High speed boat traffic: A risk to crocodilian populations

Injuries related to boat traffic have been documented as a major source of human-related injuries and deaths in many aquatic species but have not been documented in crocodilians. We examined the proportion of boat-related injuries in Spectacled Caiman (Caiman crocodilus fuscus) in the Tortuguero region of Costa Rica within waterways with enforced speed limits and those without. No boat injuries were documented in waterways with speed limits; however, in waterways without speed limits, 36.6% of caimans we captured retained old scars or fresh lacerations related to boat propellers, including two mortalities. Presence of enforced speed zones was positively associated with lower rates of collisions, boat propeller related injuries, and mortalities. Slower boat speed may provide sufficient time for caimans to avoid oncoming boats. Increasing boat traffic in the region due to increasing ecotourism and a rapidly expanding local community may increase the vulnerability of this crocodilian species to boat related injuries and population eduction. Imposing enforced speed limits within non-essential transportation routes is a reasonable mitigation measure to help protect this species

A systematic review of the use of an expertise-based randomised controlled trial design

Acknowledgements JAC held a Medical Research Council UK methodology (G1002292) fellowship, which supported this research. The Health Services Research Unit, Institute of Applied Health Sciences (University of Aberdeen), is core-funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. Views express are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

An Infinite-Dimensional Family of Black-Hole Microstate Geometries

We construct the first explicit, smooth, horizonless black-hole microstate geometry whose moduli space is described by an arbitrary function of one variable and is thus infinite-dimensional. This is achieved by constructing the scalar Green function on a simple D6 anti-D6 background, and using this Green function to obtain the fully back-reacted solution for a supertube with varying charge density in this background. We show that this supertube can store parametrically more entropy than in flat space, confirming the entropy enhancement mechanism that was predicted using brane probes. We also show that all the local properties of the fully back-reacted solution can, in fact, be obtained using the DBI action of an appropriate brane probe. In particular, the supergravity and the DBI analysis yield identical functional bubble equations that govern the relative locations of the centers. This indicates that there is a non-renormalization theorem that protects these functional equations as one moves in moduli space. Our construction creates configurations that are beyond the scope of recent arguments that appear to put strong limits on the entropy that can be found in smooth supergravity solutions.Comment: 46 pages, 1 figure, LaTe

A Trivers-Willard Effect in Contemporary Humans: Male-Biased Sex Ratios among Billionaires

BACKGROUND: Natural selection should favour the ability of mothers to adjust the sex ratio of offspring in relation to the offspring's potential reproductive success. In polygynous species, mothers in good condition would be advantaged by giving birth to more sons. While studies on mammals in general provide support for the hypothesis, studies on humans provide particularly inconsistent results, possibly because the assumptions of the model do not apply. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here, we take a subset of humans in very good condition: the Forbe's billionaire list. First, we test if the assumptions of the model apply, and show that mothers leave more grandchildren through their sons than through their daughters. We then show that billionaires have 60% sons, which is significantly different from the general population, consistent with our hypothesis. However, women who themselves are billionaires have fewer sons than women having children with billionaires, suggesting that maternal testosterone does not explain the observed variation. Furthermore, paternal masculinity as indexed by achievement, could not explain the variation, since there was no variation in sex ratio between self-made or inherited billionaires. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Humans in the highest economic bracket leave more grandchildren through sons than through daughters. Therefore, adaptive variation in sex ratios is expected, and human mothers in the highest economic bracket do give birth to more sons, suggesting similar sex ratio manipulation as seen in other mammals

Integrating climate adaptation and biodiversity conservation in the global ocean

The impacts of climate change and the socioecological challenges they present are ubiquitous and increasingly severe. Practical efforts to operationalize climate-responsive design and management in the global network of marine protected areas (MPAs) are required to ensure long-term effectiveness for safeguarding marine biodiversity and ecosystem services. Here, we review progress in integrating climate change adaptation into MPA design and management and provide eight recommendations to expedite this process. Climate-smart management objectives should become the default for all protected areas, and made into an explicit international policy target. Furthermore, incentives to use more dynamic management tools would increase the climate change responsiveness of the MPA network as a whole. Given ongoing negotiations on international conservation targets, now is the ideal time to proactively reform management of the global seascape for the dynamic climate-biodiversity reality

The evolution of postpollination reproductive isolation in Costus

Reproductive isolation is critical to the diversification of species. Postpollination barriers may be important in limiting gene flow between closely related species, but they are relatively cryptic and their evolution is poorly understood. Here, we review the role of postpollination reproductive isolation in plants, including the various stages at which it operates and the hypotheses for how it may evolve. We then review empirical studies in the plant genus Costus, evaluating documented postpollination barriers in light of these hypotheses. We summarize isolation due to parental style length differences and present evidence supporting the hypothesis that the differences are in part a by-product of selection on floral morphology. Additionally, we show that reduced pollen adhesion, germination, and tube growth contribute to reproductive isolation between two closely related sympatric species of Costus. Geographic variation in the strength of these crossing barriers supports the hypothesis that they evolved under reinforcement, or direct natural selection to strengthen isolation

