Fireflies as a catalyst for science education

The study of fireflies makes an ideal subject for introducing students of all ages to the world of science, conservation biology, field studies and the importance of observation and understanding connections in the natural world.The synchronous fireflies, Photinus carolinus of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park's Elkmont Historic District can be used as a basis for classroom and field activities in subjects as diverse as conservation biology, economics, geography, ecology, governmental policy, zoology, history, taxonomy and animal behavior.Having been fascinated with the synchronous fireflies for over two decades, I will use the life cycle of the Elkmont Phontinus carolinus found in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as an example.     

Making our offices universally accessible: guidelines for physicians

OBJECTIVE: To develop recommendations for office-based physicians who wish to make their offices accessible to all patients. OPTIONS: Include taking steps to make offices more accessible, or not; offices may be accessible to varying degrees. OUTCOMES: Outcomes of accessibility involve patient-care, economic, ethical and legal issues. Stakeholders in these outcomes include patients, physicians, government and society. EVIDENCE: Data were obtained from a series of searches of MEDLINE, CINAHL and Healthstar (previously Health) databases for articles on disability and family medicine, primary (health) care and family practice, and on access and offices, and health services accessibility, and from a telephone survey of 50 stakeholders. VALUES: A high value was placed on services to persons with disabilities and on stakeholder input. Universal accessibility was valued as an overall goal; improved accessibility was also highly valued. BENEFITS, HARMS AND COSTS: Benefits to patients include improved access to care as guaranteed by the Canada Health Act and in keeping with provincial Human Rights Codes. Benefits to physicians include contact with a broader patient population and freedom from fear of litigation. Costs of improved accessibility vary depending on individual circumstances and on whether an office is being built or renovated; some improvement costs are minimal. RECOMMENDATIONS: All physicians should take measures to improve practice accessibility. Improved access should be considered in each of the following areas: transportation and entrance to the facility, entrance to the office, waiting rooms, rest rooms, examination rooms, general building features and other features. VALIDATION: No similar guidelines exist. To assess the content validity of these guidelines, the authors had a draft document reviewed by 18 stakeholders. All specific recommendations met the minimum criterion of adherence to current legislation, including national and provincial building codes. The specific recommendations are endorsed by the Canadian Paraplegic Association (national and Ontario offices), the DisAbled Women''s Network (Ontario) and the Centre for Independent Living (Toronto). SPONSORS: Development of these guidelines was supported in part by the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Toronto Hospital, Toronto, Ont.     

Making physiotherapy more accessible: open access for general practitioners to a physiotherapy department.

Open access to a physiotherapy outpatient department of a district general hospital was offered to general practitioners to whom domiciliary physiotherapy was already available. The effects of the new service have been monitored. Delays are reduced and consultants economise on time spent in merely confirming need for physiotherapy. Policies determining treatment, placing emphasis on prevention and self-help rather than prolonged treatment, are adhered to equally well by physiotherapists whether patients are referred directly or indirectly. It had proved unnecessary to restrict access to physiotherapy by insisting that general practitioners refer all patients first to consultant clinics. General practitioners have been sufficiently selective in referral and physiotherapists sufficiently economical in selecting treatment and determining its duration for the service to remain within the limits of available resources.     

Life support for life science innovation?

think tank and an investment bank have proposed solutions to address the lack of funding to carry biotech companies through the early stages of clinical development.     

Three-dimensional growth: a developmental innovation that facilitated plant terrestrialization

Journal of Plant Research - One of the most transformative events in the history of life on earth was the transition of plants from water to land approximately 470 million years ago. Within the...     

Hydra, a niche for cell and developmental plasticity

The silencing of genes whose expression is restricted to specific cell types and/or specific regeneration stages opens avenues to decipher the molecular control of the cellular plasticity underlying head regeneration in hydra. In this review, we highlight recent studies that identified genes involved in the immediate cytoprotective function played by gland cells after amputation; the early dedifferentiation of digestive cells into blastema-like cells during head regeneration, and the early late proliferation of neuronal progenitors required for head patterning. Hence, developmental plasticity in hydra relies on spatially restricted and timely orchestrated cellular modifications, where the functions played by stem cells remain to be characterized.     

