High resolution characterisation of microstructural evolution in Rbx_{x}Fe2−y_{2-y}Se2_{2} crystals on annealing

The superconducting and magnetic properties of phase-separated A$_x$Fe$_{2-y}$Se$_2$ compounds are known to depend on post-growth heat treatments and cooling profiles. This paper focusses on the evolution of microstructure on annealing, and how this influences the superconducting properties of Rb$_x$Fe$_2-y$Se$_2$ crystals. We find that the minority phase in the as-grown crystal has increased unit cell anisotropy (c/a ratio), reduced Rb content and increased Fe content compared to the matrix. The microstructure is rather complex, with two-phase mesoscopic plate-shaped features aligned along {113} habit planes. The minority phase are strongly facetted on the {113} planes, which we have shown to be driven by minimising the volume strain energy introduced as a result of the phase transformation. Annealing at 488K results in coarsening of the mesoscopic plate-shaped features and the formation of a third distinct phase. The subtle differences in structure and chemistry of the minority phase(s) in the crystals are thought to be responsible for changes in the superconducting transition temperature. In addition, scanning photoemission microscopy has clearly shown that the electronic structure of the minority phase has a higher occupied density of states of the low binding energy Fe3d orbitals, characteristic of crystals that exhibit superconductivity. This demonstrates a clear correlation between the Fe-vacancy-free phase with high c/a ratio and the electronic structure characteristics of the superconducting phase.Comment: 6 figures v2 is exactly the same as v1. The typesetting errors in the abstract have been correcte

Overcoming of Information Extremism as a Condition of Human and Social Wellbeing

The urgency of this research is indisputable because the subjects of information extremism having at their disposal various mass media can disseminate their beliefs and ideas over thousands of people in different countries all over the world. International collaboration is needed to struggle against this evil. The paper provides deep insight into the notion "information extremism", as well as its classification and forms. It is aimed at revealing the specific character of the notions "information extremism" and "information terrorism" and their investigation. Illocutionary influence as the major method of information extremism is highlighted in the paper. The authors demonstrate important influence of mass media including the Internet over readership, especially the youth. It is concluded that the issue of information extremism requires for more rigorous and deeper consideration. It is necessary to fight against forms of its manifestation, because they have a significant effect on homeland and international safety and stability

Using the economic surplus model to measure potential returns to international livestock research. The case of trypanosomosis vaccine research

This study illustrates how productivity impacts resulting from livestock research can be measured using a herd simulation model, how the results of this model can be extended spatially using geographic information systems (GIS) to determine the potential increase in livestock production that would result from adoption of a new technology, and how an economic surplus model can be used to value the estimated productivity impacts. The particular problem examined is trypanosomosis in cattle in Africa, and the potential research product is a multi-component vaccine. The results suggest that the potential benefits of trypanosomiasis control, in terms of meat and milk productivity alone are worth over US$ 700 million per year in Africa. The methodology developed in this study can be used to measure the benefits of alleviating constraints to livestock production and the potential returns to research and development approaches addressing those constraints. The results of this study will assist in research priority setting and have highlighted the need for further research aimed at better understanding who the beneficiaries of the vaccine will be, and how it will reach them

Locating poor livestock keepers at the global level for research and development targeting

P.K. Thornton, R.L. Kruska, P.M. Kristjanson, R.S. Reid and T.P. Robinson are ILRI authorsMany research and development agencies are committed to halving the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015. Knowledge of where the poor are, and what characterises them, is patchy at best. Here we describe a global livestock and poverty mapping study designed to assist in targeting research and development activities concerning livestock. Estimates of the numbers of poor livestock keepers by production system and region are presented. While these estimates suffer from various problems, improvements in global databases are critical to improve the targeting of interventions that can meet the challenges posed by poverty and to chart progress against international development indicators

Genetically improved dual-purpose cowpea. Assessment of adoption and impact in the dry savannah of West Africa

