Search

High summer temperatures caused major crop losses in scarlet runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus) in Austrian agriculture. To evaluate the impact of temperature on pollination, a greenhouse experiment was conducted. Pollination of P. coccineus by Apis mellifera was studied under standard temperature conditions (22 °C) and was compared to heat stress conditions (35 °C) in the greenhouse as well as to natural insect–flower interactions in the field trial. Under heat stress conditions, workers of A. mellifera significantly decreased their flower visitation, while the duration of flower visits significantly increased compared to normal greenhouse temperatures. Heat stress leads to a foraging stop of honey bees on the flowers of runner beans within a few days. It is concluded that the raised ambient temperature that we are facing during global warming may have negative effects on pollination and fruit set of P. coccineus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polish physician and sociologist of science Ludwik Fleck was a prisoner in Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, the day my father, a US army physician, arrived there with the liberating troops. My father was exposed to Nazi brutality as a young Jew living in Vienna in the 1920s. Fleck was from Lvov, an epicenter of Nazi persecution. For both, a paramount question was what kind of medicine could be practiced in a world of deliberate extermination. Did they meet? My father's late-life memoir notes that "the inmates who were physicians immediately proceeded to make use of their skills to help their fellow inmates." That piqued my interest in how Fleck's socioscientific insights, described in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact , emerged from his prewar experience of Nazi terror, when his scientific work, sociological-philosophical background, and observations of the prevailing fascism coalesced. This shaped his awareness of how collective thinking—by a nation, race, party, or class—produces facts and how politics and prejudice get entangled in scientific work. This essay explores Fleck's legacy and how both physicians offered resistance and reprisal to fascism, compelling concerns in view of today's increasing tolerance for fascism, racism, antisemitism, and "alternative" truths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toxicokinetic–toxicodynamic (TKTD) models simulate organismal uptake and elimination of a substance (TK) and its effects on the organism (TD). The Reduced General Unified Threshold model of Survival (GUTS‐RED) is a TKTD modeling framework that is well established for aquatic risk assessment to simulate effects on survival. The TKTD models are applied in three steps: parameterization based on experimental data (calibration), comparing predictions with independent data (validation), and prediction of endpoints under environmental scenarios. Despite a clear understanding of the sensitivity of GUTS‐RED predictions to the model parameters, the influence of the input data on the quality of GUTS‐RED calibration and validation has not been systematically explored. We analyzed the performance of GUTS‐RED calibration and validation based on a unique, comprehensive data set, covering different types of substances, exposure patterns, and aquatic animal species taxa that are regularly used for risk assessment of plant protection products. We developed a software code to automatically calibrate and validate GUTS‐RED against survival measurements from 59 toxicity tests and to calculate selected model evaluation metrics. To assess whether specific survival data sets were better suited for calibration or validation, we applied a design in which all possible combinations of studies for the same species–substance combination are used for calibration and validation. We found that uncertainty of calibrated parameters was lower when the full range of effects (i.e., from high survival to high mortality) was covered by input data. Increasing the number of toxicity studies used for calibration further decreased parameter uncertainty. Including data from both acute and chronic studies as well as studies under pulsed and constant exposure in model calibrations improved model predictions on different types of validation data. Using our results, we derived a workflow, including recommendations for the sequence of modeling steps from the selection of input data to a final judgment on the suitability of GUTS‐RED for the data set. Environ Toxicol Chem 2024;43:197–210. © 2023 Bayer AG and The Authors. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of SETAC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The solid-state structures of two solvated forms of 4-glutarato-N,N-diisopropyltryptamine were determined by single-crystal X-ray diffraction, namely, 5-[(3-{2-[bis(propan-2-yl)azaniumyl]ethyl}-1 H-indol-4-yl)oxy]-5-oxopentanoate methanol monosolvate, C21H30N2O4-CH3OH, and the analogous ethanol monosolvate, C21H30N2O4-C2H6O. In both compounds, the 4-glutarato-N,Ndiisopropyltryptamine exists as a zwitterion with a protonated tertiary ammonium and a deprotonated glutarato carboxylate. The tryptamine zwitterions and alcohol solvates in both structures combine to produce near identical hydrogen-bonding networks, with N--H--O and O--H--O hydrogen bonds joining the molecules together in two-dimensional networks parallel to the (100) plane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 411 pp. In [...]

