'Leaves and Eats Shoots': Direct Terrestrial Feeding Can Supplement Invasive Red Swamp Crayfish in Times of Need

PMCID: PMC3411828This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Justifying violence: legitimacy, ideology and public support for police use of force

Under what conditions do people support police use of force? In this paper we assess some of the empirical links between police legitimacy, political ideology (right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation), and support for ‘reasonable’ use of force (e.g. an officer striking a citizen in self-defence) and ‘excessive’ use of force (e.g. an officer using violence to arrest an unarmed person who is not offering violent resistance). Analyzing data from an online survey with US participants (n=186) we find that legitimacy is a positive predictor of reasonable but not excessive police use of force, and that political ideology predicts support for excessive but not reasonable use of force. We conclude with the idea that legitimacy places normative constraints around police power. On the one hand, legitimacy is associated with increased support for the use of force, but only when violence is bounded within certain acceptable limits. On the other hand, excessive use of force seems to require an extra-legal justification that is – at least in our analysis – partly ideological. Our findings open up a new direction of research in what is currently a rather sparse psychological literature on the ability of legitimacy to ‘tame’ coercive power

Authority and punishment: on the ideological basis of punitive attitudes towards criminals

Why do people support tough sentencing of criminal offenders? Three explanations dominate the literature. The first is an instrumental perspective: people are concerned about becoming a victim of crime and they look to punishment to reduce future harm. The second is a relational perspective: people are concerned about community breakdown, and they support punishment to restore moral boundaries. The third is a psychological model based on ideological preferences: people desire conformity and authority in society, and they look to institutions to punish transgressions that threaten collective security. Building on the work of Tyler & Boeckmann (1997), two studies of London citizens (n1=13,929, n2=283) suggest a way of integrating these three perspectives. We show that right-wing authoritarianism predicts both the extent to which people worry about social threats and the extent to which they support harsh punitive measures. Bridging research from political psychology and criminology, we conclude with the idea that popular punitive sentiment is grounded in an uncritical submission to authorities, an adherence to conservative moral values, and consonant concerns about collective security and cohesion

Peripartum cardiomyopathy: diagnosis and management

No abstract available

Additively manufacturable micro-mechanical logic gates.

Early examples of computers were almost exclusively based on mechanical devices. Although electronic computers became dominant in the past 60 years, recent advancements in three-dimensional micro-additive manufacturing technology provide new fabrication techniques for complex microstructures which have rekindled research interest in mechanical computations. Here we propose a new digital mechanical computation approach based on additively-manufacturable micro-mechanical logic gates. The proposed mechanical logic gates (i.e., NOT, AND, OR, NAND, and NOR gates) utilize multi-stable micro-flexures that buckle to perform Boolean computations based purely on mechanical forces and displacements with no electronic components. A key benefit of the proposed approach is that such systems can be additively fabricated as embedded parts of microarchitected metamaterials that are capable of interacting mechanically with their surrounding environment while processing and storing digital data internally without requiring electric power

Identification of Gene Signature Associated with Elevated Bone Formation Rate in Aging Mice

Osteoporosis is a disease of low bone mass resulting from bone resorption exceeding bone formation that places individuals at enhanced risk for fracture, disability, and death. There is an urgent and unmet need for novel targets in treating osteoporosis, requiring a better understanding of the endogenous mechanisms regulating bone formation. Recent work indicates that deletion of the Bmpr2 gene in skeletal progenitor cells of mice using Prx1-Cre leads to substantially elevated bone mass in young adulthood due to increased bone formation rate. Additionally, unpublished work suggests that the age-related decline in bone mass of female Bmpr2 mutant mice is reduced approximately two-fold compared to control mice and quantification of serum bone turnover markers reveals this is associated with a sustained increase in bone formation to at least 35 weeks of age (but not 55 weeks of age) with no alteration in bone resorption. Collectively, these data raise the possibility that Bmpr2 mutant mice may serve as a novel model for elucidating mechanisms that regulate osteoblast activity in aging mice. We sought to identify the gene signature associated with elevated osteoblast activity using genome-wide transcriptome profiling of marrow-free humerii from control and Bmpr2 mutant mice. Applying stringent criteria comparing individual transcripts to eight well-accepted housekeeping genes (Ppib, Gapdh, Hprt, Tbp, Ppia, GusB, Prkg1, and Ywhaz), and contrasting the results at 35 weeks of age to the transcriptome profile at 55 weeks of age, we constructed a Venn diagram sorting the genes into 15 distinct zones. Bioinformatic analyses on this refined gene set indicates that elevated bone formation rate in Bmpr2 mutant mice correlates with enrichment for genes containing binding sites for transcription factors associated with skeletal homeostasis. Further, several genes corresponding with osteoblast differentiation and activity are up-regulated in Bmpr2 mutant mice at 35 weeks of age