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The present study was initiated because of concerns expressed by NHLBI-funded mid-career investigators regarding perceived difficulties in the renewal of their grant awards. This led us to ask: "Are mid-career investigators experiencing disproportionate difficulties in the advancement of their professional careers?" Our portfolio analysis indicates that there has been a significant and evolving shift in the demographics of research project grant (RPG) awardees at NHLBI. In 1998, mid-career (ages 41-55) investigators constituted approximately 60% of all investigators with the remaining 40% being equally divided between early-stage (ages 24-40) investigators and established (ages 56 to 70 and older) investigators. However, since 1998, the proportion of established RPG awardees has been increasing in a slowly progressive and strikingly linear fashion. At the same time the proportion of early-stage awardees fell precipitously until 2006 and then stabilized. During the same period, the proportion of mid-career awardees, which had been relatively stable through 2006, began to fall significantly. In examining potential causes of these demographic shifts we have identified certain inherent properties within the RPG award system that appear to promote an increasingly more established awardee population and a persistent decrease in the proportion of mid-career investigators. A collateral result of these demographic shifts, when combined with level or declining funding, is a significant reduction in the number of RPG awards received by NHLBI mid-career investigators and a corresponding decrease in the number of independent research laboratories.

Acute appendicitis is an extremely common cause for pediatric admissions, most notably presenting with right lower quadrant pain. There are few other etiologies for a young male to have pain aside from appendicitis. We present a young boy who presented with right lower quadrant abdominal pain and fevers, but was found to have funiculitis. Funiculitis, or inflammation of the spermatic cord, is a very rare condition in the pediatric population, almost always occurring in the elderly with urinary flow conditions. We share our case to remind providers the importance of a full differential diagnosis.

While there is a persistent inverse relationship between latitude and species diversity across many taxa and ecosystems, deviations from this norm offer an opportunity to understand the conditions that contribute to large-scale diversity patterns. Marine systems, in particular, provide such an opportunity, as marine diversity does not always follow a strict latitudinal gradient, perhaps because several hypothesized drivers of the latitudinal diversity gradient are uncorrelated in marine systems. We used a large scale public monitoring dataset collected over an eight year period to examine benthic marine faunal biodiversity patterns for the continental shelf (55-183 m depth) and slope habitats (184-1280 m depth) off the US West Coast (47°20'N-32°40'N). We specifically asked whether marine biodiversity followed a strict latitudinal gradient, and if these latitudinal patterns varied across depth, in different benthic substrates, and over ecological time scales. Further, we subdivided our study area into three smaller regions to test whether coast-wide patterns of biodiversity held at regional scales, where local oceanographic processes tend to influence community structure and function. Overall, we found complex patterns of biodiversity on both the coast-wide and regional scales that differed by taxonomic group. Importantly, marine biodiversity was not always highest at low latitudes. We found that latitude, depth, substrate, and year were all important descriptors of fish and invertebrate diversity. Invertebrate richness and taxonomic diversity were highest at high latitudes and in deeper waters. Fish richness also increased with latitude, but exhibited a hump-shaped relationship with depth, increasing with depth up to the continental shelf break, ~200 m depth, and then decreasing in deeper waters. We found relationships between fish taxonomic and functional diversity and latitude, depth, substrate, and time at the regional scale, but not at the coast-wide scale, suggesting that coast-wide patterns can obscure important correlates at smaller scales. Our study provides insight into complex diversity patterns of the deep water soft substrate benthic ecosystems off the US West Coast.

With the ongoing crisis of biodiversity loss and limited resources for conservation, the concept of biodiversity hotspots has been useful in determining conservation priority areas. However, there has been limited research into how temporal variability in biodiversity may influence conservation area prioritization. To address this information gap, we present an approach to evaluate the temporal consistency of biodiversity hotspots in large marine ecosystems. Using a large scale, public monitoring dataset collected over an eight year period off the US Pacific Coast, we developed a methodological approach for avoiding biases associated with hotspot delineation. We aggregated benthic fish species data from research trawls and calculated mean hotspot thresholds for fish species richness and Shannon's diversity indices over the eight year dataset. We used a spatial frequency distribution method to assign hotspot designations to the grid cells annually. We found no areas containing consistently high biodiversity through the entire study period based on the mean thresholds, and no grid cell was designated as a hotspot for greater than 50% of the time-series. To test if our approach was sensitive to sampling effort and the geographic extent of the survey, we followed a similar routine for the northern region of the survey area. Our finding of low consistency in benthic fish biodiversity hotspots over time was upheld, regardless of biodiversity metric used, whether thresholds were calculated per year or across all years, or the spatial extent for which we calculated thresholds and identified hotspots. Our results suggest that static measures of benthic fish biodiversity off the US West Coast are insufficient for identification of hotspots and that long-term data are required to appropriately identify patterns of high temporal variability in biodiversity for these highly mobile taxa. Given that ecological communities are responding to a changing climate and other environmental perturbations, our work highlights the need for scientists and conservation managers to consider both spatial and temporal dynamics when designating biodiversity hotspots.