The research reported here has the potential for contributing to a real improvement in the livelihoods of mixed crop-livestock farming households in the dry savannah zone of West Africa through widespread uptake of improved dual-purpose cowpea (IDPC). This technology offers opportunities for the production of more, higher-quality food for poor people and fodder for animals, along with soil-fertility improvement and other social benefits. The study examines issues surrounding the adoption and impact of the new varieties and associated management strategies. A novel approach was taken, combining GIS, a crop model, and household, community and participatory research approaches in northern Nigeria in order to address the following questions: `What types of impact are expected and their magnitude, where is the impact most likely to be felt, and by whom?'. The results suggest that the research investment has been beneficial, and the expected returns are high. Furthermore, the steps taken in order to quantify the benefits versus the costs of this research have identified for researchers, policy makers and development practitioners important considerations and possibilities for speeding up and widening the impact of this technology. First, it is a flexible technology that is appreciated by, and will have the greatest impact on, farming households that are usually poor and living in remoter areas where improved crop and livestock production are especially critical to livelihood strategies. Although the wealthiest households are more likely to be adopters, poorer households have also taken up IDPC. As it is the poorer households that cultivate 75% of the arable land, the potential impact of extending the technology to these more rural, less market-oriented households is huge. Uptake to date has been more likely to occur near wholesale markets in the most densely populated areas. Thus, finding innovative ways to increase access to markets and provide improved seeds and information for farmers in low-population density areas may have potentially large payoffs. The benefit from investment in rural market infrastructure and roads will be reflected in increased uptake of natural-resource-enhancing technologies such as IDPC. Farmer-impact workshops were held and the results pointed towards environmental- and poverty-impact indicators that can be monitored as people experiment with, and adapt, the new varieties and associated management techniques. The study has highlighted opportunities relating to the identification of the benefits of IDPC for livestock which are likely to emerge when data from several years of ongoing integrated crop-livestock trials become available. Given the population, climatic and land-use changes that are likely to occur in West Africa in the coming decades, there is an onus on researchers to streamline the effectiveness of R&D activities so that they benefit the rapidly increasing numbers of poor people in the region. The lessons learnt from the impact assessment study reported here will have much broader applicability in the future than to cowpea research alone. It is hoped that this analysis provides a research and impact-assessment strategy that will be useful for other crops and technologies, and in particular that it provides guidelines for assessments of more integrated natural resource management strategies (including livestock) and technologies. Most importantly, the novel multidisciplinary, multicentre and participatory approaches taken by the cowpea research team are helping to close the researcher-farmer feedback loop. Ultimately this is what will lead to faster and more widespread adoption and impact of new technologies

Global Livestock Production Systems

Informed livestock sector policy development and priority setting is heavily dependent on a good understanding of livestock production systems. In a collaborative effort between the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Livestock Research Institute, stock has been taken of where we have come from in agricultural systems classification and mapping; the current state of the art; and the directions in which research and data collection efforts need to take in the future. The book also addresses issues relating to the intensity and scale of production, moving from what is done to how it is done. The intensification of production is an area of particular importance, for it is in the intensive systems that changes are occurring most rapidly and where most information is needed on the implications that intensification of production may have for livelihoods, poverty alleviation, animal diseases, public health and environmental outcomes. A series of case studies is provided, linking livestock production systems to rural livelihoods and poverty and examples of the application of livestock production system maps are drawn from livestock production, now and in the future; livestock's impact on the global environment; animal and public health; and livestock and livelihoods. This book provides a formal reference to Version 5 of the global livestock production systems map, and to revised estimates of the numbers of rural poor livestock keepers, by country and livestock production system. These maps and data are freely available for download via FAO's web pages: www.fao.org/AG/againfo/resources/en/glw/home.html. It is hoped that this publication will stimulate further work in this field and encourage the use of livestock production systems information and maps in research and analysis

