114 research outputs found

    Nursing students? knowledge and attitudes regarding medical marijuana: A descriptive cross-sectional study

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    Marijuana use for medical purposes dates back to ancient times. Despite its high therapeutic potential, its adverse effects have raised important legal restrictions. However, this situation in Spain may soon undergo significant changes, without anyone so far having studied the knowledge and/or the level of acceptance of medical marijuana by future healthcare professionals. The aim of the present study was to determine nursing students' knowledge of and attitudes towards medical marijuana. A cross-sectional design was used. A total of 578 nursing students from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), >/=18 years old and of both sexes, were invited to complete the Spanish version of the questionnaire "Medical Marijuana" between January and May 2019. A total of 364 students decided to participate in the study. More than 75% of the students agreed with the legalization of medical marijuana, although their knowledge and confidence levels regarding efficacy, safety and drug interactions of medical marijuana were low. Nursing students showed a clear lack of knowledge about medical marijuana and thus, in light of possible regulatory changes, it would be necessary to strengthen the training of nurses with respect to medical marijuana in order to make responsible use of it

    Global mismatches in aboveground and belowground biodiversity

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    Human activities are accelerating global biodiversity change and have resulted in severely threatened ecosystem services. A large proportion of terrestrial biodiversity is harbored by soil, but soil biodiversity has been omitted from many global biodiversity assessments and conservation actions, and understanding of global patterns of soil biodiversity remains limited. In particular, the extent to which hotspots and coldspots of aboveground and soil biodiversity overlap is not clear. We examined global patterns of these overlaps by mapping indices of aboveground (mammals, birds, amphibians, vascular plants) and soil (bacteria, fungi, macrofauna) biodiversity that we created using previously published data on species richness. Areas of mismatch between aboveground and soil biodiversity covered 27% of Earth's terrestrial surface. The temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome had the highest proportion of grid cells with high aboveground biodiversity but low soil biodiversity, whereas the boreal and tundra biomes had intermediate soil biodiversity but low aboveground biodiversity. While more data on soil biodiversity are needed, both to cover geographic gaps and to include additional taxa, our results suggest that protecting aboveground biodiversity may not sufficiently reduce threats to soil biodiversity. Given the functional importance of soil biodiversity and the role of soils in human well-being, soil biodiversity should be considered further in policy agendas and conservation actions by adapting management practices to sustain soil biodiversity and considering soil biodiversity when designing protected areas.Peer reviewe

    Ancient fires enhance Amazon forest drought resistance

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    This is the final version. Available on open access from Frontiers Media via the DOI in this recordData availability statement: The datasets presented in this article are not readily available but the raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be available under reasonable request to the authors. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to TF, [email protected] and fire reduce productivity and increase tree mortality in tropical forests. Fires also produce pyrogenic carbon (PyC), which persists in situ for centuries to millennia, and represents a legacy of past fires, potentially improving soil fertility and water holding capacity and selecting for the survival and recruitment of certain tree life-history (or successional) strategies. We investigated whether PyC is correlated with physicochemical soil properties, wood density, aboveground carbon (AGC) dynamics and forest resistance to severe drought. To achieve our aim, we used an Amazon-wide, long-term plot network, in forests without known recent fires, integrating site-specific measures of forest dynamics, soil properties and a unique soil PyC concentration database. We found that forests with higher concentrations of soil PyC had both higher soil fertility and lower wood density. Soil PyC was not associated with AGC dynamics in non-drought years. However, during extreme drought events (10% driest years), forests with higher concentrations of soil PyC experienced lower reductions in AGC gains (woody growth and recruitment), with this drought-immunizing effect increasing with drought severity. Forests with a legacy of ancient fires are therefore more likely to continue to grow and recruit under increased drought severity. Forests with high soil PyC concentrations (third quartile) had 3.8% greater AGC gains under mean drought, but 33.7% greater under the most extreme drought than forests with low soil PyC concentrations (first quartile), offsetting losses of up to 0.68 Mg C ha–1yr–1 of AGC under extreme drought events. This suggests that ancient fires have legacy effects on current forest dynamics, by altering soil fertility and favoring tree species capable of continued growth and recruitment during droughts. Therefore, mature forest that experienced fires centuries or millennia ago may have greater resistance to current short-term droughts.Coordination of Improvement of Personnel in Higher Education, Brazil (CAPES)Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)FAPESPRoyal SocietyNational Council for Science and Technology Development of Brazil (CNPq

    A Search for Photons with Energies Above 2X10(17) eV Using Hybrid Data from the Low-Energy Extensions of the Pierre Auger Observatory

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    Ultra-high-energy photons with energies exceeding 10(17) eV offer a wealth of connections to different aspects of cosmic-ray astrophysics as well as to gamma-ray and neutrino astronomy. The recent observations of photons with energies in the 10(15) eV range further motivate searches for even higher-energy photons. In this paper, we present a search for photons with energies exceeding 2 x 10(17) eV using about 5.5 yr of hybrid data from the low-energy extensions of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The upper limits on the integral photon flux derived here are the most stringent ones to date in the energy region between 10(17) and 10(18) eV

    Measurement of single top-quark production in association with a W boson in the single-lepton channel at \sqrt{s} = 8\,\text {TeV} with the ATLAS detector

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    The production cross-section of a top quark in association with a W boson is measured using proton–proton collisions at \sqrt{s} = 8\,\text {TeV}. The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.2\,\text {fb}^{-1}, and was collected in 2012 by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The analysis is performed in the single-lepton channel. Events are selected by requiring one isolated lepton (electron or muon) and at least three jets. A neural network is trained to separate the tW signal from the dominant t{\bar{t}} background. The cross-section is extracted from a binned profile maximum-likelihood fit to a two-dimensional discriminant built from the neural-network output and the invariant mass of the hadronically decaying W boson. The measured cross-section is \sigma _{tW} = 26 \pm 7\,\text {pb}, in good agreement with the Standard Model expectation

    Dijet Resonance Search with Weak Supervision Using root S=13 TeV pp Collisions in the ATLAS Detector

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    This Letter describes a search for narrowly resonant new physics using a machine-learning anomaly detection procedure that does not rely on signal simulations for developing the analysis selection. Weakly supervised learning is used to train classifiers directly on data to enhance potential signals. The targeted topology is dijet events and the features used for machine learning are the masses of the two jets. The resulting analysis is essentially a three-dimensional search A → BC, for mA ∼ OðTeVÞ, mB; mC ∼ Oð100 GeVÞ and B, C are reconstructed as large-radius jets, without paying a penalty associated with a large trials factor in the scan of the masses of the two jets. The full run 2 ffiffi s p ¼ 13 TeV pp collision dataset of 139 fb−1 recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is used for the search. There is no significant evidence of a localized excess in the dijet invariant mass spectrum between 1.8 and 8.2 TeV. Cross-section limits for narrow-width A, B, and C particles vary with mA, mB, and mC. For example, when mA ¼ 3 TeV and mB ≳ 200 GeV, a production cross section between 1 and 5 fb is excluded at 95% confidence level, depending on mC. For certain masses, these limits are up to 10 times more sensitive than those obtained by the inclusive dijet search. These results are complementary to the dedicated searches for the case that B and C are standard model boson
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