Housing affordability is the relationship between households’ income and housing expenditure. The public are very concerned about the high price of residential housing in Beijing, which is considered go beyond the income of average citizens. In order to fully understand the China’s real estate market, the paper first analyses the land policy, housing reform and housing finance, etc. Then this p...

Influenza has a long history of causing morbidity and mortality in the human population through routine seasonal spread and global pandemics. The high mutation rate of the RNA genome of the influenza virus, combined with assortment of its multiple genomic segments, promote antigenic diversity and new subtypes, allowing the virus to evade vaccines and become resistant to antiviral drugs. There i...

1. Although populations harbour considerable diversity, most ecological studies still assume they are homogeneous. However, mounting evidence suggests that intraspecific diversity is not only common, but also important for interactions with community members. Here, intraspecific variation in Daphnia dentifera in haemoglobin content is shown to be a marker of hypolimnion use. 2. Hypolimnion use ...

Tetrapod biodiversity today is great; over the past 400 Myr since vertebrates moved onto land, global tetrapod diversity has risen exponentially, punctuated by losses during major extinctions. There are links between the total global diversity of tetrapods and the diversity of their ecological roles, yet no one fully understands the interplay of these two aspects of biodiversity and a numerical...

The taxonomic status of Amphinemura palmeni, a rare stonefly from northern Fennoscandia, was re-evaluated in a morphological study combined with analyses of mitochondrial COI and nuclear 28S sequences. Taxon sampling included A. standfussi, with which A. palmeni has been confused, the Nearctic A. linda and seven other Amphinemura species. Amphinemura palmeni is confirmed as a valid species, and...

OBJECTIVES Female smoking is predicted to double between 2005 and 2025. There have been numerous calls for action on women's tobacco use over the past two decades. In the present work, evidence about female tobacco use, progress, challenges and ways forward for developing gendered tobacco control is reviewed. METHODS Literature on girls, women and tobacco was reviewed to identify trends and d...

Much of the research in cross-cultural psychology is done using countries (national cultures) as main units of comparison, disregarding other important characteristics of the participants such as their ethnicity, language, religious or territorial affiliation. Thus, despite the fact that there exist clearly distinguishable sub-cultures within many countries or national cultures, they are often ...

Recognition of pathogens relies on families of proteins showing great diversity. Here we construct maximum entropy models of the sequence repertoire, building on recent experiments that provide a nearly exhaustive sampling of the IgM sequences in zebrafish. These models are based solely on pairwise correlations between residue positions but correctly capture the higher order statistical propert...

We provide information regarding the composition of the amphibian community at Yanayacu Biological Station, on the Amazonian slopes of the Andes of Ecuador, and describe a new species of Pristimantis that is referred to the P. myersi group. The new species is distinguished from other species of the group mainly by its color pattern, and by lacking ulnar and tarsal tubercles. The advertisement c...

One of the challenges that global software development teams face is the development of rich and meaningful interactions among members from different countries. Researchers and practitioners in the field are constantly looking for factors that may help organizations understand and mitigate the negative effects that nationality diversity may have on performance in global teams. This paper follow...