Long-term effects of widespread pharmaceutical pollution on trade-offs between behavioural, life-history and reproductive traits in fish.

In our rapidly changing world, understanding how species respond to shifting conditions is of paramount importance. Pharmaceutical pollutants are widespread in aquatic ecosystems globally, yet their impacts on animal behaviour, life-history and reproductive allocation remain poorly understood, especially in the context of intraspecific variation in ecologically important traits that facilitate species' adaptive capacities. We test whether a widespread pharmaceutical pollutant, fluoxetine (Prozac), disrupts the trade-off between individual-level (co)variation in behavioural, life-history and reproductive traits of freshwater fish.

Impacts of Exposure to Ultraviolet Radiation and an Agricultural Pollutant on Morphology and Behavior of Tadpoles (Limnodynastes tasmaniensis).

Amphibians are the most threatened vertebrate class globally. Multiple factors have been implicated in their global decline, and it has been hypothesized that interactions between stressors may be a major cause. Increased ultraviolet (UV) radiation, as a result of ozone depletion, has been identified as one such stressor.

Attitudes to ageing mediates the relationship between perception of age-friendly city and life satisfaction among middle-aged and older people in Macao: a cross-sectional study.

Background: Societal attitudes toward ageing play a significant role in shaping one's ageing experience, and an age-friendly environment can potentially enhance the life satisfaction of older individuals. The objective of this study is to examine the role of attitudes to ageing as mediators in the association between the perception of an age-friendly city and life satisfaction among middle-aged and older adults.

Methods: Using the tools of Age-Friendly City (AFC) criteria, Attitudes to Ageing Questionnaire (AAQ) to measure psychosocial loss, psychological growth, and physical change, and Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) to assess the level of life satisfaction among community-dwelling middle-aged and older people in Macao.

The effects of plastic additives on swimming activity and startle response in marine amphipod Echinogammarus marinus.

Plastic additives are widely used in plastic production and are found in the environment owing to their widespread applications. Among these additives, N-butyl benzenesulfonamide (NBBS) and triphenyl phosphate (TPHP) are under international watchlist for evaluation, with limited studies on amphipods. Di-ethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP) and dibutyl phthalate (DBP) are banned in some countries and categorised as substances of very high concern.

Sex-specific effects of psychoactive pollution on behavioral individuality and plasticity in fish.

The global rise of pharmaceutical contaminants in the aquatic environment poses a serious threat to ecological and evolutionary processes. Studies have traditionally focused on the collateral (average) effects of psychoactive pollutants on ecologically relevant behaviors of wildlife, often neglecting effects among and within individuals, and whether they differ between males and females. We tested whether psychoactive pollutants have sex-specific effects on behavioral individuality and plasticity in guppies (), a freshwater species that inhabits contaminated waterways in the wild.

Bigger and bolder: Widespread agricultural pollutant 17β-trenbolone increases growth and alters behaviour in tadpoles (Litoria ewingii).

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals-compounds that directly interfere with the endocrine system of exposed animals-are insidious environmental pollutants that can disrupt hormone function, even at very low concentrations. The dramatic impacts that some endocrine-disrupting chemicals can have on the reproductive development of wildlife are well documented. However, the potential of endocrine-disrupting chemicals to disrupt animal behaviour has received far less attention, despite the important links between behavioural processes and population-level fitness.

Finding Structure in the Speed of Sound of Supranuclear Matter from Binary Love Relations.

Analyses that connect observations of neutron stars with nuclear-matter properties can rely on equation-of-state insensitive relations. We show that the slope of the binary Love relations (between the tidal deformabilities of binary neutron stars) encodes the baryon density at which the speed of sound rapidly changes. Twin stars lead to relations that present a signature "hill," "drop," and "swoosh" due to the second (mass-radius) stable branch, requiring a new description of the binary Love relations.

Frontiers in quantifying wildlife behavioural responses to chemical pollution.

Animal behaviour is remarkably sensitive to disruption by chemical pollution, with widespread implications for ecological and evolutionary processes in contaminated wildlife populations. However, conventional approaches applied to study the impacts of chemical pollutants on wildlife behaviour seldom address the complexity of natural environments in which contamination occurs. The aim of this review is to guide the rapidly developing field of behavioural ecotoxicology towards increased environmental realism, ecological complexity, and mechanistic understanding.

