abstraction of services, which hide the details of the underlying software and hardware infrastructure, users without in depth computing knowledge are still forced to cope with many low level system and programming details. Therefore, we have designed and developed a software plugin of VMD, which can provide an integrated framework for NAMD to be executed on Amazon EC2. The proposed Amazon EC2 Plugin for VMD frees users from performing many tedious computing tasks such as launching, connecting and terminating Amazon EC2 compute instances; configuring a HPC cluster; and installing middleware and software applications before the system is readily available for any scientific investigation. This allows VMD/NAMD users to spend less time getting applications to work on HPC clusters but more time for bio-research.

Microsoft and Amazon : a comparison of approaches to cloud security

Research has shown that data security has always been an important aspect of quality of service for data service providers; but cloud computing poses new and challenging security threats. The most common security concerns for users of cloud storage are data confidentiality, integrity and availability. Microsoft has considered these concerns and responded with the Azure virtual private storage based on Searchable Encryption. Amazon has also responded to these security issues with its Amazon Web Services. In this paper, we investigate and compare in depth the features of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services deemed to provide security with a particular focus on confidentiality, integrity and availability of data.