Delay Discounting as an Index of Sustainable Behavior: Devaluation of Future Air Quality and Implications for Public Health

Poor air quality and resulting annual deaths represent significant public health concerns. Recently, rapid delay discounting (the devaluation of future outcomes) of air quality has been considered a potential barrier for engaging in long term, sustainable behaviors that might help to reduce emissions (e.g., reducing private car use, societal support for clean air initiatives). Delay discounting has been shown to be predictive of real world behavior outside of laboratory settings, and therefore may offer an important framework beyond traditional variables thought to measure sustainable behavior such as importance of an environmental issue, or environmental attitudes/values, although more research is needed in this area. We examined relations between discounting of air quality, respiratory health, and monetary gains and losses. We also examined, relations between discounting and self-reported importance of air quality and respiratory health, and nature relatedness. Results showed rapid delay discounting of all outcomes across the time frames assessed, and significant positive correlations between delay discounting of air quality, respiratory health, and monetary outcomes. Steeper discounting of monetary outcomes relative to air quality and respiratory health outcomes was observed in the context of gains; however, no differences in discounting were observed across losses of monetary, air quality, and respiratory health. Replicating the sign effect, monetary outcomes were discounted more steeply than monetary losses. Importance of air quality, respiratory health and nature relatedness were significantly and positively correlated with one another, but not with degree of delay discounting of any outcome, demonstrating the need for more comprehensive measures that predict pro-environmental behaviors that might benefit individuals and public health over time. These results add to our understanding of decision-making, and demonstrate alarming rates of delay discounting of air quality and health. These results implicate a major public health concern and potential barriers to individual and societal behavior that reduce pollution and emissions for conservation of clean air

Low tropical diversity during the adaptive radiation of early land plants.

The latitudinal biodiversity gradient, with tropical regions acting as 'evolutionary cradles', is a cornerstone of current biogeographical and ecological theory1. In the modern world floral biodiversity and biomass are overwhelmingly concentrated in the tropics, and it is often assumed that the tropics were evolutionary cradles throughout land plant evolutionary history. For example, the origination and diversification of angiosperms is believed to have taken place in the Cretaceous tropics2 and modern gymnosperms in the Permian tropics3. Here, we show that during the first major diversification of land plants, in the Late Silurian-Early Devonian, land plant biodiversity was much lower at the equator compared to medium-high southern latitudes. Throughout this crucial interval of plant evolution, tropical vegetation remained depauperate and of very low taxonomic biodiversity, although with similar morphological disparity to the more diverse higher latitude floras. Possible explanations for this low tropical floral biodiversity include palaeocontinental configuration or adverse palaeotropical environmental conditions. We discount the possibility that it was simply a fortuitous feature of the biogeographical spread of the earliest vascular land plants.National Geographi

Examining the Potential Disconnect Between Parents’ Perceptions and Reality Regarding the Physical Activity Levels of Their Children

Background: Parental support plays an important role in facilitating the participation of children in physical activity. However, there is evidence that parents overestimate their child’s level of physical activity – this may lead to inaction in promotion attempts by parents. This potential disconnect between parental perceptions and reality was recently the focus of the ‘Think Again’ social marketing campaign developed by PartipACTION. Purpose: To qualitatively explore parents’ perceptions of the Think Again advertisements, and the possible disconnect between perceptions and reality regarding their children’s physical activity levels. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 mothers and 12 fathers of children aged 5-11 years attending a supervised recreation class. A thematic analysis was applied to the collected data. Results: The advertisements were generally well received by the parents in serving as a reminder of how much physical activity their children should be getting. Less than half of parents believed their children were attaining physical activity guidelines although the majority believed they were sufficiently active given perceived time constraints for both them and their child. Most parents believed they could accurately estimate how active their child was but that other parents may have difficulty due to reliance on schools and organized recreation to provide opportunities for physical activity. Conclusion: PSAs have a role to play in increasing parental awareness of physical activity guidelines and communicating the importance of physical activity. More creative approaches will be needed to address the disconnect in the perceptions between sufficient and recommended levels of physical activity

Boundary Layer Transition Results From STS-114

The tool for predicting the onset of boundary layer transition from damage to and/or repair of the thermal protection system developed in support of Shuttle Return to Flight is compared to the STS-114 flight results. The Boundary Layer Transition (BLT) Tool is part of a suite of tools that analyze the aerothermodynamic environment of the local thermal protection system to allow informed disposition of damage for making recommendations to fly as is or to repair. Using mission specific trajectory information and details of each damage site or repair, the expected time of transition onset is predicted to help determine the proper aerothermodynamic environment to use in the subsequent thermal and stress analysis of the local structure. The boundary layer transition criteria utilized for the tool was developed from ground-based measurements to account for the effect of both protuberances and cavities and has been calibrated against flight data. Computed local boundary layer edge conditions provided the means to correlate the experimental results and then to extrapolate to flight. During STS-114, the BLT Tool was utilized and was part of the decision making process to perform an extravehicular activity to remove the large gap fillers. The role of the BLT Tool during this mission, along with the supporting information that was acquired for the on-orbit analysis, is reviewed. Once the large gap fillers were removed, all remaining damage sites were cleared for reentry as is. Post-flight analysis of the transition onset time revealed excellent agreement with BLT Tool predictions

