The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is dramatically impacting planetary and human societal systems that are inseparably linked. Zoonotic diseases like COVID-19 expose how well-being inextricably interconnected with the environment to other converging (human driven) social–ecological crises, such as dramatic losses of biodiversity, land use change, climate change. We argue itself a ...

South Africa is a middle-income country with the world's largest HIV patient cohort and a growing burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases - a prime location for pharmaceutical companies looking to expand their markets. Yet, 20 years after the country's first democratic elections, poor health indicators and an over-burdened public health system belie persistently stark levels of soc...

Stéfan Sinclair and Stan Ruecker / © ctr 127 Summer 2006 Based on a consideration of the vast majority of electronic texts currently available (especially on the Internet), it would be easy to conclude that electronic texts are merely digital counterparts to print-based texts, albeit in a much more convenient format for indexing (as Google does) and interlinking (as HTML – the common formatting...

Humans easily recognize "transposed" musical melodies shifted up or down in log frequency. Surprisingly, songbirds seem to lack this capacity, although they can learn to recognize human melodies and use complex acoustic sequences for communication. Decades of research have led to the widespread belief that songbirds, unlike humans, are strongly biased to use absolute pitch (AP) in melody recogn...

Cultural evolutionary theory and human behavioural ecology offer different, but compatible approaches to understanding human demographic behaviour. For much of their 30 history, these approaches have been deployed in parallel, with few explicit attempts to integrate them empirically. In this paper, we test hypotheses drawn from both approaches to explore how reproductive behaviour responds to c...

Anaplasma phagocytophilum, an obligate intracellular prokaryote, infects neutrophils, and alters cardinal functions via reprogrammed transcription. Large contiguous regions of neutrophil chromosomes are differentially expressed during infection. Secreted A. phagocytophilum effector AnkA transits into the neutrophil or granulocyte nucleus to complex with DNA in heterochromatin across all chromos...

The fossil record of early vertebrates has been influential in elucidating the evolutionary assembly of the gnathostome bodyplan. Understanding of the timing and tempo of vertebrate innovations remains, however, mired in a literal reading of the fossil record. Early jawless vertebrates (ostracoderms) exhibit restriction to shallow-water environments. The distribution of their stratigraphic occu...

Many parasites are motile and exhibit behavioural preferences for certain host species. Because hosts can vary in their susceptibility to infections, parasites might benefit from preferentially detecting and infecting the most susceptible host, but this mechanistic hypothesis for host-choice has rarely been tested. We evaluated whether cercariae (larval trematode parasites) prefer the most susc...

Why is heart failure in children important? If we just consider the number of individuals affected, adult heart failure is clearly a more compelling public health problem. However, the relatively small numbers belie the overall economic and social impact of pediatric heart failure. When a child is admitted to the hospital for heart failure, the costs are considerably higher for children than ad...

Functional imaging is increasingly being used to provide a noninvasive alternative to intracarotid sodium amobarbitol testing (i.e., the Wada test). Although magnetoencephalography (MEG) has shown significant potential in this regard, the resultant output is often reduced to a simplified estimate of laterality. Such estimates belie the richness of functional imaging data and consequently limit ...