OBJECTIVES Increasingly, support for water fluoridation has come under attack. We seek an explanation, focusing on the case of Waterloo, Ontario, where a 2010 referendum overturned its water fluoridation program. In particular, we test whether individuals perceive the risks of water fluoridation based not on 'hard' scientific evidence but on heuristics and cultural norms. METHODS A sample of ...

Observed patterns of genetic variability among marine populations are shaped not only by contemporary levels of gene flow, but also by divergences during historical isolations. We examined variability at 15 SNP loci and in mtDNA sequences (COI, 665 bp) in red king crab from 17 localities in the North Pacific. These markers define three geographically distinct evolutionary lineages (SNPs, F(CT) ...

Four new species and a new genus of lucinid bivalves are described from shallow and deeper waters in the Indian and West Pacific Oceans. The new genus Scabrilucina (subfamily Lucininae) includes the little-known Scabrilucina victorialis (Melvill, 1899) from the Arabian Sea and Scabrilucina vitrea (Deshayes, 1844) from the Andaman Sea as well as a new species Scabrilucina melvilli from the Torre...

We review a general framework of pressure effects on the structures formed by entropically driven self-assembly (for example, denaturation of proteins from their native structure and dissociation of ordered structure of the amyloid fibril occur at high pressures). In the framework, the translational entropy of water is an essential factor. Our findings are as follows: at low pressures, the stru...

Recently, it was shown that the spectral graph theory is exceptionally useful for understanding not only morphological structural differences in ion aggregates but also similarities between an ion network and a water H-bonding network in highly concentrated salt solutions. Here, we present spectral graph analysis results on osmolyte aggregates and water H-bonding network structures in aqueous r...

In conditions that mimic those of the living cell, where various biomolecules and other components are present, DNA strands can adopt many structures in addition to the canonical B-form duplex. Previous studies in the presence of cosolutes that induce molecular crowding showed that thermal stabilities of DNA structures are associated with the properties of the water molecules around the DNAs. T...

Equilibrium structures and the respective binding energies of acetic acid monohydrates and dihydrates have been determined by density-functional theory calculations with different basis sets, including 6-31+G(3d,p), 6-311++G(d,p), and 6-311++G(3df,3pd). Given that the C=O and OH groups in acetic acid provide the predominant hydrogen-bonding interactions with water, six stable conformer structur...

We performed a series of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations on Nafion membranes which contain various quantities of water and methanol. The simulations gave a variety of nanoscale phase separated structures, such as cluster structures, channel structures, and cluster-channel structures. This is the first work that an atomistic MD simulation reproduced such nanoscale phase separations from rand...

Water and hydrogen at high pressure make up a substantial fraction of the interiors of giant planets. Using ab initio random structure search methods we investigate the ground-state crystal structures of water, hydrogen, and hydrogen-oxygen compounds. We find that, at pressures beyond 14 Mbar, excess hydrogen is incorporated into the ice phase to form a novel structure with H4O stoichiometry. W...