Endemic trees in a tropical biodiversity hotspot imperilled by an invasive tree

Non-native plants invade some tropical forests but there are few long-term studies of these invasions, and the consequences for plant richness and diversity are unclear. Repeated measurements of permanent plots in tropical montane rain forests in the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park in Jamaica over 24 to 40 years coincided with invasion by a non-native tree, Pittosporum undulatum. By 2014, P. undulatum comprised, on average, 11.9% of stems ≥ 3 cm diameter and 10.4% of the basal area across 16 widespread plots within c. 250 ha of the forests. Across these plots, the more P. undulatum increased in basal area over 24 years, the greater the decline in local, plot-scale tree species richness, and the greater the reduction in the percentage of stems of endemic tree species. Plot-scale tree diversity (Shannon and Fisher\u27s alpha) also declined the more P. undulatum basal area increased, but beta diversity across the plots was not reduced. Declines in local-scale tree species diversity and richness as the invasion progresses is especially concerning because Jamaica is a global biodiversity hotspot. Native birds disperse P. undulatum seeds widely, and future hurricanes will probably further increase its invasion by reducing canopy cover and therefore promoting growth rates of its established shade-tolerant seedlings. Remedial action is needed now to identify forest communities with greatest endemism, and to protect them through a continuing programme of control and removal of P. undulatum

Chromosome Loss and Meiotic Behaviour in Interspecific Hybrids in the Genus Arachis L. and their Implications in Breeding for Disease Resistance

The cultivated peanut, and is cultivate in most tropical and subtropical areas of the world. Between thirty and fifty other species of the genus are recognized, most of which are diploid (2n=20), and native to South America (GRECORTY et al. 1973). During the past fifteen years many of these species have been collected and studied. Some of these wild species are resisteant to important disease, A. cardenasii for example is immune to leafspot caused by Cercospora personate (ABDOU et al. 1974, SHARIEF 1972)

Dupuytren's disease in bosnia and herzegovina. An epidemiological study

BACKGROUND: It is generally held that Dupuytren's disease is more common in northern than in southern Europe, but there are very few studies from southern European countries. METHODS: We examined the hands of 1207 men and women over the age of 50 years in Bosnia and Herzegovina. RESULTS: The prevalence of Dupuytren's disease was highly age-dependent, ranging from 17% for men between 50–59 years to 60% in the oldest men. The prevalence among women was lower. The great majority only had palmar changes without contracture of the digit. The prevalence was significantly lower among Bosnian Muslim men than among Bosnian Croat and Serbian men and significantly increased among diabetics. No association could be detected between Dupuytren's disease and smoking, alcohol consumption or living in rural or urban areas. CONCLUSION: We conclude that, contrary to previous opinion, Dupuytren's disease is common in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Impact and feasibility of the Allied Health Professional Enhancement Program placements – experiences from rural and remote Queensland

Background: Allied health professionals practicing in rural and remote areas are often faced with barriers that prevent them from accessing professional development opportunities. In order to address this barrier, a tailored professional development program was developed and implemented by the Cunningham Centre in Queensland, Australia. The purpose of this study was to investigate the benefits of the program to participants and their work units. Methods: This study used a concurrent mixed methods longitudinal design to investigate the medium- to long-term benefits of one Allied Health Professional Enhancement Program placement. Surveys and individual interviews provided data at 2 weeks and at 6 months post-placement. The study participants included the placement participant (a physiotherapist), their line manager, clinical supervisor, and the placement facilitator. Results: Results demonstrated that the placement resulted in various reported benefits to the placement participant, as well as to service delivery in their home location. Benefits of the placement reported by the participant included increased confidence, improved knowledge and skills, increased access to professional networks, and validation of practice. Benefits to service delivery reported included improved efficiencies, improved patient outcomes, and positive impact on other team members. Discussion: This study found that the Allied Health Professional Enhancement Program placement investigated was beneficial to the participant and to service delivery. In addition, the benefits reported were sustained at 6 months post-placement. Despite the fact that this study showcases experiences from one setting, the findings from this study and the lessons learnt may be transferrable to other similar programs elsewhere due to its methodological strengths (such as rich descriptions of the program and use of typical case sampling). While this study provides emergent evidence of usefulness of the program to participants and their work units, further studies are warranted to investigate the direct benefits of such placements on patient care, which remains as the holy grail of the impact of professional development opportunities. Conclusion: Allied Health Professional Enhancement Program placements can result in important benefits to the participant, their health service, and positively influence health care service delivery.Priya Martin, Saravana Kumar, Melinda Stone, LuJuana Abernathy, Vanessa Burge, Lucylynn Lizarond

