Temporal Decrease of Trivalent Chromium Concentration in a Standardized Algal Culture Medium: Experimental Results and Implications for Toxicity Evaluation

The fate of two trivalent chromium salts (nitrate and chloride) in ISO algal culture medium was followed over 72h; i.e., the typical duration of algal toxicity tests. Fifty percent of the initial Cr spikes was lost from the solutions by 24h, with losses up to 90% after 72h. Monitoring of the temporal variability of Cr(III) concentrations in algal culture media appears necessary to better characterize the toxicity of trivalent chromium to alga

Government-Opposition Dynamics in Spain under the Pressure of Economic Collapse and the Debt Crisis

Government - opposition relations in Spain have been long characterised by a high level of consensus and cooperation. The question analysed here is whether the economic crisis initiated in 2008 has created unprecedented levels of conflict in the political system or whether opposition parties have maintained a cooperative strategy oriented to influence far-reaching policy decisions. Results illustrate that patterns of consensus have decreased significantly since the outbreak of the crisis, and this is partly explained by the rising amount of legislation with socio-economic content, variations in the government's popularity, and the type of government. The analysis also shows that the crisis has increased the incentives of opposition parliamentary groups to oppose European Union legislation, especially among left parties

Temporal Decrease of Trivalent Chromium Concentration in a Standardized Algal Culture Medium: Experimental Results and Implications for Toxicity Evaluation

The fate of two trivalent chromium salts (nitrate and chloride) in ISO algal culture medium was followed over 72 h; i.e., the typical duration of algal toxicity tests. Fifty percent of the initial Cr spikes was lost from the solutions by 24 h, with losses up to 90% after 72 h. Monitoring of the temporal variability of Cr(III) concentrations in algal culture media appears necessary to better characterize the toxicity of trivalent chromium to algae

Landscape effects on anuran pond occupancy in an agricultural countryside: barrier-based buffers predict distributions better than circular buffers

Species movement and occupancy of habitat patches are dependent on landscape permeability. Some land-use types (e.g., roads) may be barriers to animal movement. Analyses of the effect of landscape structure on patch occupancy usually use circular buffers around focal patches. The main assumption of this methodological approach is that species are affected by a particular landscape element equally in every direction from a given patch. This assumption is likely not to hold if animal movement is restricted by barriers because barriers reduce movement patterns and reshape the ideal circular buffer into a noncircular buffer. We developed a method to determine the effect of landscape variables on the distribution of two amphibian species that explicitly takes dispersal barriers into account. We extracted landscape variables within (i) circular buffers (CB) and (ii) barrier-based buffers (BBB). BBB were produced by reducing the boundaries of CB according to major impassable barriers. The BBB approach almost doubled the explained deviance of multiple regression models in comparison with the CB approach. Moreover, CB and BBB models included different predictor variables. We suggest that the BBB approach is more useful than the traditional CB analyses of species–habitat relationships because ecological barriers are explicitly taken into account

Assessing the responsiveness of Spanish policymakers to the priorities of their citizens

This article analyses how well Spanish political elites have responded to the issues signalled as priorities preferred by Spanish citizens from the early 1990s to the present, and to what extent the degree of correspondence between citizens" and policymakers" priorities is related to elections, type of government, issue jurisdiction and institutional friction. To measure this the authors rely on Most Important Problem surveys and several databases on laws, bills, oral questions and annual speeches, coded according to the comparative agendas project. They argue that the prioritisation of issues by political elites better matches public preferences at the agenda-setting stage than at the decisionmaking stage, and that correspondence of public and policymakers" priorities is inversely related to institutional friction. The evidence also illustrates that policymakers are more responsive to public priorities on those issues without shared jurisdiction, when the executive governs without a majority and immediately after elections

Comparing government agendas: executive speeches in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Denmark

At the beginning of each parliamentary session, almost all European governments give a speech in which they present the government’s policy priorities and legislative agenda for the year ahead. Despite the body of literature on governments in European parliamentary democracies, systematic research on these executive policy agendas is surprisingly limited. In this article the authors study the executive policy agendas—measured through the policy content of annual government speeches—over the past 50 years in three Western European countries: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Contrary to the expectations derived from the well-established “politics matters” approach, the analyses show that elections and change in partisan color have little effect on the executive issue agendas, except to a limited extent for the United Kingdom. In contrast, the authors demonstrate empirically how the policy agenda of governments responds to changes in public problems, and this affects how political parties define these problems as political issues. In other words, policy responsibility that follows from having government power seems much more important for governments’ issue agendas than the partisan and institutional characteristics of governments

Reduced-intensity conditioning followed by allografting of hematopoietic cells can produce clinical and molecular remissions in patients with poor-risk hematologic malignancies

A reduced-intensity conditioning regimen was investigated in 45 patients with hematologic malignancies who were considered poor candidates for conventional myeloablative regimens. Median patient age was 49 years. Twenty-six patients previously failed autologous transplantation, and 18 patients had a refractory disease at the time of transplantation. In order to decrease nonrelapse mortality, and enhance the graft-versus-tumor effect, a program was designed in which a reduced conditioning with thiotepa, fludarabine, and cyclophosphamide was associated with programmed reinfusions of donor lymphocytes for patients without graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), not achieving clinical and molecular remission after transplantation. GVHD prophylaxis consisted of cyclosporine A and methotrexate. Seventeen patients received marrow cells and 28 received mobilized hematopoietic cells. All patients engrafted. The probability of grades II-IV and III-IV acute GVHD were 47% and 13%, respectively. The probability of nonrelapse mortality, progression-free survival, and overall survival were 13%, 57%, and 53%, respectively. Thirteen patients in complete remission had a polymerase chain reaction marker for minimal disease monitoring; 10 achieved molecular remission after transplantation. Nine patients received donor lymphocytes: one patient with mantle cell lymphoma had a minimal response, one patient with refractory anemia with excess of blasts in transformation achieved complete remission, and 7 patients did not respond. At a median follow-up of 385 days (range, 24 to 820 days), 25 patients (55%) were alive in complete remission. Although longer follow-up is needed to evaluate the long-term outcome, the study shows that this regimen is associated with a durable engraftment, has a low nonrelapse mortality rate, and can induce clinical and molecular remissions