Body sizes of insular mammals often differ strikingly from those of their mainland conspecifics. Small islands have reduced numbers of competitor and predator species, and more limited resources. Such reductions are believed to select for predictable changes in body sizes, with large mammals growing progressively smaller as island area decreases, while small ones grow progressively larger. Medi...

Modern diagnostic methods enable clinicians to look beyond a diagnosis of chronic Q fever and discern whether patients instead have persistent focalized Coxiella burnetii infection(s). Use of these methods and development of criteria to define and treat such infections, especially cardiovascular infections, will improve the prognosis for patients previously thought to have chronic Q fever.

Given that the core issues of attention research have been recognized for millenia, we do not know as much about attention as we should. I argue that the reasons for this failure are (1) we create spurious dichotomies, (2) we reify attention, treating it as a cause, when it is an effect, and (3) we equate a collection of facts with a theory. In order to correct these errors, we need a new techn...

Is the Introspection Thesis true? It certainly isn’t obvious. Introspection is the faculty by which each of us has access to his or her own mental states. Even if we were to suppose that mental states are identical to brain states, it doesn’t follow immediately from this supposition that we can introspect our mental states as brain states. This point is analogous to the following. It doesn’t fo...

conomists love to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. But the Chilean government agency responsible for school grants, Junta Nacional de Auxilio Escolar y Becas (JUNAEB), is an exception to the rule. During the school year, JUNAEB provides breakfast and lunch for 2 million children in primary and secondary public schools. In a developing country where about 14 percent of children u...

Captive carnivores are susceptible to a wide array of infectious and parasitic diseases, which reflects the diversity of the seven families of Carnivora. Unfortunately, relatively few in-depth studies have been conducted on diseases of non-domestic carnivores, and much remains to be learned, especially regarding diseases of small carnivores (e.g. mustelids, viverrids and procyonids). The more i...

Manuscript 1001; Received 14 Feb 2003; Revised finally accepted 29 April 2004; © Zoo Outreach Organisation 1540 ABSTRACT Helminthiasis in wild carnivores can cause high morbidity and mortality specially in young ones. This paper discusses in brief on the occurrence of helminthic infestation in wild carnivores as reported from India. They suffer from trematodes, cestodes, nematodes and acanthoce...

Cats and dogs have relatively good sound-localization acuity, and the question arises as to whether this trait is a characteristic of all carnivores or whether it is due to the fact that they have large heads and correspondingly large binaural localization cues available to them. The localization acuity of the least weasel, the smallest extant carnivore, was found to be less accurate than large...

Species that respond to ecosystem change in a timely, measurable, and interpretable way can be used as sentinels of global change. Contrary pervasive view, we suggest that, among Carnivora, small carnivores are more appropriate than large carnivores. This reasoning is built around six key points: compared carnivores, 1) species-rich diverse, providing potential many systems; 2) occupy wider ran...