bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The importance of secondary growth to plant responses to snow in the arctic
Authors: Addis Claire E. , Bret‐Harte Marion S. 
Published: March 2019

Abstract

In arctic environments, drifting snow around large shrub patches during winter may enhance growth by insulating the soil and facilitating overwinter nutrient turnover, leading to increased summer plant growth and potentially widespread increases in shrub cover.

To determine whether snow enhances growth of arctic plants, we examined the effect of 6 years of added snow on plant biomass allocation and growth of nine common vascular plant species collected in 2010 and 2011 on either side of snowfences established in 2005 across a gradient of shrub biomass and productivity near Toolik Lake, Alaska.

The deciduous shrub Salix pulchra responded most positively to added snow showing an 88% increase in total ramet biomass, because increased secondary growth allowed plants to support more branches and leaves. Some graminoid species also showed growth increases, especially where they were more abundant and larger than nearby shrub species.

Species sharing the same growth strategy (deciduous shrubs, evergreen shrubs and graminoids) responded differently to increased snow, with some showing increased growth, others showing decreased growth, and some showing no effects. We found that relative biomass per ramet in combination with growth strategy is a better predictor of species’ growth responses to added snow than growth strategy alone.

Our research shows that a primary mechanism for enhanced growth of shrubs in response to deeper snow is increased secondary growth. Improved growth may be an important way in which arctic plants spread, since they are often long‐lived and clonal, and this may help explain the increase in shrub cover observed across northern latitudes. As shrub patches continue to expand and increase surrounding snow depths during winter, secondary growth of fast‐growing deciduous shrub species may play an important role in defining future landscape community composition and ecosystem processes.

A plain language summary is available for this article.
A new chromosomal rearrangement improves the adaptation of wine yeasts to sulfite
Authors: García‐Ríos Estéfani , Nuévalos Marcos , Barrio Eladio , Puig Sergi , Guillamón José M. 
Published: March 2019

SummarySulfite‐generating compounds are widely used during winemaking as preservatives because of its antimicrobial and antioxidant properties. Thus, wine yeast strains have developed different genetic strategies to increase its sulfite resistance. The most efficient sulfite detoxification mechanism in Saccharomyces cerevisiae uses a plasma membrane protein called Ssu1 to efflux sulfite. In wine yeast strains, two chromosomal translocations (VIIItXVI and XVtXVI) involving the SSU1 promoter region have been shown to upregulate SSU1 expression and, as a result, increase sulfite tolerance. In this study, we have identified a novel chromosomal rearrangement that triggers wine yeast sulfite adaptation. An inversion in chromosome XVI (inv‐XVI) probably due to sequence microhomology, which involves SSU1 and GCR1 regulatory regions, increases the expression of SSU1 and the sulfite resistance of a commercial wine yeast strain. A detailed dissection of this chimeric SSU1 promoter indicates that both the removed SSU1 promoter sequence and the relocated GCR1 sequence contribute to SSU1 upregulation and sulfite tolerance. However, no relevant function has been attributed to the SSU1‐promoter‐binding transcription factor Fzf1. These results unveil a new genomic event that confers an evolutive advantage to wine yeast strains.
Doctrine and Decision: Navigating Labour's New Constitutional Position in the Lords
Authors: Robinson Emily , Watts Jake 
Published: March 2019

AbstractThe 2015–17 Parliament was the first time in history that the Conservatives were in government with no easily assembled majority in the House of Lords. This has fundamentally altered the role that Labour is able to play in the Lords and, conversely, that peers are able to play in the Labour party. Yet the political significance of this situation has not yet been fully appreciated by a party which remains culturally antagonistic and constitutionally wary of the Lords. In this paper, we draw on interviews with Labour peers, particularly the late Baroness Hollis of Heigham, who have been able to use the essentially conservative powers of the Lords for social democratic ends. We suggest that the Labour party needs to incorporate the second chamber into both its practical and symbolic politics, and to find ways to use this new source of constitutional power without accommodating to it.
Orphaned wells, oil assets, and debt: the competing ethics of value creation and care within petrocapitalist projects of return
Authors: Wood Caura 
Published: March 2019

