Because long-chain n-alkanes (n-C21 to n-C37) are found in the epicuticular leaf waxes of all vascular plants and are stable, long-lived molecules, the study of their molecular and isotopic compositions stands to serve as a potentially powerful tool in the fields of modern chemotaxonomy and paleoecology. This study attempts to...
Understanding the factors that drive the maintenance of polymorphisms in plant populations has long been of interest to evolutionary biology. Variation in floral traits has often been attributed to selection by pollinators, but recent evidence suggests that other biotic and abiotic agents may also contribute to floral trait differentiation. In...
Many preventable behaviors contribute to adolescent mortality and morbidity. Non-adherence to preventive measures represents a challenge and has been associated with worse health outcomes in this population. The widespread use of electronic communication technologies by adolescents, particularly the use of text messaging (short message service, SMS) and mobile phones, presents...
Since Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation “Plus” (REDD+) starting gaining traction in the UN climate negotiations in 2007, its architects and scholars have grappled with its community-level justice implications. On the one hand, supporters argue that REDD+ will help the environment and forest-dependent communities by generating payments for forest...
US surveillance of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) is often delayed and incomplete which creates missed opportunities to identify and respond to trends in disease. Internet search engine data has the potential to be an efficient, economical and representative enhancement to the established surveillance system. Google Trends allows the download of...
One of the most notable recent developments in survey research is the increased usage of online convenience samples
drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). While scholars have noted various social and political differences (e.g.,
age, partisanship) between MTurk and population-based samples, the breadth and depth of these variations remain unclear....
Recent work using the eye movement monitoring technique has demonstrated that when people are engaged in thought they tend to disengage from the external world by blinking or fixating on an empty portion of the visual field, such as a blank wall, or out the window at the sky. This...
Impairments in the social use of language, or pragmatics, constitute a core characteris-tic of autism. Problems with pragmatic language have also been documented in fragile X syndrome (FXS), a monogenic condition that is the most common known genetic cause of autism. Evidence suggests that social cognitive ability, or theory of...
Over the course of tumor growth, cancer cells interact with normal cells via processes that are difficult to understand by experiment alone. This challenge is particularly pronounced at early stages of tumor formation, when experimental observation is most limited. Eluci-dating such interactions could inform both understanding of cancer and clinical... and Tumor growth involves a dynamic interplay between cancer cells and host cells, which col-lectively form a tumor microenvironmental network that either suppresses or promotes tumor growth under different conditions. The transition from tumor suppression to tumor pro-motion is mediated by a tumor-induced shift in the local immune state, and despite...
Artificial spin ice lattices have emerged as model systems for studying magnetic frustration in recent years. Most work to date has looked at periodic artificial spin ice lattices. In this paper, we observe frustration effects in quasicrystal artificial spin ice lattices that lack translational symmetry and contain vertices with different...