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Trade secret protection is granted by the government to provide entities with an actionable right against the theft and misuse of their secrets. The government provides this protection to compensate for wrongful acts of competitors. However, the lack of checks on trade secret protections has instead provided a pathway for private entities to hide harmful information from the public. From water usage in a drought area to using toxic chemicals for fracking, there are countless examples of trade secret abuses. While not every use of trade secret protection is malicious, awarding unchecked trade secret protection can still have grave consequences. Recently, these consequences were most notable during the COVID-19 pandemic response when pharmaceutical companies used trade secret laws to prevent low-and middle-income countries from developing their own COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. This Comment explores a brief history of trade secret legislation in the United States, with a focus on recent challenges surrounding the invocation of trade secret protections. This illuminates the frequent exemptions of trade secrets from conventional obligations to provide information to the public, revealing a critical gap in essential knowledge concerning public health and safety. Then, this Comment proposes a new legal framework that will require private entities to provide certain information to the public on request. This proposed framework is modeled after the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and utilizes many of the same procedures and mechanisms. However, unlike FOIA, this framework weighs heavily in favor of disclosure, ensuring the public will get information—such as drug efficacy— needed to make decisions and hold private entities accountable for impacts on public health and safety without completely removing trade secret protections. Finally, this Comment proposes incentives that can be offered to private entities, including increased patent protection and tax benefits. Trade secret protections are rooted in tort law against unfair competition; trade secret law was never meant to protect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Approximately 20% to 25% of all adolescents experience significant symptoms of anxiety, but only half of those adolescents are diagnosed and treated. Recent clinical guidelines recommend routine assessment of adolescent anxiety symptoms in the primary care setting to improve the rates of identification and treatment of anxiety in this population. The objective of this project was to increase early identification and referral for treatment of adolescent anxiety during primary care visits. Methods: This project used the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 screening tool to assess anxiety symptoms in adolescents in a school-based primary care clinic. Upon arrival to the clinic, adolescent patients completed the brief self-assessment. The provider then used the assessment score to determine the need for further assessment and referral for treatment. Results: Of the 51 participants, 21.6% were referred to a mental health provider following assessment, compared with 1.2% of adolescent patients seen in the 6-month period immediately preceding the project. Conclusion: The results indicate that screening for symptoms of anxiety in adolescents using a brief self-assessment survey is an effective method for achieving the desired outcome of increased identification and referral for treatment of anxiety symptoms in this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deadwood plays important roles in forest ecosystems by storing carbon, influencing hydrology, and provisioning countless organisms. Models for these processes often assume that deadwood does not move and ignore redistribution that occurs when trees fall. To evaluate the effects of treefall, we provide the first direct estimates for the magnitude, direction, and drivers of deadwood movement in a long-term oak-hickory forest dynamics plot in Missouri, USA. Among 1871 total pieces of deadwood, logs today pointed downslope more often than branches and occurred at lower elevation than snags. Of these, 477 logs retained tags from which we reconstructed movement using new formulae for reconciling survey coordinates and calculating log shape. Relocated logs occurred at lower elevation than their original rooting location, with the magnitude of the drop dependent on log size, degree of decay, and slope. Although changes in elevation were modest, the log centroids moved up to several meters horizontally. Consequently, as large trees fall, they predictably redistribute deadwood downhill, suggesting that models of deadwood dynamics in small inventory plots may gain accuracy by incorporating import and export along with recruitment and decay. We highlight implications of small-scale deadwood movement for forest inventories, carbon dynamics, and biodiversity. Key words: carbon inventory, deadwood, geomorphology, log volume, oak-hickory forest. Le bois mort joue un role important dans les ecosystemes forestiers en emmagasinant le carbone, en influencant l'hydrologie et en ravitaillant d'innombrables organismes. Les modeles de ces processus assument souvent que le bois mort est immobile et ne tiennent pas compte de la redistribution qui se produit lorsque les arbres tombent. Afin d'evaluer les effets de la chute de arbres, nous fournissons les premieres estimations directes de l'ampleur, de la direction et des causes du mouvement du bois mort dans une placette echantillon destinee a l'etude de la dynamique a long terme d'une chenaie a caryer situee dans l'Etat du Missouri, aux Etats-Unis. Parmi un total de 1871 pieces de bois mort, les billes pointaient aujourd'hui vers le bas des pentes plus souvent que les branches et se retrouvaient plus bas que les chicots. De celles-ci, 477 billes avaient conserve leur etiquette a partir desquelles nous avons reconstitue leur deplacement a l'aide de nouvelles formules pour concilier les coordonnees de l'inventaire et calculer la forme des billes. Les billes delocalisees se retrouvaient plus bas que leur lieu original d'enracinement et l'ampleur de leur deplacement dependait de la dimension des billes, de leur degre de decomposition et de la pente. Tandis que le changement vertical etait modeste, le centre de gravite des billes s'etait deplace de plusieurs metres horizontalement. Par consequent, a mesure que les gros arbres tombent, ils redistribuent de facon previsible le bois mort vers le bas des pentes, ce qui signifie qu'on pourrait ameliorer la precision des modeles de la dynamique du bois mort dans les petites parcelles echantillons en incorporant l'importation et l'exportation avec le recrutement et la decomposition du bois mort. Nous soulignons les implications du mouvement a petite echelle du bois mort pour les inventaires forestiers, la dynamique du carbone et la biodiversite. [Traduit par la Redaction] Mots-cles: comptabilisation du carbone, bois mort, geomorphologie, volume des billes, chenaie a caryer., Introduction Deadwood plays critical roles in many terrestrial ecosystems. In forests, it represents a large carbon pool (Harmon et al. 1986; Russell et al. 2015). In some western North American [...]

