Despite its wide implications for many ecological issues, the global pattern of spatial turnover in the occurrence of species has been little studied, unlike the global pattern of species richness. Here, using a database on the breeding distributions of birds, we present the first global maps of variation in spatial turnover for an entire taxonomic class, a pattern that has to date remained lar...

Intraspecific phenotypic diversity is controlled by natural genetic and epigenetic variation. Kawakatsu et al. recently sequenced the DNA methylomes of a global collection of over 1000 Arabidopsis accessions, and have thereby provided a comprehensive resource for studying natural genetic and epigenetic variation as well as the association of such variation with phenotypic diversity.

the formulation of global health policy is political; and all institutions operating in the global health landscape are political. this is because policies and institutions inevitably represent certain values, reflect particular ideologies, and preferentially serve some interests over others. this may be expressed explicitly and consciously; or implicitly and unconsciously. but it’s important t...

The sensitivity of global climate with respect to forcing is generally described in terms of the global climate feedback—the global radiative response per degree of global annualmean surface temperature change.While the global climate feedback is often assumed to be constant, its value—diagnosed from global climate models—shows substantial time variation under transient warming. Here a reformul...

A framework for understanding the determinants in the variation in the pricing of skills across countries and the model underlying the Mincer specification of wages that is used widely to estimate the relationship between schooling and wages are described. A method for identifying skill prices and for testing the Mincer model, using wages and the human capital attributes of workers located arou...

Large-scale processes are known to be important for patterns of species richness, yet the ways in which local and larger scale processes interact is not clear. I used metacommunities consisting of five interconnected microbial aquatic communities to examine the manner in which processes at different scales affect local and metacommunity richness. Specifically, I manipulated the potential disper...

BACKGROUND The Global Fund is under pressure to improve its rationing of financial support. This study describes the GF's pattern of disbursements in relation to total health expenditure (THE), government health expenditure (GHE), income status and the burden of HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. It also examines the potential for recipient countries to increase domestic public financing for health. M...

The most prominent pattern in global marine biogeography is the biodiversity peak in the Indo-Australian Archipelago. Yet the processes that underpin this pattern are still actively debated. By reconstructing global marine paleoenvironments over the past 3 million years on the basis of sediment cores, we assessed the extent to which Quaternary climate fluctuations can explain global variation i...

Normalization and preprocessing are essential steps for the analysis of high-throughput data including next-generation sequencing and microarrays. Multi-sample global normalization methods, such as quantile normalization, have been successfully used to remove technical variation from noisy data. These methods rely on the assumption that observed global changes across samples are due to unwanted...

DNA methylation is one of the best-characterized epigenetic modifications and has an important biological relevance. Here we showed that global DNA methylation level in mouse livers displayed a daily variation where the peak phases occurred during the end of the day and the lowest level at the beginning of the day in the light-dark or dark-dark cycles. Typical repeat sequence long interspersed ...