Related Threats Research Articles

An Ultrasensitive Norfentanyl Sensor Based on a Carbon Nanotube-Based Field-Effect Transistor for the Detection of Fentanyl Exposure.

The opioid crisis is a worldwide public health crisis that has affected millions of people. In recent years, synthetic opioids, primarily illicit fentanyl, have become the primary driver of overdose deaths. There is a great need for a highly sensitive, portable, and inexpensive analytical tool that can quickly indicate the presence and relative threat of fentanyl. In this work, we develop a semiconductor enriched (sc-) single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT)-based field-effect transistor (FET) biosensor functionalized with norfentanyl antibodies for the sensitive detection of norfentanyl, the primary inactive metabolite of fentanyl, in urine samples. Different sensor configurations were explored in order to obtain the most optimized sensing results. Moreover, by employing the "reduced" antibody, we achieved orientated immobilization of the norfentanyl antibody and thus brought the antigen-antibody interaction closer to the sensor surface, further improving the sensitivity. The reported norfentanyl biosensors have a limit of detection in the fg/mL region in both calibration samples and synthetic urine samples, showing ultrasensitivity and high reliability.

Mapping inundation from sea level rise and its interaction with land cover in the Sundarbans mangrove forest

The sea level rise (SLR) in the Sundarbans areas is higher than the global-average rate of sea rise, and many studies assume that most of the dry land of the Sundarbans will be inundated by the end of the twenty-first century. This study aims to analyze the amount of dry land that can potentially be inundated by SLR in Sundarbans and the impact under different land cover conditions. Four SLR scenarios, a digital elevation data grid, and net subsidence data are used to map areas that will be potentially inundated by 2100. Results for the low (35 cm), mid (52 cm), high (70 cm), and extreme (147 cm) SLR scenarios indicate that the Sundarbans landmass area will be flooded up to 40 km2 (1%), 72 km2 (1.8%), 136 km2 (3.4%), and 918 km2 (23%), respectively, under the current net subsidence rate of −2.4 mm/year by 2100. Except for the extreme scenarios, the low, mid, and high SLR will result in riverbank and beach areas to be covered by water. The potential inundation areas of different vegetation cover classes that already exist today (2020) will be nominal for the low, mid, and high SLR scenarios. We also analyzed the sensitivity of the results through station-based SLR data, which fits with the low (35 cm) SLR scenarios under the −2.4 mm/year subsidence rate. This study concluded that the inundation aspect of SLR will not directly affect the Sundarbans; however, indirectly related threats and anthropogenic disturbances can be major drivers of the Sundarbans’ degradation by the end of the twenty-first century. This work discusses reasonable inundation scenarios integrating SLR and subsidence with a custom land-cover map that includes three forest-density categories. The study’s findings contribute to forest management planning and support the UN goals of the Bangladesh Delta Plan.

MarketTrust: blockchain-based trust evaluation model for SIoT-based smart marketplaces

Due to the significance of trust in Social Internet of Things (SIoT)-based smart marketplaces, several research have focused on trust-related challenges. Trust is necessary for a smooth connection, secure systems, and dependable services during trade operations. Recent SIoT-based trust assessment approaches attempt to solve smart marketplace trust evaluation difficulties by using a variety of direct and indirect trust evaluation techniques and other local trust rating procedures. Nevertheless, these methodologies render trust assessment very sensitive to seller dishonesty, and a dishonest seller may influence local trust scores and at the same time pose a significant trust related threats in the system. In this article, a MarketTrust model is introduced, which is a blockchain-based method for assessing trust in an IoT-based smart marketplace. It has three parts: familiarity, personal interactions, and public perception. A conceptual model, assessment technique, and a global trust evaluation system for merging the three components of a trust value are presented and discussed. Several experiments were conducted to assess the model's security, viability, and efficacy. According to results, the MarketTrust model scored a 21.99% higher trust score and a 47.698% lower average latency than both benchmark models. Therefore, this illustrates that using the proposed framework, a potential buyer can efficiently choose a competent and trustworthy resource seller in a smart marketplace and significantly reduce malicious behavior.