1. Understanding how organisms respond to thermal stress can help predict long‐term population viability under projected climate change models. Behavioural plasticity can mediate the impact of thermal stress; however, some behavioural modifications in response to novel environments act maladaptively and could implicate population persistence. 2. Burying beetles (Silphidae: Nicrophorus) have been found to modify traits related to individual fitness to be favourable in their perceived environments. To reproduce, breeding individuals of the nicrophorine genus work together to bury and prepare a suitable vertebrate carcass as food for their developing larvae. 3. Here, we explore how sustained temperature treatments influence traits that closely tie to individual fitness in Nicrophorus marginatus. We measure carcass handling, reproductive output, and activity levels in controlled and elevated temperature treatments. 4. At only 27.5 °C, we observed significantly reduced reproductive success rates, extended carcass handling time, and increased levels of activity when compared to the baseline temperature treatment of 26 °C. Additionally, at 26.5 °C, we document reduced brood size. 5. These findings indicate that slight incremental increases in temperature could have profound effects on burying beetle fitness when experienced for extended periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether global change will drive changing forests from net carbon (C) sinks to sources relates to how quickly deadwood decomposes. Because complete wood mineralization takes years, most experiments focus on how traits, environments and decomposer communities interact as wood decay begins. Few experiments last long enough to test whether drivers change with decay rates through time, with unknown consequences for scaling short‐term results up to long‐term forest ecosystem projections. Using a 7 year experiment that captured complete mineralization among 21 temperate tree species, we demonstrate that trait effects fade with advancing decay. However, wood density and vessel diameter, which may influence permeability, control how decay rates change through time. Denser wood loses mass more slowly at first but more quickly with advancing decay, which resolves ambiguity about the after‐life consequences of this key plant functional trait by demonstrating that its effect on decay depends on experiment duration and sampling frequency. Only long‐term data and a time‐varying model yielded accurate predictions of both mass loss in a concurrent experiment and naturally recruited deadwood structure in a 32‐year‐old forest plot. Given the importance of forests in the carbon cycle, and the pivotal role for wood decay, accurate ecosystem projections are critical and they require experiments that go beyond enumerating potential mechanisms by identifying the temporal scale for their effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pest outbreaks are driving tree dieback and major influxes of deadwood into forest ecosystems. Understanding how pulses of deadwood impact the climate system requires understanding which factors influence greenhouse gas production during wood decay. Recent analyses identify stem diameter as an important control, but report effects that vary in magnitude and direction. This complexity may reflect interacting effects of soil contact, geometry and variable tissue properties. To dissect these effects, we implemented a three-way factorial experiment in Fraxinus americana, (white ash), an iconic North American species threatened by an invasive beetle. Soil contact accelerated decay rates by an order of magnitude with an effect that varied with stem diameter, not bark presence. After experimentally controlling surface area-to-volume ratio, half-buried wide stems decayed more slowly than half-buried narrow stems but more quickly than the aggregate decay rate of buried and suspended stems. These results closely matched variation in moisture content within and among samples, suggesting that limited vertical conduction of soil moisture through deadwood mediates the effect of stem diameter on wood decay. Soil contact also influenced greenhouse gas concentrations reinforcing recent evidence that deadwood acts as a source for CO2 and CH4 while acting as a sink for N2O. Our results suggest that managing tree species affected by pest outbreaks, including F. americana, for biomass salvage and greenhouse gas mitigation requires understanding traits that mediate wood permeability and diffusivity to soil moisture and greenhouse gases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider numerical algorithms for modeling of the time-dependent coupling between the fluid flow and deformation in elastic porous media. Here, we employ a four-field formulation which uses the total stress, displacement, flux, and pressure as its primary variables and satisfies Darcy's law and linear elasticity in mixed weak form. We present four different iteratively coupled methods, known as drained, undrained, fixed-strain, and fixed-stress splits, in which the diffusion operator is separated from the elasticity operator and the two subproblems are solved in a staggered way while ensuring convergence of the solution at each time step. A-priori convergence results for each iterative coupling which differs from those found when using a traditional two-field or three-field formulation are presented. We also present some numerical results to support the convergence estimates and to show the accuracy and efficiency of the algorithms. