The spread of invasive species is a major component of global ecological change and how and when to manage particular species is a diicult empirical question. Ideally, these decisions should be based on the speciic impacts of invading species including both their efects on native competitors and how they may or may not play similar roles in broader ecosystem functioning. Halophila stipulacea is an invasive seagrass currently spreading through the Caribbean, and as seagrasses are...

Acinetobacter baumannii, a Gram-negative opportunistic pathogen, is a leading cause of hospital- and community-acquired infections. Acinetobacter baumannii can rapidly acquire diverse resistance mechanisms and undergo genetic modifications that confer resistance and persistence to all currently used clinical antibiotics. In this study, we found exogenous L-lysine sensitizes Acinetobacter baumannii, other Gram-negative bacteria (Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae) and a Gram-positive bacterium (Mycobacterium smegmatis) to aminoglycosides. Importantly, the combination of L-lysine with aminoglycosides killed clinically isolated multidrug-resistant...

Exceptionally well-preserved impressions of two bundles of bristles protrude from the apertures of small, spiral shells of Pelagiella exigua, recovered from the Kinzers Formation (Cambrian, Stage 4, “Olenellus Zone”, ~ 512 Ma) of Pennsylvania. These impressions are inferred to represent clusters of chitinous chaetae, comparable to those borne by annelid parapodia and some larval brachiopods. They provide an affirmative test in the early metazoan fossil record of the inference, from phylogenetic analyses of living taxa,...

Objectives Severe or critical COVID-19 is associated with intensive care unit admission, increased secondary infection rate, and would lead to significant worsened prognosis. Risks and characteristics relating to secondary infections in severe COVID-19 have not been described. Methods Severe and critical COVID-19 patients from Shanghai were included. We collected lower respiratory, urine, catheters, and blood samples according to clinical necessity and culture and mNGS were performed. Clinical and laboratory data were archived. Results We found...

Identifying population genetic structure is useful for inferring evolutionary process as well as defining subspecies boundaries and/or conservation units that can aid in species management. The American kestrel (Falco sparverius) is a widespread species with two described North American subspecies, (F. s. sparverius and F. s. paulus), the latter in the southeastern United States and the former across the remainder of its distribution. In many parts of their range, American kestrels have been declining, but...

Supplemental material, sj-xlsx-1-tam-10.1177_1758835920977117 for Low intratumor heterogeneity correlates with increased response to PD-1 blockade in renal cell carcinoma by Xia Ran, Jinyuan Xiao, Yi Zhang, Huajing Teng, Fang Cheng, Huiqian Chen, Kaifan Zhang and Zhongsheng Sun in Therapeutic Advances in Medical Oncology

The genetic control of gene expression is a core component of human physiology. For the past several years, transcriptome-wide association studies have leveraged large datasets of linked genotype and RNA sequencing information to create a powerful gene-based test of association that has been used in dozens of studies. While numerous discoveries have been made, the populations in the training data are overwhelmingly of European descent, and little is known about the generalizability of these models...

Despite the predominance of low-frequency hearing in anuran amphibians, a few frog species have evolved high-frequency communication within certain environmental contexts. Huia cavitympanum is the most remarkable anuran with regard to upper frequency limits; it is the first frog species known to emit exclusively ultrasonic signals. Characteristics of the Distortion Product Otoacoustic Emissions from the amphibian papilla and the basilar papilla were analysed to gain insight into the structures responsible for high-frequency/ultrasound sensitivity. Our results...

1. Two predominant anthropogenic impacts on ecosystems, nutrient enrichment and the removal of consumers, are predicted to interact in their effects on producer diversity. Yet, measures of diversity alone may not capture changes occurring in the underlying mechanisms structuring communities. Furthermore, evidence for these interactions in rocky intertidal systems is mixed and may be confounded by variable baseline productivity or short experimental durations that do not capture seasonality, environmental heterogeneity or successional processes. 2. We...

Fairy shrimp are integral components of vernal pool ecosystems, providing key food resources for migratory birds and amphibians. However, habitat degradation and land use change severely threaten the health of both vernal pools and the survival of fairy shrimp species. Branchinecta sandiegonensis has been particularly affected by urban and agricultural development in its small native range within San Diego County, California, USA. It is listed as an endangered species under both state and federal laws...

Craters are the most prevalent basins and potential depo-centers of sediment on Mars. Within these craters and extending from them, terminal dune fields and wind streaks are abundant, indicating active sediment transport and providing a way to study how wind and sediment interact with crater topography. Here, we explore the role of craters as both sources and sinks in the modern martian sedimentary cycle. Our results show that craters with low albedo wind streaks (indicative...

Ecological specialization has costs and benefits at various scales: traits benefitting an individual may disadvantage its population, species or clade. In particular, large body size and hypercarnivory (diet over 70% meat) have evolved repeatedly in mammals; yet large hypercarnivores are thought to be trapped in a macroevolutionary “ratchet”, marching unilaterally toward decline. Here, we weigh the impact of this specialization on extinction risk using the rich fossil record of North American canids (dogs). In two...

