Five decades of misunderstanding in the social Hymenoptera: a review and meta-analysis of Michener's paradox.

In a much-cited 1964 paper entitled "Reproductive efficiency in relation to colony size in hymenopterous societies," Charles Michener investigated the correlation between a colony's size and its reproductive efficiency - the ability of its adult females to produce reproductives, measured as per-capita output. Based on his analysis of published data from destructively sampled colonies in 18 species, he reported that in most of these species efficiency decreased with increasing colony size. His conclusion that efficiency is higher in smaller groups has since gained widespread acceptance.

Dogs and wolves differ in their response allocation to their owner/caregiver or food in a concurrent choice procedure.

Dogs and wolves both show attachment-like behaviors to their owners/caregivers, including exploring more in the presence of the owner/caregiver, and greeting the owner/caregiver more effusively after an absence. Concurrent choice studies can elucidate dogs' and wolves' relationship to their owners/caregivers by assessing their preference for the owner/caregiver compared to other stimuli. While previous research has used concurrent choice paradigms to evaluate dogs' and wolves' preference between humans giving social interaction or humans giving food, no research has explored their preferences for an owner/caregiver compared to food when the food is not delivered by a human.

Measuring outcomes in healthcare economics using Artificial Intelligence: With application to resource management.

The quality of service in healthcare is constantly challenged by outlier events such as pandemics (i.e., Covid-19) and natural disasters (such as hurricanes and earthquakes).

Putative fossil blood cells reinterpreted as diagenetic structures.

Red to red-orange spheres in the vascular canals of fossil bone thin sections have been repeatedly reported using light microscopy. Some of these have been interpreted as the fossilized remains of blood cells or, alternatively, pyrite framboids. Here, we assess claims of blood cell preservation within bones of the therizinosauroid theropod from the Jehol Lagerstätte.

Does long-term fire suppression impact leaf litter breakdown and aquatic invertebrate colonization in pine flatwoods wetlands?

Ephemeral wetlands are commonly embedded within pine uplands of the southeastern United States. These wetlands support diverse communities but have often been degraded by a lack of growing-season fires that historically maintained the vegetation structure. In the absence of fire, wetlands develop a dense mid-story of woody vegetation that increases canopy cover and decreases the amount of herbaceous vegetation.

treedata.table: a wrapper for data.table that enables fast manipulation of large phylogenetic trees matched to data.

The number of terminals in phylogenetic trees has significantly increased over the last decade. This trend reflects recent advances in next-generation sequencing, accessibility of public data repositories, and the increased use of phylogenies in many fields. Despite R being central to the analysis of phylogenetic data, manipulation of phylogenetic comparative datasets remains slow, complex, and poorly reproducible.

Temporal Control of Morphogenic Factor Expression Determines Efficacy in Enhancing Regeneration.

Background: Regeneration of fertile plants from tissue culture is a critical bottleneck in the application of new plant breeding technologies. Ectopic overexpression of morphogenic factors is a promising workaround for this hurdle.

Methods: Conditional overexpression of and Δ was used to study the effect of timing the overexpression of these morphogenic factors during shoot regeneration from root explants in Arabidopsis.

Horsenettle () fruit bacterial communities are not variable across fine spatial scales.

Fruit house microbial communities that are unique from the rest of the plant. While symbiotic microbial communities complete important functions for their hosts, the fruit microbiome is often understudied compared to other plant organs. Fruits are reproductive tissues that house, protect, and facilitate the dispersal of seeds, and thus they are directly tied to plant fitness.

Using historical dip net data to infer absence of flatwoods salamanders in stochastic environments.

Local extinction and undetected presence are two very different biological phenomena, but they can be challenging to differentiate. Stochastic environments hamper the development of standardized monitoring schemes for wildlife, and make it more challenging to plan and evaluate the success of conservation efforts. To avoid reintroductions of species at risk that could jeopardize extant populations, managers attempting translocation events require a higher level of confidence that a failure to confirm presence represents a true absence.

A mixed-methods study to test a tailored coaching program for health researchers to manage stress and achieve work-life balance.

Dissemination and implementation (D&I) researchers serve critical scientific, practical, and personal roles in translating science to public health benefit. However, they face multifaceted barriers that may erode their capacity to plan, lead, and evaluate implementation. Individualized coaching focused on human flourishing is an unexplored approach to fully actualize D&I researchers' capacity to bridge the research-practice gap.

Applying a Multi-Dimensional Digital Food and Nutrition Literacy Model to Inform Research and Policies to Enable Adults in the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to Make Healthy Purchases in the Online Food Retail Ecosystem.

The United States (U.S.) Department of Agriculture (USDA)-administered Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) made substantial changes in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

The Systems and Synthetic Biology of Auxin.

Auxin biology as a field has been at the forefront of advances in delineating the structures, dynamics, and control of plant growth networks. Advances have been enabled by combining the complementary fields of top-down, holistic systems biology and bottom-up, build-to-understand synthetic biology. Continued collaboration between these approaches will facilitate our understanding of and ability to engineer auxin's control of plant growth, development, and physiology.

Neonatal resource scarcity alters maternal care and impacts offspring core temperature and growth in rats.

