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"Environmental Influences"
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China's environmental challenges
China's huge environmental challenges affect not only the health and well-being of China but the very future of the planet. In this fully revised and updated third edition of her acclaimed book, noted scholar of Chinese environmentalism Judith Shapiro explores China's struggle to achieve the 'ecological civilization' championed by Xi Jinping since 2017. Drawing on six core analytical concepts - globalization, governance, national identity, civil society, environmental justice, and extractivism - Shapiro ably demonstrates the multifaceted and complex nature of this struggle.
BOOK
Genetic and environmental influences on height from infancy to early adulthood: An individual-based pooled analysis of 45 twin cohorts
Height variation is known to be determined by both genetic and environmental factors, but a systematic description of how their influences differ by sex, age and global regions is lacking. We conducted an individual-based pooled analysis of 45 twin cohorts from 20 countries, including 180,520 paired measurements at ages 1–19 years. The proportion of height variation explained by shared environmental factors was greatest in early childhood, but these effects remained present until early adulthood. Accordingly, the relative genetic contribution increased with age and was greatest in adolescence (up to 0.83 in boys and 0.76 in girls). Comparing geographic-cultural regions (Europe, North-America and Australia and East-Asia), genetic variance was greatest in North-America and Australia and lowest in East-Asia, but the relative proportion of genetic variation was roughly similar across these regions. Our findings provide further insights into height variation during childhood and adolescence in populations representing different ethnicities and exposed to different environments.
Journal Article
Genetic and Environmental Influences on Adolescent Emotional Inertia in Daily Life
Emotional inertia represents the extent to which individuals’ emotions tend to carry over from one time point to the next. High emotional inertia indicates low emotion regulation ability and has been associated with psychological maladjustment and mood disorders. However, the extent of genetic influence on emotional inertia, particularly in adolescents, is largely unknown. The current study examined genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in emotional inertia. This study followed a sample of 447 17-year-old same-sex UK twins (41% males) with an innovative intensive longitudinal daily diary design that captured their intra-individual emotion fluctuations over one month. Adolescents reported their positive and negative emotions once a day consecutively for up to 40 days. Time series analyses were used to construct emotional inertia and classical twin analyses were used to disentangle its genetic and environmental influences. The results showed that inertia for positive emotion was only modestly heritable and inertia for negative emotion showed no heritability at all. Both measures showed predominantly non-shared environmental influences. These findings highlight the importance of unique environmental influences in shaping individual differences in how well adolescents regulate their emotions and how easily they move from one emotional state to another in daily life. The importance of identifying specific environmental influences on emotional inertia is discussed, and suggestions of what those influences might be are offered.
Journal Article
The role of multiple global change factors in driving soil functions and microbial biodiversity
Soils underpin terrestrial ecosystem functions, but they face numerous anthropogenic pressures. Despite their crucial ecological role, we know little about how soils react to more than two environmental factors at a time. Here, we show experimentally that increasing the number of simultaneous global change factors (up to 10) caused increasing directional changes in soil properties, soil processes, and microbial communities, though there was greater uncertainty in predicting the magnitude of change. Our study provides a blueprint for addressing multifactor change with an efficient, broadly applicable experimental design for studying the impacts of global environmental change.
Journal Article
Environmental Factors Affecting Preschoolers’ Motor Development
The process of development occurs according to the pattern established by the genetic potential and also by the influence of environmental factors. The aim of the present study was to focus on the main environmental factors affecting motor development. The review of the literature revealed that family features, such as socioeconomic status, mother’s educational level, and the existence of siblings can affect children’s motor competence. Preschool centers have also become important for children’s development, due to the large amount of time children spend at them nowadays. Moreover, the social cultural context in which a child is reared forms certain demands for his/her motor behavior, favoring specific aspects of motor development and impairing others. A very influential factor (and consequently a very significant educational means) is the use of intervention movement programs. A developmentally adequate movement program can enhance motor development, thus preventing the long term negative consequences that an unfavorable influence of several genetic or the aforementioned environmental factors may have.
