Ticks are important vectors of pathogens of medical and veterinary importance worldwide. In spite of their economic importance, our current knowledge about the factors affecting tick prevalence and abundance in tropical and subtropical regions is rather limited. Both abiotic (e.g. temperature) as well as biotic variables (e.g. host sex) have been identified as key determinants of distributions....

The present work examined whether secrets are experienced as physical burdens, thereby influencing perception and action. Four studies examined the behavior of people who harbored important secrets, such as secrets concerning infidelity and sexual orientation. People who recalled, were preoccupied with, or suppressed an important secret estimated hills to be steeper, perceived distances to be f...

Law360, New York (October 17, 2012) -A fundamental issue in many toxic tort cases is whether a plaintiff’s personal injuries were caused by something other than the defendant’s alleged misconduct. Defendants often raise this question in several ways — did the plaintiff’s causation expert properly consider potential alternative causes in reaching the offered opinion? Did the plaintiff meet his o...

I discuss two types of evidential problems with the most widely touted experiments in evolutionary psychology, those performed by Leda Cosmides and interpreted by Cosmides and John Tooby. First, and despite Cosmides and Tooby’s claims to the contrary, these experiments don’t fulfil the standards of evidence of evolutionary biology. Second Cosmides and Tooby claim to have performed a crucial exp...

This paper extends our previous logical analysis of presumptions and burden of proof by studying the force of a presumption once counterevidence has been offered. In the jurisprudential literature different accounts of this issue have been given: some have argued that a presumption is nullified by counterarguments while others have maintained that this gives presumptions a force that is too sli...

The Gram-negative bacterium Burkholderia mallei causes rapidly fatal illness in equines and humans when contracted by inhalation and also has the potential to be used as a bioweapon. However, little is known regarding the early innate immune responses and signaling mechanisms required to generate protection from pneumonic B. mallei infection. We showed previously that monocyte chemoattractant p...

BACKGROUND Despite a high prevalence of depressive symptoms among university students, few studies have examined how this mental health problem is associated with perceived stress and perceived burdens related to being a student. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional study of 2,103 first year students from one western (Germany), one central (Poland), and one south-eastern European country (B...

In a model of experimental cutaneous leishmaniasis, pre-exposure of Leishmania major-resistant mice to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), an aryl hydrocarbon receptor agonist, causes suppression of the protective anti-parasite T helper 1 response while paradoxically also reducing parasite burdens in those animals. In this study, we examined if TCDD exposure could also reduce parasite b...

BACKGROUND Caring for a family member with dementia is extremely stressful, and contributes to psychiatric and physical illness among caregivers. Therefore, a comprehensive programme called Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer's Caregiver Health II (REACH II) was developed in the United States to enhance the health of Alzheimer's caregivers. REACH II causes a clear reduction of the stress and burd...

When caring for patients with end stage illness there tends to be universal agreement that overly aggressive treatment should be discouraged or limited when death is near and when further intervention would be futile or otherwise inflict undue suffering on the patient (1; 2; 3). The modern ability to delay the natural course of dying, however, has challenged the ability to distinguish at what p...