Contradiction and complacency shape attitudes towards the toll of roads on wildlife

© 2016 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Most people in the world now live in cities. Urbanisation simultaneously isolates people from nature and contributes to biodiversity decline. As cities expand, suburban development and the road infrastructure to support them widens their impact on wildlife. Even so, urban communities, especially those on the peri-urban fringe, endeavour to support biodiversity through wildlife friendly gardens, green spaces and corridors, and conservation estates. On one hand, many who live on city fringes do so because they enjoy proximity to nature, however, the ever increasing intrusion of roads leads to conflict with wildlife. Trauma (usually fatal) to wildlife and (usually emotional and financial) to people ensues. Exposure to this trauma, therefore, should inform attitudes towards wildlife vehicle collisions (WVC) and be linked to willingness to reduce risk of further WVC. While there is good anecdotal evidence for this response, competing priorities and better understanding of the likelihood of human injury or fatalities, as opposed to wildlife fatalities, may confound this trend. In this paper we sought to explore this relationship with a quantitative study of driver behaviour and attitudes to WVC from a cohort of residents and visitors who drive through a peri-urban reserve (Royal National Park) on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia. We distributed a self-reporting questionnaire and received responses from 105 local residents and 51 visitors to small townships accessed by roads through the national park. We sought the respondents’ exposure to WVC, their evasive actions in an impending WVC, their attitudes to wildlife fatalities, their strategies to reduce the risk of WVC, and their willingness to adopt new ameliorative measures. The results were partitioned by driver demographics and residency. Residents were generally well informed about mitigation strategies but exposure led to a decrease in viewing WVC as very serious. In addition, despite most respondents stating they routinely drive slower when collision risk is high (at dusk and dawn), our assessment of driving trends via traffic speeds suggested this sentiment was not generally adhered to. Thus we unveil some of the complexities in tackling driver’s willingness to act on reducing risk of WVC, particularly when risk of human trauma is low

Interactive Effects of Trait Self-Control and Stress Appraisals on Blood Pressure Responses to a Laboratory Stressor

Purpose: Stress may play a role in explaining part of the conscientiousness-longevity relationship. Conscientiousness (C) is associated with the appraisals of stressors and its lower-order facets have been shown to differentially moderate the experience of stress in daily life. This study investigated whether the lower-order facet, self-control (SC), moderated the relationship between stress appraisals and blood pressure responses to a laboratory stressor. Methods: Ninety participants (selected from the upper and lower quartiles for C scores from a sample of 679 participants) were invited to complete the Maastricht Acute Stress Test (MAST). Systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) were assessed throughout the stress task. Stress appraisals were assessed at baseline. Results: Blood pressure responses to the MAST were similar in participants who scored high and low in SC. However, primary appraisals were negatively associated with BP reactivity and recovery in the high SC group but not in the low SC group. Moreover, SC was found to moderate the relationship between primary appraisals and SBP and DBP reactivity values, such that higher primary appraisals were associated with lower BP reactivity in individuals high in SC but not in those low in SC. In addition, lower SBP recovery values were observed in the high SC group compared to their low SC counterparts. Conclusions: These findings indicate that SC may influence health status by modifying the relationship between perceived demands and blood pressure. Moreover, having a greater stake in stressors may yield health benefits in the longer term for individuals high in SC

Bipolar orientations on planar maps and SLE <inf>12</inf>

We give bijections between bipolar-oriented (acyclic with unique source and sink) planar maps and certain random walks, which show that the uniformly random bipolar-oriented planar map, decorated by the "peano curve" surrounding the tree of left-most paths to the sink, converges in law with respect to the peanosphere topology to a $\sqrt{4/3}$-Liouville quantum gravity surface decorated by an independent Schramm-Loewner evolution with parameter $\kappa=12$ (i.e., SLE$_{12}$). This result is universal in the sense that it holds for bipolar-oriented triangulations, quadrangulations, $k$-angulations, and maps in which face sizes are mixed

Active Spanning Trees with Bending Energy on Planar Maps and SLE-Decorated Liouville Quantum Gravity for κ&gt; 8

We consider the Peano curve separating a spanning tree from its dual spanning tree on an embedded planar graph, where the tree and dual tree are weighted by $y$ to the number of active edges, and "active" is in the sense of the Tutte polynomial. When the graph is a portion of the square grid approximating a simply connected domain, it is known ($y=1$ and $y=1+\sqrt{2}$) or believed ($1<y<3$) that the Peano curve converges to a space-filling SLE$_{\kappa}$ loop, where $y=1-2\cos(4\pi/\kappa)$, corresponding to $4<\kappa\leq 8$. We argue that the same should hold for $0\le y<1$, which corresponds to $8<\kappa\leq 12$

