Traits do not evolve independently. To understand how trait changes under selection might constrain adaptive changes, phenotypic and genetic correlations are typically considered within species, but these capture constraints across a few generations rather than evolutionary time. For longer-term constraints, comparisons are needed across species but associations may arise because of correlated ...

Heat stress is an effective factor on immune responses, body weight, egg production and egg quality of chickens. The major effect of heat stress is due to decreased food intake and alteration in acid-base balance. During the recent years, efforts to improve laying performance at high temperatures have been relatively successful. Supplementation of the diet or drinking water with special nutrien...

Recent studies have examined the role of anthropogenic emissions in the probability of extreme weather events. These studies examine an event aggregated over a spatial domain, but the dependence on domain definition is unknown. Here we investigate this dependence for the frequency of daily weather extremes across South Africa using a climate model run under both a real-world and a nongreenhouse...

Compound climate extremes are receiving increasing attention because of their disproportionate impacts on humans and ecosystems. However, risks assessments generally focus on univariate statistics. We analyze the co-occurrence of hot and dry summers and show that these are correlated, inducing a much higher frequency of concurrent hot and dry summers than what would be assumed from the independ...

Climate warming is expected to increase the exposure of insects to hot events (involving a few hours at extreme high temperatures). These events are unlikely to cause widespread mortality but may modify population dynamics via impacting life history traits such as adult fecundity and egg hatching. These effects and their potential impact on population predictions are still largely unknown. In t...

The presence of Cryptococcus spp. has been reported in Mexico's capital city; however, to our knowledge there are no reports of its presence in the state of Nuevo León located in northeast Mexico. This is presumed to be because the hot and dry climate in this region does not favor cryptococcal proliferation. This study confirmed the presence of C. neoformans and C. albidus in 20% (10/50) of ran...

"Climate dice," describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons, have become more and more "loaded" in the past 30 y, coincident with rapid global warming. The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more th...

Metabolic rate, a physiological trait closely related to fitness traits, is expected to evolve in response to two main environmental variables: (1) climate, low metabolic rates being found in dry and hot regions when comparing populations originating from different climates in a common garden experiment and (2) resource limitations, low metabolic rates being selected when resources are limited....

At present, China is going through a rapid rate of mass urbanisation, and this poses a number of challenges for the building sector. On one hand, under new directives from the government, new buildings will have stricter energy requirements and existing buildings will also need to lower their rate of energy consumption, on another hand, the lifetime of buildings are now intended to last longer,...