The Best Biology Photos of the Year

Bisons on Grand Prismatic Spring, by Lukas Gawenda

Highly commended, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Bisons on Grand Prismatic Spring, by Lukas Gawenda

Highly commended, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Meal Time, by Boris Barath

Highly commended, Young Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Meal Time, by Boris Barath

Highly commended, Young Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Spider like from another world, by Krasimir Matarov

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Spider like from another world, by Krasimir Matarov

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Spectral Tarsier, by Wolfgang Weinhardt

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Spectral Tarsier, by Wolfgang Weinhardt

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Striving Succulent, by Kelsey Green

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Striving Succulent, by Kelsey Green

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Life and Environment, by Dimple Pancholi

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Life and Environment, by Dimple Pancholi

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

The Suburban Mum by Billy Clapham

Winner, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

The Suburban Mum by Billy Clapham

Winner, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

A Shelter Designed by Nature, by Robert Cabagnot

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

A Shelter Designed by Nature, by Robert Cabagnot

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

A lively belly in the freshwater, by Matteo Riccardo Di Nicola

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

A lively belly in the freshwater, by Matteo Riccardo Di Nicola

Shortlisted, Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Parental care in parasitoid wasps, by Thomas Endlein

Runner up, Photographer of the Year 2014

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Parental care in parasitoid wasps, by Thomas Endlein

Runner up, Photographer of the Year 2014

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Courage doesn’t always ROAR, by Nagarjun Ram

Winner of the Young Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

Courage doesn’t always ROAR, by Nagarjun Ram

Winner of the Young Photographer of the Year

Courtesy of the Society of Biology

The winners of the Society of Biology‘s third annual photography contest include amazing images of a haunting leopard, an otherworldly spider, and Yellowstone National Park’s Grand Prismatic Spring.

The theme for this year’s contest was “Home, Habitat and Shelter.” Out of almost 800 entries, the Society selected Billy Clapham as photographer of the year for his shot of a blackbird in his backyard. Seventeen-year-old Nagarjun Ram’s photo of a leopard in a tree won the young photographer competition. Nine other photos received honors.

Nielsen Will Soon Rate Everything on the Web, From Videos to Articles

The Nielsen ratings have long held huge sway over the business of television, but television isn’t like it used to be. So, on Tuesday, Nielsen announced that it’s expanding its ratings system to all kinds of digital content to give both its creators and advertisers a more meaningful way to measure popularity in the online era.

The most striking development in Adobe’s new system is that it’s designed for comparing disparate kinds of content. The new ratings, Nielsen says, can rank an online video next to a podcast next to an article. Unlike television or radio, the internet isn’t a medium that funnels just one format. The aim of Nielsen’s new ratings is to create a context to figure out what people care about online, regardless of what form it takes.

The online rating system will combine Nielsen formulas with data from Adobe’s online traffic-measuring and internet TV software. Many of the largest traditional TV networks have already signed up, among them ESPN, Univision, Sony, Viacom, and Turner Broadcasting. While such a roster might sound like a list of clients who mostly want to know their shows are doing online, Adobe product management director Ashley Still points out that a network like ESPN is about a lot more than shows.

“If you think of espn.com, they get a lot of traffic and they sell a lot of advertising,” Still says. And little of that traffic is for what could be considered traditional TV. The site brims with articles and short-form video. A similar case could be made for CNN, which is owned by Turner. “This is not just about watching ESPN,” Still says. “This definitely is about all content types.”

Putting the Pieces Back Together

But the difficulty with a medium like the internet capable of delivering so many content types is how to compare those types to one another. Traditional TV ratings made a kind of intuitive sense, since it was all about who was watching and when—at least until DVRs came along and muddied everything. But the profound fracturing of the media landscape unleashed by the internet has forced a deep rethinking of the concept of popularity itself.

Is popularity on the internet the number of clicks? Page views? Unique visitors? Length of time spent on a site? Distance scrolled on a page? Return visits? How many times a video is watched through to the end? How many times an ad turns into an online purchase? Such uncertainty is the source of deep unease across the media and entertainment worlds, not to mention the industries that buy the ads that fund them. If how to measure popularity isn’t obvious, how can anyone know what an ad is worth?

“We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days,” wrote Tony Haile, CEO of real-time web-traffic data company Chartbeat, in Time earlier this year in piece headlined “What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong.” “We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ones and make the same mistakes all over again.”

By pulling together data from online TV and video, games, audio, and text across all the devices used to consume all of that content, Nielsen and Adobe are looking for a way to take all of those fragments and piece them together to create a picture that makes sense the way old media did. Whether it will work is a separate question, but the impetus to try won’t go away soon. The old way made a lot of people in old media a lot of money. If someone can approximate the old way for new media, maybe more of that money will start rolling in, just like it used to.

Group B streptococcus incidence rises significantly among newborns despite widespread adoption of prevention initiatives

Group B streptococcus, a major cause of serious infectious diseases including sepsis, meningitis, and pneumonia, has increased by about 60% among infants younger than 3 months in the Netherlands over the past 25 years despite the widespread use of prevention strategies, new research published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases has found.

The findings suggest that this disturbing trend could be due the emergence of more virulent group B streptococcal strains and call for a renewed evaluation of preventive strategies to reduce neonatal disease.

Passed from mother to child during birth, group B streptococcus is the most common cause of infection in newborns. Guidelines for the prevention of disease have been widely adopted in high-income countries. But despite these efforts, the bacterium remains a leading cause of blood stream infections and meningitis worldwide, typically affecting babies younger than 7 days (early-onset) or infants up to 3 months of age (late-onset).

In many European countries, including the Netherlands, antibiotic treatment to prevent neonatal group B streptococcal disease is only offered to pregnant women with known risk factors for perinatal disease.

Using nationwide surveillance data from 1987 to 2011, a team of Dutch researchers examined group B streptococcus disease trends before and after the introduction of these guidelines in the Netherlands in 1999. The analysis revealed that the incidence of early-onset disease increased from 0.11 to 0.19 cases per 1000 livebirths between 1987 and 2011, and the incidence of late-onset disease increased from 0.03 to 0.13 livebirths.

Importantly, the authors note that the continuing increase in disease incidence after the adoption of the guidelines was mainly a result of a rise in the number of cases caused by clonal complex 17 strains of group B streptococcus.

According to lead author Dr Arie van der Ende from the Reference Laboratory for Bacterial Meningitis, Amsterdam, Netherlands, "Our findings should lead to a reassessment of current practices. Only offering antibiotic treatment during labour to pregnant women at risk is probably too limited to prevent all group B streptococcal infections in newborn infants. Moving to universal screening of pregnant women by vaginal and rectal swabs for group B streptococcus and offering antibiotic prophylaxis to group B streptococcus positive pregnant women must be considered."

Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Shannon Manning from Michigan State University in the USA says, "The findings of Bekker and colleagues confirm that group B streptococcus disease in babies remains a global public health concern and show the importance of continuous surveillance in different geographic locations. Future studies should further define the mechanisms used by clonal complex 17 strains to survive in the presence of antibiotics to develop strategies to efficiently eradicate the most virulent strains of group B streptococcus from the maternal genitourinary tract."

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The above story is based on materials provided by The Lancet . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.