Pupil dilation as an index of preferred mutual gaze duration

Most animals look at each other to signal threat or interest. In humans, this social interaction is usually punctuated with brief periods of mutual eye contact. Deviations from this pattern of gazing behaviour generally make us feel uncomfortable and are a defining characteristic of clinical conditions such as autism or schizophrenia, yet it is unclear what constitutes normal eye contact. Here, we measured, across a wide range of ages, cultures and personality types, the period of direct gaze that feels comfortable and examined whether autonomic factors linked to arousal were indicative of people’s preferred amount of eye contact. Surprisingly, we find that preferred period of gaze duration is not dependent on fundamental characteristics such as gender, personality traits or attractiveness. However, we do find that subtle pupillary changes, indicative of physiological arousal, correlate with the amount of eye contact people find comfortable. Specifically, people preferring longer durations of eye contact display faster increases in pupil size when viewing another person than those preferring shorter durations. These results reveal that a person’s preferred duration of eye contact is signalled by physiological indices (pupil dilation) beyond volitional control that may play a modulatory role in gaze behaviour

Focused Deterrence and the Prevention of Violent Gun Injuries: Practice, Theoretical Principles, and Scientific Evidence

Focused deterrence strategies are a relatively new addition to a growing portfolio of evidence-based violent gun injury prevention practices available to policy makers and practitioners. These strategies seek to change offender behavior by understanding the underlying violence-producing dynamics and conditions that sustain recurring violent gun injury problems and by implementing a blended strategy of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions. Consistent with documented public health practice, the focused deterrence approach identifies underlying risk factors and causes of recurring violent gun injury problems, develops tailored responses to these underlying conditions, and measures the impact of implemented interventions. This article reviews the practice, theoretical principles, and evaluation evidence on focused deterrence strategies. Although more rigorous randomized studies are needed, the available empirical evidence suggests that these strategies generate noteworthy gun violence reduction impacts and should be part of a broader portfolio of violence prevention strategies available to policy makers and practitioners

The Blind Watchmaker Network: Scale-freeness and Evolution

It is suggested that the degree distribution for networks of the cell-metabolism for simple organisms reflects an ubiquitous randomness. This implies that natural selection has exerted no or very little pressure on the network degree distribution during evolution. The corresponding random network, here termed the blind watchmaker network has a power-law degree distribution with an exponent gamma >= 2. It is random with respect to a complete set of network states characterized by a description of which links are attached to a node as well as a time-ordering of these links. No a priory assumption of any growth mechanism or evolution process is made. It is found that the degree distribution of the blind watchmaker network agrees very precisely with that of the metabolic networks. This implies that the evolutionary pathway of the cell-metabolism, when projected onto a metabolic network representation, has remained statistically random with respect to a complete set of network states. This suggests that even a biological system, which due to natural selection has developed an enormous specificity like the cellular metabolism, nevertheless can, at the same time, display well defined characteristics emanating from the ubiquitous inherent random element of Darwinian evolution. The fact that also completely random networks may have scale-free node distributions gives a new perspective on the origin of scale-free networks in general.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Laser cooling of a diatomic molecule

It has been roughly three decades since laser cooling techniques produced ultracold atoms, leading to rapid advances in a vast array of fields. Unfortunately laser cooling has not yet been extended to molecules because of their complex internal structure. However, this complexity makes molecules potentially useful for many applications. For example, heteronuclear molecules possess permanent electric dipole moments which lead to long-range, tunable, anisotropic dipole-dipole interactions. The combination of the dipole-dipole interaction and the precise control over molecular degrees of freedom possible at ultracold temperatures make ultracold molecules attractive candidates for use in quantum simulation of condensed matter systems and quantum computation. Also ultracold molecules may provide unique opportunities for studying chemical dynamics and for tests of fundamental symmetries. Here we experimentally demonstrate laser cooling of the molecule strontium monofluoride (SrF). Using an optical cycling scheme requiring only three lasers, we have observed both Sisyphus and Doppler cooling forces which have substantially reduced the transverse temperature of a SrF molecular beam. Currently the only technique for producing ultracold molecules is by binding together ultracold alkali atoms through Feshbach resonance or photoassociation. By contrast, different proposed applications for ultracold molecules require a variety of molecular energy-level structures. Our method provides a new route to ultracold temperatures for molecules. In particular it bridges the gap between ultracold temperatures and the ~1 K temperatures attainable with directly cooled molecules (e.g. cryogenic buffer gas cooling or decelerated supersonic beams). Ultimately our technique should enable the production of large samples of molecules at ultracold temperatures for species that are chemically distinct from bialkalis.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Target Suitability and the Crime Drop

The initial focus of Felson’s routine activity perspective was the crime increases of the 1960s and 1970s that were largely a function of inadvertent changes in everyday life (Cohen & Felson, 1979). The rise in crime was an unintended side effect of developments in technology, transportation, and domestic life that were widely welcomed. More money, more consumer goods, more labour-saving devices, more transport, and more employment opportunities for women, for example, all brought benefits to citizens, but they also created more crime opportunities and hence sustained increases in crime