Stressful experiences during childhood, including poverty and inconsistent parental care, can enhance vulnerability for worsened physical and mental health outcomes in adulthood. Using Sprague Dawley rats, the present study explored the impact of limited resource availability on maternal behavior and physiological and emotional behavior outcomes in the offspring. Early life adversity was induced by incorporating aspects of the limited bedding and nesting and scarcity models, wherein limited resource availability has previously been shown to provoke unpredictable or adverse maternal care respectively.

Rheological Aspects of Cellulose Nanomaterials: Governing Factors and Emerging Applications.

Cellulose nanomaterials (CNMs), mainly including nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) and cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), have attained enormous interest due to their sustainability, biodegradability, biocompatibility, nanoscale dimensions, large surface area, facile modification of surface chemistry, as well as unique optical, mechanical, and rheological performance. One of the most fascinating properties of CNMs is their aqueous suspension rheology, i.e.

In vitro and in vivo activities of the carbonic anhydrase inhibitor, dorzolamide, against vancomycin-resistant enterococci.

Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) are a serious public health threat and a leading cause of healthcare-associated infections. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics recommended for the treatment of enterococcal infections complicates the management of these infections. Hence, there is a critical need for the discovery of new anti-VRE agents.

Investigating the Impact of Brief Outings on the Welfare of Dogs Living in US Shelters.

Social isolation likely contributes to reduced welfare for shelter-living dogs. Several studies have established that time out of the kennel with a person can improve dogs' behavior and reduce physiological measures of stress. This study assessed the effects of two-and-a-half-hour outings on the urinary cortisol levels and activity of dogs as they awaited adoption at four animal shelters.

A new caimanine alligatorid from the Middle Eocene of Southwest Texas and implications for spatial and temporal shifts in Paleogene crocodyliform diversity.

Dramatic early Cenozoic climatic shifts resulted in faunal reorganization on a global scale. Among vertebrates, multiple groups of mammals (e.g.

A Systematic Scoping Review of Media Campaigns to Develop a Typology to Evaluate Their Collective Impact on Promoting Healthy Hydration Behaviors and Reducing Sugary Beverage Health Risks.

Interventions to discourage sugary beverages and encourage water consumption have produced modest and unsustainable behavioral changes to reduce obesity and noncommunicable disease risks. This systematic scoping review examined media campaigns to develop a typology to support healthy hydration nonalcoholic beverage behaviors. Our three-step methodology included the following: (1) review and summarize expert-recommended healthy beverage guidelines; (2) review six English-language electronic databases guided by PRISMA to describe existing campaign types by issue, goal and underlying theory; and (3) develop a media campaign typology to support policies, systems and environments to encourage healthy hydration behaviors.

Improved plaque assay for human coronaviruses 229E and OC43.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, studies that work to understand SARS-CoV-2 are urgently needed. In turn, the less severe human coronaviruses such as HCoV-229E and OC43 are drawing newfound attention. These less severe coronaviruses can be used as a model to facilitate our understanding of the host immune response to coronavirus infection.

Boiled or Bottled: Regional and Seasonal Exposures to Drinking Water Contamination and Household Air Pollution in Rural China.

Background: Inadequate access to safe drinking water remains a global health problem, particularly in rural areas. Boiling is the most commonly used form of point-of-use household water treatment (HWT) globally, although the use of bottled water in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is increasing rapidly.

Objectives: We assessed the regional and seasonal prevalence of HWT practices (including bottled water use) in low-income rural areas in two Chinese provinces, evaluated the microbiological safety of drinking water and associated health outcomes, and estimated the air pollution burden associated with the use of solid fuels for boiling.

Inborn differences in emotional behavior coincide with alterations in hypothalamic paraventricular motor projections.

Integrated behavioral responses to emotionally salient stimuli require the concomitant activation of descending neural circuits that integrate physiological, affective, and motor responses to stress. Our previous work interrogated descending circuits in the brainstem and spinal cord that project to motor and sympathetic targets. The hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN), a key node of this circuitry, integrates multiple motor and sympathetic responses activated by stress.

A synthetic biosensor to detect peroxisomal acetyl-CoA concentration for compartmentalized metabolic engineering.

Background: Sub-cellular compartmentalization is used by cells to create favorable microenvironments for various metabolic reactions. These compartments concentrate enzymes, separate competing metabolic reactions, and isolate toxic intermediates. Such advantages have been recently harnessed by metabolic engineers to improve the production of various high-value chemicals via compartmentalized metabolic engineering.

Transmission of West Nile and five other temperate mosquito-borne viruses peaks at temperatures between 23°C and 26°C.

The temperature-dependence of many important mosquito-borne diseases has never been quantified. These relationships are critical for understanding current distributions and predicting future shifts from climate change. We used trait-based models to characterize temperature-dependent transmission of 10 vector-pathogen pairs of mosquitoes (, , , and others) and viruses (West Nile, Eastern and Western Equine Encephalitis, St.

Endophytic sp. SSG as a potential biofertilizer promoting boxwood growth.

Background: sp. SSG is a bacterial endophyte isolated from boxwood leaves showing a resistant response to infection by the boxwood blight pathogen . SSG acted as a protective and curative biocontrol agent for boxwood blight and as a bio-sanitizer of disease inoculum in the field.