An Empirical Analysis of Synergies and Tradeoffs between Sustainable Development Goals

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a universal agenda that nations have committed to achieving by 2030. The challenge is substantial, with no country excelling across all SDGs. Using global UN data, we assess patterns of positive and negative correlations between indicators of SDG status and progress. For nearly 70% of SDG indicators, status is positively associated with GDP/capita. Progress on SDG indicators, however, occurs in both poorer and wealthier countries. When GDP/capita is controlled for, positive associations remain between health, environment and energy usage indicators. Economic growth is negatively associated with changes in some health and environment indicators. For SDGs targets to be achieved, major opportunities and conflicts will need to be identified, prioritized and acted upon

Does polymorphism make Asiatic golden cat the most adaptable predator in Eastern Himalayas?

Some wild felines have a diverse range of coat colors while others do not. Jaguars and leopards, for instance, come in spotted and melanistic forms but tigers are always striped and lions always beige. Smaller cats like clouded leopards, marbled cats, and ocelots are almost always patterned in the same way while jaguarundis, oncillas, and golden cats occur in several different colors and patterns. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

Therapeutic limitations in tumor-specific CD8+ memory T cell engraftment

BACKGROUND: Adoptive immunotherapy with cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) represents an alternative approach to treating solid tumors. Ideally, this would confer long-term protection against tumor. We previously demonstrated that in vitro-generated tumor-specific CTL from the ovalbumin (OVA)-specific OT-I T cell receptor transgenic mouse persisted long after adoptive transfer as memory T cells. When recipient mice were challenged with the OVA-expressing E.G7 thymoma, tumor growth was delayed and sometimes prevented. The reasons for therapeutic failures were not clear. METHODS: OT-I CTL were adoptively transferred to C57BL/6 mice 21 – 28 days prior to tumor challenge. At this time, the donor cells had the phenotypical and functional characteristics of memory CD8+ T cells. Recipients which developed tumor despite adoptive immunotherapy were analyzed to evaluate the reason(s) for therapeutic failure. RESULTS: Dose-response studies demonstrated that the degree of tumor protection was directly proportional to the number of OT-I CTL adoptively transferred. At a low dose of OT-I CTL, therapeutic failure was attributed to insufficient numbers of OT-I T cells that persisted in vivo, rather than mechanisms that actively suppressed or anergized the OT-I T cells. In recipients of high numbers of OT-I CTL, the E.G7 tumor that developed was shown to be resistant to fresh OT-I CTL when examined ex vivo. Furthermore, these same tumor cells no longer secreted a detectable level of OVA. In this case, resistance to immunotherapy was secondary to selection of clones of E.G7 that expressed a lower level of tumor antigen. CONCLUSIONS: Memory engraftment with tumor-specific CTL provides long-term protection against tumor. However, there are several limitations to this immunotherapeutic strategy, especially when targeting a single antigen. This study illustrates the importance of administering large numbers of effectors to engraft sufficiently efficacious immunologic memory. It also demonstrates the importance of targeting several antigens when developing vaccine strategies for cancer

