Who owns the data?

About ten years ago, a group of scientists began to argue that it was unfair to ask other scientists to pay to read the results of research that had been publicly funded.     

Who owns the Brazilian carbon?

Brazil is one of the major contributors to land‐use change emissions, mostly driven by agricultural expansion for food, feed, and bioenergy feedstock. Policies to avoid deforestation related to private commitments, economic incentives, and other support schemes are expected to improve the effectiveness of current command and control mechanisms increasingly. However, until recently, land tenure was unknown for much of the Brazilian territory, which has undermined the governance of native vegetation and challenged support and incentive mechanisms for avoiding deforestation. We assess the total extent of public governance mechanisms protecting aboveground carbon (AGC) stocks. We constructed a land tenure dataset for the entire nation and modeled the effects and uncertainties of major land‐use acts on protecting AGC stocks. Roughly 70% of the AGC stock in Brazil is estimated to be under legal protection, and an additional 20% is expected to be protected after areas in the Amazon with currently undesignated land undergo a tenure regularization. About 30% of the AGC stock is on private land, of which roughly two‐thirds are protected. The Cerrado, Amazon, and Caatinga biomes hold about 40%, 30%, and 20% of the unprotected AGC, respectively. Effective conservation of protected and unprotected carbon will depend on successful implementation of the Forest Act, and regularization of land tenure in the Amazon. Policy development that prioritizes unprotected AGC stocks is warranted to promote conservation of native vegetation beyond the legal requirements. However, different biomes and land tenure structures may require different policy settings considering local and regional specifics. Finally, the fate of current AGC stocks relies upon effective implementation of command and control mechanisms, considering that unprotected AGC in native vegetation on private land only accounts for 6.5% of the total AGC stock.     

Who owns sturgeon in the Caspian? New theoretical model of social responses towards state conservation policy

This article explores responses to the implementation of Russian sturgeon conservation policy in three fishing communities (in Dagestan, Kalmykia and the Volga River delta areas), along the Western and Northern coasts of the Caspian Sea. Enforcement of regulatory measures has led to complex socio-cultural responses. We show how social responses to conservation policy generate various forms of poaching. An analytical model of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ forms of poaching is analyzed against three regulatory measures: introduction of specially designated fishing areas in Russia’s Caspian fisheries, border zone expansion and the ban on sturgeon fishing. We explain why in Kalmykia the policy led people to stop practicing hard forms of sturgeon fishing, while fishermen in Dagestan responded in a more complex manner by displaying resistance towards the new policies.     

"Who owns your poop?": insights regarding the intersection of human microbiome research and the ELSI aspects of biobanking and related studies

Background

While the social, ethical, and legal implications of biobanking and large scale data sharing are already complicated enough, they may be further compounded by research on the human microbiome.

Discussion

The human microbiome is the entire complement of microorganisms that exists in and on every human body. Currently most biobanks focus primarily on human tissues and/or associated data (e.g. health records). Accordingly, most discussions in the social sciences and humanities on these issues are focused (appropriately so) on the implications of biobanks and sharing data derived from human tissues. However, rapid advances in human microbiome research involve collecting large amounts of data on microorganisms that exist in symbiotic relationships with the human body. Currently it is not clear whether these microorganisms should be considered part of or separate from the human body. Arguments can be made for both, but ultimately it seems that the dichotomy of human versus non-human and self versus non-self inevitably breaks down in this context. This situation has the potential to add further complications to debates on biobanking.

Summary

In this paper, we revisit some of the core problem areas of privacy, consent, ownership, return of results, governance, and benefit sharing, and consider how they might be impacted upon by human microbiome research. Some of the issues discussed also have relevance to other forms of microbial research. Discussion of these themes is guided by conceptual analysis of microbiome research and interviews with leading Canadian scientists in the field.

     

Does the weight of the brain depend on the body height?]

Brains of 1664 subjects (895 males and 769 females) aged from 20 to 89 years have been studied. The whole material being investigated was divided, within sex groups, into body-height classes and age classes. The class interval within the age classes was 10 years, that in height classes 5 cm. Mean arithmetics, standard deviations, standard error as well as coefficients of variation and correlation for respective classes have been calculated. It has been ascertained that the brain weight depends on the body height. In tall subjects no brains of extremely low absolute weight are encountered and, adversely, high brain weight is seldom met in short individuals. The body height also exerts certain influence upon the relative weight of the brain. More favourable proportion between the brain weight and the body length has been revealed in short subjects. Tall individuals are characterized by a low relative weight of the brain. It should be supposed that the spinal cord weight is higher in the latter subjects. The differences between the mean absolute weight of women's brains and that in men of the same age class are conditioned by the difference in the body length. A constant magnitude of difference in the mean brain weight in subjects of the same body height claims 100 g. The paper provides 2 enclosed tables representing obtained results for arithmetic mean of the absolute brain weight both in the age classes and body height classes. The differences between the mean weights of brains in women as well as in men are not significant. The coefficient of correlation between the brain weight and the body height is for men r male1 = 0.2008 for women r female1 = 0.2630, wherease the coefficient of regression for the brain weight is r male2 = 3.67 and r female2 = 3.906 respectively.     

Is the body the self? Women and body image

This paper discusses how women's body image or experience of the body influences their identity and self-image. What are the implications of this tendency to equate the body and the self? For many women, being a dieter represents not only something that they do, but also an important aspect of how they see themselves. We propose that choosing to become a chronic dieter is a means of regulating not just one's feelings, but also one's identity and self-image when those central aspects of the self feel threatened. Weight-loss dieting is often unsuccessful, however, and repeated dieting attempts may increase weight as often as they reduce it, so using body shape to determine self-worth or identity is a maladaptive strategy for most women.     

Who listens to mother? A whole-family perspective on the evolution of maternal hormone allocation

Maternal effects, or the influence of maternal environment and phenotype on offspring phenotype, may allow mothers to fine-tune their offspring's developmental trajectory and resulting phenotype sometimes long after the offspring has reached independence. However, maternal effects on offspring phenotype do not evolve in isolation, but rather within the context of a family unit, where the separate and often conflicting evolutionary interests of mothers, fathers and offspring are all at play. While intrafamilial conflicts are routinely invoked to explain other components of reproductive strategy, remarkably little is known about how intrafamilial conflicts influence maternal effects. We argue that much of the considerable variation in the relationship between maternally derived hormones, nutrients and other compounds and the resulting offspring phenotype might be explained by the presence of conflicting selection pressures on different family members. In this review, we examine the existing literature on maternal hormone allocation as a case study for maternal effects more broadly, and explore new hypotheses that arise when we consider current findings within a framework that explicitly incorporates the different evolutionary interests of the mother, her offspring and other family members. Specifically, we hypothesise that the relationship between maternal hormone allocation and offspring phenotype depends on a mother's ability to manipulate the signals she sends to offspring, the ability of family members to be plastic in their response to those signals and the capacity for the phenotypes and strategies of various family members to interact and influence one another on both behavioural and evolutionary timescales. We also provide suggestions for experimental, comparative and theoretical work that may be instrumental in testing these hypotheses. In particular, we highlight that manipulating the level of information available to different family members may reveal important insights into when and to what extent maternal hormones influence offspring development. We conclude that the evolution of maternal hormone allocation is likely to be shaped by the conflicting fitness optima of mothers, fathers and offspring, and that the outcome of this conflict depends on the relative balance of power between family members. Extending our hypotheses to incorporate interactions between family members, as well as more complex social groups and a wider range of taxa, may provide exciting new developments in the fields of endocrinology and maternal effects.