Money and happiness : rank of income, not income, affects life satisfaction

Does money buy happiness, or does happiness come indirectly from the higher rank in society that money brings? Here we test a rank hypothesis, according to which people gain utility from the ranked position of their income within a comparison group. The rank hypothesis contrasts with traditional reference income hypotheses, which suggest utility from income depends on comparison to a social group reference norm. We find that the ranked position of an individual’s income predicts general life satisfaction, while absolute income and reference income have no effect. Furthermore, individuals weight upward comparisons more than downward comparisons. According to the rank hypothesis, income and utility are not directly linked: Increasing an individual’s income will only increase their utility if ranked position also increases and will necessarily reduce the utility of others who will lose rank

Differential dependencies of monocytes and neutrophils on dectin-1, dectin-2 and complement for the recognition of fungal particles in inflammation

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Intragenic meiotic recombination in Schizosaccharomyces pombe is sensitive to environmental temperature changes

Open Access via the Springer Compact Agreement Acknowledgments We are grateful to Miguel G. Ferreira, Jürg Kohli, Josef Loidl, Fekret Osman, Gerald R. Smith, Walter W. Steiner, and Matthew Whitby for providing strains. We thank Josef Loidl for critically reading an earlier version of this manuscript. This work was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council UK (BBSRC) [grant number BB/F016964/1], and the University of Aberdeen (College of Life Sciences and Medicine Start-up grant to AL).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Quantifying the value of ecosystem services: a case study of honeybee pollination in the UK

There is concern that insect pollinators, such as honey bees, are currently declining in abundance, and are under serious threat from environmental changes such as habitat loss and climate change; the use of pesticides in intensive agriculture, and emerging diseases. This paper aims to evaluate how much public support there would be in preventing further decline to maintain the current number of bee colonies in the UK. The contingent valuation method (CVM) was used to obtain the willingness to pay (WTP) for a theoretical pollinator protection policy. Respondents were asked whether they would be WTP to support such a policy and how much would they pay? Results show that the mean WTP to support the bee protection policy was £1.37/week/household. Based on there being 24.9 million households in the UK, this is equivalent to £1.77 billion per year. This total value can show the importance of maintaining the overall pollination service to policy makers. We compare this total with estimates obtained using a simple market valuation of pollination for the UK

Candida albicans colonization and dissemination from the murine gastrointestinal tract : the influence of morphology and Th17 immunity

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (086558, 080088, 102705), a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award (097377) and a studentship from the University of Aberdeen. D.K. was supported by grant 5R01AI083344 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and by a Voelcker Young Investigator Award from the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Static Magnetic Proximity Effect in Pt Layers on Sputter-Deposited NiFe2O4 and on Fe of Various Thicknesses Investigated by XRMR

The longitudinal spin Seebeck effect is detected in sputter-deposited NiFe2O4 films using Pt as a spin detector and compared to previously investigated NiFe2O4 films prepared by chemical vapor deposition. Anomalous Nernst effects induced by the magnetic proximity effect in Pt can be excluded for the sputter-deposited NiFe2O4 films down to a certain limit, since x-ray resonant magnetic reflectivity measurements show no magnetic response down to a limit of 0.04 {\mu}B per Pt atom comparable to the case of the chemicallydeposited NiFe2O4 films. These differently prepared films have various thicknesses. Therefore, we further studied Pt/Fe reference samples with various Fe thicknesses and could confirm that the magnetic proximity effect is only induced by the interface properties of the magnetic material.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Fungal Chitin Dampens Inflammation through IL-10 Induction Mediated by NOD2 and TLR9 Activation

Funding: JW and NARG thank the Wellcome Trust (080088, 086827, 075470), The Wellcome Trust Strategic Award in Medical Mycology and Fungal Immunology (097377) and the European Union ALLFUN (FP7/2007 2013, HEALTH-2010-260338) for funding. MGN was supported by a Vici grant of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. AJPB and DMM were funded by STRIFE, ERC-2009-AdG-249793 and AJPB additionally by FINSysB, PITN-GA-2008-214004 and the BBSRC [BB/F00513X/1]. MDL was supported by the MRC (MR/J008230/1). GDB and SV were funded by the Wellcome Trust (086558) and TB and MK were funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Bi 696/3-1; Bi 696/5-2; Bi 696/10-1). MS was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Sch 897/1-3) and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (R01 DE017514-01). TDK and RKSM were funded by the National Institute of Health (AR056296, AI101935) and the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

GPROF-NN: a neural-network-based implementation of the Goddard Profiling Algorithm