Changes in prey body size differentially reduces predation risk across predator and prey abundances

Trophic interactions underpin the structure of ecological communities by describing the rates at which consumers exploit their resources. The rates at which predators consume their prey are influenced by prey traits, with many species inducing defensive modifications to prey traits following the threat of predation. Here we use different clonal lines of the protist Paramecium being consumed by Stenostomum predators to highlight how differences in prey traits impact rates of predation. Clonal lines differed in their body width traits, and in their ability to induce changes in body width. By using a factorial cross of predator and prey abundances for different clonal lines we demonstrate how evolutionary or induced alterations in prey traits can impact the relative threat of predation. Our experiments show how interference among predators impacts predation rate, and how increased body width increased predator handling times. Given that reductions in the strength of interspecific interactions are associated with increased levels of overall community stability, our results indicate how individual level changes may scale up to impact whole communities.

GLOBAL CLIMATIC TRANSFORMATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR PAKISTAN

Global climate change has tremendous economic, environmental and social implications for Pakistan. Recently, there has been increased awareness about inevitability of climate change and the realization that though everyone is affected, yet not equally. The central argument of this paper is that Pakistan is the victim of global climate change and facing consequences of the action it has not committed. We will analyze the global perspective of climate change, how Pakistan is being affected by climate change and what is policy response of Pakistan for adapting and responding. We will apply qualitative approach for our analysis. Developing world is facing challenges of poor governance, resource scarcity and violence, thus suffer greater because of natural disasters. Pakistan is among those countries which have experienced increasing frequency of flooding and droughts, erratic weather and agricultural pattern, loss of biodiversity and decline in freshwater availability. Social theory forms the basis of understanding of climate related threats to developing countries. It gives rise to conceptual framework of societal vulnerability, which can be used to explain why Pakistan is the major victim of global climate change. Pakistan has experienced serious impacts of climate change in various sectors like agriculture, water scarcity, inter provincial conflicts over resources, public heath, floods and other extreme weather events. This calls for rapid climate action and concrete policy for addressing this rapidly deteriorating situation. The country should enhance is disaster management and coping capacity and work on building the resilience of people and institutions. Availability and distribution of fresh water must be guided by laws formed by coordination of central ad provincial government. For efficient administration, interaction, and implementation, it is crucial to combine the relevant ministries under the aegis of provincial and federal disaster response organizations. Keywords: climate change, Pakistan, social theory, floods, food security, water scarcity.

Romanticization and Demonization: Galician Landscapes in Russian Combatants’ Narratives During the Great War

In terms of environmental history, the First World War represents one of the most significant information gaps of the Anthropocene, where the type of warfare and the fall of empires intensified the destructiveness of the interaction between people and nature, changing the geological and cultural characteristics of Central and Eastern European landscapes. The collision of mass armies with foreign landscapes and militarized natural environments left an indelible stamp on personal accounts of the Great War. The imagery of nature, both as an uncontrollable force and as an object of impact, abounds in a broad diversity of textual and visual sources, which range from official documentation to private correspondence and from propaganda newsreels to personal photographs. It appears that pictures of landscapes destroyed or transformed by war (as well as the related epidemiological and climatic threats) contributed to shaping combatants’ existential experience to the same degree as short military operations. Unlike the universalized experience of the Western Front countries in the available literature on the environmental and spatial history of the First World War, the multiple ways in which mobile belligerent landscapes of the Eastern Front were experienced and perceived are yet to be addressed documentarily as well as methodologically. The article aims to reconstruct the horizons of expectation and environment construction strategies in combatants’ individual narratives and to identify the meaning of belligerent landscapes in the formation of specific behavioral strategies and practices on the Eastern Front of the world’s first industrial war. The analysis of ego-documents (letters, diaries, and memoirs) left by participants of WWI has identified a diversity of models for anthropomorphizing environmental objects and phenomena on the Eastern Front, which range from romanticization to demonization. The author aims to establish the way the perception of belligerent landscapes depends on the cultural baggage, prior experience of warfare, military branch, and the density of contacts with civilians populating the militarized spaces. One of the key messages of this study is the suggestion that the militarised environment’s signification through religious, literary, epidemiological anti-Semitic and other lenses contributed to the normalization of combatants’ mortal terror of war, their negative military experience, mourning, and nostalgia for the lost life-worlds.

