Tolerance of Novel Toxins through Generalized Mechanisms: Simulating Gradual Host Shifts of ButterfliesKristin

Organisms encounter a wide range of toxic compounds in their environments, from chemicals that serve anticonsumption or anticompetition functions to pollutants and pesticides. Although we understand many detoxification mechanisms that allow organisms to consume toxins typical of their diet, we know little about why organisms vary in their ability to tolerate entirely novel toxins. We tested whether variation in generalized stress responses, such as antioxidant pathways, may underlie variation in reactions to novel toxins and, if so, their associated costs. We used an artificial diet to present cabbage white butterfly caterpillars (Pieris rapae) with plant material containing toxins not experienced in their evolutionary history. Families that maintained high performance (e.g., high survival, fast development time, large body size) on diets containing one novel toxic plant also performed well when exposed to two other novel toxic plants, consistent with a generalized response. Variation in constitutive (but not induced) expression of genes involved in oxidative stress responses was positively related to performance on the novel diets. While we did not detect reproductive trade-offs of this generalized response, there was a tendency to have less melanin investment in the wings, consistent with the role of melanin in oxidative stress responses. Taken together, our results support the hypothesis that variation in generalized stress responses, such as genes involved in oxidative stress responses, may explain the variation in tolerance to entirely novel toxins and may facilitate colonization of novel hosts and environments

A Fire Severity Mapping System for Real-Time Fire Management Applications and Long-Term Planning: The FIRESEV project

Accurate, consistent, and timely fire severity maps are needed in all phases of fire management including planning, managing, and rehabilitating wildfires. The problem is that fire severity maps are commonly developed from satellite imagery that is difficult to use for planning wildfire responses before a fire has actually happened and can’t be used for real-time wildfire management because of the timing of the imagery delivery. Moreover, imagery is difficult to use for controlled fires such as prescribed burning. This study, called FIRESEV (FIRE SEVerity Mapping Tools) created a comprehensive set of tools and protocols to deliver, create, and evaluate fire severity maps for all phases of fire management. The first tool is a Severe Fire Potential Map (SFPM) that quantifies the potential for fires to burn with high severity, should they occur, for any 30m x 30m piece of ground across the western United States. This map was developed using empirical models that related topographic, vegetation, and fire weather variables to burn severity as mapped using the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) digital products. This SFPM map is currently available on the Fire Research and Management Exchange System (FRAMES, http://www.frames.gov/firesev) web site and can be used to plan for future wildfires or for managing wildfires in real time, e.g. by including it as a layer in Wildland Fire Decision Support System or other GIS analysis. The next tool was the inclusion of a fire severity mapping algorithm in the Wildland Fire Assessment Tool (WFAT) developed by the National Interagency Fuels Technology Transfer (NIFTT) team. WFAT is used for fuel treatment planning to predict potential fire effects under prescribed fire weather conditions (http://www.frames.gov/partner-sites/niftt/tools/niftt-current-resources/). Now, fire severity can be mapped explicitly from fire effects simulation models (FOFEM, Consume) for real-time and planning wildfire applications. Next, the FIRESEV project showed how results from the WFAT simulated fire severity can be integrated with satellite imagery to improve fire severity mapping. And last, the FIRESEV project produced a suite of research studies, synthesis papers, and popular articles designed to improve the description, interpretation, and mapping of fire severity for wildland fire management: (1) a research study created a completely objective method of quantifying fire severity from fire effects to obtain nine unique classes of fire severity, (2) a research study comprehensively contrasted all current classifications of fire severity using Composite Burn Index (CBI) as measured on over 300 plots across the western United States to determine commonalities and differences, and (3) a synthesis paper was written discussing the problems involved in measuring, describing, and quantifying fire severity. This FIRESEV project yielded over 15 deliverables that we feel provides a comprehensive suite of products to create useful fire severity maps, along with current satellite imagery products, and also FIRESEV provides a thorough background on how to measure, interpret, and apply fire severity in fire management

A Longitudinal Analysis of Volunteerism Activities for Individuals Educated in Public and Private Schools

Previous studies offer evidence that U.S. public and private high schools differentially influence volunteerism in adolescence. However, these studies are typically cross-sectional and only consider whether the individual volunteered or not. We address patterns of volunteering from adolescence into adulthood and the kind of volunteering activity in which individuals engage. We also theorize that distinctive civic values within public and private schools together with their respective organizational ties to other civic organizations channel students into particular volunteering activities. Relying on a longitudinal, nationally-representative sample of U.S. adolescents, we track volunteering from adolescence into young adulthood and identify the types of volunteering activities in which respondents engage. Results demonstrate that the likelihood of volunteering changes through the life course, and students from different schooling backgrounds systematically sort into specific volunteering activities as our theories predict

Evaluating the irritant factors of silicone and hydrocolloid skin contact adhesives using trans-epidermal water loss, protein stripping, erythema, and ease of removal