State-space Manifold and Rotating Black Holes

We study a class of fluctuating higher dimensional black hole configurations obtained in string theory/ $M$-theory compactifications. We explore the intrinsic Riemannian geometric nature of Gaussian fluctuations arising from the Hessian of the coarse graining entropy, defined over an ensemble of brane microstates. It has been shown that the state-space geometry spanned by the set of invariant parameters is non-degenerate, regular and has a negative scalar curvature for the rotating Myers-Perry black holes, Kaluza-Klein black holes, supersymmetric $AdS_5$ black holes, $D_1$-$D_5$ configurations and the associated BMPV black holes. Interestingly, these solutions demonstrate that the principal components of the state-space metric tensor admit a positive definite form, while the off diagonal components do not. Furthermore, the ratio of diagonal components weakens relatively faster than the off diagonal components, and thus they swiftly come into an equilibrium statistical configuration. Novel aspects of the scaling property suggest that the brane-brane statistical pair correlation functions divulge an asymmetric nature, in comparison with the others. This approach indicates that all above configurations are effectively attractive and stable, on an arbitrary hyper-surface of the state-space manifolds. It is nevertheless noticed that there exists an intriguing relationship between non-ideal inter-brane statistical interactions and phase transitions. The ramifications thus described are consistent with the existing picture of the microscopic CFTs. We conclude with an extended discussion of the implications of this work for the physics of black holes in string theory.Comment: 44 pages, Keywords: Rotating Black Holes; State-space Geometry; Statistical Configurations, String Theory, M-Theory. PACS numbers: 04.70.-s Physics of black holes; 04.70.Bw Classical black holes; 04.70.Dy Quantum aspects of black holes, evaporation, thermodynamics; 04.50.Gh Higher-dimensional black holes, black strings, and related objects. Edited the bibliograph

Constraints on Nucleon Decay via "Invisible" Modes from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Data from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory have been used to constrain the lifetime for nucleon decay to ``invisible'' modes, such as n -> 3 nu. The analysis was based on a search for gamma-rays from the de-excitation of the residual nucleus that would result from the disappearance of either a proton or neutron from O16. A limit of tau_inv > 2 x 10^{29} years is obtained at 90% confidence for either neutron or proton decay modes. This is about an order of magnitude more stringent than previous constraints on invisible proton decay modes and 400 times more stringent than similar neutron modes.Comment: Update includes missing efficiency factor (limits change by factor of 2) Submitted to Physical Review Letter

First Neutrino Observations from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

The first neutrino observations from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory are presented from preliminary analyses. Based on energy, direction and location, the data in the region of interest appear to be dominated by 8B solar neutrinos, detected by the charged current reaction on deuterium and elastic scattering from electrons, with very little background. Measurements of radioactive backgrounds indicate that the measurement of all active neutrino types via the neutral current reaction on deuterium will be possible with small systematic uncertainties. Quantitative results for the fluxes observed with these reactions will be provided when further calibrations have been completed.Comment: Latex, 7 pages, 10 figures, Invited paper at Neutrino 2000 Conference, Sudbury, Canada, June 16-21, 2000 to be published in the Proceeding

Tracing the wider impacts of biomedical research: A literature search to develop a novel citation categorisation technique

There is an increasing need both to understand the translation of biomedical research into improved healthcare and to assess the range of wider impacts from health research such as improved health policies, health practices and healthcare. Conducting such assessments is complex and new methods are being sought. Our new approach involves several steps. First, we developed a qualitative citation analysis technique to apply to biomedical research in order to assess the contribution that individual papers made to further research. Second, using this method, we then proposed to trace the citations to the original research through a series of generations of citing papers. Third, we aimed eventually to assess the wider impacts of the various generations. This article describes our comprehensive literature search to inform the new technique. We searched various databases, specific bibliometrics journals and the bibliographies of key papers. After excluding irrelevant papers we reviewed those remaining for either general or specific details that could inform development of our new technique. Various characteristics of citations were identified that had been found to predict their importance to the citing paper including the citation’s location; number of citation occasions and whether the author(s) of the cited paper were named within the citing paper. We combined these objective characteristics with subjective approaches also identified from the literature search to develop a citation categorisation technique that would allow us to achieve the first of the steps above, i.e., being able routinely to assess the contribution that individual papers make to further research.Medical Research Council as part of the MRC-NIHR Methodology Research Programme, and Professor Martin Buxton