AbstractThis essay explores the phenomenon known as ‘orphaned wells’, meaning unprofitable oil and gas wells (‘legacy wells’) that have become disentangled from their corporate owners owing to insolvency, or owing to a failure to comply with local regulations. Drawing from an ethnographic example of a near‐insolvent oil and gas corporation in Alberta, Canada, and its strategies of refinancing, the essay explores how value creation and the moral force of the obligation to create a financial return give rise to a ‘durational ethics’ that shapes corporate and financial performativities and prolongs the ‘life’ of legacy oil and gas assets. Legacy assets, understood as potential orphans, are thus caught up in a lively corporate practice of asset circulation and recombination often deployed by producers for the moral work of ‘cleaning balance sheets’. This essay calls for ‘thinking with orphans’ to recognize the competing ethical registers which produce them in addition to the growing need for responsibility and corporate care for legacy oil and gas assets.
Greater goods: ethics, energy, and other‐than‐human speech
Authors: Howe Cymene 
Published: March 2019

AbstractRenewable energy projects are ethically laudable for their cleansing intentions, but they also produce effects upon other‐than‐human beings in their orbit. Taking the case of Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which is home to the densest concentration of on‐shore wind parks anywhere in the world, and following Foucault's reading of the speech form ‘parrhesia’, this essay argues that the bodies of affected nonhuman beings, particularly those whose existence is actively balanced against a ‘greater good’ for humanity, enact a form of other‐than‐human speech, first in their threatened status and, secondly, through environmental management regimes that seek to synchronize human and nonhuman lives in settings of both local and global ecological failures.
Milk MicroRNAs in Health and Disease
Authors: Benmoussa Abderrahim , Provost Patrick 
Published: March 2019

AbstractMicroRNAs are small noncoding RNAs responsible for regulating 40% to 60% of gene expression at the posttranscriptional level. The discovery of circulating microRNAs in several biological fluids opened the path for their study as biomarkers and long‐range cell‐to‐cell communication mediators. Their transfer between individuals in the case of blood transfusion, for example, and their high enrichment in milk have sparked the interest for microRNA transfer through diet, especially from mothers to infants during breastfeeding. The extension of such paradigm led to the study of milk microRNAs in the case of cow or goat milk consumption in adults. Here we provide a comprehensive critical review of the key findings surrounding milk microRNAs in human, cow, and goat milk among other species. We discuss the data on their biological properties, their use as disease biomarkers, their transfer between individuals or species, and their putative or verified functions in health and disease of infants and adult consumers. This work is based on all the literature available and integrates all the results, theories, debates, and validation studies available so far on milk microRNAs and related areas of investigations. We critically discuss the limitations and outline future aspects and avenues to explore in this rapidly growing field of research that could impact public health through infant milk formulations or new therapies. We hope that this comprehensive review of the literature will provide insight for all teams investigating milk RNAs’ biological activities and help ensure the quality of future reports.
Does Wetland Location Matter When Managing Wetlands for Watershed‐Scale Flood and Drought Resilience?
Authors: Ameli Ali A. , Creed Irena F. 
Published: March 2019