YesA composite silicone skin adhesive material was designed to improve its water vapor permeability to offer advantages to wearer comfort compared to existing skin adhesive dressings available (including perforated silicone and hydrocolloid products). The chemical and mechanical properties of this novel dressing were analyzed to show that it has a high creep compliance, offering anisotropic elasticity that is likely to place less stress on the skin. A participant study was carried out in which 31 participants wore a novel silicone skin adhesive (Sil2) and a hydrocolloid competitor and were monitored for physiological response to the dressings. Trans-epidermal water loss (TEWL) was measured pre- and postwear to determine impairment of skin barrier function. Sil2 exhibited a higher vapor permeability than the hydrocolloid dressings during wear. Peel strength measurements and dye counter staining of the removed dressings showed that the hydrocolloid had a higher adhesion to the participants’ skin, resulting in a greater removal of proteins from the stratum corneum and a higher pain rating from participants on removal. Once the dressings were removed, TEWL of the participants skin beneath the Sil2 was close to normal in comparison to the hydrocolloid dressings that showed an increase in skin TEWL, indicating that the skin had been highly occluded. Analysis of the skin immediately after removal showed a higher incidence of erythema following application of hydrocolloid dressings (>60%) compared to Sil2, (T.S. received partial funding to study skin adhesive materials from a Medical Research Council Confidence in Concept grant obtained by John Bridgeman at the University of Bradford (MC_PC_19030). Initial formulation and characterization work benchmarking the Sil2 material was funded in part by Trio Healthcare Ltd., who have had no role in the analysis or interpretation of the data presented. All data was obtained independently by staff at the University of Bradford. We also wish to thank the Royal Society of Chemistry for funding Edward Dyson’s position as a research technician via a Research Enablement Grant (E21-8346952505)

E-Cadherin mediates UVR- and calcium-induced melanin transfer in human skin cells

yesSkin pigmentation is directed by epidermal-melanin units, characterized by long-lived and dendritic epidermal melanocytes (MC) that interact with viable keratinocytes (KC) to contribute melanin to the epidermis. Previously we reported that MC:KC contact is required for melanosome transfer, that this can be enhanced by filopodial and by UVR/UVA irradiation, which can up-regulate melanosome transfer via Myosin X-mediated control of MC filopodia. Both MC and KC express Ca2+-dependent E-cadherins. These homophilic adhesion contacts induce transient increases in intra-KC Ca2+, while ultraviolet radiation (UVR) raises intra-MC Ca2+ via calcium selective ORAI1 ion channels; both are associated with regulating melanogenesis. However, how Ca2+ triggers melanin transfer remains unclear, and here we evaluated the role of E-Cadherin in UVR-mediated melanin transfer in human skin cells. MC and KC in human epidermis variably express filopodia-associated E-Cadherin, Cdc42, VASP and β-catenin, all of which were upregulated by UVR/UVA in human MC in vitro. Knockdown of E-cadherin revealed that this cadherin is essential for UVR-induced MC filopodia formation and melanin transfer. Moreover, Ca2+ induced a dose-dependent increase in filopodia formation and melanin transfer, as well as increased β-catenin, Cdc42, Myosin X, and E-Cadherin expression in these skin cells. Together these data suggest that filopodial proteins and E-Cadherin, which are upregulated by intracellular (UVR-stimulated) and extracellular Ca2+ availability, are required for filopodia formation and melanin transfer. This may open new avenues to explore how Ca2+ signalling influences human pigmentation

Religious Identity, Religious Attendance, and Parental Control

Using a national sample of adolescents aged 10–18 years and their parents (N = 5,117), this article examines whether parental religious identity and religious participation are associated with the ways in which parents control their children. We hypothesize that both religious orthodoxy and weekly religious attendance are related to heightened levels of three elements of parental control: monitoring activities, normative regulations, and network closure. Results indicate that an orthodox religious identity for Catholic and Protestant parents and higher levels of religious attendance for parents as a whole are associated with increases in monitoring activities and normative regulations of American adolescents

Lament as Transitional Justice

Works of human rights literature help to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos. Writers have developed four major modes of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter. Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the United States, and Bosnia, I focus on the mode of lament, the literature of mourning. Lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions. Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the ghosts of the past the justice of a monument while renewing the survivors’ capacity for rebuilding civil society in the future. Human rights scholars need a broader, extra-juridical meaning for “transitional justice” if we hope to capture its power

Explaining disappearances as a tool of political terror

Despite the widespread use of disappearances as a central tool of terror in recent decades, little is known about the emergence of the phenomenon or its underlying rationale. We argue that growing international accountability norms, coupled with the improved quality of reporting human rights abuses, paradoxically reshaped the repressive strategies of certain regimes and pushed them to deploy more clandestine and extrajudicial forms of repression, predominantly disappearances. We also explore the timing of disappearances: when a state decides to deploy a particular instrument of terror can greatly benefit our understanding of why it was used. We show that repressive regimes tend to use disappearances in the first period after a coup, taking advantage of the general confusion and opacity to secure strategic benefits and protect the regime from external scrutiny and future accountability. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on human rights and political repression by highlighting an ‘unintended consequence’ of international accountability norms: repressive regimes turn to clandestine crimes

Human Rights and the Pink Tide in Latin America : Which Rights Matter?

Latin America witnessed the election of ‘new Left’ governments in the early 21 st century that, in different ways, sought to open a debate about alternatives to paradigms of neoliberal development. What has this meant for the way that human rights are understood and for patterns of human rights compliance? Using qualitative and quantitative evidence, this article discusses how human rights are imagined and the compliance records of new Left governments through the lens of the three ‘generations’ of human rights — political and civil, social and economic, and cultural and environmental rights. The authors draw in particular on evidence from Andean countries and the Southern Cone. While basic civil and individual liberties are still far from guaranteed, especially in the Andean region, new Left countries show better overall performances in relation to socio-economic rights compared to the past and to other Latin American countries. All new Left governments also demonstrate an increasing interest in ‘third generation’ (cultural and environmental) rights, though this is especially marked in the Andean Left. The authors discuss the tensions around interpretations and categories of human rights, reflect on the stagnation of first generation rights and note the difficulties associated with translating second and third generation rights into policy