Social Conflict and Outgroup Sentiment in South Korea: Evidence from the Yemeni Anti-Refugee Campaign

AbstractResearch on attitudes toward immigrants and refugees largely focuses on intergroup conflict and related threats imposed by outgroup members. This study shifts the analytic focus to intragroup conflict: a domestic struggle among natives over how to handle recently arrived refugees and on their perception of foreign workers in general and Muslims in particular. By exploiting an exogenous variation in the interview timing of a nationally representative survey conducted in South Korea, a “new immigration destination,” this study offers a causal estimate (local average treatment effect) of domestic societal conflict on outgroup attitudes. Results from regression discontinuity (RD) analysis show that in its aftermath—immediately following the completion of a controversial e-petition sponsored by the anti-refugee group demanding that the government extradite asylum seekers—the public opinion of Korean adults toward foreign workers and Muslims became more, not less, favorable. Heterogeneous treatment effects are also found across two respondent-level characteristics: cosmopolitan identity and relative deprivation. Specifically, the focal relationship is more pronounced among individuals who identify less with cosmopolitan citizenship and among those who are more relatively deprived.

Mating status, independent of size, influences lethal fighting in an entomopathogenic nematode

Males of many species compete over access to females by physical contests. Previous experience of mating and the opportunity to mate with a female may influence the motivation of males to engage in contests and the outcome of such contests. Often, prior mating results in increased aggression and probability of success. This is mediated by the effects on the male's subjective evaluation of both the resource value (RV) and his own ability to acquire the resource (resource-holding potential, RHP). Moreover, having mated may also affect a male's actual fighting ability. In Steinernema nematodes, mated males paired with naïve males are more likely to win contests. Here we show that this advantage in mated males of Steinernema carpocapsae cannot be explained solely by the physical changes brought about by prior female contact, since males exposed to female pheromone alone developed sperm and increased in size like mated males but did not have the same advantage as them in contests with naïve males. Effects of mating on other components of RHP, such as skill or motivation, or on RV may explain the greater probability of mated males winning. We also show that mating had differential effects on the probability of a male initiating attack, depending on whether the opponent was a mated male (and thus ready to mate again) or naïve, consistent with the relative threat of the opponent as a competitor for copulations.

Circulating PACAP levels are associated with increased amygdala-default mode network resting-state connectivity in posttraumatic stress disorder

The pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP) system is implicated in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related amygdala-mediated arousal and threat reactivity. PTSD is characterized by increased amygdala reactivity to threat and, more recently, aberrant intrinsic connectivity of the amygdala with large-scale resting state networks, specifically the default mode network (DMN). While the influence of PACAP on amygdala reactivity has been described, its association with intrinsic amygdala connectivity remains unknown. To fill this gap, we examined functional connectivity of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in eighty-nine trauma-exposed adults (69 female) screened for PTSD symptoms to examine the association between blood-borne (circulating) PACAP levels and amygdala-DMN connectivity. Higher circulating PACAP levels were associated with increased amygdala connectivity with posterior DMN regions, including the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/Precun) and left angular gyrus (lANG). Consistent with prior work, this effect was seen in female, but not male, participants and the centromedial, but not basolateral, subregions of the amygdala. Clinical association analyses linked amygdala-PCC/Precun connectivity to anxious arousal symptoms, specifically exaggerated startle response. Taken together, our findings converge with previously demonstrated effects of PACAP on amygdala activity in PTSD-related processes and offer novel evidence for an association between PACAP and intrinsic amygdala connectivity patterns in PTSD. Moreover, these data provide preliminary evidence to motivate future work ascertaining the sex- and subregion-specificity of these effects. Such findings may enable novel mechanistic insights into neural circuit dysfunction in PTSD and how the PACAP system confers risk through a disruption of intrinsic resting-state network dynamics.

