Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Off-field practices have the advantage that land owners do not need to change their typical crop management; however, they still entail implementation and opportunity costs. On the other hand, on-field practices generally necessitate changes in how farmers manage their crops, which may reduce implementation costs but potentially increase opportunity costs . Occasionally, the costs of implementing…

Wild collections are diverse across geographic regions and highly heterogeneous within populations, including the presence or absence of arcelin . The great variation in their expression of arcelin production, suggests that this seed protein may have a limited effect on fitness. Alternatively, the cost of acrelin production may outweigh the benefits in some settings. This…

Results were similar when total temporal variance was partitioned into variances and summed covariances . In both systems, between-site differences in abundance fluctuations of species present at both sites were more important than species loss and gain to between-site differences in total temporal variance of ES, although only slightly so in the blueberry system. Specifically,…

We were unable to evaluate the independent effect of soil saturation on canopy openness, but the fact that canopy openness was a significant predictor of shore pine and mountain hemlock sapling occurrence suggests the important roles of soil conditions and light in determining which species are more likely to regenerate. Both species are known to have preferences…

Every plant in the Arboretum was mapped with geographic coordinates as part of an earlier Arboretum study .Monthly bloom times were generalized to the plant genus level by recording the longest demonstrated bloom duration recorded for the plant genus or for any species within it. If research needed to be done to determine a bloom time,…

Vitamin D also augmented markers of innate mucosal immunity. A second, forthcoming study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of adding spices and herbs to increase vegetable intake among junior-enlisted Service Members. Using a cycle of basic science/discovery that advances to clinical trials with various review steps helps move the field of nutrition science forward in a “total…

A European CMV isolate, PV0187, which is 99% identical in RNA sequence to CMV-Fny and which encodes a 2b VSR that is identical in amino acid sequence to that of CMV-Fny , was used for these experiments in order to comply with UK quarantine and containment regulations. CMV-PV0187 had similar effects on growth of tomato plants…

An additional RCT reported age-dependent effects of quercetin on blood pressure . Supplementation of 150 mg quercetin/d for 6 wk resulted in a decrease in SBP by 2.6 mm Hg in the entire study group, by 2.9 mm Hg in the subgroup of hypertensive subjects, and by 3.7 mm Hg in the subgroup of younger…

Ultimately, a broader benchmarking effort would be needed to understand when each approach should be used, similar to benchmarking efforts in the environmental DNA sequencing community. In addition to providing a framework for chemically informed sample comparisons within a dataset, Qemistree also provides a framework for comparing independently processed datasets. In the Qemistree workflow, we…

Still, we do not have any replication for the different levels of connectance and so it is impossible to draw any conclusions regarding this structural property. We expect that, following many plant-pollinator network and food web extinction simulations, higher connectance would lead to greater robustness . However, the addition of negative interactions could complicate the…