Data Integration Model for Air Quality: A Hierarchical Approach to the Global Estimation of Exposures to Ambient Air Pollution

This is the author accepted manuscript. Available from arXiv via the URL in this record.Air pollution is a major risk factor for global health, with both ambient and household air pollution contributing substantial components of the overall global disease burden. One of the key drivers of adverse health effects is fine particulate matter ambient pollution (PM2:5) to which an estimated 3 million deaths can be attributed annually. The primary source of information for estimating exposures has been measurements from ground monitoring networks but, although coverage is increasing, there remain regions in which monitoring is limited. Ground monitoring data therefore needs to be supplemented with information from other sources, such as satellite retrievals of aerosol optical depth and chemical transport models. A hierarchical modelling approach for integrating data from multiple sources is proposed allowing spatially-varying relationships between ground measurements and other factors that estimate air quality. Set within a Bayesian framework, the resulting Data Integration Model for Air Quality (DIMAQ) is used to estimate exposures, together with associated measures of uncertainty, on a high resolution grid covering the entire world. Bayesian analysis on this scale can be computationally challenging and here approximate Bayesian inference is performed using Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations. Model selection and assessment is performed by cross-validation with the final model offering substantial increases in predictive accuracy, particularly in regions where there is sparse ground monitoring, when compared to previous approaches: root mean square error (RMSE) reduced from 17.1 to 10.7, and population weighted RMSE from 23.1 to 12.1 gm3. Based on summaries of the posterior distributions for each grid cell, it is estimated that 92% of the world’s population reside in areas exceeding the World Health Organization’s Air Quality Guidelines.Matthew Lloyd Thomas is supported by a scholarship from the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistical Applied Mathematics at Bath (SAMBa), under the project EP/L015684/1. Amelia Jobling was supported for this work by WHO contracts APW 201255146 and 201255393

The Elg1-RFC Clamp-Loading Complex Performs a Role in Sister Chromatid Cohesion

It is widely accepted that of the four Replication Factor C (RFC) complexes (defined by the associations of either Rfc1p, Ctf18p, Elg1p or Rad24p with Rfc2p-Rfc5p), only Ctf18-RFC functions in sister chromatid cohesion. This model is based on findings that CTF18 deletion is lethal in combination with mutations in either CTF7ECO1 or MCD1 sister chromatid cohesion genes and that ctf18 mutant cells exhibit cohesion defects. Here, we report that Elg1-RFC not only participates in cohesion but performs a function that is distinct from that of Ctf18-RFC. The results show that deletion of ELG1 rescues both ctf7eco1 mutant cell temperature sensitivity and cohesion defects. Moreover, over-expression of ELG1 enhances ctf7eco1 mutant cell phenotypes. These findings suggest that the balance of Ctf7pEco1p activity depends on both Ctf18-RFC and Elg1-RFC. We also report that ELG1 deletion produces cohesion defects and intensifies the conditional phenotype of mcd1 mutant cells, further supporting a role for Elg1-RFC in cohesion. Attesting to the specificity of these interactions, deletion of RAD24 neither suppressed nor exacerbated cohesion defects in either ctf7eco1 or mcd1 mutant cells. While parallel analyses failed to uncover a similar role in cohesion for Rad24-RFC, it is well known that Rad24-RFC, Elg1-RFC and Ctf18-RFC play key roles in DNA damage responses. We tested and found that Ctf7pEco1p plays a significant role in Rad24-RFC-based DNA response pathways. In combination, these findings challenge current views and document new and distinct roles for RFC complexes in cohesion and for Ctf7pEco1p in DNA repair

Degenerate distributions in complex Langevin dynamics: one-dimensional QCD at finite chemical potential

We demonstrate analytically that complex Langevin dynamics can solve the sign problem in one-dimensional QCD in the thermodynamic limit. In particular, it is shown that the contributions from the complex and highly oscillating spectral density of the Dirac operator to the chiral condensate are taken into account correctly. We find an infinite number of classical fixed points of the Langevin flow in the thermodynamic limit. The correct solution originates from a continuum of degenerate distributions in the complexified space.Comment: 20 pages, several eps figures, minor comments added, to appear in JHE

Nanoethics, science communication, and a fourth model for public engagement

This paper develops a fourth model of public engagement with science, grounded in the principle of nurturing scientific agency through online participatory bioethics. It argues that social media is an effective device through which to enable such engagement, as it has the capacity to empower users and transforms audiences into co-producers of knowledge, rather than consumers of content, the value of which is recognised within the citizen science movement. Social media also fosters greater engagement with the political and legal implications of science, thus promoting the value of scientific citizenship through the acquisition of science capital. This argument is explored by considering the case of nanoscience and nanotechnology, as an exemplar for how emerging technologies may be handled by the scientific community and science policy makers, and as a technology that has defined a second era of science communication