Exposure to an androgenic agricultural pollutant does not alter metabolic rate, behaviour, or morphology of tadpoles.

Globally, amphibian species are experiencing dramatic population declines, and many face the risk of imminent extinction. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have been recognised as an underappreciated factor contributing to global amphibian declines. In this regard, the use of hormonal growth promotants in the livestock industry provides a direct pathway for EDCs to enter the environment-including the potent anabolic steroid 17β-trenbolone.

Context is Key: Social Environment Mediates the Impacts of a Psychoactive Pollutant on Shoaling Behavior in Fish.

Behavior-modifying drugs, such as antidepressants, are increasingly being detected in waterways and aquatic wildlife around the globe. Typically, behavioral effects of these contaminants are assessed using animals tested in social isolation. However, for group-living species, effects seen in isolation may not reflect those occurring in realistic social settings.

Ten (+1) lessons from conducting a mass casualty in situ simulation exercise in a Canadian academic hospital setting.

Providing care in a twenty-first century urban emergency department (ED) and trauma center is a complex high-pressure practice environment. The pressure is intensified during patient surge scenarios commonly seen during mass casualty incidents, such that response must be practiced regularly. Beyond clinical mastery of individual patient trauma care, a coordinated system-level response is essential to optimize patient care during these relatively infrequent events.

The endocrine disruptor 17β-trenbolone alters the relationship between pre- and post-copulatory sexual traits in male mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki).

It is now well-established that reproduction in wildlife can be disrupted by anthropogenic environmental changes, such as chemical pollution. However, very little is known about how these pollutants might affect the interplay between pre- and post-copulatory mechanisms of sexual selection. Here, we investigated the impacts of 21-day exposure of male eastern mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) to a field-realistic level (average measured concentration: 11 ng/L) of the endocrine-disrupting chemical 17β-trenbolone (17β-TB) on pre- and post-copulatory reproductive traits.

Integration of In Situ Simulation Into an Emergency Department Code Orange Exercise in a Tertiary Care Trauma Referral Center.

Objectives: Disaster-preparedness and response are a commonly overlooked aspect of hospital policy and can frequently be outdated and undertested. Simulation-based education has become a core education modality within Canadian medical training programs. We hypothesized that integrating in situ simulation (ISS) into a hospital-wide, mass-casualty response exercise would enhance realism and our ability to identify latent safety threats (LSTs).

Psychoactive pollution suppresses individual differences in fish behaviour.

Environmental contamination by pharmaceuticals is global, substantially altering crucial behaviours in animals and impacting on their reproduction and survival. A key question is whether the consequences of these pollutants extend beyond mean behavioural changes, restraining differences in behaviour between individuals. In a controlled, two-year, multigenerational experiment with independent mesocosm populations, we exposed guppies () to environmentally realistic levels of the ubiquitous pollutant fluoxetine (Prozac).

Neutron Star Equation of State in Light of GW190814.

The observation of gravitational waves from an asymmetric binary opens the possibility for heavy neutron stars, but these pose challenges to models of the neutron star equation of state. We construct heavy neutron stars by introducing nontrivial structure in the speed of sound sourced by deconfined QCD matter, which cannot be well recovered by spectral representations. Their moment of inertia, Love number, and quadrupole moment are very small, so a tenfold increase in sensitivity may be needed to test this possibility with gravitational waves, which is feasible with third generation detectors.

Long-Term Pharmaceutical Contamination and Temperature Stress Disrupt Fish Behavior.

Natural environments are subject to a range of anthropogenic stressors, with pharmaceutical pollution being among the fastest-growing agents of global change. However, despite wild animals living in complex multi-stressor environments, interactions between pharmaceutical exposure and other stressors remain poorly understood. Accordingly, we investigated effects of long-term exposure to the pervasive pharmaceutical contaminant fluoxetine (Prozac) and acute temperature stress on reproductive behaviors and activity levels in the guppy ().

Chronic exposure to a pervasive pharmaceutical pollutant erodes among-individual phenotypic variation in a fish.

