Flood realities, perceptions, and the depth of divisions on climate

Research has led to broad agreement among scientists that anthropogenic climate change is happening now and likely to worsen. In contrast to scientific agreement, US public views remain deeply divided, largely along ideological lines. Science communication has been neutralised in some arenas by intense counter-messaging, but as adverse climate impacts become manifest they might intervene more persuasively in local perceptions. We look for evidence of this occurring with regard to realities and perceptions of flooding in the northeastern US state of New Hampshire. Although precipitation and flood damage have increased, with ample news coverage, most residents do not see a trend. Nor do perceptions about past and future local flooding correlate with regional impacts or vulnerability. Instead, such perceptions follow ideological patterns resembling those of global climate change. That information about the physical world can be substantially filtered by ideology is a common finding from sociological environment/society research

Degree of adaptability of the somatosensory cortex to change: Prospects for integration of bone-mounted dental prostheses

1. The topographic representation of the body surface in the somatosensory cortex provides an important model system for the in vivo study of neuronal plasticity, induced changes in somatotopy providing a direct measure of plasticity not available in most parts of the central nervous system. 2. Over the past two decades, animal experimentation in a number of laboratories has shown a remarkable degree of adaptability of the cortical representation following peripheral lesions and has had a widespread influence by challenging the once-accepted dogma that the brain is a structurally fixed organ. 3. Although some aspects of original stimulation will be missing, it is likely that receptors stimulated through bone conduction and compression by bone-mounted dental prostheses preserve some of the geometric and temporal relationships of original stimulation. By analogy with data obtained from the forearm representations, it would be expected that many features of the original cortical representations will be recreated. 4. There are also examples in the literature of perceptual learning without gross changes to the cortical representation (some being within a class of adaptability known as gain control) and it is likely that perceptual integration of many dental prostheses occurs within the limits of these neural adaptation mechanisms

How to predict environmental attitude by neighborhood sense of community

The environmental attitude is interested with the relationship between human and its environment, as a subject of environmental psychology. Environmental problems that come up with the industrial revolution have led to increasing awareness and consciousness on the environment since from 1970s in the scope of sustainability. It is expected from the persons who have conscious on environmental issues raise awareness and conscious at the community level as well. Normally, it is expected from the community members that have strong environmental awareness and conscious to be alive and have strong social relations. Neighborhood scale should be considered as the core place to build community and ensure social sustainability. This study aims to reveal the experimental relationship between environmental attitude and sense of community and determine how various socio-demographic objective variables explain subjective environmental attitude variable. Oral interviews applied to the inhabitants of Kultur Neighborhood from Duzce City as our study area. Linear regression model was conducted to test the experimental relationship between the concepts of sense of community and environmental attitude, and one-way ANOVA and t-tests were operated to learn relationships between environmental attitude and socio-demographic variables. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.2-s2.0-8510114134