On the scaling of activity in tropical forest mammals

Activity range – the amount of time spent active per day – is a fundamental aspect contributing to the optimization process by which animals achieve energetic balance. Based on their size and the nature of their diet, theoretical expectations are that larger carnivores need more time active to fulfil their energetic needs than do smaller ones and also more time active than similar‐sized non‐carnivores. Despite the relationship between daily activity, individual range and energy acquisition, large‐scale relationships between activity range and body mass among wild mammals have never been properly addressed. This study aimed to understand the scaling of activity range with body mass, while controlling for phylogeny and diet. We built simple empirical predictions for the scaling of activity range with body mass for mammals of different trophic guilds and used a phylogenetically controlled mixed model to test these predictions using activity records of 249 mammal populations (128 species) in 19 tropical forests (in 15 countries) obtained using camera traps. Our scaling model predicted a steeper scaling of activity range in carnivores (0.21) with higher levels of activity (higher intercept), and near‐zero scaling in herbivores (0.04). Empirical data showed that activity ranges scaled positively with body mass for carnivores (0.061), which also had higher intercept value, but not for herbivores, omnivores and insectivores, in general, corresponding with the predictions. Despite the many factors that shape animal activity at local scales, we found a general pattern showing that large carnivores need more time active in a day to meet their energetic demands. Introduction Activity range – the amount of time, in hours, spent active per day – is a fundamental outcome of the complex physiological and behavioral optimization process by which animals ensure that energy input keeps pace with energy output. In addition to basal metabolism, animals face costs of foraging, acquiring mates and shelter, building reserves for lean times and escaping predators (Carbone et al. 2007, Halle and Stenseth 2012). Environmental and ecological factors that vary through the day (e.g. luminosity, temperature, predation risk and competition avoidance) constrain activity to certain times, depending on morpho‐physiological limitations (Castillo‐Ruiz et al. 2012, Hut et al. 2012). In addition, animals need time to rest in order to recover their cognitive or physical condition (Siegel 2005). Thus, they must optimize their activity range to meet their resource requirements, while dealing with natural daily cycles and saving time for sleep/rest (Downes 2001, Siegel 2005, Cozzi et al. 2012). The resource requirements of mammals are related to basal metabolic rate, which scales positively with body mass (Kleiber 1932, Isaac and Carbone 2010), while predation risk decreases with body mass (Sinclair et al. 2003, Hopcraft et al. 2009). Because high predation risk constrains activity while high resource needs increases activity range (Cozzi et al. 2012, Suselbeek et al. 2014), the question arises whether and how activity range also scales with body mass. Day range (total distance travelled in a day) and home range (area in which animals perform their daily activities) scales positively with body mass and are key metrics to understand the resource requirements of an animal (McNab 1963, Kelt and Van Vuren 2001, Carbone et al. 2005, Tamburello et al. 2015). As activity range is related to space‐use metrics (i.e. home range and day range), it is hence, also related to the acquisition of energy. Given that, one might expect activity range to increase with body mass. However, we have a poor understanding of how this relationship actually looks. Previous work developed predictions of body mass scaling with day range (Garland 1983, Carbone et al. 2005) and travel speed (Carbone et al. 2007, Rowcliffe et al. 2016). From a simple physical viewpoint, activity range should equal the day range divided by average travel speed. It should thus be possible to infer the scaling of activity range with body mass from these relationships. Some of the variation in space use across species that is not explained by body mass is associated with different evolutionary histories and ecological traits (McNab 1963, Kelt and Van Vuren 2001, Price and Hopkins 2015, Tamburello et al. 2015). Diet is the most conspicuous of these, because primary and secondary productivity present different overall yields and accessibility for consumers (Jetz et al. 2004), which in turn influence individual movements (Carbone et al. 2005) and potentially activity range, when exploiting resources at different trophic levels. The nature of the diet aggravates the higher energetic demands of larger carnivores. Predators have considerable energetic constraints related to hunting and handling their prey (Gorman et al. 1998, Carbone et al. 1999) as animal prey can be rare, widely dispersed, unpredictable in time and space and not storable (Jetz et al. 2004, Carbone et al. 2007). Therefore, carnivores have the lowest energy supply rates (supply rate of usable resources available inside the home range), independent of body mass, when compared to other diet categories (Jetz et al. 2004) besides exploring larger areas and traveling greater daily distances (McNab 1963, Kelt and Van Vuren 2001, Carbone et al. 2005, Tamburello et al. 2015). Therefore, larger animals occupy larger areas than small ones, and carnivores occupy larger areas than do similar‐sized non‐carnivores (Jetz et al. 2004, Tamburello et al. 2015). To date, few studies have considered interspecific variation in activity range with body mass and other species traits. For example, van Schaik and Griffiths (1996) and Gómez et al. (2005) anecdotally suggested that larger mammal species are cathemeral (i.e. active day and night), which implies that they can be active during a larger proportion of the 24‐h cycle. Rowcliffe et al. (2014) found that activity range is positively correlated with body mass in tropical forest mammals in Panama. Ramesh et al. (2015) found a negative relationship between body mass and activity concentration (i.e. how concentrated in few hours is the activity of an animal during the day) in Indian mammals, also equating to a positive association between activity range and body mass. However, no study has explored variation in activity range across a diverse range of species, while controlling for phylogeny and diet. This has been, at least in part, due to a lack of consistent data available on a wide range of species. Recent work using camera traps (Oliveira‐Santos et al. 2013, Rowcliffe et al. 2014), however, has demonstrated that accurate estimates of activity range can be obtained from photographic records from camera traps. Given the large and rapidly increasing volume of camera‐trapping data available globally (Burton et al. 2015), these approaches, consistently applied across a wide range of studies, can provide an important basis for the large‐scale study of activity. Here, we provided simple empirical predictions for the scaling of activity range with body mass for mammals of different trophic guilds. To test these predictions, we estimated the activity range for 249 populations of 128 terrestrial mammal species across 19 tropical forests, and used a phylogenetically controlled mixed model to determine how activity range scales with body mass by diet. As larger animals occupy larger areas than small ones, and carnivores occupy larger areas than do similar‐sized non‐carnivores (Jetz et al. 2004), we hypothesize that carnivores will present a higher scaling of activity range with body mass and also higher activity ranges for a given mass (higher intercept) when compared to herbivores, omnivores and insectivores