On Meeting a Pooka: Five Poems

Ed Madden’s contribution to this special issue is a creative response to themes of the Irish gothic, including four poems from his most recent book, A pooka in Arkansas (Word Works, 2023) and a new poem written explicitly for this volume. The poems offer a creative engagement with themes that animate Irish gothic representation (otherness, repression, authenticity, sexuality, threat) in relation to both sexual and ethnic identity, as well as a specific focus on the folkloric figure of the pooka/púca.

Climate change and pregnancy complications: From hormones to the immune response.

Pregnant women are highly vulnerable to adverse environments. Accumulating evidence highlights that increasing temperatures associated with the ongoing climate change pose a threat to successful reproduction. Heat stress caused by an increased ambient temperature can result in adverse pregnancy outcomes, e.g., preterm birth, stillbirth and low fetal weight. The pathomechanisms through which heat stress interferes with pregnancy maintenance still remain vague, but emerging evidence underscores that the endocrine system is severely affected. It is well known that the endocrine system pivotally contributes to the physiological progression of pregnancy. We review - sometimes speculate - how heat stress can offset hormonal dysregulations and subsequently derail other systems which interact with hormones, such as the immune response. This may account for the heat-stress related threat to successful pregnancy progression, fetal development and long-term children's health.

Diversity Matters: The Election of Asian Americans to U.S. State and Federal Legislatures

Despite substantial research on descriptive representation for Blacks and Latinos, we know little about the electoral conditions under which Asian candidates win office. Leveraging a new dataset on Asian American legislators elected from 2011 to 2020, combined with pre-existing and newly conducted surveys, we develop and test hypotheses related to Asian American candidates’ ingroup support, and their crossover appeal to other racial and ethnic groups. The data show Asian Americans preferring candidates of their own ethnic origin and of other Asian ethnicities to non-Asian candidates, indicating strong ethnic and panethnic motives. Asian candidates have comparatively strong crossover appeal, winning at higher rates than Blacks or Latinos for any given percentage of the reference group. All else equal, Asian American candidates fare best in multiracial districts, so growing diversity should benefit their electoral prospects. This crossover appeal is not closely tied to motives related to relative group status or threat.

A Critically Endangered Proteaceae in the Cape Florisitic Region threatened by an invasive pathogen

Background: Sorocephalus imbricatus (Thunb.) R.Br. is a range-restricted species endemic to the Cape Floristic Region (CFR), South Africa. It is currently classified as Critically Endangered in accordance with the IUCN criteria. Like many other species endemic to the CFR, S. imbricatus is subjected to several major threats including habitat loss, habitat degradation and the impacts of invasive alien species. Sorocephalus imbricatus was recently identified as a species requiring improved representation in ex-situ collections. During field work undertaken to collect germ­plasm for this purpose, a concerning number of dead and dying plants were observed. Objectives: To determine the cause of rapid death of individuals in a remnant subpopulation of S. imbricatus. Method: A field visit to a subpopulation of the only extant population, Elands­kloof, was conducted to examine the symptoms associated with S. imbricatus mortality, and to collect samples for isolation and identification of putative pathogens. Results: Dead and dying plants showed clear symptoms of root and collar rot, with Phytophthora cinnamomi Rands recovered from all samples. The collections highlighted the severe impact of P. cinnamomi on S. imbricatus, with the size of the subpopulation being reduced from 62 to 37 individuals (a 40% reduction) between October 2021 and May 2022. Conclusion: This study describes, for the first time, rapid mortality of the Critically Endangered Proteaceae species, S. imbricatus, likely caused by the invasive pathogen P. cinnamomi. This concerning discovery highlights the urgent need for greater recognition of the threat P. cinnamomi poses not only to S. imbricatus, but to the broader floristic diversity of the CFR. Importantly, it illustrates a need for a substantial body of work to be undertaken to address a significant lack of knowledge regarding the relative threat that P. cinnamomi poses to species of the CFR.

