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A long-awaited new translation of Giorgio Vasari's \"Life of Leonardo da Vinci,\" illustrated for the first time, that preserves Vasari's compelling narrative and respects his meaning with a new precision. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550 and 1568) is a classic of cultural history. In his monumental assembly of artists' lives, no life is more vivid than that of Leonardo da Vinci, a near-contemporary of Vasari. Illustrated with the works of art discussed by Vasari, and including a selection of Da Vinci's studies of science and technology, The Life of Leonardo da Vinci paints an intriguing picture of the progress of art in the hands of the master. Succinct notes also provide new insights in light of modern knowledge of Da Vinci's career. This beautiful gift edition offers a literary translation by eminent scholar Martin Kemp that respects the sixteenth-century Italian, transposing Vasari's vocabulary into its modern equivalent. Translated in partnership with Lucy Russell, the text will be the first to integrate the 1550 edition and the expanded version of 1568. This fascinating and accessible read coincides with the five hundredth anniversary of Da Vinci's death.

Human activities, especially conversion and degradation of habitats, are causing global biodiversity declines. How local ecological assemblages are responding is less clear—a concern given their importance for many ecosystem functions and services. We analysed a terrestrial assemblage database of unprecedented geographic and taxonomic coverage to quantify local biodiversity responses to land use and related changes. Here we show that in the worst-affected habitats, these pressures reduce within-sample species richness by an average of 76.5%, total abundance by 39.5% and rarefaction-based richness by 40.3%. We estimate that, globally, these pressures have already slightly reduced average within-sample richness (by 13.6%), total abundance (10.7%) and rarefaction-based richness (8.1%), with changes showing marked spatial variation. Rapid further losses are predicted under a business-as-usual land-use scenario; within-sample richness is projected to fall by a further 3.4% globally by 2100, with losses concentrated in biodiverse but economically poor countries. Strong mitigation can deliver much more positive biodiversity changes (up to a 1.9% average increase) that are less strongly related to countries' socioeconomic status. Analysis of a global data set of local biodiversity comparisons reveals an average 13.6% reduction in species richness and 10.7% reduction in abundance as a result of past human land use, and projections based on these data under a business-as-usual land-use scenario predict further substantial loss this century, unless strong mitigation efforts are undertaken to reverse the effects. Biodiversity losses linked to changing land-use Global studies of biodiversity paint a consistent picture of declines associated with human activity. At the same time, many studies at a local level have shown that biodiversity loss affects ecosystem functions and services. Tim Newbold et al . have assembled a global data set of local biodiversity trends — including 1% of the global total of named species — as a measure of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human pressures. The authors estimate that human-caused changes have already reduced average local species richness by 13.6% and total abundance by 10.7% during the past few centuries. Under projected business-as-usual land use scenarios, further substantial loss is expected this century, but there is room for strong mitigation efforts to reverse the effects.

Logged and disturbed forests are often viewed as degraded and depauperate environments compared with primary forest. However, they are dynamic ecosystems1 that provide refugia for large amounts of biodiversity2,3, so we cannot afford to underestimate their conservation value4. Here we present empirically defined thresholds for categorizing the conservation value of logged forests, using one of the most comprehensive assessments of taxon responses to habitat degradation in any tropical forest environment. We analysed the impact of logging intensity on the individual occurrence patterns of 1,681 taxa belonging to 86 taxonomic orders and 126 functional groups in Sabah, Malaysia. Our results demonstrate the existence of two conservation-relevant thresholds. First, lightly logged forests (<29% biomass removal) retain high conservation value and a largely intact functional composition, and are therefore likely to recover their pre-logging values if allowed to undergo natural regeneration. Second, the most extreme impacts occur in heavily degraded forests with more than two-thirds (>68%) of their biomass removed, and these are likely to require more expensive measures to recover their biodiversity value. Overall, our data confirm that primary forests are irreplaceable5, but they also reinforce the message that logged forests retain considerable conservation value that should not be overlooked.

