Variabilidad genética de Aedes aegypti determinada mediante marcadores moleculares, en dos áreas endémicas para dengue en el Paraguay

Aedes aegypti es el principal vector del dengue en Paraguay, cuya composición genética poblacional puede ser afectada por los controles químicos y ambientales, por lo que es necesario evaluarlos con marcadores moleculares capaces de estimar la diversidad genética existente entre poblaciones naturales de mosquitos. Con el objetivo de establecer la variabilidad genética de Ae. aegypti, se analizaron 40 especímenes hembras de los Departamentos Central y Cordillera de Paraguay. Los insectos fueron sometidos a procesos de extracción de DNA genómico y los fragmentos se amplificaron mediante dos marcadores moleculares; RAPD-PCR y PCR-RFLP. Para el RAPD se utilizaron los cebadores comerciales H3 y A2, los cuales amplificaron 24 loci. Se observaron loci polimórficos en 83% y 95,8% para H3 y A2 respectivamente.Asociación Parasitológica Argentin

The Floristic-Holistic Method for Arid, Semiarid, and Subhumid Areas: A Tool for the Revaluation of Floristic Diversity, Conservation, and Protection of the Ecosystem

The valorization of methods for comprehensive data collection is one of the fundamental tools to establish concrete bases and is applicable to lines of work in conservation, preservation, and protection of ecosystems. During the last 20 years, from the Botany Laboratory and Herbarium Trelew, we have valued the Floristic-Holistic Method that we have been adapting, for flora surveys. Method is intensively used in some Argentine provinces of arid, semiarid, and subhumid zones of the South American Arid Diagonal (Santa Cruz, Chubut, Río Negro, Neuquén, Mendoza, and arid islands of the Patagonian Atlantic coast). This revaluation focuses its importance on not only providing information on ecological parameters (bare soil, topsoil, living plant cover, and dead plant cover), richness, equitability, and floristic diversity, but also on status, conservation, botanical types, biological forms, adaptations, plant density, percentages of protected species, potential invasions of exotic species, forage productivity, and animal receptivity. The information is comprehensive and adaptable to different situations, applicable to different plant associations, types of terrain, and landscape units (open and closed mount, shrubby steppes, subshrubs, grasses, wastelands, rocky fields, peladales, and all kinds of modified areas). The method thus holistically conceptualizes ecosystem goods and services, allowing their study at different scales

Storylines of family medicine V:ways of thinking-honing the therapeutic self

Storylines of Family Medicine is a 12-part series of thematically linked essays with accompanying illustrations that explore the many dimensions of family medicine, as interpreted by individual family physicians and medical educators in the USA and elsewhere around the world. In 'V: ways of thinking-honing the therapeutic self', authors present the following sections: 'Reflective practice in action', 'The doctor as drug-Balint groups', 'Cultivating compassion', 'Towards a humanistic approach to doctoring', 'Intimacy in family medicine', 'The many faces of suffering', 'Transcending suffering' and 'The power of listening to stories.' May readers feel a deeper sense of their own therapeutic agency by reflecting on these essays.</p

Cryptic speciation in gentoo penguins is driven by geographic isolation and regional marine conditions: Unforeseen vulnerabilities to global change

The conservation of biodiversity is hampered by data deficiencies, with many new species and subspecies awaiting description or reclassification. Population genomics and ecological niche modelling offer complementary new tools for un-covering functional units of phylogenetic diversity. We hypothesize that phyloge-netically delineated lineages of gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) distributed across Antarctica and sub-Antarctic Islands are subject to spatially explicit ecological con-ditions that have limited gene flow, facilitating genetic differentiation, and thereby speciation processes

