Method for Prioritizing Urban Pesticides for Monitoring

Environmental Monitoring Branch (EM) is to monitor pesticide residues in surface waters with urban runoff inputs. Recent monitoring efforts have identified urban runoff as a major contributor of pesticides to California surface waters (Ensminger et al., 2012). Pesticide use is i

“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life

Homo Æqualis: A Cross-Society Experimental Analysis of Three Bargaining Games

Data from three bargaining games-the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Third-Party Punishment Game-played in 15 societies are presented. The societies range from US undergraduates to Amazonian, Arctic, and African hunter-gatherers. Behaviour within the games varies markedly across societies. The paper investigates whether this behavioural diversity can be explained solely by variations in inequality aversion. Combining a single parameter utility function with the notion of subgame perfection generates a number of testable predictions. While most of these are supported, there are some telling divergences between theory and data: uncertainty and preferences relating to acts of vengeance may have influenced play in the Ultimatum and Third-Party Punishment Games; and a few subjects used the games as an opportunity to engage in costly signalling.

Costly Punishment Across Human Societies

Recent behavioral experiments aimed at understanding the evolutionary foundations of human cooperation have suggested that a willingness to engage in costly punishment, even in one-shot situations, may be part of human psychology and a key element in understanding our sociality. However, because most experiments have been confined to students in industrialized societies, generalizations of these insights to the species have necessarily been tentative. Here, experimental results from 15 diverse populations show that (i) all populations demonstrate some willingness to administer costly punishment as unequal behavior increases, (ii) the magnitude of this punishment varies substantially across populations, and (iii) costly punishment positively covaries with altruistic behavior across populations. These findings are consistent with models of the gene-culture coevolution of human altruism and further sharpen what any theory of human cooperation needs to explain

Reply to van Hoorn: Converging lines of evidence

We agree with the comments by van Hoorn (1) on our critique (2): testing causal hypotheses about human behavior is a challenge (1, 3). Making progress requires specifying alternative hypotheses and then testing these hypotheses using diverse and converging lines of evidence. We have defended the hypothesis that social norms, which culturally coevolved with the institutions of large-scale societies including markets, influence economic decision-making. This hypothesis emerged from a larger set that we developed both at the outset of our project and as we went along. Our interdisciplinary team’s initial list of hypotheses included the idea that experimental games might spark an innate reciprocity module that would yield little variation across populations

Reading comprehension and immersion schooling: evidence from component skills

Version of record online: 29 December 2016The present research aims to assess literacy acquisition in children becoming bilingual via second language immersion in school. We adopt a cognitive components approach, assessing text-level reading comprehension, a complex literacy skill, as well as underlying cognitive and linguistic components in 144 children aged 7 to 14 (72 immersion bilinguals, 72 controls). Using principal component analysis, a nuanced pattern of results was observed: although emergent bilinguals lag behind their monolingual counterparts on measures of linguistic processing, they showed enhanced performance on a memory and reasoning component. For reading comprehension, no between-group differences were evident, suggesting that selective benefits compensate costs at the level of underlying cognitive components. Overall, the results seem to indicate that literacy skills may be modulated by emerging bilingualism even when no between-group differences are evident at the level of complex skill, and the detection of such differences may depend on the focus and selectivity of the task battery used.This research was partially supported by doctoral research grant AP2010-3434 from the Spanish Ministry of Education to Laura Birke Hansen, grant CSD2008- 00048 to all authors, postdoctoral research grant cofinanced by the Andalusian Government and FEDER funds from the European Union to Julia Morales, grant PSI2012-32287 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to Pedro Macizo, grant PSI2012- 33625 from the Spanish Ministry of Education, and grants CTS 2369 from the Andalusian Government, and APCIN. NSF-PIRE to M. Teresa Bajo

The influence of maternal glucocorticoids on offspring phenotype in high-and low-risk environments

Elevated maternal glucocorticoid levels during gestation can lead to phenotypic changes in offspring via maternal effects. Although such effects have traditionally been considered maladaptive, maternally derived glucocorticoids may adaptively prepare offspring for their future environment depending upon the correlation between maternal and offspring environments. Nevertheless, relatively few studies test the effects of prenatal glucocorticoid exposure across multiple environments. We tested the potential for ecologically relevant increases in maternal glucocorticoids in the eastern fence lizard (Sceloporus undulatus) to induce adaptive phenotypic changes in offspring exposed to high or low densities of an invasive fire ant predator. Maternal treatment had limited effects on offspring morphology and behavior at hatching, but by 10 days of age, we found maternal treatment interacted with offspring environment to alter anti-predator behaviors. We did not detect differences in early-life survival based on maternal treatment or offspring environment. Opposing selection on anti-predator behaviors from historic and novel invasive predators may confound the potential of maternal glucocorticoids to adaptively influence offspring behavior. Our test of the phenotypic outcomes of transgenerational glucocorticoid effects across risk environments provides important insight into the context-specific nature of this phenomenon and the importance of understanding both current and historic evolutionary pressures

Reparaturwege in Krebszellen gezielt ausschalten

Mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 are associated with breast, ovarian and other cancers. Cells with these mutations are defective in homologous recombination (HR), one of two main processes to repair DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). Survival of these cells strongly relies on the usage of alternative repair pathways, such as POLθ-mediated end-joining (TMEJ). Thus, targeting TMEJ could be a promising new strategy for the therapy of BRCA1- and BRCA2-mutant tumours

DNA breaks and chromosomal aberrations arise when replication meets base excision repair

Exposures that methylate DNA potently induce DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) and chromosomal aberrations, which are thought to arise when damaged bases block DNA replication. Here, we demonstrate that DNA methylation damage causes DSB formation when replication interferes with base excision repair (BER), the predominant pathway for repairing methylated bases. We show that cells defective in the N-methylpurine DNA glycosylase, which fail to remove N-methylpurines from DNA and do not initiate BER, display strongly reduced levels of methylation-induced DSBs and chromosomal aberrations compared with wild-type cells. Also, cells unable to generate single-strand breaks (SSBs) at apurinic/apyrimidinic sites do not form DSBs immediately after methylation damage. In contrast, cells deficient in x-ray cross-complementing protein 1, DNA polymerase β, or poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 activity, all of which fail to seal SSBs induced at apurinic/apyrimidinic sites, exhibit strongly elevated levels of methylation-induced DSBs and chromosomal aberrations. We propose that DSBs and chromosomal aberrations after treatment with N-alkylators arise when replication forks collide with SSBs generated during BER