Cetaceans of the oceanic northern Gulf of Mexico: Distributions, group sizes and interspecific associations

The Gulf of Mexico is a subtropical ocean basin with a diverse oceanic cetacean community. Cetacean research in the Gulf of Mexico has been driven by mandates of the US Marine Mammal Protection Act as well as concerns over the rapidly expanding oil and natural gas industry and related potential threats (e.g. seismic surveys, increased ship traffic, oil spills). Previously, cetacean distribution and abundances for specific Gulf of Mexico areas or species have been described based on work over periods of several years, and recently abundance estimates were made for the entire oceanic northern Gulf of Mexico (1996-2001). For each cetacean species, the paper describes distribution, group size, associated sea surface temperature and water depth and interspecific associations based on surveys conducted over 11 years that span the entire northern Gulf of Mexico. This dataset is the most comprehensive to date for the oceanic northern Gulf. Nine ship surveys totalling 45,462km of effort were conducted during spring seasons (1991-2001) in continental shelf-edge and oceanic waters ( 100m) of the northern Gulf of Mexico. Eighteen species were identified from 1,868 sightings. Cetaceans were found throughout the area although some species had localised distributions or occurred in restricted ranges of water depths. Spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris) had the largest mean group size (n = 40, x – = 151.5, SE = 30.90), followed by melon-headed whales (Peponocephala electra), clymene dolphins (S. clymene), pantropical spotted dolphins (S. attenuata), Fraser’s dolphins (Lagenodelphis hosei) and striped dolphins (S. coeruleoalba) (range of means 46.1-99.6). Beaked whales (Ziphiidae), Bryde’s whales (Balaenoptera edeni/brydei), sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) and pygmy/dwarf sperm whales (Kogia spp.) were found in the smallest groups (x – < 3). Twenty-seven sightings (1.4% of all sightings) were composed of two cetacean species. Common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) were recorded in mixedspecies groups with more species than any other cetacean. Forty-five cetacean sightings (2.4% of all sightings) were associated with at least one bird species, and 21 (1.1% of all sightings) were associated with schools of fish. Contrary to previous reports, pantropical spotted dolphins were observed in association with both fish (including surface tunas) and seabirds, although to a lesser extent than for other tropical oceans. No mixed pantropical spotted and spinner dolphin groups were sighted despite their regular co-occurrence in other tropical oceans.

Stability and disruptive speech

Stability and disruptive speech

Deceptive Affection is Strategically Expressed Under Relational Threat—But Not Towards Partners with Low Mate Value

Individuals sometimes express affection that they do not feel. This describes deceptive affectionate messages and occurs when communicators express affectionate messages that are not consistent with their internal feelings of affection in the moment. They are commonly expressed in romantic relationships (about 3 times per week) and are argued to function as relational maintenance and retention. The present work ( N = 1993) demonstrated that deceptive affectionate messages are the behavioral output of an evolved psychological system that strategically operates to maintain significant pair bonds (i.e., high mate value partners) but not non-significant pair bonds (i.e., low mate value partners). This system is uniquely and nonrandomly designed to increasingly generate deceptive affectionate messages when the individual’s highly valued partnership is perceived to be under relational threat and decreasingly deploy deceptive affectionate messages when the highly valued partnership is not under threat, but the system does not apply this relational strategy in low-valued partnerships. This supports evolutionary psychological reasoning that affectionate communication should be predicated on a cost–benefit ratio, such that deceptive affectionate messages are expressed to high value mates because the substantial costs of losing a highly valued partner outweigh the smaller risks of enacting them (e.g., discovered deception, temporary relational conflict). By establishing that deceptive affection is predicated on a cost–benefit ratio, the present work better solidifies deceptive affection, and affection exchange theory more broadly, in the human evolutionary sciences.

