Climate change and freshwater zooplankton: what does it boil down to?

Recently, major advances in the climate–zooplankton interface have been made some of which appeared to receive much attention in a broader audience of ecologists as well. In contrast to the marine realm, however, we still lack a more holistic summary of recent knowledge in freshwater. We discuss climate change-related variation in physical and biological attributes of lakes and running waters, high-order ecological functions, and subsequent alteration in zooplankton abundance, phenology, distribution, body size, community structure, life history parameters, and behavior by focusing on community level responses. The adequacy of large-scale climatic indices in ecology has received considerable support and provided a framework for the interpretation of community and species level responses in freshwater zooplankton. Modeling perspectives deserve particular consideration, since this promising stream of ecology is of particular applicability in climate change research owing to the inherently predictive nature of this field. In the future, ecologists should expand their research on species beyond daphnids, should address questions as to how different intrinsic and extrinsic drivers interact, should move beyond correlative approaches toward more mechanistic explanations, and last but not least, should facilitate transfer of biological data both across space and time

Optimized Optical Rectification and Electro-optic Sampling in ZnTe Crystals with Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses

Erschens DN, Turchinovich D, Jepsen PU. Optimized Optical Rectification and Electro-optic Sampling in ZnTe Crystals with Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses. Journal of Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz Waves. 2011;32(12):1371–1381

Selenium Level and Dyslipidemia in Rural Elderly Chinese.

ObjectiveHigher selenium level has been hypothesized to have the potential to reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases including dyslipidemia. However, results from previous studies are inconsistent. This study aims to determine the association between selenium level and dyslipidemia in elderly Chinese with relatively low selenium status.MethodsA cross-sectional study of 1859 participants aged 65 or older from four rural counties in China was conducted. Serum total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), high density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDLC) and low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDLC), nail selenium concentration and APOE genotype were measured in all subjects. The four types of dyslipidemia were defined as >5.17 mmol/L for High-TC, >1.69 mmol/L for High-TG, >3.36 mmol/L for High-LDLC, and ResultsMean nail selenium concentration was 0.465 μg/gin this sample. Rates for High-TC, High-LDLC, High-TG, Low-HDLC were 18.13%, 13.23%, 12.21% and 32.76% respectively. Results from logistic models indicated that higher selenium levels were significantly associated with higher risk of High-TC, High-LDLC and lower risk of Low-HDLC adjusting for covariates (p ConclusionsOur results suggest long-term selenium exposure level may be associated with the risk of dyslipidemia in elderly population. Future studies are needed to examine the underlying mechanism of the association