In Southeast Asia, biodiversity-rich forests are being extensively logged and converted to oil palm monocultures. Although the impacts of these changes on biodiversity are largely well documented, we know addition to samples we collected in 201 little about how these large-scale impacts affect freshwater trophic ecology. We used stable isotope analyses (SIA) to determine the impacts of land-use changes on the relative contribution of allochthonous and autochthonous basal resources in 19 stream food webs. We also applied compoundspecific SIA and bulk-SIA to determine the trophic position of fish apex predators and mesopredators (invertivores and omnivores). There was no difference in the contribution of autochthonous resources in either consumer group (70–82%) among streams with different landuse type. There was no change in trophic position for meso-predators, but trophic position decreased significantly for apex predators in oil palm plantation streams compared to forest streams. This change in maximum food chain length was due to turnover in identity of the apex predator among land-use types. Disruption of aquatic trophic ecology, through reduction in food chain length and shift in basal resources, may cause significant changes in biodiversity as well as ecosystem functions and services. Understanding this change can help develop more focused priorities for mediating the negative impacts of human activities on freshwater ecosystems.

Despite occupying only 12% of Earth's surface, tropical forests contain disproportionate biodiversity, contribute approximately 40% of terrestrial net primary productivity, and contain 20% of global carbon biomass. In parallel, tropical forests experience extreme destruction and degradation, leading to a pressing need to understand the value of degraded forest. Recent work suggests that degraded forests which retain a high percentage of native tree cover, or are in late stage recovery, can support levels of species richness close to those of intact forests. However, the impacts of tropical forest degradation on ecosystem functions remain unclear due to a paucity of studies. Among the key functions that may be modified by habitat degradation is the flux of energy and nutrients through an ecosystem. In chapter two, I determined insectivorous bat community response to short- and long-term pressures, climatic and logging respectively. In the second and third chapters. In the third and fourth chapters I examined how forest degradation influenced bat resource use, food web structure, and associated ecological functions. I focused on summarising complex interactions between bats, their prey and basal resources by analysing naturally abundant isotope compositions. Initially, I focused on shifts across a narrow degradation gradient, and found that both landscape- and localscale traits correlated with changes to isotopic niche and trophic position, respectively. I extended this investigation to examine patterns across both logged and primary forest, and examined how long term habitat changes correlated with dietary shift. Furthermore, I explored how short-term environmental stress interacted with established gradients of habitat quality. In the last chapter, I undertook a 15nitrogen-tracer mesocosms study to investigate dung beetle effects upon nitrogen cycling in tropical soils, facilitating future studies on the response of nitrogen processes to environmental change. This research assists in identification of landscape elements which should be favoured by management policies in order to retain ecosystem functioning.

This thesis combines theoretical and practical reasoning behind police brutality and draws on methodologies and frameworks from a range of academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and politics. It bridges the gap in the current academic literature around police brutality by showing that implicit bias, training and weaponry culminate in the reasoning behind the cycle of police abuse. It shows that there is an ongoing Black Freedom Struggle and that it is not justifiable to assume that the Civil Rights Movement ended in the 1960s as the battles are the same, not only from the 1960s to the 1990s but to the contemporary too, whereby legislation still needs to change in order to prevent unnecessary killings of unarmed African Americans. Police brutality is one of the most deadly affects on African Americans and the thesis proves that implicit bias, the lack of adequate training and the weaponry used by police, both individually and when combined, are direct causes of overzealous policing, and will present arguments to resolve the ongoing battle between police and unarmed African Americans. Chapter One analyses the effect of implicit bias on the police and shows how status and class have little bearing to reduce this. Chapter Two discusses the inadequacy of police training around the key issues of police use of force and establishes the need to adjust the current curriculum to create new methods to reduce the deaths of African Americans in the community. The final chapter analyses the weaponry used by the police as problematic to African Americans, as they are all too readily used. These three key elements are fundamental to the cycle of police brutality, which prevents the Civil Rights Movement from ending and this analysis will resolve at least some of the issues which arise from their affect on policing.

