Changing Children’s Understanding of the Brain: A Longitudinal Study of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures as a Measure of Public Engagement

Demonstrating the impact of public engagement is an increasingly important activity for today’s academics and researchers. The difficulty is that many areas of interest do not lend themselves well to evaluation because the impact of each single intervention can be hard to trace and take time to become manifest. With this in mind, we evaluated a lecture based around the 2011 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, ”Meet Your Brain,” delivered to school children from low performing schools. We compared knowledge about four neuroscience facts one week before, one week after and six weeks after the lecture. Analysis revealed significant knowledge transfer one week after the lecture that was retained five weeks later. We conclude that public engagement through tailored lectures can have significant impact in the moderate term with the potential to leave a lasting impression over a longer period.     

How Expert Advice Influences Decision Making

People often use expert advice when making decisions in our society, but how we are influenced by this advice has yet to be understood. To address this, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we provided expert and novice advice to participants during an estimation task. Participants reported that they valued expert advice more than novice advice, and activity in the ventral striatum correlated with this valuation, even before decisions with the advice were made. When using advice, participants compared their initial opinion to their advisor’s opinion. This comparison, termed the “opinion difference”, influenced advice utilization and was represented in reward-sensitive brain regions. Finally, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex integrated both the size of the opinion difference and the advisor’s level of expertise, and average activity in this area correlated with mean advice utilization across participants. Taken together, these findings provide neural evidence for how advice engenders behavioral change during the decision-making process.     

To Crowdfund Research,Scientists Must Build an Audience for Their Work

As rates of traditional sources of scientific funding decline, scientists have become increasingly interested in crowdfunding as a means of bringing in new money for research. In fields where crowdfunding has become a major venue for fundraising such as the arts and technology, building an audience for one''s work is key for successful crowdfunding. For science, to what extent does audience building, via engagement and outreach, increase a scientist''s abilities to bring in money via crowdfunding? Here we report on an analysis of the #SciFund Challenge, a crowdfunding experiment in which 159 scientists attempted to crowdfund their research. Using data gathered from a survey of participants, internet metrics, and logs of project donations, we find that public engagement is the key to crowdfunding success. Building an audience or “fanbase” and actively engaging with that audience as well as seeking to broaden the reach of one''s audience indirectly increases levels of funding. Audience size and effort interact to bring in more people to view a scientist''s project proposal, leading to funding. We discuss how projects capable of raising levels of funds commensurate with traditional funding agencies will need to incorporate direct involvement of the public with science. We suggest that if scientists and research institutions wish to tap this new source of funds, they will need to encourage and reward activities that allow scientists to engage with the public.     

Prospective Optimization with Limited Resources

The future is uncertain because some forthcoming events are unpredictable and also because our ability to foresee the myriad consequences of our own actions is limited. Here we studied how humans select actions under such extrinsic and intrinsic uncertainty, in view of an exponentially expanding number of prospects on a branching multivalued visual stimulus. A triangular grid of disks of different sizes scrolled down a touchscreen at a variable speed. The larger disks represented larger rewards. The task was to maximize the cumulative reward by touching one disk at a time in a rapid sequence, forming an upward path across the grid, while every step along the path constrained the part of the grid accessible in the future. This task captured some of the complexity of natural behavior in the risky and dynamic world, where ongoing decisions alter the landscape of future rewards. By comparing human behavior with behavior of ideal actors, we identified the strategies used by humans in terms of how far into the future they looked (their “depth of computation”) and how often they attempted to incorporate new information about the future rewards (their “recalculation period”). We found that, for a given task difficulty, humans traded off their depth of computation for the recalculation period. The form of this tradeoff was consistent with a complete, brute-force exploration of all possible paths up to a resource-limited finite depth. A step-by-step analysis of the human behavior revealed that participants took into account very fine distinctions between the future rewards and that they abstained from some simple heuristics in assessment of the alternative paths, such as seeking only the largest disks or avoiding the smaller disks. The participants preferred to reduce their depth of computation or increase the recalculation period rather than sacrifice the precision of computation.     

