Search results for "Off"
showing 10 items of 2973 documents
Justice for All? Issues Faced by Linguistic Minorities and Border Patrol Agents during Interpreted Arraignment Interviews.
2015
The Tijuana (Mexico) - San Ysidro (San Diego County, CA) international border is the world’s busiest port of entry. The US Customs and Border Protection Agency hires over 60,000 employees, 21,000 of whom are agents in the US Border Patrol. Several steps must be taken to become a border patrol agent, but being bilingual is not a pre-requisite. In order to communicate with detainees, and interrogate them, the US Border Patrol Agency hires the services of Telephone Interpreting Companies. In this study I present segments of a 2 hour and fifty minute transcript that captures a typical border patrol agent /detainee interaction facilitated by an ad-hoc interpreter. I examine the power differentia…
Assessing the Cost of Mounting an Immune Response
2003
International audience; The evolution of parasite resistance has often been assumed to be governed by antagonistic selection pressures. Defense against pathogens, by mounting an immune response, confers evident benefits but may also incur costs, so that the optimal level of defense is expected to depend on the balance between benefits and costs. Although the benefits of immune surveillance are well known, estimates of costs are still equivocal. Here we studied the behavioral and physiological modifications associated with exposure to a onreplicating antigen (lipopolysaccharide [LPS] of Escherichia coli) in a passerine species, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus).We further investigated wh…
Parental experience of a risky environment leads to improved offspring growth rate.
2014
Abstract Parasites (or diseases) are major selective force for the evolution of life history traits and parasite-host evolution. Mothers can show a variety of responses to parasites during pregnancy with different consequences for them or their offspring. However, whether information in the maternal environment before pregnancy can cause a change in the phenotype of the offspring is unknown. To avoid the confounding effect of pathogens and to reduce the risk of direct effect of mother's immune activation, we injected female laboratory mice with lipopolysaccharides (LPS) before mating. In order to provide a constant information on the potential infectious risk of the environment, females wer…
Immune-mediated change in the expression of a sexual trait predicts offspring survival in the wild.
2011
9 pages; International audience; BACKGROUND: The "good genes" theory of sexual selection postulates that females choose mates that will improve their offspring's fitness through the inheritance of paternal genes. In spite of the attention that this hypothesis has given rise to, the empirical evidence remains sparse, mostly because of the difficulties of controlling for the many environmental factors that may covary with both the paternal phenotype and offspring fitness. Here, we tested the hypothesis that offspring sired by males of a preferred phenotype should have better survival in an endangered bird, the houbara bustard (Chlamydotis undulata undulata). METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We…
Biophysical Characterization of Polysialic Acid—Membrane Nanosystems
2019
Polysialic acid (polySia) is a long, membrane-bound, polyanionic polymer (with the degree of polymerization, DP, up to 400) of negatively charged sialic acid monomers. Biological roles of polySia are based on its ability to modulate repulsive and attractive interactions, and its ability to modulate membrane surface charge density, pH at the membrane surface, and membrane potentials. PolySia is used in anti-bacterial and anti-cancer therapies, and in neural tissue repair. Hydrophobically-modified polySia chains can form nano-structures (micelles or liposomes) with high stability and low toxicity for drug delivery. The analysis, based on the Goldman-Hodgkin-Katz equation, of transmembrane pot…
Old Frisian skalk: A ‘Servant’ or a ‘Rogue’?
2017
The Old Frisian wordscalc, scalch, schalcis usually used in the sense of ‘servant, slave’. However, the word evidences a pejoration in meaning, being also attested in the Frisian written tradition in the sense of ‘ill-mannered person, villain, a bad guy’. The investigation of the occurrences ofskalk–along with a comparison of its Germanic cognates–will allow us to draw a picture of the semantic development of this word from medieval times to the Modern stage of the Frisian language. In the author’s opinion, the negative connotation ofskalkas an offensive epithet is the final result of a range of different causes, whose origin should be searched both in Frisian-Scandinavian contacts during t…
Manipulation of offspring number and size: benefits of large body size at birth depend upon the rearing environment
2003
Summary 1. Allocation of reproductive effort between the number and size of offspring determines the immediate rearing environment for the growing young. As the number of offspring increases, the amount of parental investment per individual offspring decreases, and the quality of the rearing environment is expected to decrease. This may result in a lower quality of offspring reared in such conditions. 2. We studied the effects of the rearing environment on the quality of juvenile bank voles, Clethrionomys glareolus , with different initial body sizes at birth in a 2 〈 2 factorial experiment. The rearing environment was manipulated by enlarging both the litter size by two extra pups, and mea…
GENETIC BASIS OF THE TRADE-OFF BETWEEN OFFSPRING NUMBER AND QUALITY IN THE BANK VOLE
2004
One of the main tenets of modern life-history theory is the negative relationship (trade-off) between the number and quality of offspring produced. Theory predicts a negative genetic correlation between these traits since both are closely related to fitness of individuals. However, the genetic basis of the trade-off has only been tested to a limited extent in natural populations. We examined whether size and quality of offspring are negatively related to litter size in the bank vole Clethrionomys glareolus. First, we found a significant negative phenotypic correlation between the number and size of offspring at birth in both laboratory and field populations of the bank vole. Second, a large…
Optimal allocation of reproductive effort: manipulation of offspring number and size in the bank vole
2001
The number of offspring attaining reproductive age is an important measure of an individual's fitness. However, reproductive success is generally constrained by a trade-off between offspring number and quality. We conducted a factorial experiment in order to study the effects of an artificial enlargement of offspring number and size on the reproductive success of female bank voles (Clethrionomys glareolus). We also studied the effects of the manipulations on growth, survival and reproductive success of the offspring. Potentially confounding effects of varying maternal quality were avoided by cross-fostering. Our results showed that the number of offspring alive in the next breeding season w…
A trade-off between current and future sex allocation revealed by maternal energy budget in a small mammal.
2011
Sex-allocation theories generally assume differential fitness costs of raising sons and daughters. Yet, experimental confirmation of such costs is scarce and potential mechanisms are rarely addressed. While the most universal measure of physiological costs is energy expenditure, only one study has related the maternal energy budget to experimentally controlled offspring sex. Here, we experimentally test this in the bank vole (Myodes glareolus) by simultaneously manipulating the litter's size and sex ratio immediately after birth. Two weeks after manipulation, when mothers were at the peak of lactation and were pregnant with concurrent litters, we assessed their energy budget. We found that …