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) possess important regulatory effects on multiple myeloma (MM) progression. Here, we aimed at exploring the function of circ_0007841 in MM and the underlying molecular mechanism. Expression of circ_0007841, microRNA (miR)-129-5p and Jagged1 (JAG1) was determined via qRT-PCR or western blot assay. Methyl thiazolyl tetrazolium (MTT) assay was applied to examine cell viability and IC50 value of MM cells to bortezomib (BTZ). Colony formation assay was performed to analyze cell proliferation. Moreover, cell...

Urbanization affects key aspects of wildlife ecology. Dispersal in urban wildlife species may be impacted by geographical barriers but also by a species’ inherent behavioural variability. There are no functional connectivity analyses using continuous individual-based sampling across an urban-rural continuum that would allow a thorough assessment of the relative importance of physical and behavioural dispersal barriers. We used 16 microsatellite loci to genotype 374 red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) from the city of Berlin and surrounding...

These data contain vertical rates (mm/yr) of surface land displacements and their associated uncertainties from 2015-03-15 to 2019-06-01. They are associated with Buzzanga, B. A., Bekaert, D. P. S., Hamlington, B. D., and Sanga, S. (2020), "Towards Sustained Monitoring of Subsidence at the Coast Using InSAR and GNSS: An Application in Hampton Roads, Virginia submitted to Geophysical Research Letters.

Human cooperation is likely supported by our tendency to punish selfishness in others. Social norms play an important role in motivating third-party punishment, and also in explaining societal differences in prosocial behavior. However, there has been little work directly linking social norms to the development of third-party punishment across societies. In this study, we explored the impact of normative information on the development of third-party punishment in 603 children aged 4-14 years, across six diverse...

Tree death due to lightning influences tropical forest carbon cycling and tree community dynamics. However, the distribution of lightning damage among trees in forests remains poorly understood. We developed models to predict direct and secondary lightning damage to trees based on tree size, crown exposure, and local forest structure. We parameterized these models using data on the locations of lightning strikes and censuses of tree damage in strike zones, combined with drone-based maps of tree...

Supplemental material, sj-xlsx-2-tam-10.1177_1758835920977117 for Low intratumor heterogeneity correlates with increased response to PD-1 blockade in renal cell carcinoma by Xia Ran, Jinyuan Xiao, Yi Zhang, Huajing Teng, Fang Cheng, Huiqian Chen, Kaifan Zhang and Zhongsheng Sun in Therapeutic Advances in Medical Oncology

This dataset describes candidate signal detections obtained at the Green Bank Telescope in 2018 and 2019 and reprocessed with the 2020 UCLA SETI Group data processing pipeline. We conducted a search for technosignatures in April of 2018 and 2019 with the L-band receiver (1.15–1.73 GHz) of the 100 m diameter Green Bank Telescope. These observations focused on regions surrounding 31 Sun-like stars near the plane of the Galaxy. We present the results of our search...

The Dark Triad (DT) traits are differentially related to psychometrically assessed life history strategy (LHS), such that psychopathy is strongly associated with a faster LHS whereas narcissism appears to be, if anything, a slow LHS indicator. However, the research supporting these generalizations has been based largely on undergraduate samples in which LHS has been measured using the Arizona Life History Battery (ALHB) (or its short version the Mini-K), an instrument that arguably lacks adequate coverage...

Relaxed random walk (RRW) models of trait evolution introduce branch-specific rate multipliers to modulate the variance of a standard Brownian diffusion process along a phylogeny and more accurately model overdispersed biological data. Increased taxonomic sampling challenges inference under RRWs as the number of unknown parameters grows with the number of taxa. To solve this problem, we present a scalable method to efficiently fit RRWs and infer this branch-specific variation in a Bayesian framework. We develop...

Changes in the physical environment along the Antarctic Peninsula have been among the most rapid anywhere on the planet. In concert with environmental change, the potential for direct human disturbance resulting from tourism, scientific programs, and commercial fisheries continues to rise in the region. While seabirds, such as the gentoo penguin Pygoscelis papua, are commonly used to assess the impact of these disturbances on natural systems, research efforts are often hampered by limited spatial coverage...

Study-1-data and Study-2-data comprise responses to the Mini-K (Figueredo et al. 2006). The Study 1 participants were Amazon's Mechanincal Turk workers. The Study 2 participants were undergraduates at Oklahoma State University. Study-3-data comprises reponses to the K-SF-42 (Figueredo et al. 2017). Participants were Amazon's Mechanincal Turk workers. See the paper for additional information. R-code contains the code used to run the network analyses described in the paper. "Datafile" represents the file name of the data...

The fluid nature of the ocean, combined with planktonic dispersal of marine larvae, lowers physical barriers to gene flow. However, divergence can still occur despite gene flow if strong selection acts on populations occupying different ecological niches. Here, we examined the population genomics of an ectoparasitic snail, Coralliophila violacea (Kiener 1836), that specializes on Porites corals in the Indo-Pacific. Previous genetic analyses revealed two sympatric lineages associated with different coral hosts. In this study, we...

Soil microorganisms influence a variety of processes in plant communities. Many theoretical and empirical studies have shown that dynamic feedbacks between plants and soil microbes can stabilize plant coexistence by generating negative frequency-dependent plant population dynamics. However, inferring the net effects of soil microbes on plant coexistence requires also quantifying the degree to which they provide one species an average fitness advantage, an effect that has received little empirical attention. We conducted a greenhouse study...