A Sixth Mass Extinction? How Linguistic Uncertainty Shapes Our Understanding of the Biodiversity Crisis.

The term 'sixth mass extinction' has become synonymous with the current biodiversity crisis. However, despite a general agreement that current biodiversity declines are severe, no consensus has been reached on whether this constitutes a 'mass extinction event', and thus, whether our current situation is comparable to the catastrophic extinction events of deep time. Here, we suggest that our inability to gauge whether the current biodiversity crisis is a mass extinction event may lie less in quantifiable evidence and more in the language used to define such events.

New task-new results? How the gaze cone is influenced by the method of measurement.

Perceiving direct gaze - the perception of being looked at - is important in everyday life. The gaze cone is a concept to define the area in which observers perceive gaze as direct. The most frequently used methods to measure direct gaze threshold fall into two broad groups: First, a variant of the method of constant stimuli, firstly introduced by Gibson and Pick (The American Journal of Psychology, 76, 386-394, 1963).

Association between blood ethylene oxide levels and the prevalence of periodontitis: evidence from NHANES 2013-2014.

Background: The study aimed to establish a link between blood ethylene oxide (EO) levels and periodontitis, given the growing concern about EO's detrimental health effects.

Materials And Methods: The study included 1006 adults from the 2013-2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) dataset. We assessed periodontitis prevalence across groups, used weighted binary logistic regression and restricted cubic spline fitting for HbEO-periodontitis association, and employed Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves for prediction.

Differences in the perception of direct gaze between the externally and internally rotated eye.

The perception of direct gaze provides multiple benefits for the observer. Previous studies have investigated how the information from both eyes is used to estimate gaze direction, showing that the perception of gaze direction differs when only the externally rotated eye versus only the internally rotated eye is visible. We examined the width and center of the area of direct gaze by presenting the observers with either the externally or internally rotated eye, or both eyes with the task to judge whether a computer avatar is looking at them.

Are the directions of both eyes integrated before or after the perception of direct gaze? Evidence from simulated mild strabismus.

The cone of gaze is a looker's range of gaze directions that is accepted as direct by an observer. The present research asks how the condition of mild strabismus, that is, when the two eyes point in slightly different directions, influences the cone of gaze. Normally, both eyes are rotated in a coordinated manner such that both eyes are directed to the same fixation point.