Fraternity/sorority life is a complex profession with a high turnover rate of professional staff members. In this qualitative study of 11 new fraternity/sorority professionals following their first year in their roles, we examine how new professionals perceive and navigate expertise. We then present implications for practice and research in fraternity/sorority life and student affairs more broadly.

BACKGROUND: Filoviruses, including Ebola virus, are unusual in being filamentous animal viruses. Structural data on the arrangement, stoichiometry and organisation of the component molecules of filoviruses has until now been lacking, partially due to the need to work under level 4 biological containment. The present study provides unique insights into the structure of this deadly pathogen. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We have investigated the structure of Ebola virus using a combination of cryo-electron microscopy, cryo-electron tomography, sub-tomogram averaging, and single particle image processing. Here we report the three-dimensional structure and architecture of Ebola virus and establish that multiple copies of the RNA genome can be packaged to produce polyploid virus particles, through an extreme degree of length polymorphism. We show that the helical Ebola virus inner nucleocapsid containing RNA and nucleoprotein is stabilized by an outer layer of VP24-VP35 bridges. Elucidation of the structure of the membrane-associated glycoprotein in its native state indicates that the putative receptor-binding site is occluded within the molecule, while a major neutralizing epitope is exposed on its surface proximal to the viral envelope. The matrix protein VP40 forms a regular lattice within the envelope, although its contacts with the nucleocapsid are irregular. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study demonstrate a modular organization in Ebola virus that accommodates a well-ordered, symmetrical nucleocapsid within a flexible, tubular membrane envelope.

Efforts to mitigate bias in faculty hiring processes are well-documented in the literature. Yet, significant barriers to the hiring of racially minoritized and White women in many STEM fields remain. An underreported barrier to inclusive hiring is assessment of risk. Guided by theory from behavioral economics, social psychology, and decision-making, we examine the inner workings of five faculty search committees to understand how committee members identified and assessed risk with particular attention to assessments of risk that became intermingled with social biases. Committees identified and assessed five risks, including candidate interest, candidate disciplinary expertise, candidate competence, candidate collegiality, and the timing and oversight of the search process itself. We discuss implications of risk identification and assessment for effective and inclusive searches.

The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd-edition (ADOS-2) Toddler Module is the current gold-standard measure of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental condition more frequently diagnosed in toddler boys than girls. Some evidence suggests that behaviors assessed by the Toddler Module may capture an ASD phenotype that is more common among boys than girls. Focus on these behaviors may contribute to sex differences in ASD diagnoses. Particularly, the ADOS-2 may equivalently weight social communication behaviors on which boys and girls are expected to look similar and behaviors that which girls may, due to early socialization, perform differently than boys. As a consequence, the Toddler Module may fail to identify ASD in girls who should qualify for the diagnosis. The current study examined the possibility that some ADOS-2 items may function differently for boys and girls by testing the degree to which eight items equivalently related to a social communication latent factor across sexes in toddlers with suspected ASD. Inconsistent with hypotheses, tests of differential item functioning revealed no evidence of sex differences, suggesting that the Toddler Module assesses these eight items similarly for boys and girls. Examination of factor loadings point to Creativity/Imagination as an area of interest for future research.

This study examined the use of an iPhone and the List Recorder Application to teach three adolescents with autism spectrum disorder to acquire, maintain, and generalize interpersonal daily living skills (DLS) in a community setting. A multiple probe design across participants was used to teach participants to use interpersonal DLS to order and purchase coffee and a snack. All three participants demonstrated an increase in their use of interpersonal skills in the community. Participants were able to maintain these skills once the intervention was removed during follow-up and to generalize these skills to a novel community setting. Results indicate that the use of mobile technology can effectively be used to teach DLS, inclusive of interpersonal skills, entirely in a community setting.

Many studies have estimated the adverse effects of climate change on crop yields, however, this literature almost universally assumes a constant geographic distribution of crops in the future. Movement of growing areas to limit exposure to adverse climate conditions has been discussed as a theoretical adaptive response but has not previously been quantified or demonstrated at a global scale. Here, we assess how changes in rainfed crop area have already mediated growing season temperature trends for rainfed maize, wheat, rice, and soybean using spatially-explicit climate and crop area data from 1973 to 2012. Our results suggest that the most damaging impacts of warming on rainfed maize, wheat, and rice have been substantially moderated by the migration of these crops over time and the expansion of irrigation. However, continued migration may incur substantial environmental costs and will depend on socio-economic and political factors in addition to land suitability and climate.