This essay centers on a story from the Holocaust, situated in the context of history, identity, and political economy, a story with lessons that have continued relevance for our understanding of violence, suffering, survival, and their aftermath. My mother was an aspiring physician in pre-war Poland, whose career was cut short when she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. As a Polish Catholic caught in the Holocaust, her story raises issues concerning the blurred boundaries of concepts such as survivor and collective memory, and provides the opportunity to apply 'the focusing power of the Holocaust,' by underscoring the key, pervasive role that forces such as dehumanization continue to play in the production and reproduction of violence, be it physical political symbolic, or structural. [Holocaust, Ravensbruck, Poland, dehumanization, violence, survivor, autoethnography]

Despite intensive research on species dissimilarity patterns across communities (i.e. β‐diversity), we still know little about their implications for variation in food‐web structures. Our analyses of 50 lake and 48 forest soil communities show that, while species dissimilarity depends on environmental and spatial gradients, these effects are only weakly propagated to the networks. Moreover, our results show that species and food‐web dissimilarities are consistently correlated, but that much of the variation in food‐web structure across spatial, environmental, and species gradients remains unexplained. Novel food‐web assembly models demonstrate the importance of biotic filtering during community assembly by (1) the availability of resources and (2) limiting similarity in species' interactions to avoid strong niche overlap and thus competitive exclusion. This reveals a strong signature of biotic filtering processes during local community assembly, which constrains the variability in structural food‐web patterns across local communities despite substantial turnover in species composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metacommunity ecology currently lacks a consistent functional trait perspective across trophic levels. To foster new cross‐taxa experiments and field studies, we present hypotheses on how three trait dimensions change along gradients of density of individuals, resource supply and habitat isolation. The movement dimension refers to the ability to move and navigate in space, the tolerance dimension addresses the ability to tolerate prevailing environmental conditions and the interaction dimension aggregates the abilities to acquire resources in competition with other species, to defend against consumers or to profit from other species by mutualism and facilitation. In multi‐trophic studies, functionally analogous traits associated to these dimensions need to be defined across taxa and measured. The dimensions represent subnetworks of strongly correlated traits within the overall phenotypic trait network. These subnetworks can be aggregated to trait modules using dimension reduction techniques. We demonstrate how to derive dimensions from species distributions and trait correlation networks, using salt marshes as an example. We hypothesize that at the single‐community scale, investments by organisms in the tolerance dimension increase with decreasing resource supply. Investments to the interaction dimension increase with increasing density. Communities with densely packed individuals are characterized by convergence under equal competition and by increasing divergence under stabilizing and equalizing competition. At the metacommunity scale, trade‐offs between the movement dimension and the interaction dimension shape the community functional composition. Biomass removal by consumers act as an equalizing factor and increase divergence in the interaction and movement dimension, particularly in well‐connected habitats. As future research directions to advance functional metacommunity ecology, we propose investigating 1) the feasibility of using dimensions as broad generalizations of multiple functions in different meta‐ecosystems, 2) functional trait analogues across taxa, 3) dimension responses and effects on gradients of meta‐ecosystems and 4) matching of functionally analogous traits between trophic levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic in light of two key concepts in medical anthropology: syndemics and structural violence. Following a discussion of the nature of these two concepts, the paper addresses the direct and associated literatures on the syndemic and structural violence features of the COVID pandemic, with a specific focus on: 1) the importance of local socioenvironmental conditions/demographics and disease configurations in creating varying local syndemic expressions; 2) the ways that the pandemic has exposed the grave weaknesses in global health care investment; and 3) how the syndemic nature of the pandemic reveals the rising rate of noncommunicable diseases and their potential for interaction with current and future infectious disease. The paper concludes with a discussion on the role of anthropology in responding to COVID-19 from a syndemics perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aquatic ecosystem services are important for human wellbeing, but they are much less studied than terrestrial ecosystem services. The objectives of this study are to broaden, itemize and exemplify the human-nature interactions in modeling the future provision of aquatic ecosystem services. We include shared socioeconomic and representative concentration pathways, used extensively in climate research, as drivers of change for the future development of the Baltic Sea. Then we use biogeochemical and ecosystem models to demonstrate the future development of exemplary supporting, provisioning and cultural ecosystem services for two distinct combinations of regionally downscaled global climate and socioeconomic futures. According to the model simulations, the two global futures ("Sustainable well-being" vs. "Fossil-fuelled development") studied lead to clearly deviating trajectories in the provision of marine ecosystem services. Under the "Sustainable well-being"-scenario primary production decreases by 20%, catches of demersal fish increases and the recreation opportunities increase significantly by the end of the ongoing century. Under the "fossil-fuelled development"-scenario primary production doubles, fisheries focus on less valued pelagic fish and the recreation possibilities will decrease. Long-term projections of aquatic ecosystem services prepared for alternative global socioeconomic futures can be used by policy makers and managers to adaptively and iteratively adjust mitigation and adaptation effort with plausible future changes in the drivers of water pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]