Damages: Expert Testimony and Future Inflation

The question of the measure of compensatory damages in personal injury and wrongful death actions is of paramount concern to both aggrieved parties and defendants. In the determination of total compensation for the plaintiff, one frequently occurring issue —future damages — involves complex economic theory and statistical projections in the computation of such items of prospective loss as future earnings. At this point in the trial it is crucial that expert testimony be admitted so that jurors can fathom the technical complexities of these future financial determinations. Inflation has become an accepted ingredient of our contemporary society. Whether or not a jury should be allowed to consider testimony by expert economists on possible future rates of inflation, however, has become a source of controversy in both state and federal courts

Retracing the history and planning the future of the red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) in Ireland using non-invasive genetics

The Eurasian red squirrel’s (Sciurus vulgaris) history in Ireland is largely unknown, but the original population is thought to have been driven to extinction by humans in the 17th Century, and multiple records exist for its subsequent reintroduction in the 19th 4 Century. However, it is currently unknown how these reintroductions affect the red squirrel population today, or may do so in the future. In this study, we report on the development of a DNA toolkit for the non-invasive genetic study of the red squirrel. Non-invasively collected red squirrel samples were combined with other samples collected throughout Ireland and previously published mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from Ireland, Great Britain and continental Europe to give an insight into population genetics and historical introductions of the red squirrel in Ireland. Our findings demonstrate that the Irish red squirrel population is on a national scale quite genetically diverse, but at a local level contains relatively low levels of genetic diversity and evidence of genetic structure. This is likely an artefact of the introduction of a small number of genetically similar animals to specific sites. A lack of continuous woodland cover in Ireland has prevented further mixing with animals of different origins that may have been introduced even to neighbouring sites. Consequently, some of these genetically isolated populations are or may in the future be at risk of extinction. The Irish red squirrel population contains mtDNA haplotypes of both a British and Continental European origin, the former of which are now extinct or simply not recorded in contemporary Great Britain. The Irish population is therefore important in terms of red squirrel conservation not only in Ireland, but also for Great Britain, and should be appropriately managed

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Dose-related effects of alcohol on cognitive functioning

We assessed the suitability of six applied tests of cognitive functioning to provide a single marker for dose-related alcohol intoxication. Numerous studies have demonstrated that alcohol has a deleterious effect on specific areas of cognitive processing but few have compared the effects of alcohol across a wide range of different cognitive processes. Adult participants (N = 56, 32 males, 24 females aged 18–45 years) were randomized to control or alcohol treatments within a mixed design experiment involving multiple-dosages at approximately one hour intervals (attained mean blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) of 0.00, 0.048, 0.082 and 0.10%), employing a battery of six psychometric tests; the Useful Field of View test (UFOV; processing speed together with directed attention); the Self-Ordered Pointing Task (SOPT; working memory); Inspection Time (IT; speed of processing independent from motor responding); the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP; strategic optimization); the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART; vigilance, response inhibition and psychomotor function); and the Trail-Making Test(TMT; cognitive flexibility and psychomotor function). Results demonstrated that impairment is not uniform across different domains of cognitive processing and that both the size of the alcohol effect and the magnitude of effect change across different dose levels are quantitatively different for different cognitive processes. Only IT met the criteria for a marker for wide-spread application: reliable dose-related decline in a basic process as a function of rising BAC level and easy to use non-invasive task properties.Mathew J. Dry, Nicholas R. Burns, Ted Nettelbeck, Aaron L. Farquharson and Jason M. Whit

Evidence of Inbreeding Depression on Human Height

WOS:000306840400001Peer reviewe