Mother's occupation and sex ratio at birth

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many women are working outside of the home, occupying a multitude of jobs with varying degrees of responsibilities and levels of psychological stress. We investigated whether different job types in women are associated with child sex at birth, with the hypothesis that women in job types, which are categorized as "high psychological stress" jobs, would be more likely to give birth to a daughter than a son, as females are less vulnerable to unfavourable conditions during conception, pregnancy and after parturition, and are less costly to carry to term.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We investigated the effects of mother's age, maternal and paternal job type (and associated psychological stress levels) and paternal income on sex ratio at birth. Our analyses were based on 16,384 incidences of birth from a six-year (2000 to 2005 inclusive) childbirth dataset from Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, UK. We obtained a restricted data set from Addenbrooke's hospital with: maternal age, maternal and paternal occupations, and whether or not the child was first-born.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Women in job types that were categorized as "high stress" were more likely to give birth to daughters, whereas women in job types that were categorized as "low stress" had equal sex ratios or a slight male bias in offspring. We also investigated whether maternal age, and her partner's income could be associated with reversed offspring sex ratio. We found no association between mother's age, her partner's job stress category or partner income on child sex. However, there was an important interaction between job stress category and partner income in some of the analyses. Partner income appears to attenuate the association between maternal job stress and sex ratios at moderate-income levels, and reverse it at high-income levels.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>To our knowledge this is the first report on the association between women's job type stress categories and offspring sex ratio in humans, and the potential mitigating effect of their partners' income.</p

Larger than Life: Humans' Nonverbal Status Cues Alter Perceived Size

Social dominance and physical size are closely linked. Nonverbal dominance displays in many non-human species are known to increase the displayer's apparent size. Humans also employ a variety of nonverbal cues that increase apparent status, but it is not yet known whether these cues function via a similar mechanism: by increasing the displayer's apparent size.We generated stimuli in which actors displayed high status, neutral, or low status cues that were drawn from the findings of a recent meta-analysis. We then conducted four studies that indicated that nonverbal cues that increase apparent status do so by increasing the perceived size of the displayer. Experiment 1 demonstrated that nonverbal status cues affect perceivers' judgments of physical size. The results of Experiment 2 showed that altering simple perceptual cues can affect judgments of both size and perceived status. Experiment 3 used objective measurements to demonstrate that status cues change targets' apparent size in the two-dimensional plane visible to a perceiver, and Experiment 4 showed that changes in perceived size mediate changes in perceived status, and that the cue most associated with this phenomenon is postural openness.We conclude that nonverbal cues associated with social dominance also affect the perceived size of the displayer. This suggests that certain nonverbal dominance cues in humans may function as they do in other species: by creating the appearance of changes in physical size

Atherogenic Dyslipidemia: Cardiovascular Risk and Dietary Intervention

Atherogenic dyslipidemia comprises a triad of increased blood concentrations of small, dense low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles, decreased high-density lipoprotein (HDL) particles, and increased triglycerides. A typical feature of obesity, the metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes mellitus, atherogenic dyslipidemia has emerged as an important risk factor for myocardial infarction and cardiovascular disease. A number of genes have now been linked to this pattern of lipoprotein changes. Low-carbohydrate diets appear to have beneficial lipoprotein effects in individuals with atherogenic dyslipidemia, compared to high-carbohydrate diets, whereas the content of total fat or saturated fat in the diet appears to have little effect. Achieving a better understanding of the genetic and dietary influences underlying atherogenic dyslipidemia may provide clues to improved interventions to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in high-risk individuals

Acquisition and Evolution of Plant Pathogenesis–Associated Gene Clusters and Candidate Determinants of Tissue-Specificity in Xanthomonas

is a large genus of plant-associated and plant-pathogenic bacteria. Collectively, members cause diseases on over 392 plant species. Individually, they exhibit marked host- and tissue-specificity. The determinants of this specificity are unknown. lineage. genome and indicate that differentiation with respect to host- and tissue-specificity involved not major modifications or wholesale exchange of clusters, but subtle changes in a small number of genes or in non-coding sequences, and/or differences outside the clusters, potentially among regulatory targets or secretory substrates