Reaction rates and transport in neutron stars

Understanding signals from neutron stars requires knowledge about the transport inside the star. We review the transport properties and the underlying reaction rates of dense hadronic and quark matter in the crust and the core of neutron stars and point out open problems and future directions.Comment: 74 pages; commissioned for the book "Physics and Astrophysics of Neutron Stars", NewCompStar COST Action MP1304; version 3: minor changes, references updated, overview graphic added in the introduction, improvements in Sec IV.A.

Quantum Gravity in 2+1 Dimensions: The Case of a Closed Universe

In three spacetime dimensions, general relativity drastically simplifies, becoming a ``topological'' theory with no propagating local degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, many of the difficult conceptual problems of quantizing gravity are still present. In this review, I summarize the rather large body of work that has gone towards quantizing (2+1)-dimensional vacuum gravity in the setting of a spatially closed universe.Comment: 61 pages, draft of review for Living Reviews; comments, criticisms, additions, missing references welcome; v2: minor changes, added reference

An Interferon-Driven Oxysterol-Based Defense against Tumor-Derived Extracellular Vesicles

Tumor-derived extracellular vesicles (TEV) “educate” healthy cells to promote metastases. We found that melanoma TEV downregulated type I interferon (IFN) receptor and expression of IFN-inducible cholesterol 25-hydroxylase (CH25H). CH25H produces 25-hydroxycholesterol, which inhibited TEV uptake. Low CH25H levels in leukocytes from melanoma patients correlated with poor prognosis. Mice incapable of downregulating the IFN receptor and Ch25h were resistant to TEV uptake, TEV-induced pre-metastatic niche, and melanoma lung metastases; however, ablation of Ch25h reversed these phenotypes. An anti-hypertensive drug, reserpine, suppressed TEV uptake and disrupted TEV-induced formation of the pre-metastatic niche and melanoma lung metastases. These results suggest the importance of CH25H in defense against education of normal cells by TEV and argue for the use of reserpine in adjuvant melanoma therapy

Ultrafast Light and Electrons: Imaging the Invisible

In this chapter, the evolutionary and revolutionary developments of microscopic imaging are overviewed with focus on ultrashort light and electrons pulses; for simplicity, we shall use the term “ultrafast” for both. From Alhazen’s camera obscura, to Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek’s optical micrography, and on to three- and four-dimensional (4D) electron microscopy, the developments over a millennium have transformed humans’ scope of visualization. The changes in the length and time scales involved are unimaginable, beginning with the visible shadows of candles at the centimeter and second scales, and ending with invisible atoms with space and time dimensions of sub-nanometer and femtosecond, respectively. With these advances it has become possible to determine the structures of matter and to observe their elementary dynamics as they fold and unfold in real time, providing the means for visualizing materials behavior and biological function, with the aim of understanding emergent phenomena in complex systems. Both light and light-generated electrons are now at the forefront of femtosecond and attosecond science and technology, and the scope of applications has reached beyond the nuclear motion as electron dynamics become accessible