4,430 research outputs found
On Holiday! Policy and provision for disabled children and their families
This summary describes some findings from the On Holiday! study, carried out by the Thomas Coram Research Unit between 2004 and 2006 and funded by DfES. The study investigated the experiences of disabled children and their families outside school time and especially during the school holidays. The study took an approach informed by a social model of disability, one which emphasises the social construction of disability, rather than impairment
Animal movements in the Kenya Rift and evidence for the earliest ambush hunting by hominins
Animal movements in the Kenya Rift Valley today are influenced by a combination of topography and trace nutrient distribution. These patterns would have been the same in the past when hominins inhabited the area. We use this approach to create a landscape reconstruction of Olorgesailie, a key site in the East African Rift with abundant evidence of large-mammal butchery between ~1.2 and ~0.5 Ma BP. The site location in relation to limited animal routes through the area show that hominins were aware of animal movements and used the location for ambush hunting during the Lower to Middle Pleistocene. These features explain the importance of Olorgesailie as a preferred location of repeated hominin activity through multiple changes in climate and local environmental conditions, and provide insights into the cognitive and hunting abilities of Homo erectus while indicating that their activities at the site were aimed at hunting, rather than scavenging
Why is timing of bird migration advancing when individuals are not?
Recent advances in spring arrival dates have been reported in many migratory species but the mechanism driving these advances is unknown. As population declines are most widely reported in species that are not advancing migration, there is an urgent need to identify the mechanisms facilitating and constraining these advances. Individual plasticity in timing of migration in response to changing climatic conditions is commonly proposed to drive these advances but plasticity in individual migratory timings is rarely observed. For a shorebird population that has significantly advanced migration in recent decades, we show that individual arrival dates are highly consistent between years, but that the arrival dates of new recruits to the population are significantly earlier now than in previous years. Several mechanisms could drive advances in recruit arrival, none of which require individual plasticity or rapid evolution of migration timings. In particular, advances in nest-laying dates could result in advanced recruit arrival, if benefits of early hatching facilitate early subsequent spring migration. This mechanism could also explain why arrival dates of short-distance migrants, which generally return to breeding sites earlier and have greater scope for advance laying, are advancing more rapidly than long-distance migrants
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Quantifying the value of ecosystem services: a case study of honeybee pollination in the UK
There is concern that insect pollinators, such as honey bees, are currently declining in abundance, and are under serious threat from environmental changes such as habitat loss and climate change; the use of pesticides in intensive agriculture, and emerging diseases. This paper aims to evaluate how much public support there would be in preventing further decline to maintain the current number of bee colonies in the UK. The contingent valuation method (CVM) was used to obtain the willingness to pay (WTP) for a theoretical pollinator protection policy. Respondents were asked whether they would be WTP to support such a policy and how much would they pay? Results show that the mean WTP to support the bee protection policy was £1.37/week/household. Based on there being 24.9 million households in the UK, this is equivalent to £1.77 billion per year. This total value can show the importance of maintaining the overall pollination service to policy makers. We compare this total with estimates obtained using a simple market valuation of pollination for the UK
Three-Tone Coherent Microwave Electromechanical Measurement of a Superfluid Helmholtz Resonator
We demonstrate electromechanical coupling between a superfluid mechanical
mode and a microwave mode formed by a patterned microfluidic chip and a 3D
cavity. The electric field of the chip-cavity microwave resonator can be used
to both drive and detect the motion of a pure superflow Helmholtz mode, which
is dictated by geometric confinement. The coupling is characterized using a
coherent measurement technique developed for measuring weak couplings deep in
the sideband unresolved regime. The technique is based on two-probe
optomechanically induced transparency/amplification using amplitude modulation.
Instead of measuring two probe tones separately, they are interfered to retain
only a signal coherent with the mechanical motion. With this method, we measure
a vacuum electromechanical coupling strength of
Hz, three orders of magnitude larger than previous superfluid
electromechanical experiments.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Appl. Phys. Lett., out for peer
review, revte
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