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"Walsh, Peter"
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Lose the clutter, lose the weight : the six-week total-life slim down
\"A recent study showed that people with cluttered homes were 77 percent more likely to be overweight or obese. Why? Organization pro Peter Walsh thinks it's because you can't make your best or the healthiest choices in a cluttered, messy, disorganized environment. But there's good news: you can change your habits, change you health, and change your life--all in just 6 weeks. [Includes] a room-by-room organizing guide, quizzes to create customizable plans, and testimonials from eight of the dozens of volunteers who followed this plan\"
Book
Consequences of Non-Intervention for Infectious Disease in African Great Apes
Infectious disease has recently joined poaching and habitat loss as a major threat to African apes. Both \"naturally\" occurring pathogens, such as Ebola and Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), and respiratory pathogens transmitted from humans, have been confirmed as important sources of mortality in wild gorillas and chimpanzees. While awareness of the threat has increased, interventions such as vaccination and treatment remain controversial. Here we explore both the risk of disease to African apes, and the status of potential responses. Through synthesis of published data, we summarize prior disease impact on African apes. We then use a simple demographic model to illustrate the resilience of a well-known gorilla population to disease, modeled on prior documented outbreaks. We found that the predicted recovery time for this specific gorilla population from a single outbreak ranged from 5 years for a low mortality (4%) respiratory outbreak, to 131 years for an Ebola outbreak that killed 96% of the population. This shows that mortality rates comparable to those recently reported for disease outbreaks in wild populations are not sustainable. This is particularly troubling given the rising pathogen risk created by increasing habituation of wild apes for tourism, and the growth of human populations surrounding protected areas. We assess potential future disease spillover risk in terms of vaccination rates amongst humans that may come into contact with wild apes, and the availability of vaccines against potentially threatening diseases. We discuss and evaluate non-interventionist responses such as limiting tourist access to apes, community health programs, and safety, logistic, and cost issues that constrain the potential of vaccination.
Journal Article
Hierarchical social modularity in gorillas
Modern human societies show hierarchical social modularity (HSM) in which lower-order social units like nuclear families are nested inside increasingly larger units. It has been argued that this HSM evolved independently and after the chimpanzee–human split due to greater recognition of, and bonding between, dispersed kin. We used network modularity analysis and hierarchical clustering to quantify community structure within two western lowland gorilla populations. In both communities, we detected two hierarchically nested tiers of social structure which have not been previously quantified. Both tiers map closely to human social tiers. Genetic data from one population suggested that, as in humans, social unit membership was kin structured. The sizes of gorilla social units also showed the kind of consistent scaling ratio between social tiers observed in humans, baboons, toothed whales, and elephants. These results indicate that the hierarchical social organization observed in humans may have evolved far earlier than previously asserted and may not be a product of the social brain evolution unique to the hominin lineage.
Journal Article
It's all too much, so get it together
Organizational expert Peter Walsh presents steps on decluttering one's personal space, covering how to identify clutter, four steps for decluttering, applying decluttering principals to other areas, such as goals, schoolwork, after-school activities, and relationships with family and friends.
Book
Modelling the mobility of living organisms in heterogeneous landscapes: does memory improve foraging success?
Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on single trajectories offers the possibility of understanding how animals move and of testing basic movement models. Random walks have long represented the main description for micro-organisms and have also been useful to understand the foraging behaviour of large animals. Nevertheless, most vertebrates, in particular humans and other primates, rely on sophisticated cognitive tools such as spatial maps, episodic memory and travel cost discounting. These properties call for other modelling approaches of mobility patterns. We propose a foraging framework where a learning mobile agent uses a combination of memory-based and random steps. We investigate how advantageous it is to use memory for exploiting resources in heterogeneous and changing environments. An adequate balance of determinism and random exploration is found to maximize the foraging efficiency and to generate trajectories with an intricate spatio-temporal order, where travel routes emerge without multi-step planning. Based on this approach, we propose some tools for analysing the non-random nature of mobility patterns in general.
