March Mammal Madness and the power of narrative in science outreach.

March Mammal Madness is a science outreach project that, over the course of several weeks in March, reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. We combine four approaches to science outreach - gamification, social media platforms, community event(s), and creative products - to run a simulated tournament in which 64 animals compete to become the tournament champion. While the encounters between the animals are hypothetical, the outcomes rely on empirical evidence from the scientific literature. Players select their favored combatants beforehand, and during the tournament scientists translate the academic literature into gripping "play-by-play" narration on social media. To date ~1100 scholarly works, covering almost 400 taxa, have been transformed into science stories. March Mammal Madness is most typically used by high-school educators teaching life sciences, and we estimate that our materials reached ~1% of high-school students in the United States in 2019. Here we document the intentional design, public engagement, and magnitude of reach of the project. We further explain how human psychological and cognitive adaptations for shared experiences, social learning, narrative, and imagery contribute to the widespread use of March Mammal Madness

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon¹⁻³. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses⁴⁻⁹. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.Keywords: Ecology, Environmental scienc

Eyes-closed Rest Provides a Memory Benefit

Подсудность гражданских дел : аннотация к дипломной работе / Ольга Сергеевна Шпак; Юридический факультет, кафедра гражданского процесса и трудового права; науч. рук. В.П. Скобеле

Resting state EEG correlates of memory consolidation

This project archives methods and data for the study described in this manuscript: Brokaw, K., Tishler, W., Manceor, S., Hamilton, K., Gaulden, A., Parr, E., & Wamsley, E. J. (2016). Resting state EEG correlates of memory consolidation. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 130, 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2016.01.008 The aim of this project was to determine the conditions under which memory is optimally enhanced across a short period of resting wakefulness. To accomplish this goal, we examined changes in memory across a brief interval filled with either quiet resting or active wakefulness, while brain activity was monitored using EEG

Participant Forms

Here we archive copies of questionnaires used in this research study

Data

SPSS format data file used for analysis

Tasks

Materials for short story task