Fil: Dáttilo, Wesley. Instituto de Ecología; México

Objectives To test the feasibility of a randomised controlled trial (RCT) of aspirin and/or vitamin D3 in active surveillance (AS) low/favourable intermediate risk prostate cancer (PCa) patients with Prolaris® testing. Patients and Methods Newly‐diagnosed low/favourable intermediate risk PCa patients (PSA ≤ 15 ng/ml, International Society of Urological Pathology (ISUP) Grade Group ≤2, maximum biopsy core length <10 mm, clinical stage ≤cT2c) were recruited into a multi‐centre randomised, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled study (ISRCTN91422391, NCT03103152). Participants were randomised to oral low dose (100 mg), standard dose (300 mg) aspirin or placebo and/or vitamin D3 (4000 IU) versus placebo in a 3 × 2 factorial RCT design with biopsy tissue Prolaris® testing. The primary endpoint was trial acceptance/entry rates. Secondary endpoints included feasibility of Prolaris® testing, 12‐month disease re‐assessment (imaging/biochemical/histological), and 12‐month treatment adherence/safety. Disease progression was defined as any of the following (i) 50% increase in baseline PSA, (ii) new Prostate Imaging‐Reporting and Data System (PI‐RADS) 4/5 lesion(s) on multi‐parametric MRI where no previous lesion, (iii) 33% volume increase in lesion size, or radiological upstaging to ≥T3, (iv) ISUP Grade Group upgrade or (v) 50% increase in maximum cancer core length. Results Of 130 eligible patients, 104 (80%) accepted recruitment from seven sites over 12 months, of which 94 patients represented the per protocol population receiving treatment. Prolaris® testing was performed on 76/94 (81%) diagnostic biopsies. Twelve‐month disease progression rate was 43.3%. Assessable 12‐month treatment adherence in non‐progressing patients to aspirin and vitamin D across all treatment arms was 91%. Two drug‐attributable serious adverse events in 1 patient allocated to aspirin were identified. The study was not designed to determine differences between treatment arms. Conclusion Recruitment of AS PCa patients into a multi‐centre multi‐arm placebo‐controlled RCT of minimally‐toxic adjunctive oral drug treatments with molecular biomarker profiling is acceptable and safe. A larger phase III study is needed to determine optimal agents, intervention efficacy, and outcome‐associated biomarkers.

The construction of shelters on plants by arthropods might influence other organisms via changes in colonization, community richness, species composition, and functionality. Arthropods, including beetles, caterpillars, sawflies, spiders, and wasps often interact with host plants via the construction of shelters, building a variety of structures such as leaf ties, tents, rolls, and bags; leaf and stem galls, and hollowed out stems. Such constructs might have both an adaptive value in terms of protection (i.e., serve as shelters) but may also exert a strong influence on terrestrial community diversity in the engineered and neighboring hosts via colonization by secondary occupants. Although different traits of the host plant (e.g., physical, chemical, and architectural features) may affect the potential for ecosystem engineering by insects, such effects have been, to a certain degree, overlooked. Further analyses of how plant traits affect the occurrence of shelters may therefore enrich our understanding of the organizing principles of plant-based communities. This data set includes more than 1000 unique records of ecosystem engineering by arthropods, in the form of structures built on plants. All records have been published in the literature, and span both natural structures (91% of the records) and structures artificially created by researchers (9% of the records). The data were gathered between 1932 and 2021, across more than 50 countries and several ecosystems, ranging from polar to tropical zones. In addition to data on host plants and engineers, we aggregated data on the type of constructs and the identity of inquilines using these structures. This data set highlights the importance of these subtle structures for the organization of terrestrial arthropod communities, enabling hypotheses testing in ecological studies addressing ecosystem engineering and facilitation mediated by constructs. There are no copyright restrictions and please cite this paper when using the data in publications.

Logging activities degrade forest habitats across large areas of the tropics, but the impacts on trophic interactions that underpin forest ecosystems are poorly understood. DNA metabarcoding provides an invaluable tool to investigate such interactions, allowing analysis at a far greater scale and resolution than has previously been possible. We analysed the diet of the insectivorous fawn leaf-nosed bat Hipposideros cervinus across a forest disturbance gradient in Borneo, using a dataset of ecological interactions from an unprecedented number of bat-derived faecal samples. Bats predominantly consumed insects from the orders Lepidoptera, Blattodea, Diptera and Coleoptera, and the taxonomic composition of their diet remained relatively consistent across sites regardless of logging disturbance. There was little difference in the richness of prey consumed in each logging treatment, indicating potential resilience of this species to habitat degradation. In fact, bats consumed a high richness of prey items, and intensive sampling is needed to reliably compare feeding ecology over multiple sites regardless of the bioinformatic procedures used. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.