Journal Article
Origin of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum in gorillas
Plasmodium falciparum
is the most prevalent and lethal of the malaria parasites infecting humans, yet the origin and evolutionary history of this important pathogen remain controversial. Here we develop a single-genome amplification strategy to identify and characterize
Plasmodium
spp. DNA sequences in faecal samples from wild-living apes. Among nearly 3,000 specimens collected from field sites throughout central Africa, we found
Plasmodium
infection in chimpanzees (
Pan troglodytes
) and western gorillas (
Gorilla gorilla
), but not in eastern gorillas (
Gorilla beringei
) or bonobos (
Pan paniscus
). Ape plasmodial infections were highly prevalent, widely distributed and almost always made up of mixed parasite species. Analysis of more than 1,100 mitochondrial, apicoplast and nuclear gene sequences from chimpanzees and gorillas revealed that 99% grouped within one of six host-specific lineages representing distinct
Plasmodium
species within the subgenus
Laverania
. One of these from western gorillas comprised parasites that were nearly identical to
P. falciparum
. In phylogenetic analyses of full-length mitochondrial sequences, human
P. falciparum
formed a monophyletic lineage within the gorilla parasite radiation. These findings indicate that
P. falciparum
is of gorilla origin and not of chimpanzee, bonobo or ancient human origin.
Human malaria parasite traced to a fellow primate
The evolutionary origin of
Plasmodium falciparum
, the most prevalent and lethal of the malaria parasites infecting humans, is much debated. Genetic analysis of thousands of fecal samples from wild-living African apes show that the parasites found in the western gorillas — rather than those of chimpanzees or bonobos — are most closely related to the human parasite. The data suggest that all extant human strains of the parasite evolved from a single host transfer event. The new findings are also relevant to the current antimalaria campaign, as they point to potential
Plasmodium
reservoirs in apes.
The evolutionary origin of the human malaria parasite
Plasmodium falciparum
has been much debated. Genetic analysis of a large number of faecal samples from wild-living African apes now shows that
Plasmodium
parasites from Western gorillas are most closely related to the human parasite. The data suggest that human
P. falciparum
evolved from a gorilla parasite after a single host transfer event.
Journal Article
Wave-Like Spread of Ebola Zaire
In the past decade the Zaire strain of Ebola virus (ZEBOV) has emerged repeatedly into human populations in central Africa and caused massive die-offs of gorillas and chimpanzees. We tested the view that emergence events are independent and caused by ZEBOV variants that have been long resident at each locality. Phylogenetic analyses place the earliest known outbreak at Yambuku, Democratic Republic of Congo, very near to the root of the ZEBOV tree, suggesting that viruses causing all other known outbreaks evolved from a Yambuku-like virus after 1976. The tendency for earlier outbreaks to be directly ancestral to later outbreaks suggests that outbreaks are epidemiologically linked and may have occurred at the front of an advancing wave. While the ladder-like phylogenetic structure could also bear the signature of positive selection, our statistical power is too weak to reach a conclusion in this regard. Distances among outbreaks indicate a spread rate of about 50 km per year that remains consistent across spatial scales. Viral evolution is clocklike, and sequences show a high level of small-scale spatial structure. Genetic similarity decays with distance at roughly the same rate at all spatial scales. Our analyses suggest that ZEBOV has recently spread across the region rather than being long persistent at each outbreak locality. Controlling the impact of Ebola on wild apes and human populations may be more feasible than previously recognized.
Journal Article
Ebola Outbreak Killed 5000 Gorillas
Over the past decade, the Zaire strain of Ebola virus (ZEBOV) has repeatedly emerged in Gabon and Congo. Each human outbreak has been accompanied by reports of gorilla and chimpanzee carcasses in neighboring forests, but both the extent of ape mortality and the causal role of ZEBOV have been hotly debated. Here, we present data suggesting that in 2002 and 2003 ZEBOV killed about 5000 gorillas in our study area. The lag between neighboring gorilla groups in mortality onset was close to the ZEBOV disease cycle length, evidence that group-to-group transmission has amplified gorilla die-offs.
Journal Article