AbstractWetland protection and restoration strategies that are designed to promote hydrologic resilience do not incorporate the location of wetlands relative to the main stream network. This is primarily attributed to the lack of knowledge on the effects of wetland location on wetland hydrologic function (e.g., flood and drought mitigation). Here, we combined a watershed‐scale, surface–subsurface, fully distributed, physically based hydrologic model with historical, existing, and lost (drained) wetland maps in the Nose Creek watershed in the Prairie Pothole Region of North America to (1) estimate the hydrologic functions of lost wetlands and (2) estimate the hydrologic functions of wetlands located at different distances from the main stream network. Modeling results showed wetland loss altered streamflow, decreasing baseflow and increasing stream peakflow during the period of the precipitation events that led to major flooding in the watershed and downstream cities. In addition, we found that wetlands closer to the main stream network played a disproportionately important role in attenuating peakflow, while wetland location was not important for regulating baseflow. The findings of this study provide information for watershed managers that can help to prioritize wetland restoration efforts for flood or drought risk mitigation.
The Petrological and Geochemical Evolution of Ediacaran Rare‐Metal Bearing A‐type Granites from the Jabal Aja Complex, Northern Arabian Shield, Saudi Arabia
Authors: ABDALLAH Shehta E. , AZER Mokhles K. , SHAMMARI Abdullah S. AL 
Published: March 2019

AbstractNew fieldwork, mineralogical and geochemical data and interpretations are presented for the rare‐metal bearing A‐type granites of the Aja intrusive complex (AIC) in the northern segment of the Arabian Shield. This complex is characterized by discontinuous ring‐shaped outcrops cut by later faulting. The A‐type rocks of the AIC are late Neoproterozoic post‐collisional granites, including alkali feldspar granite, alkaline granite and peralkaline granite. They represent the outer zones of the AIC, surrounding a core of older rocks including monzogranite, syenogranite and granophyre granite. The sharp contacts between A‐type granites of the outer zone and the different granitic rocks of the inner zone suggest that the AIC was emplaced as different phases over a time interval, following complete crystallization of earlier batches. The A‐type granites represent the late intrusive phases of the AIC, which were emplaced during tectonic extension, as shown by the emplacement of dykes synchronous with the granite emplacement and the presence of cataclastic features. The A‐type granites consist of K‐feldspars, quartz, albite, amphiboles and sodic pyroxene with a wide variety of accessory minerals, including Fe‐Ti oxides, zircon, allanite, fluorite, monazite, titanite, apatite, columbite, xenotime and epidote. They are highly evolved (71.3–75.8 wt% SiO2) and display the typical geochemical characteristics of post‐collisional, within‐plate granites. They are rare‐metal granites enriched in total alkalis, Nb, Zr, Y, Ga, Ta, REE with low CaO, MgO, Ba, and Sr. Eu‐negative anomalies (Eu/Eu* = 0.17–0.37) of the A‐type granites reflect extreme magmatic fractionation and perhaps the effects of late fluid‐rock interactions. The chemical characteristics indicate that the A‐type granites of the AIC represent products of extreme fractional crystallization involving alkali feldspar, quartz and, to a lesser extent, ferromagnesian minerals. The parent magma was derived from the partial melting of a juvenile crustal protolith with a mantle contribution. Accumulation of residual volatile‐rich melt and exsolved fluids in the late stage of the magma evolution produced pegmatite and quartz veins that cut the peripheries of the AIC. Post‐magmatic alteration related to the final stages of the evolution of the A‐type granitic magma, indicated by alterations of sodic amphibole and sodic pyroxene, hematitization and partial albitization.
The Political Economy of ‘Tax Spillover’: A New Multilateral Framework
Authors: Baker Andrew , Murphy Richard 
Published: March 2019

AbstractTax spillovers are the effects one country's tax rules and practices have on other countries. They have been assessed in aggregate terms by the IMF using econometric models, and were found to have a ‘significant and sizable’ impact in reducing corporate tax bases and rates in ‘developing countries. However, a widely accepted form of country level spillover analysis remains elusive, despite demands from non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) and international organisations (IOs). We present the first framework for conducting comprehensive national level spillover analyses using a qualitative evaluation framework in three steps. First we identify the importance of the normative underpinnings of multilateral evaluation frameworks. We make the case for an international moral harm convention that discourages states from doing harm to other states through their tax policies. Second we illustrate some of the difficulties in conducting country level spillover analyses using econometric methods, while advancing a broader conception of spillover, based on the defensive purpose of corporation tax. Third we present a new framework for conducting spillover analysis, that assesses relationships between four direct taxes and a number of administrative and institutional features of tax systems. Finally, we present initial pilot qualitative assessments for the UK and Denmark, involving scores, risk dashboards and visualisations.
Tenants’ land access in the rental market: evidence from northern Ethiopia
Authors: Gebru Menasbo , Holden Stein T. , Tilahun Mesfin 
Published: March 2019