Content Volatility of Scientific Topics in Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale

Wikipedia has quickly become one of the most frequently accessed encyclopedic references, despite the ease with which content can be changed and the potential for ‘edit wars’ surrounding controversial topics. Little is known about how this potential for controversy affects the accuracy and stability of information on scientific topics, especially those with associated political controversy. Here we present an analysis of the Wikipedia edit histories for seven scientific articles and show that topics we consider politically but not scientifically “controversial” (such as evolution and global warming) experience more frequent edits with more words changed per day than pages we consider “noncontroversial” (such as the standard model in physics or heliocentrism). For example, over the period we analyzed, the global warming page was edited on average (geometric mean ±SD) 1.9±2.7 times resulting in 110.9±10.3 words changed per day, while the standard model in physics was only edited 0.2±1.4 times resulting in 9.4±5.0 words changed per day. The high rate of change observed in these pages makes it difficult for experts to monitor accuracy and contribute time-consuming corrections, to the possible detriment of scientific accuracy. As our society turns to Wikipedia as a primary source of scientific information, it is vital we read it critically and with the understanding that the content is dynamic and vulnerable to vandalism and other shenanigans.     

Placebo Trends across the Border: US versus Canada

Background

Physicians around the world report to using placebos in a variety of situations and with varying degrees of frequency. Inconsistent methodologies, however, complicate interpretation and prevent direct comparisons across studies. While US- and Canada-based physicians share similar professional standards, Canada harbours a less-litigious universal healthcare model with no formal placebo-related policy—factors that may impact how physicians view and use placebos.

Methods

To compare American and Canadian data, we circulated an online survey to academic physicians practicing in Canada, collected anonymous responses, and extracted those of internists and rheumatologists for comparison to US data obtained through parallel methodologies.

Results

Whereas our data show overall concordance across the border—from definitions to ethical limitations and therapeutic potential—differences between American- and Canadian-based placebo practices merit acknowledgement. For example, compared to 45%-80% among US-based respondents, only 23±7% of Canada-based respondents reported using placebos in clinical practice. However, 79±7% of Canada-respondents—a figure comparable to US data—professed to prescribing at least one form of treatment without proven or expected efficacy. Placebo interventions including unwarranted vitamins and herbal supplements (impure placebos) as well as sugar pills and saline injections (pure placebos) appear more common in Canada, where more doctors described placebos as “placebos” (rather than “medications”) and used them as a “diagnostic” tool (rather than a means of placating patient demands for treatment).

Interpretation

Cross-border variation in the use of clinical placebos appears minor despite substantial differences in health care delivery system, malpractice climate, and placebo-related policy. The prevalence of impure placebos in both Canadian and US clinics raises ethical and practical questions currently unaddressed by policy and warranting investigation.     

Psychological Antecedents to Conception Among Abortion Seekers

At a university hospital, 642 women seeking induced abortion for an unwanted pregnancy were surveyed before the procedure regarding their perception of what psychological and behavioral factors, if any, played a role in their becoming pregnant: 35 percent said they had had intercourse during what they believed was a “safe period”; 33 percent believed that they had experienced a contraceptive failure; 29 percent indicated fear of side effects influenced their use of a contraceptive method; 27 percent and 21 percent, respectively, indicated that they had thought pregnancy “couldn''t happen to me” or had “put the thought of pregnancy out of my mind.” The women''s responses indicated that a number of additional attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors were also important and that for any individual woman at least three or four factors had often combined in a dynamic sequence to greatly increase her risk of pregnancy. The implications of the findings for educational and counseling programs are discussed.     

