Collaborative management has gained popularity across the United States as a means of addressing the sustainability of mixed-ownership landscapes and resolving persistent conflicts in public lands management. At the same time, it has generated skepticism because its ecological and social outcomes are seldom measured. Evaluating the success of collaborative efforts is difficult because framework...

BACKGROUND The western Amazon is the most biologically rich part of the Amazon basin and is home to a great diversity of indigenous ethnic groups, including some of the world's last uncontacted peoples living in voluntary isolation. Unlike the eastern Brazilian Amazon, it is still a largely intact ecosystem. Underlying this landscape are large reserves of oil and gas, many yet untapped. The gro...

Recent theoretical ideas and observational claims suggest that the fine structure constant α may be variable. We examine a spectrum of models in which α is a function of a scalar field. Specifically, we consider three scenarios: oscillating α, monotonic time variation of α, and time-independent α that is spatially varying. We examine the constraints imposed upon these theories by cosmological o...

This essay briefly evaluates the ongoing controversy between LIU Qingping and GUO Qiyong (and their followers) about the “moral heart” of Confucianism in order to draw a comparison with Islamic ethics for mutual illumination of the two traditions (see Guo 2007: 21). Liu argues that Confucianism is basically consanguinism and, as such, it lands into an “embarrassing paradox” in its moral thinkin...

When large carnivores occupy peripheral human lands conflict with humans becomes inevitable, and the reduction of human-carnivore interactions must be the first consideration for those concerned with conflict mitigation. Studies designed to identify areas of high human-bear interaction are crucial for prioritizing management actions. Due to a surge in conflicts, against a background of social i...

In recent years, protein science has been revolutionized by the discovery of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). In contrast to the classical paradigm that a given protein sequence corresponds to a defined structure and an associated function, we now know that proteins can be functional in the absence of a stable three-dimensional structure. In many cases, disordered proteins or protein r...

In developed countries dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are permitted to accompany human visitors to many protected areas (e.g., >96% of protected lands in California, U.S.A.), and protected-area management often focuses on regulating dogs due to concerns about predation, competition, or transmission of disease and conflicts with human visitors. In 2004 and 2005, we investigated whether carnivore ...

This paper approaches the choice between the open and closed nuclear fuel cycles as a matter of intergenerational justice, by revealing the value conflicts in the production of nuclear energy. The closed fuel cycle improve sustainability in terms of the supply certainty of uranium and involves less long-term radiological risks and proliferation concerns. However, it compromises short-term publi...