Ya Ya is Memphis Zoo’s female panda. Photo courtesy Memphis Zoo.

When we received a new subscription order from Memphis Zoo, we were intrigued to find out what they were using NIR for. The answer is quite a lot! They are using faecal NIR reflectance spectroscopy to determine and monitor the physiological parameters in animals and plants, including those such as sex, age, heath and pregnancy status of the giant panda as well as other exotic species, measuring the nutrient content of bamboo species used in the diet of giant and red pandas in captivity and in the wild and investigating the effectiveness of afforestation strategies in restoring forest soil quality.

A new line of research is the use of NIR spectroscopy screening for Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd is a zoosporic fungus that causes chytridiomycosis in amphibians) to prevent widespread infection of the zoo’s collections. They will be studying 20 amphibian species currently housed at the Herpetarium, as well as disease in controlled research colonies such as the leopard frog (Rana pipiens) or Fowler’s toad (Anaxyrus fowleri). Gender determination in juvenile and sexually monomorphic amphibian species like the Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus) is also being explored using NIR by the Zoo and Mississippi State University.

Read more of the researchers and their work at http://www.memphiszoo.org/meettheteam. You might also be interested in a paper in JNIRS titled “Use of near infrared spectroscopy to discriminate between and predict the nutrient composition of different species and parts of bamboo: application for studying giant panda foraging ecology”. This is available to download free until 31 August 2012.

As the number of people owning tablet computers, whether iPads or others, increases, IM Publications has introduced a Tablet Edition of NIR news. This is part of the subscription for all existing and new subscribers to the Print and Online Editions, but also offers tablet owners a dedicated version at a lower price.

The Tablet Edition can be viewed on any device able to display PDF files. You can buy individual issues for immediate download at £15 or a whole year of eight issues for just £59, discounted to £39 for orders received by 31 July 2012.

Please note that the Tablet Edition is dedicated to onscreen reading and cannot be printed.

Gerald S. Birth Award
The Council for Near Infrared Spectroscopy has announced that this year’s winner of the Gerald S. Birth Award for best work in diffuse spectroscopy published in 2010—2011 is Dr Michael (Micky) Myrick.
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Büchi Young Scientists NIRAward
Nominations are sought for the Büchi Young Scientists NIRAward, which is dedicated to young scientists (35 years and under).
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The JNIRS CD Edition enables you to search over 1370 papers from JNIRS—Journal of Near Infrared Spectroscopy and Proceedings of the ICNIRS Conferences quickly and efficiently. Every word is searchable, rather than just the title, authors and abstracts in the Online Edition.

The individual PDFs are indexed, so that they can be searched using Acrobat’s advanced search facilities which provide features such as Boolean logic and proximity searching. The JNIRS CD Edition contains all papers published in JNIRS up to the previous volume—currently up to Volume 19 (2011)—plus the Proceedings of NIR-95, NIR-99, NIR-2001 and NIR-2003.

The JNIRS CD Edition costs £465, but subscribers benefit from a 50% discount.

The demands for Open Access publishing are increasing. Indeed, the UK Government has just announced that all UK publicly funded research should be published in Open Access or hybrid (both Open Access and traditional paid subscription content) journals within two years. IM Publications have offered an Open Access publishing option for a number of years. If you would like to make your paper Open Access, find out more...