Prenatal,Perinatal and Neonatal Risk Factors for Intellectual Disability: A Systemic Review and Meta-Analysis

BackgroundThe etiology of non-genetic intellectual disability (ID) is not fully known, and we aimed to identify the prenatal, perinatal and neonatal risk factors for ID.MethodPubMed and Embase databases were searched for studies that examined the association between pre-, peri- and neonatal factors and ID risk (keywords “intellectual disability” or “mental retardation” or “ID” or “MR” in combination with “prenatal” or “pregnancy” or “obstetric” or “perinatal” or “neonatal”. The last search was updated on September 15, 2015. Summary effect estimates (pooled odds ratios) were calculated for each risk factor using random effects models, with tests for heterogeneity and publication bias.ResultsSeventeen studies with 55,344 patients and 5,723,749 control individuals were eligible for inclusion in our analysis, and 16 potential risk factors were analyzed. Ten prenatal factors (advanced maternal age, maternal black race, low maternal education, third or more parity, maternal alcohol use, maternal tobacco use, maternal diabetes, maternal hypertension, maternal epilepsy and maternal asthma), one perinatal factor (preterm birth) and two neonatal factors (male sex and low birth weight) were significantly associated with increased risk of ID.ConclusionThis systemic review and meta-analysis provides a comprehensive evidence-based assessment of the risk factors for ID. Future studies are encouraged to focus on perinatal and neonatal risk factors and the combined effects of multiple factors.     

THE MISTREATED CHILD

“The battered child” has recently attracted the attention of physicians and social workers, but despite the fact that inflicted trauma produces characteristic x-ray changes, physicians are often reluctant to admit this cause. The neglected child may be more difficult to diagnose and is probably more common. The most typical example is the infant who is admitted to the hospital for “failure to thrive,” yet gains weight rapidly while away from his parents.The parents of both types of children are likely to be immature and inadequate, but much more study is required before the factors common to these parents are known, to say nothing of the means required for prevention and treatment.When the physician suspects that the parent is causing the difficulties manifested by the child, he should seek the help of a social worker in clarifying the situation and in contacting the appropriate social or legal agency. A greater awareness of the problems of these children should result in more rapid recognition of the condition, the establishment of well-defined methods of handling such cases, and ultimately better legislation to safeguard the child''s rights to a safe and healthy childhood.     

Genetic Variants and Their Interactions in the Prediction of Increased Pre-Clinical Carotid Atherosclerosis: The Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study

The relative contribution of genetic risk factors to the progression of subclinical atherosclerosis is poorly understood. It is likely that multiple variants are implicated in the development of atherosclerosis, but the subtle genotypic and phenotypic differences are beyond the reach of the conventional case-control designs and the statistical significance testing procedures being used in most association studies. Our objective here was to investigate whether an alternative approach—in which common disorders are treated as quantitative phenotypes that are continuously distributed over a population—can reveal predictive insights into the early atherosclerosis, as assessed using ultrasound imaging-based quantitative measurement of carotid artery intima-media thickness (IMT). Using our population-based follow-up study of atherosclerosis precursors as a basis for sampling subjects with gradually increasing IMT levels, we searched for such subsets of genetic variants and their interactions that are the most predictive of the various risk classes, rather than using exclusively those variants meeting a stringent level of statistical significance. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used to evaluate the predictive value of the variants, and cross-validation was used to assess how well the predictive models will generalize to other subsets of subjects. By means of our predictive modeling framework with machine learning-based SNP selection, we could improve the prediction of the extreme classes of atherosclerosis risk and progression over a 6-year period (average AUC 0.844 and 0.761), compared to that of using conventional cardiovascular risk factors alone (average AUC 0.741 and 0.629), or when combined with the statistically significant variants (average AUC 0.762 and 0.651). The predictive accuracy remained relatively high in an independent validation set of subjects (average decrease of 0.043). These results demonstrate that the modeling framework can utilize the “gray zone” of genetic variation in the classification of subjects with different degrees of risk of developing atherosclerosis.     

