March Mammal Madness and the power of narrative in science outreach.

March Mammal Madness is a science outreach project that, over the course of several weeks in March, reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. We combine four approaches to science outreach - gamification, social media platforms, community event(s), and creative products - to run a simulated tournament in which 64 animals compete to become the tournament champion. While the encounters between the animals are hypothetical, the outcomes rely on empirical evidence from the scientific literature. Players select their favored combatants beforehand, and during the tournament scientists translate the academic literature into gripping "play-by-play" narration on social media. To date ~1100 scholarly works, covering almost 400 taxa, have been transformed into science stories. March Mammal Madness is most typically used by high-school educators teaching life sciences, and we estimate that our materials reached ~1% of high-school students in the United States in 2019. Here we document the intentional design, public engagement, and magnitude of reach of the project. We further explain how human psychological and cognitive adaptations for shared experiences, social learning, narrative, and imagery contribute to the widespread use of March Mammal Madness

DEPISTAGE DES MELANOMES (AIDE AU DIAGNOSTIC DIFFERENTIEL DES LESIONS PIGMENTAIRES)

NANTES-BU Médecine pharmacie (441092101) / SudocSudocFranceF

Associations between blood parasite infection and a microsatellite DNA allele in an Australian scincid lizard (Egernia stokesii)

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comWe used blood samples from 175 individuals of the Australian lizard Egernia stokesii to determine infection status of three apicomplexan blood parasites from the genera Hemolivia, Schellackia, and Plasmodium and to determine genotypes at 12 microsatellite DNA loci. We found one significant association between genotype and infection status. For locus Est4, individuals carrying allele 159 had lower prevalence of infection with Hemolivia (14.3% of 28 lizards) than individuals that did not carry the allele (58.4% of 89 lizards). We interpret this as a linkage to a functional gene associated with parasite resistance. We found no evidence among seven lizard populations that the frequency of allele 159 was related to the population prevalence of Hemolivia infection and discuss several explanations of that pattern.Stephanie S. Godfrey, C. Michael Bull and Michael G. Gardne

Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts

International audienceLooking at representations of the Irish landscape in contemporary literature and the arts, this volume discusses the economic, political and environmental issues associated with it, questioning the myths behind Ireland's landscape, from the first Greek descriptions to present day post Celtic-Tiger architecture