while it is a well-known fact that geopolitics is a subject of boardroom discussions that has been derived from the debth of political science, there are those who consider it to be an academic discipline, independent of both political geography and political science. yet, an etymological review of the case proves that political geography must have gained prominance as a specialist field of aca...

Paul C. Cross,* James O. Lloyd-Smith, Philip L. F. Johnson and Wayne M. Getz Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA USGS, Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, USA Biophysics Graduate Group, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA Department of Zoology and Entomology, Mammal Research Institute, Univer...

E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Species comparisons are a cornerstone of biology and there is a long tradition of using the comparative framework to study the ecology and evolution of plant defensive traits. Early comparative studies led to the hypothesis that plant chemistry plays a central role in plant defence, and the evolution of plant secondary chemistry in response to insect herbivory...

BACKGROUND Evaluating the impact of federally funded research with a broad, methodical, and objective approach is important to ensure that public funds advance the mission of federal agencies. OBJECTIVES We aimed to develop a methodical approach that would yield a broad assessment of National Toxicology Program's (NTP's) effectiveness across multiple sectors and demonstrate the utility of the...

BACKGROUND Although adverse effects of high temperature on mortality have been studied extensively in urban areas, little is known of the heat-mortality associations outside of cities. OBJECTIVE We investigated whether heat-mortality associations differed between urban and nonurban areas and how urbanicity affected the vulnerability to heat-related mortality. METHODS We first analyzed heat-...

BACKGROUND The ashes and dust resulting from the 2011 eruptions of the Puyehue volcano in Chile more than doubled monthly averages of PM10 concentrations in Montevideo, Uruguay. Few studies have taken advantage of natural experiments to assess the relationship between ambient air pollutant concentrations and birth outcomes. OBJECTIVES In this study we explored the effect of particulate matter...

BACKGROUND Exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) has been associated with the progression of chronic liver diseases, yet the contribution of POPs to the development of fibrosis in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a condition closely linked to obesity, remains poorly documented. OBJECTIVES We investigated the effects of subchronic exposure to low doses of the POP 2,3,7,8-t...

BACKGROUND Exposure science studies the interactions and outcomes between environmental stressors and human or ecological receptors. To augment its role in understanding human health and the exposome, we aimed to centralize and integrate exposure science data into the broader biological framework of the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), a public resource that promotes understanding of ...

Advisory Group on Ionising Radiation. 2010. Circulatory Disease Risk. Report of the Independent Advisory Group on Ionising Radiation. London:Health Protection Agency. Available: http://www.hpa.org.uk/webc/HPAwebFile/ HPAweb_C/1284475204588 [accessed 8 November 2012]. Burnham KP, Anderson DR. 1998. Model Selection and Multimodel Inference: A Practical Information-Theoretic Approach. 2nd ed. New ...