Personhood, Masculinity, and Male-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence

Most international violence research that are firmly rooted in the ontology and cultural background of individualism make rash generalisations about violence and human nature by taking the examples of self and gender concepts in Western settings as the only reference point for their claims. Based on the understanding of self in Western cultures, many social psychological studies have over the years blamed interpersonal violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV), on perpetrators’ self-image. For example, while some studies indicate that people with low self-esteem are more likely to turn violent in order to gain esteem, others have theorised that individuals with inflated (high) self-esteem are more susceptible to use violence, particularly when the inflated self is threatened in interpersonal relationships. A growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship also traces the aetiology of IPV and the propensity for men to commit violence against women to the internalisation, endorsement and enactment of culturally defined male gender role. Despite the valuable contributions of these studies, there are significant challenges inherent in research that make broad universal claims about self and violence at the expense of culture and context. One of the most important phenomena that seems underexplored, overlooked or neglected in the context of violence research is how culture-specific notions of personhood and masculinity shapes male-perpetrated IPV. In this article, I explore the centrality of context and culture-specificities of personhood and masculinity in understanding male-perpetrated IPV. I discuss how the dialogical relationship between men’s psychological sense of who they are (personhood) and cultural notions of masculinity provides new insights for understanding violence research in context. I argue that, rather than a threat to a person’s dispositional self, the social pain of unfavourable third-party communal evaluations of masculine inadequacy threatens a man’s relational sense of personhood, and consequently provoke the use of violence towards the source of the threat in intimate relationships in Ghana.

Non-canonical pattern recognition of a pathogen-derived metabolite by a nuclear hormone receptor identifies virulent bacteria in C. elegans

Distinguishing infectious pathogens from harmless microorganisms is essential for animal health. The mechanisms used to identify infectious microbes are not fully understood, particularly in metazoan hosts that eat bacteria as their food source. Here, we characterized a non-canonical pattern-recognition system in Caenorhabditis elegans (C.elegans) that assesses the relative threat of virulent Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P.aeruginosa) to activate innate immunity. We discovered that the innate immune response in C.elegans was triggered by phenazine-1-carboxamide (PCN), a toxic metabolite produced by pathogenic strains of P.aeruginosa. We identified the nuclear hormone receptor NHR-86/HNF4 as the PCN sensor in C.elegans and validated that PCN bound to the ligand-binding domain of NHR-86/HNF4. Activation of NHR-86/HNF4 by PCN directly engaged a transcriptional program in intestinal epithelial cells that protected against P.aeruginosa. Thus, a bacterial metabolite is a pattern of pathogenesis surveilled by nematodes to identify a pathogen in its bacterial diet.

IAC-21-E-9 (Paper ID: 67116) Information sharing for the mitigation of outer space–related cybersecurity threats

IAC-21-E-9 (Paper ID: 67116) Information sharing for the mitigation of outer space–related cybersecurity threats

An integrated abundance model for estimating county-level prevalence of opioid misuse in Ohio.

Opioid misuse is a national epidemic and a significant drug related threat to the United States. While the scale of the problem is undeniable, estimates of the local prevalence of opioid misuse are lacking, despite their importance to policy-making and resource allocation. This is due, in part, to the challenge of directly measuring opioid misuse at a local level. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian hierarchical spatio-temporal abundance model that integrates indirect county-level data on opioid-related outcomes with state-level survey estimates on prevalence of opioid misuse to estimate the latent county-level prevalence and counts of people who misuse opioids. A simulation study shows that our integrated model accurately recovers the latent counts and prevalence. We apply our model to county-level surveillance data on opioid overdose deaths and treatment admissions from the state of Ohio. Our proposed framework can be applied to other applications of small area estimation for hard to reach populations, which is a common occurrence with many health conditions such as those related to illicit behaviors.