Mapping climate vulnerability and poverty in Africa

The world’s climate is continuing to change at rates that are projected to be unprecedented in recent human history. Some models are now indicating that the temperature increases to 2100 may be larger than previously estimated in 2001. The impacts of climate change are likely to be considerable in tropical regions. Developing countries are generally considered more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than more developed countries, largely attributed to a low capacity to adapt in the developing world. Of the developing countries, many in Africa are seen as being the most vulnerable to climate variability and change. High levels of vulnerability and low adaptive capacity in the developing world have been linked to factors such as a high reliance on natural resources, limited ability to adapt financially and institutionally, low per capita GDP and high poverty, and a lack of safety nets. The challenges for development are considerable, not least because the impacts are complex and highly uncertain. The overall aims of DFID’s new research programme on climate change and development in sub-Saharan Africa are to improve the ability of poor people to be more resilient to current climate variability as well as to the risks associated with longer-term climate change. The programme is designed to address the knowledge implications of interacting and multiple stresses, such as HIV/AIDS and climate change, on the vulnerability of the poor, and it will concentrate on approaches that work where government structures are weak. To help identify where to locate specific research activities and where to put in place uptake pathways for research outputs, information is required that relates projected climate change with vulnerability data. ILRI undertook some exploratory vulnerability mapping for the continent in late 2005 and early 2006, building on some livestock poverty mapping work carried out in 2002. The work described here is a small piece of a larger activity that involved the commissioning of several studies on climate change and the identification of the critical researchable issues related to development. A project inception meeting was held with research collaborators, to discuss analytical approaches and assess data availability. Over the succeeding few months, data were assembled and analysis undertaken. This involved the downscaling of outputs from several coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (GCMs) for four different scenarios of the future, and possible changes in lengths of the growing period were estimated for Africa to 2050 for several different combinations of GCM and scenario (we used the SRES scenarios of the IPCC). Results are presented on the basis of agricultural system types by country, using a systems classification as a proxy for the livelihood options available to natural resource users. From this, we identified areas that appear to be particularly prone to climate change impacts. These include arid-semiarid rangeland and the drier mixed systems across broad swathes of the continent, particularly in southern Africa and the Sahel, and coastal systems in eastern Africa. The next stage was to consider the biophysical and social vulnerability of these and other areas. To characterise sub-Saharan Africa in terms of vulnerability, on the same country-by-system basis as was done for the climate change impacts, a set of proxy indicators developed at the workshop was pragmatically assessed in relation to data sources, while being guided by the experiences of others in the area. A final set of fourteen indicators was used; three are associated with natural capital, one with physical capital, two with social capital, six with human capital, and two with financial capital. We carried out statistical analysis and reduced this set of fourteen proxy indicators to four components, which were then used to construct an “overall” indicator of vulnerability, and systemsby- countries were then classified in quartiles. These results were then qualitatively combined with the climate change hotspot analysis. The results should be treated as indicative only, and we would caution strongly against their over-interpretation, particularly because the uncertainty associated with them is not yet known. Results do indicate, however, that many vulnerable regions are likely to be adversely affected in sub-Saharan Africa. These include the mixed arid-semiarid systems in the Sahel, arid-semiarid rangeland systems in parts of eastern Africa, the systems in the Great Lakes 4 region of eastern Africa, the coastal regions of eastern Africa, and many of the drier zones of southern Africa. There are several limitations to the analysis and to the availability of data for such work. For the future, considerable emphasis needs to be placed on collaborative efforts to collect and greatly improve the store of baseline information, on understanding very well the needs of potential users, on developing more flexible and generic frameworks for assessing vulnerability, taking advantage of the experiences of others in vulnerability assessment work in developing-country contexts through southsouth collaboration, and on incorporating scenario analysis into the impact assessment framework. The project also involved a study of the potential uses of information concerning climate variability and climate change for effective decision-making. A small survey of potential users was carried out. Findings of the survey confirm the results of other scoping studies: there are broad needs across many different sectors in terms of capacity building and opportunities for research in the future, including vulnerability mapping at different levels. The report concludes with a discussion of the feasibility of expanding the methods and tools used here to develop a tool box that could be used for cross-sectoral ex-ante assessment of interventions related to climate change and coping mechanisms. There are several challenges that have to be addressed, but there are good prospects for developing a useful framework. The work has highlighted two other key points. First, even allowing for the technical problems and uncertainties associated with the analysis, it is clear that macro-level analyses, while useful, can hide enormous variability concerning what may be complex responses to climate change. There is considerable heterogeneity in households’ access to resources, poverty levels, and ability to cope. Vulnerability and impact assessment work can certainly be usefully guided by macro-level analyses, but ultimately this work has to be done at regional and national levels. Second, these results have underlined that local responses to climate change through time are not necessarily linear. In terms of adaptation strategies, far more work is needed on the dynamics of change through time and on the dynamics of household responses. If adaptation itself has to be seen as an essentially dynamic, continuous and non-linear process, this has considerable implications for the tools and methods needed to guide it, and for the indicators and threshold analyses that will be needed. The sciences of climate modelling and vulnerability assessment are developing rapidly, and over time some of the key technical issues that remain are likely to be resolved. At the same time, there are several other issues that have to be addressed. One is the necessity of communities starting to take centre stage in conducting vulnerability analysis and implementation to enhance their long-term capacities for adaptation. Another is the organisational changes that are needed to face the threat that climate change poses to development: climate change is inevitable, and it will add burdens to those who are already poor and vulnerable. A third issue is that Africa appears to have some of the greatest burdens of climate change impacts, certainly from the human health and agricultural perspectives; it is a region with generally limited ability to cope and adapt; and it has some of the lowest per capita emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. The likely impacts of climate change thus present a global ethical challenge as well as a development and scientific challenge, and this challenge has to be addressed by all of us