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspecific negative density dependence is thought to maintain diversity by limiting abundances of common species. Yet the extent to which this mechanism can explain patterns of species diversity across environmental gradients is largely unknown. We examined density-dependent recruitment of seedlings and saplings and changes in local species diversity across a soil-resource gradient for 38 woody-plant species in a temperate forest. At both life stages, the strength of negative density dependence increased with resource availability, becoming relatively stronger for rare species during seedling recruitment, but stronger for common species during sapling recruitment. Moreover, negative density dependence appeared to reduce diversity when stronger for rare than common species, but increase diversity when stronger for common species. Our results suggest that negative density dependence is stronger in resource-rich environments and can either decrease or maintain diversity depending on its relative strength among common and rare species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cross-sectional study was carried out in the Basque Country of Spain to determine the seroprevalence of 10 Leptospira serovars in a population of dairy cattle with poor fertility, and a case-control study was carried out in another northern area to investigate the role of Leptospira interrogans serovar Bratislava in abortions. L Bratislava was the most prevalent serovar in the cross-sectional study, with 25.4 per cent of the cows testing positive in the microagglutination test when a cut-off of 1:10 or higher was applied, followed by Leptospira Hardjo (8.2 per cent), Leptospira Pomona (7.7 per cent), Leptospira Autumnalis (0.7 per cent) and Leptospira Copenhageni (0.1 per cent). In the case-control study the seroprevalence of L Bratislava was significantly higher among the cows which had aborted when a titre of 1:300 or more was used as a cut-off (9.7 per cent v 3.4 per cent, P=0.008); 69 per cent of the L Bratisiava-infected cows that had aborted apparently aborted as a result of the infection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A longitudinal survey was carried out to determine and describe the prevalence and intensity of gastrointestinal parasite infections and Dictyocaulus viviparus in a dairy and a beef cattle farm of two different ecological zones in Costa Rica. The influence of anthelmintic treatment, age and meteorological factors (rainfall, minimum and maximum temperatures) on gastrointestinal nematodes and D. viviparus counts was determined. Calves were subjected to monthly sampling of feces and blood between April 2002 and March 2003. Coprological techniques were used to detect gastrointestinal helminthes, protozoan and D. viviparus. Blood samples were analyzed for antibodies to D. viviparus by ELISA. The most prevalent gastrointestinal parasites detected on both farms (dairy cattle, A; beef cattle, B) were Eimeria spp. (94.7%, 93.7%), Strongylidae (75.0%, 81.4%), Buxtonella sulcata (38.0%, 21.6%) and Strongyloides papillosus (29.8%, 31.7%), whereas Moniezia benedeni (4.8%, 9.1%), Trichuris spp. (7.3%, 13.2%), Toxocara vitulorum (0.0%, 1.8%) and Entamoeba bovis (2.5%, 1.1%) were less prevalent. Mean fecal egg counts (FEC) showed highest values of Strongylidae in April, May and July (>335.3eggs/g feces) on farm A, and April, May and August (>304.3eggs/g feces) on farm B. S. papillosus presented low FEC throughout the year on farm A, on farm B the highest values were obtained in April (303.0eggs/g feces). Trichuris spp. presented maximum FEC values in May (328.6eggs/g feces) on farm A and in June (157.5eggs/g feces) on farm B. Treatment and age had significant influence on infection intensity of Strongylidae (farms A and B), S. papillosus (farms A and B) and Trichuris spp. (farm A). Rainfall had significant effect on S. papillosus (farms A and B) and Trichuris spp. (farm B). Maximum temperature showed significant effect on S. papillosus (farm A) and Trichuris spp. (farms A and B). Minimum temperature had significant influence on Strongylidae (farm A), S. papillosus (farms A and B) and Trichuris spp. (farm B). Haemonchus spp. (57%, 66%) and Cooperia spp. (30.0%, 30.7%) were the most prevalent genera identified by coproculture on both farms, in contrast, Trichostrongylus spp. and Oesophagostomum spp. were less frequent. Patent lungworm infections were low on both farms (10.8%, 1.8%). On farm A, high prevalence of antibodies against D. viviparus was determined only at the beginning of the study, in contrast, on farm B the seroprevalence fluctuated throughout the year. Treatment, age and maximum temperature had significant effect on D. viviparus counts on farm A, but not on farm B. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]