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to investigate the allocation efficiency in the tenancy market, and thereby the potential of the market to facilitate operational farm size adjustment that can help land‐poor tenant households to transform into smallholder commercial farms. We analyzed three rounds of balanced panel data for the production seasons 2005–2006, 2009–2010, and 2014–2015 collected from 320 smallholder farms in Tigrai region in northern Ethiopia. Random effects dynamic probit and tobit models are used to assess how land‐poor tenants’ access and extent of access to land are affected by state dependency (earlier participation in the market), kinship ties, climate shocks, and legal restrictions. The results indicate that state dependency and kinship ties with the landholder had strong positive effects on participation and intensity of participation. Climate shocks significantly affected the intensity of participation of tenants already in the rental market. Tenants’ overall access to rented land had not improved from 2005–2006 to 2014–2015. The amount of land accessed by those already in the market was insufficient for them to become commercial farmers. The important policy implication is that orchestrated interventions at community level are needed to reduce transaction costs and thereby improve land access of entrepreneurial tenants.
Amphiregulin and ocular axial length
Authors: Dong Li , Shi Xu Han , Kang Yi Kun , Wei Wen Bin , Wang Ya Xing , Xu Xiao Lin , Gao Fei , Yuan Lin Hong , Zhen Jie , Jiang Wen Jun , Jonas Jost B. 
Published: March 2019

AbstractPurposeTo assess the potential role of amphiregulin as messenger molecule in ocular axial elongation.MethodsThe experimental study included guinea pigs (total n = 78) (age: 3–4 weeks) which underwent bilateral lens‐induced myopization and received 15 days later three intraocular injections in weekly intervals of amphiregulin antibody (doses:5 μg, 10 μg, 20 μg) into their right eyes, and three phosphate‐buffered saline injections into their left eyes; and guinea pigs without lens‐induced myopization and which received three unilateral intraocular injections of amphiregulin antibody (dose: 20 μg) or amphiregulin (doses: 1 ng; 10 ng; 20 ng) into their right eyes, and three phosphate‐buffered saline injections into their left eyes. Seven days later, the animals were sacrificed. Intravitally, we performed biometry, and histology and immunohistochemistry post‐mortem.ResultsIn animals with bilateral lens‐induced myopization, the right eyes receiving amphiregulin antibody showed reduced axial elongation in a dose‐dependent manner (dose: 5 μg: side difference: 0.14 ± 0.05 mm;10 μg: 0.22 ± 0.06 mm; 20 μg: 0.32 ± 0.06 mm; p < 0.001), thicker sclera (all p < 0.05) and higher cell density in the retinal nuclear layers and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) (all p < 0.05). In animals without lens‐induced myopia, the right eyes with amphiregulin antibody application (20 μg) showed reduced axial elongation (p = 0.04), and the right eyes with amphiregulin injections experienced increased (p = 0.02) axial elongation in a dose‐dependent manner (1 ng: 0.04 ± 0.06 mm; 10 ng: 0.10 ± 0.05 mm; 20 ng: 0.11 ± 0.06 mm). Eyes with lens‐induced axial elongation as compared to eyes without lens‐induced axial elongation revealed an increased visualization of amphiregulin upon immunohistochemistry and higher expression of mRNA of endogenous amphiregulin and epidermal growth factor receptor, in particular in the outer part of the retinal inner nuclear layer and in the RPE.ConclusionAmphiregulin may be associated with axial elongation in young guinea pigs.
Causal Inference With Interfering Units for Cluster and Population Level Treatment Allocation Programs
Authors: Papadogeorgou Georgia , Mealli Fabrizia , Zigler Corwin M. 
Published: March 2019