Privacy-Preserving Release of Spatio-temporal Density

International audienceIn today’s digital society, increasing amounts of contextually rich spatio-temporal information are collected and used, e.g., for knowledge-based decision making, research purposes, optimizing operational phases of city management, planning infrastructure networks, or developing timetables for public transportation with an increasingly autonomous vehicle fleet. At the same time, however, publishing or sharing spatio-temporal data, even in aggregated form, is not always viable owing to the danger of violating individuals’ privacy, along with the related legal and ethical repercussions. In this chapter, we review some fundamental approaches for anonymizing and releasing spatio-temporal density, i.e., the number of individuals visiting a given set of locations as a function of time. These approaches follow different privacy models providing different privacy guarantees as well as accuracy of the released anonymized data. We demonstrate some sanitization (anonymization) techniques with provable privacy guarantees by releasing the spatio-temporal density of Paris, in France. We conclude that, in order to achieve meaningful accuracy, the sanitization process has to be carefully customized to the application and public characteristics of the spatio-temporal data

Multiwavelength Observations of A0620-00 in Quiescence

[Abridged.] We present multiwavelength observations of the black hole binary system, A0620-00. Using the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope, we have obtained the first FUV spectrum of A0620-00. The observed spectrum is flat in the FUV and very faint (with continuum fluxes \simeq 1e - 17 ergs/cm^2/s/A). We compiled the dereddened, broadband spectral energy distribution of A0620-00 and compared it to previous SEDs as well as theoretical models. The SEDs show that the source varies at all wavelengths for which we have multiple samples. Contrary to previous observations, the optical-UV spectrum does not continue to drop to shorter wavelengths, but instead shows a recovery and an increasingly blue spectrum in the FUV. We created an optical-UV spectrum of A0620-00 with the donor star contribution removed. The non-stellar spectrum peaks at \simeq3000 {\deg}A. The peak can be fit with a T=10,000 K blackbody with a small emitting area, probably originating in the hot spot where the accretion stream impacts the outer disk. However, one or more components in addition to the blackbody are needed to fit the FUV upturn and the red optical fluxes in the optical-UV spectrum. By comparing the mass accretion rate determined from the hot spot luminosity to the mean accretion rate inferred from the outburst history, we find that the latter is an order of magnitude smaller than the former, indicating that \sim90% of the accreted mass must be lost from the system if the predictions of the disk instability model and the estimated interoutburst interval are correct. The mass accretion rate at the hot spot is 10^5 the accretion rate at the black hole inferred from the X-ray luminosity. To reconcile these requires that outflows carry away virtually all of the accreted mass, a very low rate of mass transfer from the outer cold disk into the inner hot region, and/or radiatively inefficient accretion.Comment: ApJ, accepte

Oldest Known Eucalyptus Macrofossils Are from South America

The evolutionary history of Eucalyptus and the eucalypts, the larger clade of seven genera including Eucalyptus that today have a natural distribution almost exclusively in Australasia, is poorly documented from the fossil record. Little physical evidence exists bearing on the ancient geographical distributions or morphologies of plants within the clade. Herein, we introduce fossil material of Eucalyptus from the early Eocene (ca. 51.9 Ma) Laguna del Hunco paleoflora of Chubut Province, Argentina; specimens include multiple leaves, infructescences, and dispersed capsules, several flower buds, and a single flower. Morphological similarities that relate the fossils to extant eucalypts include leaf shape, venation, and epidermal oil glands; infructescence structure; valvate capsulate fruits; and operculate flower buds. The presence of a staminophore scar on the fruits links them to Eucalyptus, and the presence of a transverse scar on the flower buds indicates a relationship to Eucalyptus subgenus Symphyomyrtus. Phylogenetic analyses of morphological data alone and combined with aligned sequence data from a prior study including 16 extant eucalypts, one outgroup, and a terminal representing the fossils indicate that the fossils are nested within Eucalyptus. These are the only illustrated Eucalyptus fossils that are definitively Eocene in age, and the only conclusively identified extant or fossil eucalypts naturally occurring outside of Australasia and adjacent Mindanao. Thus, these fossils indicate that the evolution of the eucalypt group is not constrained to a single region. Moreover, they strengthen the taxonomic connections between the Laguna del Hunco paleoflora and extant subtropical and tropical Australasia, one of the three major ecologic-geographic elements of the Laguna del Hunco paleoflora. The age and affinities of the fossils also indicate that Eucalyptus subgenus Symphyomyrtus is older than previously supposed. Paleoecological data indicate that the Patagonian Eucalyptus dominated volcanically disturbed areas adjacent to standing rainforest surrounding an Eocene caldera lake