73 research outputs found

    The state of the Martian climate

    Get PDF
    60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

    The origin and speciation of orchids

    Get PDF
    SummaryOrchids constitute one of the most spectacular radiations of flowering plants. However, their origin, spread across the globe, and hotspots of speciation remain uncertain due to the lack of an up-to-date phylogeographic analysis.We present a new Orchidaceae phylogeny based on combined high-throughput and Sanger sequencing data, covering all five subfamilies, 17/22 tribes, 40/49 subtribes, 285/736 genera, and c. 7% (1921) of the 29 524 accepted species, and use it to infer geographic range evolution, diversity, and speciation patterns by adding curated geographical distributions from the World Checklist of Vascular Plants.The orchids' most recent common ancestor is inferred to have lived in Late Cretaceous Laurasia. The modern range of Apostasioideae, which comprises two genera with 16 species from India to northern Australia, is interpreted as relictual, similar to that of numerous other groups that went extinct at higher latitudes following the global climate cooling during the Oligocene. Despite their ancient origin, modern orchid species diversity mainly originated over the last 5 Ma, with the highest speciation rates in Panama and Costa Rica.These results alter our understanding of the geographic origin of orchids, previously proposed as Australian, and pinpoint Central America as a region of recent, explosive speciation

    Rare variants in NR2F2 cause congenital heart defects in humans

    Get PDF
    Congenital heart defects (CHDs) are the most common birth defect worldwide and are a leading cause of neonatal mortality. Nonsyndromic atrioventricular septal defects (AVSDs) are an important subtype of CHDs for which the genetic architecture is poorly understood. We performed exome sequencing in 13 parent-offspring trios and 112 unrelated individuals with nonsyndromic AVSDs and identified five rare missense variants (two of which arose de novo) in the highly conserved gene NR2F2, a very significant enrichment (p = 7.7 × 10?7) compared to 5,194 control subjects. We identified three additional CHD-affected families with other variants in NR2F2 including a de novo balanced chromosomal translocation, a de novo substitution disrupting a splice donor site, and a 3 bp duplication that cosegregated in a multiplex family. NR2F2 encodes a pleiotropic developmental transcription factor, and decreased dosage of NR2F2 in mice has been shown to result in abnormal development of atrioventricular septa. Via luciferase assays, we showed that all six coding sequence variants observed in individuals significantly alter the activity of NR2F2 on target promoters

    Voters, Non-Voters, and the Implications of Election Timing for Public Policy

    Full text link

    High school optional course enrollment and performance

    Get PDF
    Issued as final reportSpencer Foundatio

    Psychomotor and perceptual abilities and skilled performance

    No full text
    Issued as final repor

    Intelligence Process vs. Content and Academic Performance: A Trip through a House of Mirrors

    No full text
    The main purpose of modern intelligence tests has been to predict individual differences in academic performance, first of children, then adolescents, and later extending to adults. From the earliest Binet–Simon scales to current times, most one-on-one omnibus intelligence assessments include both process subtests (e.g., memory, reasoning) and content subtests (e.g., vocabulary, information). As somewhat parallel developments, intelligence theorists have argued about the primacy of the process components or the content components reflecting intelligence, with many modern researchers proposing that process constructs like working memory are the fundamental determinant of individual differences in intelligence. To address whether there is an adequate basis for re-configuring intelligence assessments from content or mixed content and process measures to all-process measures, the question to be answered in this paper is whether intellectual process assessments are more or less valid predictors of academic success, in comparison to content measures. A brief review of the history of intelligence assessment is provided with respect to these issues, and a number of problems and limitations of process measures is discussed. In the final analysis, there is insufficient justification for using process-only measures to the exclusion of content measures, and the limited data available point to the idea that content-dominated measures are more highly predictive of academic success than are process measures

    Mind-Personality Relations: Comment on Demetriou et al., 2018

    No full text
    The article by Demetriou et al. [1] represents an impressive documentation of the relations between intellectual ability constructs and personality constructs [...
    corecore