BACKGROUND Extreme temperatures are associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths. Previous studies have investigated the relative CVD mortality risk of temperature, but this risk is heavily influenced by deaths in frail elderly people. To better estimate the burden of extreme temperatures, we estimated their effects on years of life lost due to CVD. METHODS AND RESULTS The data were da...

This paper examines why fundamental freedoms are so unevenly distributed across the earth. Climato-economic theorizing proposes that humans adapt needs, stresses, and choices of goals, means, and outcomes to the livability of their habitat. The evolutionary process at work is one of collectively meeting climatic demands of cold winters or hot summers by using monetary resources. Freedom is expe...

Bumble bees are important pollinators of crops and other plants. However, many aspects of their basic biology remain relatively unexplored. For example, one important and unusual natural history feature in bumble bees is the massive size variation seen between workers of the same nest. This size polymorphism may be an adaptation for division of labor, colony economics, or be nonadaptive. It was...

way some applicants worry. A paper in Nature, Science or Cell is not essential to get an interview. Instead, our search committees look for evidence of success as a leader of a project in different environments (e.g. the PhD and postdoc labs) — a few fi rst-author publications that push a fi eld forward in journals of reasonable reputation and outstanding letters of recommendation from multiple...

This review describes some of the literature pertaining to sleep deprivation, shift working, and heat exposure. Consequences of each on human cognitive function, particularly with respect to vigilance and attentional capacity are reviewed. Individually, each of these factors is known to impair human cognition; however, we propose the possibility that for miners working in hot underground enviro...

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...

INTRODUCTION Many countries still have unacceptably high hospitalizations and deaths from scalds from hot tap water. Prevention strategies implemented in some countries may not work in others. Legislation aimed at changing environments that are conducive to hot tap water scalds may not be effective in many situations for a number of reasons, including lack of acceptability and practicality. M...

The corona is a high-temperature portion of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, beginning slightly above the visible surface and extending hundreds of thousands of kilometers, or further, into interplanetary space. A precise definition of the term “corona” is to some extent dependent on one’s theoretical bias: if the solar atmosphere is viewed as spherically symmetric and homogeneous (“plane-parallel”)...

We study the emission of photoelectrons from plasmonic nanoparticles into a surrounding matrix. We consider two mechanisms of electron emission from the nanoparticles--surface and volume ones--and use models for these two mechanisms which allow us to obtain analytical results for the photoelectron emission rate from a nanoparticle. Calculations have been carried out for a step potential at the ...

Thermal stress is a pervasive selective agent in natural populations that impacts organismal growth, survival, and reproduction. Drosophila melanogaster exhibits a variety of putatively adaptive phenotypic responses to thermal stress in natural and experimental settings; however, accompanying assessments of fitness are typically lacking. Here, we quantify changes in fitness and known thermal to...