Mink Farms Predict Aleutian Disease Exposure in Wild American Mink

BACKGROUND: Infectious diseases can often be of conservation importance for wildlife. Spillover, when infectious disease is transmitted from a reservoir population to sympatric wildlife, is a particular threat. American mink (Neovison vison) populations across Canada appear to be declining, but factors thus far explored have not fully explained this population trend. Recent research has shown, however, that domestic mink are escaping from mink farms and hybridizing with wild mink. Domestic mink may also be spreading Aleutian disease (AD), a highly pathogenic parvovirus prevalent in mink farms, to wild mink populations. AD could reduce fitness in wild mink by reducing both the productivity of adult females and survivorship of juveniles and adults. METHODS: To assess the seroprevalence and geographic distribution of AD infection in free-ranging mink in relation to the presence of mink farms, we conducted both a large-scale serological survey, across the province of Ontario, and a smaller-scale survey, at the interface between a mink farm and wild mink. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Antibodies to AD were detected in 29% of mink (60 of 208 mink sampled); however, seroprevalence was significantly higher in areas closer to mink farms than in areas farther from farms, at both large and small spatial scales. Our results indicate that mink farms act as sources of AD transmission to the wild. As such, it is likely that wild mink across North America may be experiencing increased exposure to AD, via disease transmission from mink farms, which may be affecting wild mink demographics across their range. In light of declining mink populations, high AD seroprevalence within some mink farms, and the large number of mink farms situated across North America, improved biosecurity measures on farms are warranted to prevent continued disease transmission at the interface between mink farms and wild mink populations

Population variation in brain size of nine-spined sticklebacks (Pungitius pungitius) - local adaptation or environmentally induced variation?

Abstract Background Most evolutionary studies on the size of brains and different parts of the brain have relied on interspecific comparisons, and have uncovered correlations between brain architecture and various ecological, behavioural and life-history traits. Yet, similar intraspecific studies are rare, despite the fact that they could better determine how selection and phenotypic plasticity influence brain architecture. We investigated the variation in brain size and structure in wild-caught nine-spined sticklebacks (Pungitius pungitius) from eight populations, representing marine, lake, and pond habitats, and compared them to data from a previous common garden study from a smaller number of populations. Results Brain size scaled hypo-allometrically with body size, irrespective of population origin, with a common slope of 0.5. Both absolute and relative brain size, as well as relative telencephalon, optic tectum and cerebellum size, differed significantly among the populations. Further, absolute and relative brain sizes were larger in pond than in marine populations, while the telencephalon tended to be larger in marine than in pond populations. These findings are partly incongruent with previous common garden results. A direct comparison between wild and common garden fish from the same populations revealed a habitat-specific effect: pond fish had relatively smaller brains in a controlled environment than in the wild, while marine fish were similar. All brain parts were smaller in the laboratory than in the wild, irrespective of population origin. Conclusion Our results indicate that variation among populations is large, both in terms of brain size and in the size of separate brain parts in wild nine-spined sticklebacks. However, the incongruence between the wild and common garden patterns suggests that much of the population variation found in the wild may be attributable to environmentally induced phenotypic plasticity. Given that the brain is among the most plastic organs in general, the results emphasize the view that common garden data are required to draw firm evolutionary conclusions from patterns of brain size variability in the wild.</p