Why don't we prevent childhood accidents?

Accidental injury is the most important epidemic in the Western world today, and is especially important as a cause of death and disability in childhood. Many environmental factors are important causes of accidents, but there is no organisation within which doctors, official bodies, industry, and voluntary bodies can pool their experience and co-ordinate their efforts to reduce these environmental risks. A joint committee on childhood accident prevention should be formed in this country similar to that which exists in Sweden.     

Games fish play: Making decisions as a social forager

Suppose a customer wishes to buy a bag of fruit in a market hall during his lunch break and has the choice between two crowded fruiterers' shops. The complexity of problems inherent in such a situation has been increasingly appreciated by behavioural ecologists interested in social foraging of animals. The recognition of consistent individual differences in competitive ability and their incorporation into classical game theoretical models has recently facilitated a step forward in our understanding of social foraging. Here I review theoretical developments in connection with experiments on resource sharing in foraging fish.     

Games spiders play. III: Cues underlying context-associated changes in agonistic behaviour

In this paper I consider the proximate cues underlying context-associated variation in the agonistic behaviour of the spider Agelenopsis aperta (Gertsch). At the initiation of a contest, individual opponents are shown to assess their relative weights; the subsequent behaviour of each is adjusted according to the result of the assessment. Escalation to potentially injurious behaviour early in the contest, for instance, is a threshold effect of weight bias. Several lines of evidence indicate, that only the territory Owner (resident) has information about the quality of a site at the initiation of a territorial dispute. (1) Owners of poor-quality sites that received food supplements exhibited significantly greater persistence and estimated energy expenditure in contests over these sites than unsupplemented individuals did over theirs. (2) A significant correlation was observed between web area and the behaviour of Owners, but not between web area and the behaviour of Intruders (individuals that encroach on occupied webs). (3) No correspondence was observed between spider body temperature and agonistic behaviour. (4) The presence or absence of prey on the web during the dispute did not affect the agonistic behaviour of either opponent. I conclude that the Intruder's behaviour is in some way adjusted to that of the Owner rather than directly to some aspect of the disputed site. Partial correlation analysis show site quality to have a greater influence on agonistic behaviour than weight bias, although both are important determinants of spider behaviour in territorial disputes.     

Games viruses play: a strategic initiative against the interferon-induced dsRNA activated 68,000 Mr protein kinase

A number of eukaryotic viruses have devised strategies to down-regulate activity of the interferon induced, double-stranded RNA activated protein kinase, referred to as p68. This control is essential to prevent decreases in protein synthetic rates and possibly to avoid the antiviral effects of interferon. In this review, I will describe primarily the progress made in understanding how influenza virus and poliovirus take advantage of cellular gene products to repress p68 kinase activity. In addition, studies on the inactivation of p68 by viral protein products in the reovirus and vaccinia virus systems will be discussed as will recent structure-function studies aimed at elucidating the molecular mechanisms of kinase activation and repression.     

Games network and application to PAs system

In this article, we present a game theory based framework, named games network, for modeling biological interactions. After introducing the theory, we more precisely describe the methodology to model biological interactions. Then we apply it to the plasminogen activator system (PAs) which is a signal transduction pathway involved in cancer cell migration. The games network theory extends game theory by including the locality of interactions. Each game in a games network represents local interactions between biological agents. The PAs system is implicated in cytoskeleton modifications via regulation of actin and microtubules, which in turn favors cell migration. The games network model has enabled us a better understanding of the regulation involved in the PAs system.     

Targeting fat to prevent diabetes

An emerging view is that obesity causes metabolic problems when adipose tissue fails to meet the increased demands for fat storage. A study in this issue of Cell Metabolism (Waki et al., 2007) has identified harmine as a proadipogenic small molecule that promotes energy expenditure in white adipose tissue and delays the onset of obesity-associated diabetes.     

Injuries to pedestrians in road traffic accidents.

Although there have been many reports on injuries to occupants of cars in road traffic accidents, there have been few prospective studies of injuries to pedestrians in such accidents. For this reason a two year prospective study of pedestrians in road traffic accidents in the Oxford region was carried out. The incidence of death in pedestrians was significantly higher than in car occupants or motorcyclists. The principal determinant of death was the weight of the vehicle concerned. The most common site of injury was the head because of a high incidence of brief concussion, but the most common site of serious injuries was the leg. Injuries to all regions of the body increased with age and with the weight of the vehicle in the collision. Accidents most often concerned young children or the elderly.