There is a common view among social and public health scientists that there is an evidence-based medicine (EBM) juggernaut, a powerful, naive, and overweening attempt to impose an inappropriately narrow and medical model of experimentation onto a complex social world. We have both frequently come across hostility among social scientists, and public health or health promotion practitioners or th...

Fortification of foods such as salt has been shown to be an effective way to ensure pregnant women get adequate iodine, a critical nutrient for proper brain growth. But dietary and food production shifts in the past few decades have resulted in dramatically decreased population levels of iodine, with potentially devastating effects for babies of iodine-deficient mothers.

Over the last decade we have been witnessing a tremendous increase in the capacities of our computation and communication systems On the one hand processor speeds have been increasing exponentially doubling every months or so while network bandwidth has followed a similar if not higher rate of improvement doubling every months or so Unfortunately applications that communicate frequently using s...

Models occupy a central role in the scientific endeavour. Among the many purposes they serve, representation is of great importance. Many models are representations of something else; they stand for, depict, or imitate a selected part of the external world (often referred to as target system, parent system, original, or prototype). Well-known examples include the model of the solar system, the ...

Range shifts of many species are now documented as a response to global warming. But whether these observed changes are occurring fast enough remains uncertain and hardly quantifiable. Here, we developed a simple framework to measure change in community composition in response to climate warming. This framework is based on a community temperature index (CTI) that directly reflects, for a given ...

1 Département de Biochimie, Centre Robert-Cedergren, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2 Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, United States of America, 3 Department of Zoology, The Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom, 4 Université Paris 6, UMR 7138 "Systématique, Adaptation, Evolution" UPMC CNRS IRD MHNH, Paris, ...

Several approaches have been proposed to model spatiotemporal phenomena at multiple LoDs, in particularly, under the granular computing research area, where a granularities-based model was proposed. Such model stands out from the related literature, but has two major limitations. On one hand, it has difficulties for describing regions, intervals of time, among others complex descriptions, and o...

Allergic diseases, such as atopic eczema, food allergy, rhinitis and wheezing disorders are among the most fre­ quent complaints, especially in childhood. The current evidence also attests that type I allergic reactions are becoming more and more widespread, affecting up to 20% of the population. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently estimated that approximately 300 million people suffer...