Ed Gillespie’s strong showing in Virginia’s Senate election is heartening for republicans

In the run up to this year’s midterm elections in Virginia, the contest between the incumbent Senator Mark Warner, and his Republican challenger, Ed Gillespie, was widely expected to be a relatively easy win for the incumbent. Why then, did Mark Warner win the election by less than 1 percent of votes cast? Toni Michelle-Travis looks at Virginia’s surprising result, writing that a combination of Gillespie’s attacks against Warner over his links to President Obama and Warner’s lack of strategies to account for an expected fall in turnout were key in making the election much more favorable to Gillespie than had been previously predicted

Wintertime Climate Variability in the Lake Michigan Region: Sensitivity of Snowfall to Temperature and Northern Hemisphere Teleconnection Patterns

Using available long-term stations, a wintertime climatology of temperature and snowfall since 1950 has been composited for the region near Lake Michigan. The seasonal snowfall characteristics of six sub-region composites were subsequently explored, using composites for three sub-regions to the west and east of Lake Michigan, respectively. While snowfall records can be problematic due to observer changes, data within a given sub-region mostly exhibit similar variability. Not surprisingly, locations to the east of Lake Michigan have higher average seasonal snowfall and greater snowfall variability than their upstream counterparts. The variations correlate fairly well among neighboring sub-regions, with the weakest relationship between northwest and southeast regions. There is a clear relationship between snowfall and temperature, with colder winters producing greater snowfall than milder winters. However, this sensitivity is strongest in the lake-effect prone regions to the east of the lake, with an effective de-correlation of snowfall and temperature in the northwest zone. As anticipated, El Niño winters are warmer and less snowy on average than neutral and La Niña winters. The North Atlantic Oscillation has the strongest relationship to snowfall in eastern regions, with a weaker correlation in the western zones. The Pacific North America and Pacific Decadal Oscillation indices do not have a clear relationship with snowfall or temperature in the eastern zones, but do exhibit a relationship to snowfall in the northwest zones. Principle Component Analysis was utilized to further explore the temporal variability, as well as generate a regional wintertime index. The leading PC exhibits substantial noise, super-imposed on a trend toward less cold and snowy winters. Snowfall trends were also examined for each sub-region, with a downward trend in recent decades most pronounced in the southeastern sub-region. This has been mostly driven by the tails of the snowfall season; an additional student group has been exploring the November data in detail

Open Lumbosacral Dislocation: A Case Report

Open injuries in the lumbar spine are rare. We describe a 20-year-old woman who presented with persistent weaknesses due to an associated lumbar plexus injury. She underwent surgical treatment of lumbosacral dislocation with prompt reduction with debridement and stabilization. At 7 months postoperatively, her symptoms showed signs of recovery. We believe the immediate reduction of the dislocation prevented permanent neurological injury, and stabilization helped healing and early mobilization. In keeping with the classical teaching of open fracture treatment, prioritizing early initiation of intravenous antibiotics and prompt debridement and stabilization may have helped decrease the long-term morbidity and overall sequelae of this unique and devastating injury

An Integrated Conceptual Framework for Adapting Forest Management Practices to Alternative Futures

This paper proposes an integrated, conceptual framework that forest managers can use to simulate the multiple objectives/indicators of sustainability for different spatial patterns of forest management practices under alternative futures, rank feasible (affordable) treatment patterns for forested areas, and determine if and when it is advantageous to adapt or change the spatial pattern over time for each alternative future. The latter is defined in terms of three drivers: economic growth; land use policy; and climate change. Four forest management objectives are used to demonstrate the framework, minimizing wildfire risk and water pollution and maximizing expected net return from timber sales and the extent of potential wildlife habitat. The fuzzy technique for preference by similarity to the ideal solution is used to rank the feasible spatial patterns for each subperiod in a planning horizon and alternative future. The resulting rankings for subperiods are used in a passive adaptive management procedure to determine if and when it is advantageous to adapt the spatial pattern over subperiods. One of the objectives proposed for the conceptual framework is simulated for the period 2010–2059, namely, wildfire risk, as measured by expected residential losses from wildfire in the wildland-urban interface for Flathead County, Montana