A Mixture of “Cheats” and “Co-Operators” Can Enable Maximal Group Benefit

Is a group best off if everyone co-operates? Theory often considers this to be so (e.g. the “conspiracy of doves”), this understanding underpinning social and economic policy. We observe, however, that after competition between “cheat” and “co-operator” strains of yeast, population fitness is maximized under co-existence. To address whether this might just be a peculiarity of our experimental system or a result with broader applicability, we assemble, benchmark, dissect, and test a systems model. This reveals the conditions necessary to recover the unexpected result. These are 3-fold: (a) that resources are used inefficiently when they are abundant, (b) that the amount of co-operation needed cannot be accurately assessed, and (c) the population is structured, such that co-operators receive more of the resource than the cheats. Relaxing any of the assumptions can lead to population fitness being maximized when cheats are absent, which we experimentally demonstrate. These three conditions will often be relevant, and hence in order to understand the trajectory of social interactions, understanding the dynamics of the efficiency of resource utilization and accuracy of information will be necessary.     

SCREENING TESTS FOR DIABETES DETECTION—Combined with a Chest X-Ray Survey

A program was carried out to test the value and feasibility of performing blood sugar screening tests in conjunction with a community-wide chest x-ray survey. A simple, rapid and inexpensive blood sugar screening test requiring only about two drops of blood from the finger tip was used. Among 14,681 persons who stated that they did not have diabetes, 191 or 1.3 per cent had “positive” results in screening tests. The number of persons referred to their physicians for diagnostic study because of the possibility of diabetes was reduced from 191 to 127 by means of a more specific secondary screening test.Diagnostic information with regard to 102 of the 127 persons referred to their physicians was supplied by the physicians. In 58 (0.40 per cent of the 14,681 participants) the diagnosis was diabetes—newly discovered as a result of referral by the survey.Some of the persons referred to their physicians because of suspicion of diabetes, while not then diabetic, might be considered prediabetic. The appearance of diabetes in this group during the year following the survey was therefore investigated. Glucose tolerance tests were performed for 32 of the diabetes suspects whose diagnosis immediately following the survey was either “not diabetic” or unknown. In 15 cases the glucose tolerance curves were indicative of diabetes, in seven cases questionable and in ten cases normal.The 58 persons diagnosed immediately after the survey plus the 15 found to have “diabetic” glucose tolerance curves a year later made a total of 73 newly discovered diabetics. This is a discovery rate of 0.50 per cent among the 14,681 participants in the survey.The success of this combined diabetes detection and chest x-ray survey suggests that other screening procedures should be studied to determine the desirability of adding them to similar community-wide case-finding programs.     

Freelancer

What long‐term changes can we expect, in how academic work is conducted and remunerated, in the post‐pandemic world? Subject Categories: S&S: Economics & Business, S&S: History & Philosophy of Science, S&S: Ethics

