BACKGROUND Phytophagous insects have emerged successfully on the planet also because of the development of diverse and often astonishing defensive strategies against their enemies. The larvae of the mustard leaf beetle Phaedon cochleariae, for example, secrete deterrents from specialized defensive glands on their back. The secretion process involves ATP-binding cassette transporters. Therefore,...

OBJECTIVE The study aimed to determine prevalence, patterns and risk factors of defensive medicine by obstetricians and gynaecologists across China. DESIGN This is a questionnaire survey by written and on-line interview for participants. PARTICIPANTS Among 1804 registered physicians participating at the 2017 Congress of Chinese Obstetricians and Gynecologists Association in Chengdu City, Si...

Following isolation housing, mice typically exhibit heightened emotional reactivity to mild social stimulation. Aggression, social avoidance and a variety of defensive behaviors that differ in terms of motor activation (e.g. freezing, escape) can be observed depending on strain. Previous studies suggested that D2-like dopamine (DA) receptors play an important, albeit strain specific, role in th...

Previous work (Knee & Zuckerman, 1996) found that the combination of high autonomy and low control was associated with fewer self-enhancing attributions after success and fewer self-protective attributions after failure. The present research again found strong support for a synergistic effect of causality orientations on defensive behavior through a prospective examination of defensive coping s...

Lending officers (LOs) assess loan applications under conditions characterized by shifts in economic climate, wavering public credibility for banks and greater industry regulation. This paper examines the extent to which, in such an economic environment, the LOs’ assessment of commercial loan applications may be defensive, and, if so, which mechanisms that may trigger defensive loan assessment ...

Microbes that protect their hosts from pathogens are widespread in nature and are attractive disease control agents. Given that pathogen adaptation to barriers against infection can drive changes in pathogen virulence, 'defensive microbes' may shape disease severity. Here we show that co-evolving a microbe with host-protective properties (Enterococcus faecalis) and a pathogen (Staphylococcus au...

In this paper, we address issues related to defending against widespreading worms on the Internet. We study a new class of worms called the selfadaptive worms. These worms dynamically adapt their propagation patterns to defensive countermeasures, in order to avoid or postpone detection, and to eventually infect more computers. We show that existing worm detection schemes cannot effectively defe...