Identifying Blood Biomarkers and Physiological Processes That Distinguish Humans with Superior Performance under Psychological Stress

BACKGROUND:Attrition of students from aviation training is a serious financial and operational concern for the U.S. Navy. Each late stage navy aviator training failure costs the taxpayer over $1,000,000 and ultimately results in decreased operational readiness of the fleet. Currently, potential aviators are selected based on the Aviation Selection Test Battery (ASTB), which is a series of multiple-choice tests that evaluate basic and aviation-related knowledge and ability. However, the ASTB does not evaluate a person's response to stress. This is important because operating sophisticated aircraft demands exceptional performance and causes high psychological stress. Some people are more resistant to this type of stress, and consequently better able to cope with the demands of naval aviation, than others. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:Although many psychological studies have examined psychological stress resistance none have taken advantage of the human genome sequence. Here we use high-throughput -omic biology methods and a novel statistical data normalization method to identify plasma proteins associated with human performance under psychological stress. We identified proteins involved in four basic physiological processes: innate immunity, cardiac function, coagulation and plasma lipid physiology. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:The proteins identified here further elucidate the physiological response to psychological stress and suggest a hypothesis that stress-susceptible pilots may be more prone to shock. This work also provides potential biomarkers for screening humans for capability of superior performance under stress

The atmospheres of massiveness: The politics and times of the maybe in Southern megaregions

In this introduction to the special issue on massive urbanisation, the collective that has prepared this issue reviews the thinking and experiences that have been important to them. The reflections centre on the use of ‘massive’ in Jamaican patois, where it has two countervailing meanings. On the one hand, it means an inordinate lack of sensitivity to the real conditions taking place, a sense of extreme self-inflation beyond reason. On the other, it means a collectivity coming into being without a set form, but reflective of a desire for collaboration and mutuality. Massive urbanisation thus means here both the voluminous expansion of speculative accumulation, extraction of land value, replication of vast inequities and disfunction, and the continuous emergence of new forms of urban inhabitation, a constant remaking of the social field by what has been called the urban majority. All of the contributions attempt to work with this sense of doubleness, amplifying the creation of particular atmospheres of the urban as a materiality of its heterogeneity

Two-year-olds' expectation that lexical gaps will be filled

Children tend to select unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds as the referents of novel names. This tendency has been hypothesized by some to derive from an expectation that unfamiliar kinds will be labelled. In Study 1, two-year-olds (N = 16) showed little evidence of such an expectation when they had to decide whether a visible picture of an unfamiliar object or a depicted object concealed in a box was the referent of a novel name. They tended to check the box before making a selection. This test was preceded by two tasks, the first requiring the same type of decision about familiar names and the second highlighting the status of unfamiliar objects as ‘new kinds of things’. In Study 2 (N = 16), the latter task was replaced by one in which toddlers had to decide whether unfamiliar kinds were more likely than familiar kinds to be the referents of novel names. After this experience, participants showed a moderately strong expectation that unfamiliar kinds would be labelled. In Study 3 (N = 60) this finding was replicated. In two other conditions, the task that preceded the test was replaced with direct teaching of novel names for unfamiliar kinds. These groups showed little expectation that lexical gaps would be filled. Although results are compatible with a restricted form of the lexical gap filling hypothesis, they do not support the broad form that has been advanced by some theorists. </jats:p