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission measures global precipitation at a temporal resolution of a few hours to enable close monitoring of the global hydrological cycle. GPM achieves this by combining observations from a spaceborne precipitation radar, a constellation of passive microwave (PMW) sensors, and geostationary satellites. The Goddard Profiling Algorithm (GPROF) is used operationally to retrieve precipitation from all PMW sensors of the GPM constellation. Since the resulting precipitation rates serve as input for many of the level 3 retrieval products, GPROF constitutes an essential component of the GPM processing pipeline. This study investigates ways to improve GPROF using modern machine learning methods. We present two neuralnetwork-based, probabilistic implementations of GPROF: GPROF-NN 1D, which (just like the current GPROF implementation) processes pixels individually, and GPROF-NN 3D, which employs a convolutional neural network to incorporate structural information into the retrieval. The accuracy of the retrievals is evaluated using a test dataset consistent with the data used in the development of the GPROF and GPROF-NN retrievals. This allows for assessing the accuracy of the retrieval method isolated from the representativeness of the training data, which remains a major source of uncertainty in the development of precipitation retrievals. Despite using the same input information as GPROF, the GPROF-NN 1D retrieval improves the accuracy of the retrieved surface precipitation for the GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) from 0.079 to 0.059mmh 1 in terms of mean abso- lute error (MAE), from 76.1% to 69.5% in terms of symmetric mean absolute percentage error (SMAPE) and from 0 :797 to 0 :847 in terms of correlation. The improvements for the Microwave Humidity Sounder (MHS) are from 0.085 to 0.061mmh 1 in terms of MAE, from 81% to 70.1% for SMAPE, and from 0 :724 to 0 :804 in terms of correlation. Comparable improvements are found for the retrieved hydrometeor profiles and their column integrals, as well as the detection of precipitation. Moreover, the ability of the retrievals to resolve small-scale variability is improved by more than 40% for GMI and 29% for MHS. The GPROFNN 3D retrieval further improves the MAE to 0.043mmh 1; the SMAPE to 48.67 %; and the correlation to 0:897 for GMI and 0.043mmh 1, 63.42 %, and 0:83 for MHS. Application of the retrievals to GMI observations of Hurricane Harvey shows moderate improvements when compared to co-located GPM-combined and ground-based radar measurements indicating that the improvements at least partially carry over to assessment against independent measurements. Similar retrievals for MHS do not show equally clear improvements, leaving the validation against independent measurements for future investigation. Both GPROF-NN algorithms make use of the same input and output data as the original GPROF algorithm and thus may replace the current implementation in a future update of the GPM processing pipeline. Despite their superior accuracy, the single-core runtime required for the operational processing of an orbit of observations is lower than that of GPROF. The GPROF-NN algorithms promise to be a simple and cost-efficient way to increase the accuracy of the PMW precipitation retrievals of the GPM constellation and thus improve the monitoring of the global hydrological cycle

Integrated crop pollination to buffer spatial and temporal variability in pollinator activity

Insect pollination improves the yield and quality of many crops, yet there is increasing evidence of insufficient insect pollinators limiting crop production. Effective Integrated Crop Pollination (ICP) involves adaptable, targeted and cost effective management of crop pollination and encourages the use of both wild and managed pollinators where appropriate. In this study we investigate how the addition of honeybee hives affects the community of insects visiting oilseed rape, and if hive number and location affect pollinator foraging and oilseed rape pollination in order to provide evidence for effective ICP. We found that introducing hives increased overall flower visitor numbers and altered the pollinator community, which became dominated by honeybees. Furthermore a greater number of hives did not increase bee numbers significantly but did result in honeybees foraging further into fields. The timing of surveys and proximity to the field edge influenced different pollinators in different ways and represents an example of spatial and temporal complementarity. For example dipteran flower visitor numbers declined away from the field edge whereas honeybees peaked at intermediate distances into the field. Furthermore, no significant effects of survey round on wild bees overall was observed but honeybee numbers were relatively lower during peak flowering and dipteran abundance was greater in later survey rounds. Thus combining diverse wild pollinators and managed species for crop pollination buffers spatial and temporal variation in flower visitation. However we found no effect of insect pollination on seed set or yield of oilseed rape in our trial, highlighting the critical need to understand crop demand for insect pollination before investments are made in managing pollination services

Duality between Electric and Magnetic Black Holes

A number of attempts have recently been made to extend the conjectured $S$ duality of Yang Mills theory to gravity. Central to these speculations has been the belief that electrically and magnetically charged black holes, the solitons of quantum gravity, have identical quantum properties. This is not obvious, because although duality is a symmetry of the classical equations of motion, it changes the sign of the Maxwell action. Nevertheless, we show that the chemical potential and charge projection that one has to introduce for electric but not magnetic black holes exactly compensate for the difference in action in the semi-classical approximation. In particular, we show that the pair production of electric black holes is not a runaway process, as one might think if one just went by the action of the relevant instanton. We also comment on the definition of the entropy in cosmological situations, and show that we need to be more careful when defining the entropy than we are in an asymptotically-flat case.Comment: 23 pages, revtex, no figures. Major revision: two sections on the electric Ernst solution adde