Although still two years away, my looming “retirement” from university employment is inevitably going to herald a major change of life. “Of course, you''ll become ‘Emeritus’”, most colleagues have opined. My answer to all of them has been a firm “No. I''ll become a freelancer”. The concept of a freelance scientist is obviously so alien to most of them that they invariably change the subject immediately. However, my gut feeling is that in 20 years or less, almost all of us will be freelancers of some kind.The COVID‐19 pandemic has altered the world of work in very obvious ways. There has been much talk of how the changes are likely to carry over to the future, even if more traditional patterns will probably reassert themselves in the short to medium term. Working from home, conducting meetings remotely, not wasting days travelling between continents for a few precious hours of face‐time and being free to structure workdays around our own priorities: these are the most obvious novelties that many believe will continue long after the effects of the pandemic on health and wealth have faded. But I have a slightly different take.Major disruptive events of worldwide import—world wars, global economic slumps, cataclysmic volcanic eruptions and pandemics—have often been harbingers of profound social change. This is not only due to their direct and immediate effects, but more so because the disruption accelerates and facilitates changes that were already happening. In the case of COVID‐19, one may place in this category the demise of cash, the rise of streaming services in place of live entertainment, online grocery shopping and even virtual dating. Another is paying people to stay home and do nothing, otherwise known as the universal basic income (or, in the USA, “stimulus cheques”).Inefficient practices in academia are equally ripe for change. Why bother with classes for 500 first‐year students when a much better edition of the lecture by an expert communicator is available on the internet? What’s the use of an ageing PhD advisor 20 years away from bench science, who struggles to guide the next generation of experimentalists in the lab, when the expertise of a plethora of specialists can easily be accessed online? What’s the value in published papers that are read by fewer people than wrote them? Or in seminars delivered to a roomful of attentive postdocs and PhD students who lack the courage or the time to address even a single question to the speaker?Yes, there is still great value in small‐group teaching and mentorship, in the creative verve of a close‐knit laboratory team, and in good writing and oratory: but the required skills are already different from those in which we were schooled. Thus, even if I do not hold in my palm the crystal ball to predict exactly which changes will happen and how fast, I believe that our traditional jobs are going to melt away very fast in the post‐pandemic world. Universities and research institutes may still exist, but I expect that their practices will be different, reshaped by rational need more than by tradition. Today’s academic science is already quite unlike that of 1920, but it has evolved so slowly during that century—spanning a much longer time period than the lifetime of a scientific career—that we barely perceive the changes that have occurred. In contrast, the changes now afoot will certainly happen much faster, especially since the funds to support the current “inefficient” model are likely to diminish rapidly.So, I predict that university teaching and science communication in general will be the first to evolve into freelance activities, where universities will invite bids from individuals or their agents and award commissions on a fee‐paying basis rather than using salaried employees. But these are not the only component parts of academia facing such a shake‐up. The practices of laboratory science are also likely to be rebuilt. When discussing with colleagues how research might be undertaken on a freelance basis, they usually raise issues such as bricks and mortar and the complex infrastructure that is needed to sustain cutting‐edge research, especially in the life sciences: how, they ask, could a freelancer access state‐of‐the‐art imaging, mass spectrometry or DNA sequencing? How could their acquisition of such expensive hardware possibly be financed, especially if they had to somehow acquire it personally and set it up in the garage or carry it around with them?But the answers to these questions are already evident in the practices of some major research agencies, most notably in Europe’s pioneering funder of single‐investigator grants for blue‐skies science, the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC already treats its awardees as freelancers, in the sense that it encourages them to shop around for the most attractive venue in which to embed and implement their research project. The quest for the best host institution takes place not only at the preparatory step of an ERC application: it also happens after the grant is awarded, since the grant money is considered inherently portable and can even be moved later on from one institution to another. This encourages potential host universities to compete for providing the best research environment, in which many factors come into play, not just but not least, the quality of its research infrastructure. How well it supports, rather than burdens its staff with administrative tasks, the nature of its recruitment and personnel policies, how it handles relocation issues for incoming researchers and their families, what opportunities it provides for further training in relevant skills and career development: these are just some of the factors in play.In recent years, universities have seen their primary role in this process as encouraging their own tenured or tenure‐track staff to apply for ERC grants. But I foresee the emphasis shifting increasingly to investigators who seek out universities that can make the most appealing offer, whilst universities and government agencies standing behind them will shape their policies so as to remain competitive. Moreover, in such a landscape there is no reason why a scientist cannot operate research projects on multiple sites if this offers the most convenient arrangement. The tools for remote meetings and cloud computing to which we have all become accustomed mean that there is no longer any need for a research group to be located in one building or even in one country, to operate efficiently as a team.At the same time, many of the tasks involved in running a research institute or department can be efficiently outsourced to the most competitive bidder—to be assessed on the basis of value‐for‐money, not just minimum cost. As a society, we should be asking ourselves why we continue to waste the talents of highly specialized scientists on performing admin tasks for which they are neither properly trained nor motivated, instead of just engaging a smart‐software developer. Why should we fund creative thinkers to undertake laboratory projects in host institutions that do not have the required state‐of‐the‐art facilities to perform them? Or allocate budgets that are so pared down that grantholders cannot even afford to purchase such services elsewhere? Why should we expect them to make do with poorly paid trainees instead of a team of professionals? And why should we continue to organize research in pyramid structures where everything depends on commands from the top, where all findings are announced using an institutional slide template, where colleagues elsewhere are considered as untrustworthy “competitors”, and where credit for individual creativity is usurped by seniors who barely know the contents of the papers they “write”?In the “old system”, we have all gotten used to making do with sub‐optimal working arrangements and grumbling about them, whilst considering them an immutable fact of life. But I envisage a time coming soon where we scientists will have the edge in reshaping the market for teaching and research in a way that is much more to our liking and properly aligned with our skills. At the same time, our individual success in accomplishing our professional goals will have a direct effect on our income and job satisfaction, and steer us towards activities where our talents are most effectively deployed. In short, I believe that we, as freelance scientists, will be much more firmly in control of science in the future and that time is not far off.     

