Coping with unpleasant knowledge: Meat eating among students of environmental studies.

This paper presents qualitative research on the attitudes and behaviors of environmental studies graduate students toward meat eating, and their strategies for coping with the cognitive dissonance induced by the issues related to meat eating and production. The research draws on theoretical and empirical research on the issue of meat eating and the psychological processes involved in it, and by analyzing in-depth interviews it reveals that these students exhibit partially different coping strategies than what studies on general population show, as a result of their awareness and their social circle. The results show that even though these people do not usually regard meat eating as wrong or undesirable in principle, they are well aware of the ethical and environmental issues related to it.

Interpopulation hybridization generates meiotically stable rDNA epigenetic variants in allotetraploid Tragopogon mirus.

Uniparental silencing of 35S rRNA genes (rDNA), known as nucleolar dominance (ND), is common in interspecific hybrids. Allotetraploid Tragopogon mirus composed of Tragopogon dubius (d) and Tragopogon porrifolius (p) genomes shows highly variable ND. To examine the molecular basis of such variation, we studied the genetic and epigenetic features of rDNA homeologs in several lines derived from recently and independently formed natural populations.