BACKGROUND Despite the health risks, physical inactivity is common. Identifying the correlates of physical activity to inform the design of interventions to reduce the disease burden associated with physical inactivity is a public health imperative. Rural adults have a unique set of characteristics influencing their activity behaviour, and are typically understudied, especially in England. The ...

We consider a population model where individuals behave independently from each other and whose genealogy is described by a chronological tree called splitting tree. The individuals have i.i.d. (non-exponential) lifetime durations and give birth at constant rate to clonal or mutant children in an infinitely many alleles model with neutral mutations. First, to study the allelic partition of the ...

Emergency visits are rising nationally, whereas the number of emergency departments is shrinking. However, volume has not increased uniformly at all emergency departments. It is unclear what factors account for this variability in emergency volume growth rates. The objective of this study was to test the association of hospital and population characteristics and the effect of hospital closures ...

Island biogeography has provided fundamental hypotheses in population genetics, ecology and evolutionary biology. Insular populations usually face different feeding conditions, predation pressure, intraspecific and interspecific competition than continental populations. This so-called island syndrome can promote the evolution of specific phenotypes like a small (or large) body size and a light ...

In this paper, we review recent results of ours concerning branching processes with general lifetimes and neutral mutations, under the infinitely many alleles model, where mutations can occur either at birth of particles or at a constant rate during their lives. In both models, we study the allelic partition of the population at time t. We give closed-form formulae for the expected frequency sp...

In this work, we are exploring mechanisms that may contribute to cultural diversity and that rely on our everyday understanding of culture as a set of attitudes, behaviors, tools, ways of thinking etc., some of which are not directly exposed to the outside. We are using as a starting point an extended Axelrod model that defines a Moore neighborhood and generally heterogeneous sets of cultural f...

To investigate the effects of gender on static and dynamic postural stability in community dwelling healthy older adults. Thirty men and 30 women older than 65 years participated in the study. They completed 4 balance tests, including one-legged stance test (OLST) with eyes open (EO), OLST with eyes closed (EC), Sharpened Romberg (SR) and Dynamic postural stability (Turn 180). Means of static a...

TO THE EDITOR—We were interested to read Campbell and colleagues' timely network meta-analysis of antifungal therapies for HIV-associated cryptoccocal meningitis, recently published in the journal [1]. One of the authors' main conclusions is that the benefit of combination therapy with amphotericin B and flucytosine seems to be limited to individuals with altered consciousness at treatment init...

15 If parental allocation to each offspring sex has the same cost/benefit ratio, Fisher's 16 hypothesis predicts a sex ratio biased towards the cheaper sex. However, in 17 dimorphic birds there is little evidence for this, especially at hatching. We 18 investigated the pre-fledgling (i) sex ratio, (ii) body condition and (iii) sex19 differential mortality in a population of the glossy ibis (Ple...

Sexual selection of high-quality mates can conflict with species recognition if traits that govern intraspecific mate preferences also influence interspecific recognition. This conflict might be resolved by developmental plasticity and learned mate preferences, which could drive preference divergence in populations that differ in local species composition. We integrate field and laboratory expe...