Physician assistants (PAs) have medical training and work supervised by a doctor. In 2006-2008 the Scottish Government piloted use of USA-trained PAs. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the impact and contribution made by PAs to delivering effective health care in National Health Service (NHS) Scotland. Mixed methods, longitudinally, including interviews, feedback forms and activity data colle...

Understanding how evolution promotes pathogen emergence would aid disease management, and prediction of future host shifts. Increased pathogen infectiousness of different hosts may occur through direct selection, or fortuitously via indirect selection. However, it is unclear which type of selection tends to produce host breadth promoting pathogen emergence. We predicted that direct selection fo...

The cyst banks of 6 coastal hypersaline lakes of South-East Europe have been investigated. The study concerned the bottom sediments of Khersonesskoe and Koyashskoe lakes in the Crimea (Ukraine), Nartë saltworks (Albania), Vecchia Salina at Torre Colimena (Apulia, Italy), Pantano Grande and Pantano Roveto at Vendicari (Sicily, Italy). A total of 19 cyst types were recognised. The cyst banks of l...

At least half of metazoan species are herbivorous insects. Why are they so diverse? Most herbivorous insects feed on few plant species, and adaptive host specialization is often invoked to explain their diversification. Nevertheless, it is possible that the narrow host ranges of many herbivorous insects are nonadaptive. Here, we test predictions of this hypothesis with comparative phylogenetic ...

Generalist parasites exploit multiple host species at the population level, but the individual parasite's strategy may be either itself a generalist or a specialist pattern of host species use. Here, we studied the relationship between host availability and host use in the individual parasitism patterns of the Shiny Cowbird Molothrus bonariensis, a generalist avian obligate brood parasite that ...

Large brains, relative to body size, can confer advantages to individuals in the form of behavioral flexibility. Such enhanced behavioral flexibility is predicted to carry fitness benefits to individuals facing novel or altered environmental conditions, a theory known as the brain size-environmental change hypothesis. Here, we provide the first empirical link between brain size and survival in ...

“I understand dark clouds, but I’m not a meteorologist . . . I understand addiction, but I’m not a rehab counsellor.” So run some of the quotes from a selection of well groomed GPs featured in a multimedia campaign by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. The campaign has been ongoing in the context of intense funding pressure and in election season, and the college is trying h...

What is the prevalent topology among interaction networks? How do consumers balance between generalism and performance when exploiting different resources? These two long-standing, still open questions have been unified under a common framework by integrative hypothesis of specialization (IHS). According to IHS, ecological structured processes at small large network hierarchical levels, from an...