Online petitions are an important avenue for direct political action, yet the dynamics that determine when a petition will be successful are not well understood. Here we analyze the temporal characteristics of online-petition signing behavior in order to identify systematic differences between popular petitions, which receive a high volume of signatures, and unpopular ones. We find that, in lin...

Antarctica is widely regarded as one of the planet's last true wildernesses, insulated from threat by its remoteness and declaration as a natural reserve dedicated to peace and science. However, rapidly growing human activity is accelerating threats to biodiversity. We determined how well the existing protected-area system represents terrestrial biodiversity and assessed the risk to protected a...

Trying to anticipate the future of tourism may be a particularly fraught task. However, this does not mean that trying to predict the future of tourism is not without value. From a business perspective, examining the future enables firms to anticipate new business conditions and develop new strategies. From a destination perspective, reflections on the future enable consideration of how to main...

Self-exciting point processes describe the manner in which every event facilitates the occurrence of succeeding events, as in the case of epidemics or human activity. By increasing excitability, the event occurrences start to exhibit bursts even in the absence of external stimuli. We revealed that the transition is uniquely determined by the average number of events added by a single event, 1-1...

We study the impact of human activity patterns on information diffusion. To this end we ran a viral email experiment involving 31,183 individuals in which we were able to track a specific piece of information through the social network. We found that, contrary to traditional models, information travels at an unexpectedly slow pace. By using a branching model which accurately describes the exper...

We study the susceptible-infected model with power-law waiting time distributions P(τ)~τ^{-α}, as a model of spreading dynamics under heterogeneous human activity patterns. We found that the average number of new infections n(t) at time t decays as a power law in the long-time limit, n(t)~t^{-β}, leading to extremely slow prevalence decay. We also found that the exponent in the spreading dynami...

Changes in land cover have become key components of global environmental change and represent the impact of human activity. To better understand the fundamental processes of land transition characteristics before and after the implementation of ecological programmes, we determined the dominant systematic changes in land cover in Yongshou, a hilly-gully region on the Loess Plateau. This was achi...

Readers ask what I meant in my previous column by saying: ‘The basis for all organised human activity, whether governing a country, changing a job or undertaking a randomised controlled trial, is not facts. It is ideas that drive us’. As with politics or employment, so it is with public health nutrition. Here’s how the philosopher of science Steve Fuller makes the point: ‘The most salient featu...

Introduction / objectives Work accidents are events that occur in the environment of workers according to their activities. The work is an important human activity which brings a gain both professional and personal, but submittingfails as well . This study aims to analyze the main occupational risks that health professionals are subjected in their work activities, and reflect measures that can ...

Understanding which factors affect the distribution pattern of extremely small populations is essential to the protection and propagation of rare and endangered plant species. In this study, we established 108 plots covering the entire Hainan Island, and measured the appearance frequency and species richness of plant species with extremely small populations, as well as the ecological environmen...