Taxonomy of the order Mononegavirales: update 2016

In 2016, the order Mononegavirales was emended through the addition of two new families (Mymonaviridae and Sunviridae), the elevation of the paramyxoviral subfamily Pneumovirinae to family status (Pneumoviridae), the addition of five free-floating genera (Anphevirus, Arlivirus, Chengtivirus, Crustavirus, and Wastrivirus), and several other changes at the genus and species levels. This article presents the updated taxonomy of the order Mononegavirales as now accepted by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV)

Housing dampness and health amongst British Bengalis in East London

The paper describes a survey that was undertaken to investigate the possible associations between damp public sector housing in London (U.K.) and the health of British Bengali tenants. The problems of establishing epidemiological evidence in this field and the accurate assessment of dampness and health are addressed, and the relative importance of housing and lifestyle factors in the prevalence of damp in the home is considered. The results show that there are significant relationships between reported and measured damp, cold and mould in the home and various aspects of reported health. It is also apparent that it is aspects of housing, in particular the provision of a good heating system rather than lifestyle that determine the degree of dampness in a home.housing dampness cold mould health British Bengalis

Variability in body physique, ecology, and subsistence in the Fly River region of Papua New Guinea

There are some 40,000 indigenous peoples of the Fly River drainage in Papua New Guinea. The 4,000-mm rainfall contour ecologically demarcates hunter-horticulturalist peoples living in the rainforests of the Upper Fly from hunter-gatherer peoples living in the savanna-swamplands of the Middle and Lower Fly. A complex of factors operate to create significant physical differences between Upper Fly peoples and those of the Middle and Lower Fly. The ecological division between rainforests and savanna-swamplands demarcates a clear clinal separation by stature of Upper Fly peoples from those of the Middle and Lower Fly

Mining, modernisation and dietary change among the wopkaimin of papua new guinea

This paper examines retrospectively the changes in food and nutrient intake which have taken place over a nine-year period in which the intrusion of a major gold and copper mine has brought rapid socio-economic and ecological change to the Papua New Guinea Wopkaimin population, especially those who now rely upon cash incomes. A small proportion of the population remains subsistence-oriented. Since 1975 taro (Colocasia), the traditional staple, has become less important, and sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) more so. Store-bought and imported western foods are the main sources of energy and protein for the population with cash income. Increased availability of food due to the relatively faster yielding sweet potato staple now cultivated at low elevations, and to the availability of money to buy food with, has resulted in increased energy intakes, but not of protein. Increased body mass of workers and workers' wives is attributed to this increase in energy intake

Approximating conditional density functions using dimension reduction

We propose to approximate the conditional density function of a random variable Y given a dependent random d-vector X by that of Y given θ τ X, where the unit vector θ is selected such that the average Kullback-Leibler discrepancy distance between the two conditional density functions obtains the minimum. Our approach is nonparametric as far as the estimation of the conditional density functions is concerned. We have shown that this nonparametric estimator is asymptotically adaptive to the unknown index θ in the sense that the first order asymptotic mean squared error of the estimator is the same as that when θ was known. The proposed method is illustrated using both simulated and real-data examples

The T2K experiment

The T2K experiment is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. Its main goal is to measure the last unknown lepton sector mixing angle θ13 by observing νe appearance in a νμ beam. It also aims to make a precision measurement of the known oscillation parameters, and sin22θ23, via νμ disappearance studies. Other goals of the experiment include various neutrino cross-section measurements and sterile neutrino searches. The experiment uses an intense proton beam generated by the J-PARC accelerator in Tokai, Japan, and is composed of a neutrino beamline, a near detector complex (ND280), and a far detector (Super-Kamiokande) located 295 km away from J-PARC. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the instrumentation aspect of the T2K experiment and a summary of the vital information for each subsystem