The practice of family planning (FP) has been used since time immemorial to solve community, individual, and familial problems. There are Biblical references to incest being used to ensure the conception of children and to coitus interruptus being used to prevent conception. Pastoralists used cessation of breastfeeding of male calves to promote the conception and birth of more desirable femal...

We obtain the nucleation rate of critical droplets for an elastic string moving in a phi(6) local potential and subject to noise and damping forces. The critical droplet is a bound soliton-antisoliton pair that carries a section of the string out of the metastable central minimum into one of the stable side minima. The frequencies of small oscillations about the critical droplet are obtained fr...

Cell cycle is controlled at two restriction points, R (1) and R (2). At both points the cell will commit apoptosis if it detects irreparable damage. But at R (1) an undamaged cell also decides whether to proceed to the S phase or go into a quiescent mode, depending on the environmental conditions (e.g., overpopulation, hypoxia). We consider the effect of this decision at the population level in...

Bacteria have developed a variety of mechanisms for surviving harsh environmental conditions, nutrient stress and overpopulation. Paenibacillus dendritiformis produces a lethal protein (Slf) that is able to induce cell death in neighbouring colonies and a phenotypic switch in more distant ones. Slf is derived from the secreted precursor protein, DfsB, after proteolytic processing. Here, we pres...

The prevention of respiratory diseases caused by high air pollution rates is an important issue in big cities, where industrialization and overpopulation cause an increase in allergenic particles that aggravate the disease of allergic rhinitis and asthma, especially in childhood. The problem lies in the disinformation of the population about air quality and the preventive measures to be taken i...

This article addresses one of the most controversial issues in resource management: how do population and market pressures a€ect resource use? After examining some shortcomings in several major approaches to the issue, the authors use structural equation analysis to decipher the relative and reciprocal in ̄uence of population pressures, markets, and institutional arrangements on forest use in th...

It was taken for granted that poverty led to environmental degradation: poverty is related to massive consumption of raw materials, to overpopulation, and thus to overconsumption of natural resources, and so on. But more recent studies have shown that the poverty–environment link was caused by a combination of several factors. Traditional societies used to have their own system of preserving th...

Humans are the ultimate ecosystem engineers who have profoundly transformed the world’s landscapes in order to enhance their survival. Somewhat paradoxically, however, sometimes the unforeseen effect of this ecosystem engineering is the very collapse of the population it intended to protect. Here we use a spatial version of a standard population dynamics model of ecosystem engineers to study th...

On November 25, 2022, Dr. William Godnick, Professor of Practice at the J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, presented on Military Responses to Prison Violence in Latin America: A Big Mistake or a Necessary Evil? The presentation was followed by question-and-answer period with questions from audience and CASIS-Vancouver executives. key points discussion included overpopulation priso...