Pharmaceutical pollution is now recognised as a major emerging agent of global change. Increasingly, pharmaceutical pollutants are documented to disrupt ecologically important physiological and behavioural traits in exposed wildlife. However, little is known about potential impacts of pharmaceutical exposure on among-individual variation in these traits, despite phenotypic diversity being critical for population resilience to environmental change.

Field-realistic antidepressant exposure disrupts group foraging dynamics in mosquitofish.

Psychoactive pollutants, such as antidepressants, are increasingly detected in the environment. Mounting evidence suggests that such pollutants can disrupt the behaviour of non-target species. Despite this, few studies have considered how the response of exposed organisms might be mediated by social context.

Low noise frequency comb carriers for 64-QAM via a Brillouin comb amplifier.

Optical frequency comb lines with poor carrier to noise ratio (CNR) are significantly improved by Brillouin amplification using its extreme narrow bandwidth gain to suppress out of band noise, enabling higher quality signal modulation. Its application to spectral lines of narrow 10 GHz pitch and poor CNR is shown to suppress the otherwise strong phase distortion caused by poor CNR after encoding with 96 Gb/s DP-64-QAM signals and restore the bit error rate (BER) to below the limit for standard forward error correction (FEC). This is also achieved with the required frequency shifted optical pump for amplification obtained by seeding it from the comb itself, sparing the need for lasers and frequency locking.

Signal phase regeneration through multiple wave coherent addition enabled by hybrid optical phase squeezer.

A newly proposed concept, which is called hybrid optical phase squeezer (HOPS), achieves multi-level optical phase quantization through coherent addition of two (dual-wave scheme) or three (triple-wave scheme) optical waves exploiting optical parametric processes and electro-optic modulation. The triple-wave scheme enables signal phase regeneration free from phase-to-amplitude noise transfer, which is inevitable in the dual-wave scheme. By using HOPS in the dual-wave scheme, 3-fold phase-noise reduction was achieved for 24-Gb/s QPSK signals with a slight increase of amplitude noise.

Transmission and pass-drop operations of mixed baudrate Nyquist OTDM-WDM signals for all-optical elastic network.

We propose the use of Nyquist OTDM-WDM signal for highly efficient, fully elastic all-optical networks. With the possibility of generation of ultra-coarse yet flexible granular channels, Nyquist OTDM-WDM can eliminate guard-bands in conventional WDM systems, and hence improves the spectral efficiency in network perspective. In this paper, transmission and pass-drop operations of mixed baudrate Nyquist OTDM-WDM channels from 43 Gbaud to dual-polarization 344 Gbaud are successfully demonstrated over 320 km fiber link with four FlexGrid-compatible WSS nodes.

No guard-band wavelength translation of Nyquist OTDM-WDM signal for spectral defragmentation in an elastic add-drop node.

We demonstrate a seamless spectral defragmentation in an elastic all-optical add-drop node based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) channels of Nyquist optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) signal. A 172 Gbaud Nyquist OTDM signal occupying a 215 GHz range is elastically shifted adjacent to its neighboring channel, completely filling a variable spectral gap caused by the dropped channel. The frequency shift is done in a dual-stage polarization-diversity four wave mixing-based converter using polarization-maintaining highly nonlinear fiber.

Profound depletion of host conventional dendritic cells, plasmacytoid dendritic cells, and B cells does not prevent graft-versus-host disease induction.

The efficacy of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is limited by graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Host hematopoietic APCs are important initiators of GVHD, making them logical targets for GVHD prevention. Conventional dendritic cells (DCs) are key APCs for T cell responses in other models of T cell immunity, and they are sufficient for GVHD induction.

Generation of multi-wavelength picosecond pulses with tunable pulsewidth and channel spacing using a Raman amplification-based adiabatic soliton compressor.

We experimentally demonstrate pulsewidth-tunable picosecond multi-wavelength pulse generation at 10 Gb/s by the use of a Raman amplification-based adiabatic soliton compressor (RA-ASC). Multi-wavelength seed pulse trains are generated by a commercially available electroabsorption modulator and then compressed by using the RA-ASC. The pulsewidths of the compressed pulses can be simultaneously controlled from 16.