1 I acknowledge a major intellectual debt to members of the NAS panel on Transitions to Adulthood in Developing Countries, which I served as chair, as well as to Ann Blanc, who served as a consultant to the panel. While most of the tabulations presented here have been specially prepared for this paper, the ideas and the basic approach to the topics covered in this paper have their origins in th...

Theories suggest that, in cooperatively breeding species, female control over paternity and reproductive output may affect male reproductive skew and group stability. Female paternity control may come about through cryptic female choice or female reproductive behaviour, but experimental studies are scarce. Here, we show a new form of female paternity control in a cooperatively polyandrous cichl...

There is growing evidence that the reproductive schedules of female mammals can be affected by conditions experienced during early development, with low parental investment leading to accelerated life-history strategies in the offspring. In humans, the relationships between early-life conditions and timing of puberty are well studied, but much less attention has been paid to reproductive behavi...

background: thalassemic disorders are the most prevalent monogenic hereditary diseases around the world caused by decreased and altered synthesis or agenesis in one or more globin chains. families who have a child with thalassemia major face a myriad of significant problems. hormozgan province ranks second with thalassemic patients in iran. therefore, current research is aimed to analyze the re...

Rats emit distinct types of ultrasonic vocalizations, which differ depending on age, the subject's current state and environmental factors. Since it was shown that 50-kHz calls can serve as indices of the animal's positive subjective state, they have received increasing experimental attention, and have successfully been used to study neurobiological mechanisms of positive affect. However, it is...

Of the various disciplines within the animal sciences, the issue of animal welfare has been most closely associated with ethology, the study of animal behavior. Prior to the modern welfare movement, applied ethology was primarily involved in studies on feeding and reproductive behavior. The emphasis on freedom of movement and mental experiences in animal welfare resulted in the field of applied...

Mating induces pronounced changes in female reproductive behavior, typically including a dramatic reduction in sexual receptivity. In Drosophila, postmating behavioral changes are triggered by sex peptide (SP), a male seminal fluid peptide that acts via a receptor (SPR) expressed in sensory neurons (SPSNs) of the female reproductive tract. Here, we identify second-order neurons that mediate the...

BACKGROUND HIV-negative members of sero-discordant couples are at high risk for HIV acquisition but few behavioral prevention interventions have been implemented in sub-Saharan Africa and discordance is not well understood by couples themselves. METHODS In this nested sub-study, we interviewed 40 HIV sero-discordant couples before and after a 6-month behavioral intervention that was comprised...

BACKGROUND A growing number of middle-income countries are scaling up youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health pilot projects to national level programmes. Yet, there are few case studies on successful national level scale-up of such programmes. Estonia is an excellent example of scale-up of a small grassroots adolescent sexual and reproductive health initiative to a national programme, wh...

Reproduction consists of various physiological events including fertilization, development of sexual characteristics, social behavior, maturation, and aging. Reproductive functions are ultimately regulated by the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis. Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) is a pivotal hypothalamic neuropeptide that regulates vertebrate reproduction (Schally et al., 1972). I...