Measuring farm progress of plan II veterans taking institutional on-the-farm training

August 1949.Includes bibliographical references (pages 125-129).Covers not scanned.To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document

Analysis of climate paths reveals potential limitations on species range shifts

Copyright © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/CNRSForecasts of species endangerment under climate change usually ignore the processes by which species ranges shift. By analysing the 'climate paths' that range shifts might follow, and two key range-shift processes--dispersal and population persistence--we show that short-term climatic and population characteristics have dramatic effects on range-shift forecasts. By employing this approach with 15 amphibian species in the western USA, we make unexpected predictions. First, inter-decadal variability in climate change can prevent range shifts by causing gaps in climate paths, even in the absence of geographic barriers. Second, the hitherto unappreciated trait of persistence during unfavourable climatic conditions is critical to species range shifts. Third, climatic fluctuations and low persistence could lead to endangerment even if the future potential range size is large. These considerations may render habitat corridors ineffectual for some species, and conservationists may need to consider managed relocation and augmentation of in situ populations.Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technolog

Niche syndromes, species extinction risks, and management under climate change

Copyright © 2013 Elsevier. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution Vol. 28 (2013), DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2013.05.010The current distributions of species are often assumed to correspond with the total set of environmental conditions under which species can persist. When this assumption is incorrect, extinction risk estimated from species distribution models can be misleading. The degree to which species can tolerate or even thrive under conditions found beyond their current distributions alters extinction risks, time lags in realizing those risks, and the usefulness of alternative management strategies. To inform these issues, we propose a conceptual framework within which empirical data could be used to generate hypotheses regarding the realized, fundamental, and ‘tolerance’ niche of species. Although these niche components have rarely been characterized over geographic scales, we suggest that this could be done for many plant species by comparing native, naturalized, and horticultural distributions.FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Properties of HxTaS2

The preparation of Hx TaS2 (0 \u3c x \u3c 0.87) is described. The compounds are only marginally stable at room temperature, slowly evolving H2S and H2 (and possibly Hp in air). Magnetic susceptibility data show that a low temperature transformation in 2H ... TaS2 (at so•K) is suppressed with the addition of hydrogen, and· at the same time the superconducting transition temperature T c rises from 0.8 to ~4.2•K at x = 0.11. Heat capacity measurements near this concentration show the superconductivity to be a bulk effect. Finally, by correlation of this data with susceptibility and T c measurements in other intercalation compounds, we suggest that the rise of T c (at low electron transfer) is due to suppression of the low temperature transformation and not due to an excitonic mechanism of superconductivity

Evolvability meets biogeography: evolutionary potential decreases at high and low environmental favourability

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Royal Society via the DOI in this record.Understanding and forecasting the effects of environmental change on wild populations requires knowledge on a critical question: Do populations have the ability to evolve in response to that change? However, our knowledge on how evolution works in wild conditions under different environmental circumstances is extremely limited. We investigated how environmental variation influences the evolutionary potential of phenotypic traits. We used published data to collect or calculate 135 estimates of evolvability of morphological traits of European wild bird populations. We characterised the environmental favourability of each population throughout the species’ breeding distribution. Our results suggest that the evolutionary potential of morphological traits decreases as environmental favourability becomes high or low. Strong environmental selection pressures and high intra-specific competition may reduce species’ evolutionary potential in low and high favourability areas, respectively. This suggests that species may be least able to adapt to new climate conditions at their range margins and at the centre. Our results underscore the need to consider the evolutionary potential of populations when studying the drivers of species distributions, particularly when predicting the effects of environmental change. We discuss the utility of integrating evolutionary dynamics into a biogeographical perspective to understand how environmental variation shapes evolutionary patterns. This approach would also produce more reliable predictions about the effect of environmental change on population persistence and therefore on biodiversity.We acknowledge funding from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (grants CGL2012-34685, CGL2015-70639-P, and CGL2016-76173-P) and thanks to the ERA-Net BiodivERsA, with the national funder FCT (Project: BIODIVERSA/0003/2011). AE has a contract funded by the project 1098/2014 (Organismo Autónomo Parques Nacionales, Spain)

Towards magnetic slowing of atoms and molecules

We outline a method to slow paramagnetic atoms or molecules using pulsed magnetic fields. We also discuss the possibility of producing trapped particles by adiabatic deceleration of a magnetic trap. We present numerical simulation results for the slowing and trapping of molecular oxygen

Constrained Willmore Surfaces

Constrained Willmore surfaces are conformal immersions of Riemann surfaces that are critical points of the Willmore energy $W=\int H^2$ under compactly supported infinitesimal conformal variations. Examples include all constant mean curvature surfaces in space forms. In this paper we investigate more generally the critical points of arbitrary geometric functionals on the space of immersions under the constraint that the admissible variations infinitesimally preserve the conformal structure. Besides constrained Willmore surfaces we discuss in some detail examples of constrained minimal and volume critical surfaces, the critical points of the area and enclosed volume functional under the conformal constraint.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures; v2: Hopf tori added as an example, minor changes in presentation, numbering changed; v3: new abstract and appendix, several changes in presentatio

Autopsy Standardized Mortality Review: A Pilot Study Offering a Methodology for Improved Patient Outcomes

A standardized mortality review of hospital autopsies identified discrepancies between clinical diagnoses and autopsy findings, unexpected deaths, adequacy of diagnostic workup, presence of adverse event, and type of a quality issue if present. The standardized review elements were chosen based on a review of quality metrics commonly used by hospitals. The review was completed by the pathologist based on their initial autopsy findings. The final autopsy report was later reviewed to confirm the initial review findings. Major discrepancies in diagnosis were categorized as class I or II based on the modified Goldman criteria. Ninety-six hospital autopsy cases from January 2015 to February 2018 were included in the study. The overall major discrepancy rate was 27%. Class I discrepancies, where a diagnosis found at autopsy might have improved survival had it been made premortem, were identified in 16% of cases. Categories associated with increased discrepancy rates included unexpected deaths, inadequate workup, abnormal labs or imaging not addressed, and certain quality issues. Deaths not expected at admission but expected at the time of death, those with adverse events, those within 48 hours of a procedure, those within 48 hours of admission, those with physician-specific quality issues, and those with system or process issues were not significantly related to diagnostic accuracy