Pumping the Brakes on Robot Cars: Current Urban Traveler Willingness to Consider Driverless Vehicles

A growing literature suggests that widespread travel conducted through driverless connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) accessed as a service, in contrast to those personally owned, could have significant impacts on the sustainability of urban transportation. However, it is unclear how the general public currently considers willingness to travel in driverless vehicles, and if they would be more comfortable doing so in one personally owned or one accessed as a service. To address this, we collected travel survey data by intercepting respondents on discretionary or social trips to four popular destinations in a medium-size U.S. city in the spring of 2017. After collecting data on how the respondent reached the survey site and the trip’s origin and destination, survey administrators then asked if respondents would have been willing to make their current trip in either a personally-owned driverless vehicle or through a driverless vehicle service. Over one-third expressed willingness to use both forms, while 31% were unwilling to use either. For those that considered only one, slightly more favored the personally-owned model. Consideration of an existing mobility service was consistently a positive and significant predictor of those that expressed willingness to travel in a driverless vehicle, while traveling downtown negatively and significantly influenced consideration of at least one form of driverless vehicle. These findings highlight the diverse public views about the prospect of integration of CAVs in transportation systems and raise questions about the assumption that travelers to central city locations would be early adopters of automated vehicle mobility services.The research reported here was supported in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), SPEED Program Grant No. 83594901the University of Michigan Energy Institute (UMEI) and University of Michigan Dow Sustainability Fellows progra

The Genetics of Phenotypic Plasticity in Plant Defense: Trichome Production in Mimulus guttatus

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/651300#fn1.Insect herbivory is a major driving force of plant evolution. Phenotypic plasticity and developmental variation provide a means for plants to cope with variable herbivory. We characterized the genetics of developmental variation and phenotypic plasticity in trichome density, a putative defensive trait of Mimulus guttatus (yellow monkeyflower). Our results are evaluated in relation to the optimal defense theory, which provides testable predictions for plastic and developmental patterns in defense traits. We found that both developmental stage and simulated insect damage affected trichome production, but in different ways. Plants were more likely to produce at least some trichomes on later leaves than on earlier leaves, regardless of damage. Damage did not affect the average probability of producing trichomes, but it did increase the density of hairs on trichome‐positive plants. We mapped trichome quantitative trait loci (QTL) by selectively genotyping a large panel of recombinant inbred lines derived from two highly divergent populations. Several highly pleiotropic QTL influenced multiple aspects of the trichome phenotype (constitutive, developmental, and/or plastic responses). Only one of the QTL influenced trichome induction following damage. In a result that is consistent with a central prediction of optimal defense theory, the high allele at this location was from the ancestral population with low constitutive trichome production

Measuring Population Transmission Potential for HIV: An Alternative Metric of Transmission Risk in Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) in the US

Background Various metrics for HIV burden and treatment success [e.g. HIV prevalence, community viral load (CVL), population viral load (PVL), percent of HIV-positive persons with undetectable viral load] have important public health limitations for understanding disparities. Methods and Findings Using data from an ongoing HIV incidence cohort of black and white men who have sex with men (MSM), we propose a new metric to measure the prevalence of those at risk of transmitting HIV and illustrate its value. …See full text for complete abstract

The Influence of the Patient-Clinician Relationship on Healthcare Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Objective: To determine whether the patient-clinician relationship has a beneficial effect on either objective or validated subjective healthcare outcomes. Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data Sources Electronic databases EMBASE and MEDLINE and the reference sections of previous reviews. Eligibility Criteria for Selecting Studies Included studies were randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in adult patients in which the patient-clinician relationship was systematically manipulated and healthcare outcomes were either objective (e.g., blood pressure) or validated subjective measures (e.g., pain scores). Studies were excluded if the encounter was a routine physical, or a mental health or substance abuse visit; if the outcome was an intermediate outcome such as patient satisfaction or adherence to treatment; if the patient-clinician relationship was manipulated solely by intervening with patients; or if the duration of the clinical encounter was unequal across conditions. Results: Thirteen RCTs met eligibility criteria. Observed effect sizes for the individual studies ranged from d = −.23 to .66. Using a random-effects model, the estimate of the overall effect size was small (d = .11), but statistically significant (p = .02). Conclusions: This systematic review and meta-analysis of RCTs suggests that the patient-clinician relationship has a small, but statistically significant effect on healthcare outcomes. Given that relatively few RCTs met our eligibility criteria, and that the majority of these trials were not specifically designed to test the effect of the patient-clinician relationship on healthcare outcomes, we conclude with a call for more research on this important topic

A single H/ACA small nucleolar RNA mediates tumor suppression downstream of oncogenic RAS.

Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are a diverse group of non-coding RNAs that direct chemical modifications at specific residues on other RNA molecules, primarily on ribosomal RNA (rRNA). SnoRNAs are altered in several cancers; however, their role in cell homeostasis as well as in cellular transformation remains poorly explored. Here, we show that specific subsets of snoRNAs are differentially regulated during the earliest cellular response to oncogenic RASG12V expression. We describe a novel function for one H/ACA snoRNA, SNORA24, which guides two pseudouridine modifications within the small ribosomal subunit, in RAS-induced senescence in vivo. We find that in mouse models, loss of Snora24 cooperates with RASG12V to promote the development of liver cancer that closely resembles human steatohepatitic hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). From a clinical perspective, we further show that human HCCs with low SNORA24 expression display increased lipid content and are associated with poor patient survival. We next asked whether ribosomes lacking SNORA24-guided pseudouridine modifications on 18S rRNA have alterations in their biophysical properties. Single-molecule Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) analyses revealed that these ribosomes exhibit perturbations in aminoacyl-transfer RNA (aa-tRNA) selection and altered pre-translocation ribosome complex dynamics. Furthermore, we find that HCC cells lacking SNORA24-guided pseudouridine modifications have increased translational miscoding and stop codon readthrough frequencies. These findings highlight a role for specific snoRNAs in safeguarding against oncogenic insult and demonstrate a functional link between H/ACA snoRNAs regulated by RAS and the biophysical properties of ribosomes in cancer