Abstract
Interference arises when an individual's potential outcome depends on the individual treatment level, but also on the treatment level of others. A common assumption in the causal inference literature in the presence of interference is partial interference, implying that the population can be partitioned in clusters of individuals whose potential outcomes only depend on the treatment of units within the same cluster. Previous literature has defined average potential outcomes under counterfactual scenarios where treatments are randomly allocated to units within a cluster. However, within clusters there may be units that are more or less likely to receive treatment based on covariates or neighbors’ treatment. We define new estimands that describe average potential outcomes for realistic counterfactual treatment allocation programs, extending existing estimands to take into consideration the units’ covariates and dependence between units’ treatment assignment. We further propose entirely new estimands for population-level interventions over the collection of clusters, which correspond in the motivating setting to regulations at the federal (vs. cluster or regional) level. We discuss these estimands, propose unbiased estimators and derive asymptotic results as the number of clusters grows. For a small number of observed clusters, a bootstrap approach for confidence intervals is proposed. Finally, we estimate effects in a comparative effectiveness study of power plant emission reduction technologies on ambient ozone pollution.
Couple‐focused interventions for men with localized prostate cancer and their spouses: A randomized clinical trial
Authors: Manne Sharon L. , Kashy Deborah A. , Zaider Talia , Kissane David , Lee David , Kim Isaac Y. , Heckman Carolyn J. , Penedo Frank J. , Murphy Evangelynn , Virtue Shannon Myers 
Published: March 2019

ObjectivesFew couple‐focused interventions have improved psychological and relationship functioning among men diagnosed with localized prostate cancer and their spouses. This study compared the impact of intimacy‐enhancing therapy (IET), a general health and wellness intervention (GHW), and usual care (UC) on the psychological and relationship functioning of localized prostate cancer patients and their partners. Relationship length, relationship satisfaction, and patient masculinity were evaluated as moderators.DesignThis study was a randomized clinical trial with three study arms and four assessment time points.MethodsA total of 237 patients and partners were randomly assigned to receive IET, GHW, or UC. Participants completed measures of psychological functioning and relationship satisfaction at baseline, 5 weeks, 3 months, and 6 months post‐baseline. Primary outcomes were psychological adjustment, depression, cancer‐specific distress, cancer concerns, and relationship satisfaction.ResultsSpouses in IET showed greater increases in relationship satisfaction than spouses in GHW and UC between the baseline and 5‐week follow‐up. Among patients in longer relationships, significant increases in psychological adjustment were found in both treatments compared to UC. Among spouses in longer relationships, psychological adjustment increased in both IET and UC but declined in GHW.ConclusionsIntimacy‐enhancing therapy did not show an impact on general or cancer‐specific distress, but did show an early impact on relationship satisfaction among spouses. IET was superior to UC for patients in longer relationships. It will be important for researchers to understand which couple‐focused interventions benefits both patients and spouses and to identify characteristics of patients, partners, and couples who may not benefit from psychological treatments.
Statement of contribution

What is already known on this subject?

Men diagnosed with localized prostate cancer report lower health‐related quality of life and both patients and spouses report elevated distress.

Relationship communication plays a role in couples’ psychological adaptation to prostate cancer.

Couple‐focused interventions have illustrated an impact on relationship communication.

There are no studies comparing different couple‐focused interventions.

What does this study add?

Intimacy‐enhancing therapy was not superior to no treatment or a comparison treatment for the broad range of psychological and relationship outcomes.

Intimacy‐enhancing therapy was superior to no treatment for patients in longer‐term relationship.

The general health and wellness intervention was not beneficial for men in shorter relationships and for men who did not endorse traditional masculine norms.