Human kin detection

Natural selection has favored the evolution of behaviors that benefit not only one's genes, but also their copies in genetically related individuals. These behaviors include optimal outbreeding (choosing a mate that is neither too closely related, nor too distant), nepotism (helping kin), and spite (hurting non-kin at a personal cost), and all require some form of kin detection or kin recognition. Yet, kinship cannot be assessed directly; human kin detection relies on heuristic cues that take into account individuals' context (whether they were reared by our mother, or grew up in our home, or were given birth by our spouse), appearance (whether they smell or look like us), and ability to arouse certain feelings (whether we feel emotionally close to them). The uncertainties of kin detection, along with its dependence on social information, create ample opportunities for the evolution of deception and self-deception. For example, babies carry no unequivocal stamp of their biological father, but across cultures they are passionately claimed to resemble their mother's spouse; to the same effect, neutral' observers are greatly influenced by belief in relatedness when judging resemblance between strangers. Still, paternity uncertainty profoundly shapes human relationships, reducing not only the investment contributed by paternal versus maternal kin, but also prosocial behavior between individuals who are related through one or more males rather than females alone. Because of its relevance to racial discrimination and political preferences, the evolutionary pressure to prefer kin to non-kin has a manifold influence on society at large

Scaling aerosol assisted chemical vapour deposition: Exploring the relationship between growth rate and film properties

Thin films of fluorine doped tin oxide were deposited, by an aerosol assisted chemical vapour deposition route, to study the effect of scaling the growth rate. The effect of precursor concentration on the growth rate of the films and the properties of deposited films were compared. The films were characterised by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, UV/vis spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Hall effect measurements. A maximum film growth rate of ca. 100 nm min− 1 was observed, which is significantly faster than previously reported aerosol assisted studies. This method shows the ability of aerosol assisted methods to deliver high growth rates whilst maintaining the ease of doping and control over stoichiometry

Neutrophil and Monocyte Bactericidal Responses to 10 Weeks of Low-Volume High-Intensity Interval or Moderate-Intensity Continuous Training in Sedentary Adults.

Neutrophils and monocytes are key components of the innate immune system that undergo age-associated declines in function. This study compared the impact of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and moderate-intensity continuous training (MICT) on immune function in sedentary adults. Twenty-seven (43 ± 11 years) healthy sedentary adults were randomized into ten weeks of either a HIIT (>90% maximum heart rate) or MICT (70% maximum heart rate) group training program. Aerobic capacity (VO2peak), neutrophil and monocyte bacterial phagocytosis and oxidative burst, cell surface receptor expression, and systemic inflammation were measured before and after the training. Total exercise time commitment was 57% less for HIIT compared to that for MICT while both significantly improved VO2peak similarly. Neutrophil phagocytosis and oxidative burst and monocyte phagocytosis and percentage of monocytes producing an oxidative burst were improved by training similarly in both groups. Expression of monocyte but not neutrophil CD16, TLR2, and TLR4 was reduced by training similarly in both groups. No differences in systemic inflammation were observed for training; however, leptin was reduced in the MICT group only. With similar immune-enhancing effects for HIIT compared to those for MICT at 50% of the time commitment, our results support HIIT as a time efficient exercise option to improve neutrophil and monocyte function

The importance of metagenomic surveys to microbial ecology: or why Darwin would have been a metagenomic scientist

Scientific discovery is incremental. The Merriam-Webster definition of 'Scientific Method' is "principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses". Scientists are taught to be excellent observers, as observations create questions, which in turn generate hypotheses. After centuries of science we tend to assume that we have enough observations to drive science, and enable the small steps and giant leaps which lead to theories and subsequent testable hypotheses. One excellent example of this is Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, which was essentially an opportunistic survey of biodiversity. Today, obtaining funding for even small-scale surveys of life on Earth is difficult; but few argue the importance of the theory that was generated by Darwin from his observations made during this epic journey. However, these observations, even combined with the parallel work of Alfred Russell Wallace at around the same time have still not generated an indisputable 'law of biology'. The fact that evolution remains a 'theory', at least to the general public, suggests that surveys for new data need to be taken to a new level