Standing in a Garden of Forking Paths

According to the Path Principle, it is permissible to expand your set of beliefs iff (and because) the evidence you possess provides adequate support for such beliefs. If there is no path from here to there, you cannot add a belief to your belief set. If some thinker with the same type of evidential support has a path that they can take, so do you. The paths exist because of the evidence you possess and the support it provides. Evidential support grounds propositional justification. The principle is mistaken. There are permissible steps you may take that others may not even if you have the very same evidence. There are permissible steps that you cannot take that others can even if your beliefs receive the same type of evidential support. Because we have to assume almost nothing about the nature of evidential support to establish these results, we should reject evidentialism

Thinking through illusion

Perception of a property (e.g. a colour, a shape, a size) can enable thought about the property, while at the same time misleading the subject as to what the property is like. This long-overlooked claim parallels a more familiar observation concerning perception-based thought about objects, namely that perception can enable a subject to think about an object while at the same time misleading her as to what the object is like. I defend the overlooked claim, and then use it to generate a challenge for a standard way of thinking about the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation. Put informally, that view holds that just as we can mislead others by saying something false, illusory experience misleads by misrepresenting how things stand in the world. I argue that we ought to abandon this view in favour of some radical alternative account of the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation

Improved annotation of 3' untranslated regions and complex loci by combination of strand-specific direct RNA sequencing, RNA-seq and ESTs

The reference annotations made for a genome sequence provide the framework for all subsequent analyses of the genome. Correct annotation is particularly important when interpreting the results of RNA-seq experiments where short sequence reads are mapped against the genome and assigned to genes according to the annotation. Inconsistencies in annotations between the reference and the experimental system can lead to incorrect interpretation of the effect on RNA expression of an experimental treatment or mutation in the system under study. Until recently, the genome-wide annotation of 3-prime untranslated regions received less attention than coding regions and the delineation of intron/exon boundaries. In this paper, data produced for samples in Human, Chicken and A. thaliana by the novel single-molecule, strand-specific, Direct RNA Sequencing technology from Helicos Biosciences which locates 3-prime polyadenylation sites to within +/- 2 nt, were combined with archival EST and RNA-Seq data. Nine examples are illustrated where this combination of data allowed: (1) gene and 3-prime UTR re-annotation (including extension of one 3-prime UTR by 5.9 kb); (2) disentangling of gene expression in complex regions; (3) clearer interpretation of small RNA expression and (4) identification of novel genes. While the specific examples displayed here may become obsolete as genome sequences and their annotations are refined, the principles laid out in this paper will be of general use both to those annotating genomes and those seeking to interpret existing publically available annotations in the context of their own experimental dataComment: 44 pages, 9 figure

Reducing bias in auditory duration reproduction by integrating the reproduced signal

Duration estimation is known to be far from veridical and to differ for sensory estimates and motor reproduction. To investigate how these differential estimates are integrated for estimating or reproducing a duration and to examine sensorimotor biases in duration comparison and reproduction tasks, we compared estimation biases and variances among three different duration estimation tasks: perceptual comparison, motor reproduction, and auditory reproduction (i.e. a combined perceptual-motor task). We found consistent overestimation in both motor and perceptual-motor auditory reproduction tasks, and the least overestimation in the comparison task. More interestingly, compared to pure motor reproduction, the overestimation bias was reduced in the auditory reproduction task, due to the additional reproduced auditory signal. We further manipulated the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the feedback/comparison tones to examine the changes in estimation biases and variances. Considering perceptual and motor biases as two independent components, we applied the reliability-based model, which successfully predicted the biases in auditory reproduction. Our findings thus provide behavioral evidence of how the brain combines motor and perceptual information together to reduce duration estimation biases and improve estimation reliability

Perforated carcinoma of the caecum presenting as necrotising fasciitis of the abdominal wall, the key to early diagnosis and management

BACKGROUND: Necrotising Fasciitis is a life threatening soft tissue infection which requires aggressive, early surgical management. CASE PRESENTATION: We present a rare case of a retroperitoneal perforation of a carcinoma of the caecum presenting as a necrotising fasciitis of the anterior abdominal wall. CONCLUSION: This case highlights the importance of early aggressive debridement to healthy tissue limits, the consideration of a rare underlying cause, and the scope for plastic surgical reconstruction in order that aggressive initial surgery can be adequately performed