Journal Article
A high-resolution summary of Cambrian to Early Triassic marine invertebrate biodiversity
One great challenge in understanding the history of life is resolving the influence of environmental change on biodiversity. Simulated annealing and genetic algorithms were used to synthesize data from 11,000 marine fossil species, collected from more than 3000 stratigraphic sections, to generate a new Cambrian to Triassic biodiversity curve with an imputed temporal resolution of 26 ± 14.9 thousand years. This increased resolution clarifies the timing of known diversification and extinction events. Comparative analysis suggests that partial pressure of carbon dioxide (PCO2) is the only environmental factor that seems to display a secular pattern similar to that of biodiversity, but this similarity was not confirmed when autocorrelation within that time series was analyzed by detrending. These results demonstrate that fossil data can provide the temporal and taxonomic resolutions necessary to test (paleo)biological hypotheses at a level of detail approaching those of long-term ecological analyses.
Journal Article
Stem cell divisions, somatic mutations, cancer etiology, and cancer prevention
Cancers are caused by mutations that may be inherited, induced by environmental factors, or result from DNA replication errors (R). We studied the relationship between the number of normal stem cell divisions and the risk of 17 cancer types in 69 countries throughout the world. The data revealed a strong correlation (median = 0.80) between cancer incidence and normal stem cell divisions in all countries, regardless of their environment. The major role of R mutations in cancer etiology was supported by an independent approach, based solely on cancer genome sequencing and epidemiological data, which suggested that R mutations are responsible for two-thirds of the mutations in human cancers. All of these results are consistent with epidemiological estimates of the fraction of cancers that can be prevented by changes in the environment. Moreover, they accentuate the importance of early detection and intervention to reduce deaths from the many cancers arising from unavoidable R mutations.
Journal Article
Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions
Some tissue types give rise to human cancers millions of times more often than other tissue types. Although this has been recognized for more than a century, it has never been explained. Here, we show that the lifetime risk of cancers of many different types is strongly correlated (0.81) with the total number of divisions of the normal self-renewing cells maintaining that tissue's homeostasis. These results suggest that only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to \"bad luck,\" that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells. This is important not only for understanding the disease but also for designing strategies to limit the mortality it causes.
Journal Article
The Invasion Ecology of Sleeper Populations
It is well established that nonnative species are a key driver of global environmental change, but much less is known about the underlying drivers of nonnative species outbreaks themselves. In the present article, we explore the concept and implications of nonnative sleeper populations in invasion dynamics. Such populations persist at low abundance for years or even decades—a period during which they often go undetected and have negligible impact—until they are triggered by an environmental factor to become highly abundant and disruptive. Population irruptions are commonly misinterpreted as a recent arrival of the nonnative species, but sleeper populations belie a more complex history of inconspicuous occurrence followed by an abrupt shift in abundance and ecological impact. In the present article, we identify mechanisms that can trigger their irruption, and the implications for invasive species risk assessment and management.
Journal Article
Organic Food Purchases in an Emerging Market: The Influence of Consumers’ Personal Factors and Green Marketing Practices of Food Stores
The consumption of food has a significant impact on the environment, individuals and public health. This study aims to investigate the integrative effects of consumers’ personal and situational factors on their attitude and purchase behavior of organic meat. The consumption of this product has been widely regarded as contributing towards sustainable food practices. The study was conducted in an emerging market economy, i.e., Vietnam. Data were collected using a customized and validated survey instrument from a sample of 609 organic meat consumers at four food outlets in Hanoi. The findings suggested that consumers’ concerns regarding the environment, health, food safety and their knowledge of organic food, all significantly impacted their attitude towards the purchase behavior of organic meat. Interestingly, their positive attitude did not necessarily translate into their actual purchase of organic meat. Additionally, food stores’ green marketing practices significantly enhanced consumers’ actual purchase behavior. Conversely, premium prices of organic meat were certainly a deterrent for the actual purchase of organic meat. The findings of this study have several important implications for organic food producers, retailers, policy makers and socio-environmental organizations that seek to develop intervention strategies aimed at increasing organic meat consumption in Vietnam.
Journal Article