肿瘤,一个发育生物学问题

发育生物学是研究生物变化过程的科学,尤其是对胚胎,因为胚胎是动植物从受精卵发育到成体的必经之途,是介于基因型和表型之间的过渡体。肿瘤,是分化异常、生长失控的细胞集合体,恶性肿瘤严重威胁着人们的身心健康。在发育生物学领域,人类对自身的认识,尤其是对受精卵到个体发育的解读在不断地探索。同样,人们对肿瘤的研究也在不断地深入。研究发现肿瘤细胞和胚胎细胞生物学行为存在某些相似之处,这启发人们从发育生物学角度去认识肿瘤的发生、发展。本文从发育生物学角度详细评述了肿瘤细胞的起源、胚胎与肿瘤相似性和差异性比较及肿瘤与胚胎相互作用的研究进展。     

How to Push Forward Science and Technology in China——About Research, Development，and Technological Innovation

It is out of question that China has achieved considerable advancements in science and technology. The worldwide spread of ＂Made in China＂ that gets on the western countries＇ nerves is a good illustration. However, although comparatively better than some other developing countries, we have to face the situation that science and technology in such a great nation as China is still seriously lagged behind, lacking great breakthroughs and top-ranking masters and leaders. That＇s why we feel uneasy in front of international colleagues.     

Galaxy-ML: An accessible,reproducible, and scalable machine learning toolkit for biomedicine

Supervised machine learning is an essential but difficult to use approach in biomedical data analysis. The Galaxy-ML toolkit (https://galaxyproject.org/community/machine-learning/) makes supervised machine learning more accessible to biomedical scientists by enabling them to perform end-to-end reproducible machine learning analyses at large scale using only a web browser. Galaxy-ML extends Galaxy (https://galaxyproject.org), a biomedical computational workbench used by tens of thousands of scientists across the world, with a suite of tools for all aspects of supervised machine learning.

This is a PLOS Computational Biology Software paper.

     

Creating multithemed ecological regions for macroscale ecology: Testing a flexible,repeatable, and accessible clustering method

Understanding broad‐scale ecological patterns and processes often involves accounting for regional‐scale heterogeneity. A common way to do so is to include ecological regions in sampling schemes and empirical models. However, most existing ecological regions were developed for specific purposes, using a limited set of geospatial features and irreproducible methods. Our study purpose was to: (1) describe a method that takes advantage of recent computational advances and increased availability of regional and global data sets to create customizable and reproducible ecological regions, (2) make this algorithm available for use and modification by others studying different ecosystems, variables of interest, study extents, and macroscale ecology research questions, and (3) demonstrate the power of this approach for the research question—How well do these regions capture regional‐scale variation in lake water quality? To achieve our purpose we: (1) used a spatially constrained spectral clustering algorithm that balances geospatial homogeneity and region contiguity to create ecological regions using multiple terrestrial, climatic, and freshwater geospatial data for 17 northeastern U.S. states (~1,800,000 km²); (2) identified which of the 52 geospatial features were most influential in creating the resulting 100 regions; and (3) tested the ability of these ecological regions to capture regional variation in water nutrients and clarity for ~6,000 lakes. We found that: (1) a combination of terrestrial, climatic, and freshwater geospatial features influenced region creation, suggesting that the oft‐ignored freshwater landscape provides novel information on landscape variability not captured by traditionally used climate and terrestrial metrics; and (2) the delineated regions captured macroscale heterogeneity in ecosystem properties not included in region delineation—approximately 40% of the variation in total phosphorus and water clarity among lakes was at the regional scale. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of this method for creating customizable and reproducible regions for research and management applications.     

Validating a low-cost,consumer force-measuring platform as an accessible alternative for measuring postural sway

The Zibrio SmartScale is a low-cost, portable force platform designed to perform an objective assessment of postural stability. The purpose of the present study was to validate the center of pressure (COP) measurements in the Zibrio SmartScale. Simultaneous COP data was collected by a Zibrio SmartScale and a laboratory-grade force platform (LFP) under the dynamic motion of an inverted pendulum device intended to mimic the sway of a standing human. The inverted pendulum was placed on the Zibrio SmartScale which was placed on the LFP. The pendulum was then displaced to angles of 3° and 5° in both the anterior-posterior (AP) and medial–lateral (ML) directions. The findings of this study show low mean average error (MAE) among the measures taken simultaneously upon the LFP and Zibrio SmartScale with no appreciable difference in error in either AP or ML COP directions. Averaged over repeated trials, the MAE did not surpass 0.5 mm. This represented 0.4% of the total range (±50 to 60 mm in 5° displacement trials) of simulated COP. The results of this study strongly indicate that the Zibrio SmartScale can perform adequately as a light-weight and low-cost alternative method of COP measurement in comparison to a traditional LFP.     

Galaxy: a comprehensive approach for supporting accessible,reproducible, and transparent computational research in the life sciences

Increased reliance on computational approaches in the life sciences has revealed grave concerns about how accessible and reproducible computation-reliant results truly are. Galaxy , an open web-based platform for genomic research, addresses these problems. Galaxy automatically tracks and manages data provenance and provides support for capturing the context and intent of computational methods. Galaxy Pages are interactive, web-based documents that provide users with a medium to communicate a complete computational analysis.