Increased signal-to-noise ratios within experimental field trials by regressing spatially distributed soil properties as principal components

Environmental variability poses a major challenge to any field study. Researchers attempt to mitigate this challenge through replication. Thus, the ability to detect experimental signals is deter-mined by the degree of replication and the amount of environmental variation, noise, within the experimental system. A major source of noise in field studies comes from the natural heterogeneity of soil properties which create microtreatments throughout the field. In addition, the variation within different soil properties is often nonrandomly distributed across a field. We explore this challenge through a sorghum field trial dataset with accompanying plant, microbiome, and soil property data. Diverse sorghum genotypes and two watering regimes were applied in a split-plot design. We describe a process of identifying, estimating, and controlling for the effects of spatially distributed soil properties on plant traits and microbial communities using minimal degrees of freedom. Importantly, this process provides a method with which sources of environmental variation in field data can be identified and adjusted, improving our ability to resolve effects of interest and to quantify subtle phenotypes

Psychometric properties of the revised children’s anxiety and depression scale (RCADS) for autistic youth without co-occurring intellectual disability

Autistic youth often present with comorbid anxiety and depression yet there is a dearth of validated assessment tools. The Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) assesses internalizing symptoms but there is little psychometric data in autistic youth. Treatment-seeking autistic youth with anxiety or obsessive-compulsive symptoms (N = 74; age 6–14 years), and caregivers, were administered the RCADS-Parent, RCADS-Child, and assessments of internalizing, externalizing symptoms and social impairment indicative of autism. RCADS-Parent and RCADS-Child total anxiety scores demonstrated excellent internal consistency, and the six subscales demonstrated acceptable-to-good internal consistency. The RCADS-Child and Parent total anxiety scores were weakly correlated, and neither child age nor gender altered the strength of this association. Convergent validity was supported by moderate-to-strong correlations with clinician and parent-reported anxiety symptoms. Support for divergent validity was mixed. Results provide support for the RCADS-Parent and RCADS-Child as reliable, valid measures of internalizing symptoms in autistic youth

Glutathione Peroxidase 4 is associated with Neuromelanin in Substantia Nigra and Dystrophic Axons in Putamen of Parkinson's brain

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized pathologically by the loss of nigrostriatal dopamine neurons that project from the substantia nigra in the midbrain to the putamen and caudate nuclei, leading to the clinical features of bradykinesia, rigidity, and rest tremor. Oxidative stress from oxidized dopamine and related compounds may contribute to the degeneration characteristic of this disease.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To investigate a possible role of the phospholipid hydroperoxidase glutathione peroxidase 4 (GPX4) in protection from oxidative stress, we investigated GPX4 expression in postmortem human brain tissue from individuals with and without Parkinson's disease. In both control and Parkinson's samples, GPX4 was found in dopaminergic nigral neurons colocalized with neuromelanin. Overall GPX4 was significantly reduced in substantia nigra in Parkinson's vs. control subjects, but was increased relative to the cell density of surviving nigral cells. In putamen, GPX4 was concentrated within dystrophic dopaminergic axons in Parkinson's subjects, although overall levels of GPX4 were not significantly different compared to control putamen.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study demonstrates an up-regulation of GPX4 in neurons of substantia nigra and association of this protein with dystrophic axons in striatum of Parkinson's brain, indicating a possible neuroprotective role. Additionally, our findings suggest this enzyme may contribute to the production of neuromelanin.</p

Reconstructing unseen transmission events to infer dengue dynamics from viral sequences.

For most pathogens, transmission is driven by interactions between the behaviours of infectious individuals, the behaviours of the wider population, the local environment, and immunity. Phylogeographic approaches are currently unable to disentangle the relative effects of these competing factors. We develop a spatiotemporally structured phylogenetic framework that addresses these limitations by considering individual transmission events, reconstructed across spatial scales. We apply it to geocoded dengue virus sequences from Thailand (N = 726 over 18 years). We find infected individuals spend 96% of their time in their home community compared to 76% for the susceptible population (mainly children) and 42% for adults. Dynamic pockets of local immunity make transmission more likely in places with high heterotypic immunity and less likely where high homotypic immunity exists. Age-dependent mixing of individuals and vector distributions are not important in determining spread. This approach provides previously unknown insights into one of the most complex disease systems known and will be applicable to other pathogens