Spatial Effects and GWA Mapping of Root Colonization Assessed in the Interaction Between the Rice Diversity Panel 1 and an Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungus

The majority of the research reported here is an output of EU project “EURoot” (FP7-KBBE-2011-5 Grant Agreement No. 289300) project. RS’s contribution was funded by FACCE-JPI NET project “GreenRice” (Sustainable and environmental friendly rice cultivation systems in Europe) and was funded by the BBSRC award BB/M018415/1.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Images of survival, stories of destruction: Nuclear war on British screens from 1945 to the early 1960s

This article discusses a range of depictions and discussions of nuclear war, which appeared on British screens in the first half of the Cold War, in order to understand the changing way nuclear weapons were viewed within British culture. Using such screened images to understand how nuclear war was constructed and represented within British culture, the article argues that the hydrogen bomb, not the atomic bomb, was the true harbinger of the nuclear revolution that transformed cultural understandings of warfare and destruction. Although the atomic bomb created a great deal of anxiety within British popular culture, representations of atomic attack elided atomic destruction with that experienced in 1939-45, emphasising the 'survivability' of atomic war. In the thermonuclear era, the Second World War could not undertake the same symbolic work. The image of the city-destroying bomb was an imaginative as well as technological step-change. Screened representations stressed that a thermonuclear war would literally end the world. As such, they preceded, and indeed provided the cultural climate for, the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The Campaign exploited and further popularised this idea of the apocalyptic nuclear war as a key aspect of its political and moral standpoint. The article concludes, however, that the cultural hegemony of this vision of nuclear war equally helped underpin notions of nuclear deterrence. The basic assumptions about the nature of nuclear war constructed and circulated on British screens therefore formed part of CND's 'cultural' victory but the article also explains why this did not translate into the political realm. © Edinburgh University Press

The global decline of reptiles, deja’ vu amphibians

Reptile species are declining on a global scale. Six significant threats to reptile populations are habitat loss and degradation, introduced invasive species, environmental pollution, disease, unsustainable use, and global climate change

TE Hub: A community-oriented space for sharing and connecting tools, data, resources, and methods for transposable element annotation

Transposable elements (TEs) play powerful and varied evolutionary and functional roles, and are widespread in most eukaryotic genomes. Research into their unique biology has driven the creation of a large collection of databases, software, classification systems, and annotation guidelines. The diversity of available TE-related methods and resources raises compatibility concerns and can be overwhelming to researchers and communicators seeking straightforward guidance or materials. To address these challenges, we have initiated a new resource, TE Hub, that provides a space where members of the TE community can collaborate to document and create resources and methods. The space consists of (1) a website organized with an open wiki framework, https://tehub.org, (2) a conversation framework via a Twitter account and a Slack channel, and (3) bi-monthly Hub Update video chats on the platform’s development. In addition to serving as a centralized repository and communication platform, TE Hub lays the foundation for improved integration, standardization, and effectiveness of diverse tools and protocols. We invite the TE community, both novices and experts in TE identification and analysis, to join us in expanding our community-oriented resource

Status Report of the DPHEP Study Group: Towards a Global Effort for Sustainable Data Preservation in High Energy Physics

Data from high-energy physics (HEP) experiments are collected with significant financial and human effort and are mostly unique. An inter-experimental study group on HEP data preservation and long-term analysis was convened as a panel of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). The group was formed by large collider-based experiments and investigated the technical and organisational aspects of HEP data preservation. An intermediate report was released in November 2009 addressing the general issues of data preservation in HEP. This paper includes and extends the intermediate report. It provides an analysis of the research case for data preservation and a detailed description of the various projects at experiment, laboratory and international levels. In addition, the paper provides a concrete proposal for an international organisation in charge of the data management and policies in high-energy physics