Could Work Be a Source of Behavioural Disorders? A Study in Horses

Stress at work, as shown by a number of human studies, may lead to a variety of negative and durable effects, such as impaired psychological functioning (anxiety, depression…). Horses share with humans this characteristic of working on a daily basis and are submitted then to work stressors related to physical constraints and/or more “psychological” conflicts, such as potential controversial orders from the riders or the requirement to suppress emotions. On another hand, horses may perform abnormal repetitive behaviour (“stereotypies”) in response to adverse life conditions. In the present study, we investigated whether the type of work the horses are used for may have an impact on their tendency to show stereotypic behaviour (and its type) outside work. Observations in their box of 76 horses all living in the same conditions, belonging to one breed and one sex, revealed that the prevalence and types of stereotypies performed strongly depended upon the type of work they were used for. The stereotypies observed involved mostly mouth movements and head tossing/nodding. Work constraints probably added to unfavourable living conditions, favouring the emergence of chronic abnormal behaviours. This is especially remarkable as the 23 hours spent in the box were influenced by the one hour work performed every day. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence of potential effects of work stressors on the emergence of abnormal behaviours in an animal species. It raises an important line of thought on the chronic impact of the work situation on the daily life of individuals.     

Contact Trees: Network Visualization beyond Nodes and Edges

Node-Link diagrams make it possible to take a quick glance at how nodes (or actors) in a network are connected by edges (or ties). A conventional network diagram of a “contact tree” maps out a root and branches that represent the structure of nodes and edges, often without further specifying leaves or fruits that would have grown from small branches. By furnishing such a network structure with leaves and fruits, we reveal details about “contacts” in our ContactTrees upon which ties and relationships are constructed. Our elegant design employs a bottom-up approach that resembles a recent attempt to understand subjective well-being by means of a series of emotions. Such a bottom-up approach to social-network studies decomposes each tie into a series of interactions or contacts, which can help deepen our understanding of the complexity embedded in a network structure. Unlike previous network visualizations, ContactTrees highlight how relationships form and change based upon interactions among actors, as well as how relationships and networks vary by contact attributes. Based on a botanical tree metaphor, the design is easy to construct and the resulting tree-like visualization can display many properties at both tie and contact levels, thus recapturing a key ingredient missing from conventional techniques of network visualization. We demonstrate ContactTrees using data sets consisting of up to three waves of 3-month contact diaries over the 2004-2012 period, and discuss how this design can be applied to other types of datasets.     

