Although the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) can be considered as one of the most extensively investigated carnivorous plants, knowledge is still scarce about diversity of the snap-trap motion, the functionality of snap traps under varying environmental conditions, and their opening motion. By conducting simple snap-trap closure experiments in air and under water, we present striking evidence...

Research examining dysfunctional attitudes in Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) has produced contrasting results. The present study sought to resolve this contradiction by addressing some methodological problems of the previous studies. The study examined dysfunctional attitudes using the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale (DAS) in individuals with SAD and never-depressed controls. The SAD group wer...

BACKGROUND Timely influenza surveillance is important to monitor influenza epidemics. OBJECTIVES (i) To calculate the epidemic threshold for influenza-like illness (ILI) and acute respiratory infections (ARI) in 19 countries, as well as the thresholds for different levels of intensity. (ii) To evaluate the performance of these thresholds. METHODS The moving epidemic method (MEM) has been de...

Background: Vulnerability to the reduction in natural light associated with fall/winter is generally accepted as the main trigger of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), whereas light therapy is a treatment of choice of the disorder. However, the relationship between exposure to light and mood regulation remains unclear. As compared with green light, blue light was shown to acutely modulate emoti...

Backgroud During 1980-1983 I was a scientist and General Secretary in the Nordic Council of Arctic Medical Research (NCAMR). This organization belonged to the Nordic Council of Ministers, and its office was situated at the University of Oulu, Finland. One of the purposes of NCARM was to promote scientific research related to adaptation of circumpolar people to their environment. My research int...

There is a growing recognition in the literature on business cycles that production technologies may give rise to complicated interactions between seasonal and cyclical movements in economic time series, which can distort business cycle inference based on seasonally adjusted data. For the most part, however, the empirical research in this area has relied on standard univariate seasonal adjustme...

This article reports a study of attitudes and beliefs about seasonal psychological cycles in a sample of 160 people living in London. Participants rated their perceptions of seasonal fluctuations on cognitive, emotional, physical, and social functioning in themselves, in others at the same latitude, and in the Arctic population by means of the Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire and a spe...

Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3rd person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer's perspective, whereas 2nd person pronouns support an actor's perspective. The direction of the effect for 1st person pronouns seems to depend on the situational context. In ...

Understanding how risks to human health change as a result of seasonal variations in environmental conditions is likely to become of increasing importance in the context of climatic change, especially in lower-income countries. A multi-disciplinary approach can be a useful tool for improving understanding, particularly in situations where existing data resources are limited but the environmenta...

a study was conducted to determine the copper status of different classes of grazing sheep during twodifferent seasons on a farm located in southern punjab, pakistan. a complete free-choice supplement wasavailable to all animals throughout the year. soil, forage and blood plasma from animals were taken eighttimes during the year (2005) (four times in both summer and winter seasons). soil cu2+ w...