The Paradoxical Role of Perceived Control in Late Life Health Behavior

Research has established the health benefits of psychological factors, including the way individuals appraise outcomes. Although many studies confirm that appraising outcomes as controllable is adaptive for health, a paradoxical possibility is largely ignored: Perceived control may be detrimental under some conditions. Our premise was that appraising health as controllable but at the same time ascribing little value to it might signal a dysfunctional psychological mindset that fosters a mistaken sense of invincibility. During face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of older adults (age range = 72–99), we identified individuals with such a potentially maladaptive “invincible” mindset (high perceived control and low health value) and compared them to their counterparts on several outcomes. The findings were consistent with our hypotheses. The invincibles denied future risks, they lacked the activating emotion of fear, and they visited their physicians less often over a subsequent five-year period. Moreover, in contrast to their counterparts, the invincibles did not appear strategic in their approach to seeking care: Even poor health did not prompt them to seek the counsel of a physician. The recognition that psychological appraisals are modifiable highlights the promise of remedial methods to alter maladaptive mindsets, potentially improving quality of life.     

Semi‐intensive shrimp farms as experimental arenas for the study of predation risk from falcons to shorebirds

Varying environmental conditions and energetic demands can affect habitat use by predators and their prey. Anthropogenic habitats provide an opportunity to document both predation events and foraging activity by prey and therefore enable an empirical evaluation of how prey cope with trade‐offs between starvation and predation risk in environments of variable foraging opportunities and predation danger. Here, we use seven years of observational data of peregrine falcons Falco peregrinus and shorebirds at a semi‐intensive shrimp farm to determine how starvation and predation risk vary for shorebirds under a predictable variation in foraging opportunities. Attack rate (mean 0.1 attacks/hr, equating 1 attack every ten hours) was positively associated with the total foraging area available for shorebirds at the shrimp farm throughout the harvesting period, with tidal amplitude at the adjacent mudflat having a strong nonlinear (quadratic) effect. Hunt success (mean 14%) was higher during low tides and declined as the target flocks became larger. Finally, individual shorebird vigilance behaviors were more frequent when birds foraged in smaller flocks at ponds with poorer conditions. Our results provide empirical evidence of a risk threshold modulated by tidal conditions at the adjacent wetlands, where shorebirds trade‐off risk and rewards to decide to avoid or forage at the shrimp farm (a potentially dangerous habitat) depending on their need to meet daily energy requirements. We propose that semi‐intensive shrimp farms serve as ideal “arenas” for studying predator–prey dynamics of shorebirds and falcons, because harvest operations and regular tidal cycles create a mosaic of foraging patches with predictable food supply. In addition, the relatively low hunt success suggests that indirect effects associated with enhanced starvation risk are important in shorebird life‐history decisions.     

Using “Big Data” to Capture Overall Health Status: Properties and Predictive Value of a Claims-Based Health Risk Score

BackgroundInvestigators across many fields often struggle with how best to capture an individual’s overall health status, with options including both subjective and objective measures. With the increasing availability of “big data,” researchers can now take advantage of novel metrics of health status. These predictive algorithms were initially developed to forecast and manage expenditures, yet they represent an underutilized tool that could contribute significantly to health research. In this paper, we describe the properties and possible applications of one such “health risk score,” the DxCG Intelligence tool.MethodsWe link claims and administrative datasets on a cohort of U.S. workers during the period 1996–2011 (N = 14,161). We examine the risk score’s association with incident diagnoses of five disease conditions, and we link employee data with the National Death Index to characterize its relationship with mortality. We review prior studies documenting the risk score’s association with other health and non-health outcomes, including healthcare utilization, early retirement, and occupational injury.

Results and Conclusions

We find that the risk score is associated with outcomes across a variety of health and non-health domains. These examples demonstrate the broad applicability of this tool in multiple fields of research and illustrate its utility as a measure of overall health status for epidemiologists and other health researchers.     

On Leukocytes in Mammary Development and Cancer

During metastasis, tumor cells may be copying a program that is executed by hematopoietic stem cells during development.That cancer is development gone awry is not a new concept. Most of the “hallmarks” ascribed to cancer—proliferation, invasion and induction of blood vessel growth—also occur during organogenesis and development. Therefore, tumors are not necessarily learning new tricks during their development, but how about when they metastasize? In colonizing a new organ, often with some degree of specificity, tumor cells may simply be copying a program that is executed during development by hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs)—the stem cells that ultimately generate all of the cells in our blood and maintain its homeostasis. One family of cells generated by HSCs—leukocytes—is the focus of the work by Coussens and Pollard (2012). These two scientists have woven together several studies that revolutionized the way we think of immune cells. As pointed out by the investigators (whose respective laboratories are responsible for much of the seminal work on this subject), immune cells also have a variety of trophic functions, and it is these functions that are used rationally during development, and recklessly during tumor growth.This leads us back to metastasis. There is so much to learn about why a tumor travels from one organ to another, how it does so, and the manner by which it adapts to and ultimately flourishes (or fails) in a foreign microenvironment. And as stated above, immune cell precursors, HSCs, do the same. In the mouse, HSCs have originated in one tissue (the dorsal aorta), traveled to another (the placenta) via the circulation, and matured somewhere else (the liver)—all before birth. Finally, HSCs make their way to the bone marrow, where they reside postnatally. Specialized niches in the bone marrow are thought to mediate HSC dormancy as a means to preserve the “stemness” of this population, and there are mechanisms in place that allow these cells to rapidly exit these environs and proliferate in response to injury. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that a common site where micrometastases are found is the bone marrow for many cancers (including that of the breast).Uncovering whether the same niches that control HSC expansion in the bone marrow are also responsible for maintaining quiescence of tumor cell populations is an exciting prospect, as is deciphering the precise components of these niches. Such work could explain the seemingly incongruous observation that despite an absence of clinically detectable disease, circulating tumor cells are present in the blood of post-treatment cancer patients sometimes even decades later! Perhaps the niches that regulate prolonged dormancy of tumors are dynamic and inhibit tumor proliferation while allowing them to mobilize periodically, much like for HSCs. It also stands to reason that loss of the same controls that prevent HSC expansion until systemic damage occurs could awaken dormant tumors.Shiozawa et al. (2011) have demonstrated that prostate cancer cells do in fact compete with HSCs for niches within the bone marrow, and that tumor cells are mobilized from HSC niches by similar mechanisms as for HSCs. Whether this is the case for other cancers and whether these similarities can be exploited therapeutically remain to be seen.So what more is there to be learned about immune cells? By furthering our understanding of how solid cancers mimic and hijack components of our immune system, we may not “cure” cancer, but we very well may uncover a means to suppress some cancers into a state of permanent dormancy.     

Community species diversity mediates the trade‐off between aboveground and belowground biomass for grasses and forbs in degraded alpine meadow,Tibetan Plateau

Although many empirical experiments have shown that increasing degradation results in lower aboveground biomass (AGB), our knowledge of the magnitude of belowground biomass (BGB) for individual plants is a prerequisite for accurately revealing the biomass trade‐off in degraded grasslands. Here, by linking the AGB and BGB of individual plants, species in the community, and soil properties, we explored the biomass partitioning patterns in different plant functional groups (grasses of Stipa capillacea and forbs of Anaphalis xylorhiza). Our results indicated that 81% and 60% of the biomass trade‐off variations could be explained by environmental factors affecting grasses and forbs, respectively. The change in community species diversity dominated the biomass trade‐off via either direct or indirect effects on soil properties and biomass. However, the community species diversity imparted divergent effects on the biomass trade‐off for grasses (scored at −0.72) and forbs (scored at 0.59). Our findings suggest that plant communities have evolved two contrasting strategies of biomass allocation patterns in degraded grasslands. These are the “conservative” strategy in grasses, in which plants with larger BGB trade‐off depends on gigantic roots for soil resources, and the “opportunistic” strategy in forbs, in which plants can adapt to degraded lands using high variation and optimal biomass allocation.