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1. Pathways describe the processes that result in the introduction of alien species from one location to another. A framework is proposed to facilitate the comparative analysis of invasion pathways by a wide range of taxa in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Comparisons with a range of data helped identify existing gaps in current knowledge of pathways and highlight the limitations of existing legislation to manage introductions of alien species. The scheme aims for universality but uses the European Union as a case study for the regulatory perspectives. 2. Alien species may arrive and enter a new region through three broad mechanisms: importation of a commodity, arrival of a transport vector, and/or natural spread from a neighbouring region where the species is itself alien. These three mechanisms result in six principal pathways: release, escape, contaminant, stowaway, corridor and unaided. 3. Alien species transported as commodities may be introduced as a deliberate release or as an escape from captivity. Many species are not intentionally transported but arrive as a contaminant of a commodity, for example pathogens and pests. Stowaways are directly associated with human transport but arrive independently of a specific commodity, for example organisms transported in ballast water, cargo and airfreight. The corridor pathway highlights the role transport infrastructures play in the introduction of alien species. The unaided pathway describes situations where natural spread results in alien species arriving into a new region from a donor region where it is also alien. 4. Vertebrate pathways tend to be characterized as deliberate releases, invertebrates as contaminants and plants as escapes. Pathogenic micro-organisms and fungi are generally introduced as contaminants of their hosts. The corridor and unaided pathways are often ignored in pathway assessments but warrant further detailed consideration. 5. Synthesis and applications. Intentional releases and escapes should be straightforward to monitor and regulate but, in practice, developing legislation has proved difficult. New introductions continue to occur through contaminant, stowaway, corridor and unaided pathways. These pathways represent special challenges for management and legislation. The present framework should enable these trends to be monitored more clearly and hopefully lead to the development of appropriate regulations or codes of practice to stem the number of future introductions.

Survival of airplane stowaways is rare. Here we report an exceptional case of successful treatment and full recovery. After a transcontinental flight an unconscious stowaway was discovered in a wheel well of a Boeing 747-400F. Airport paramedics confirmed regular respiration and achieved 100% oxygen saturation (pulse oximetry) by high-flow oxygen. Rectal body temperature was 35.5 °C. On arrival at the emergency department, the patient's vital signs were stable. He did not respond to verbal stimuli. He localized to painful stimuli with both arms, however, there was no reaction to stimuli to both legs. We suspected his neurological deficits were caused by posthypoxic encephalopathy or altitude decompression sickness (DCS), the latter amenable to hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). HBOT was performed for 5 h (US Navy Treatment Table 6) and afterwards, full neurological recovery was documented. About 24 h after admission a new proximal paresis of the left leg was noted. Assuming recurrence of DCS, daily HBOT was scheduled for three days, after which motor function had again returned to normal. Stowaways travelling in airplane wheel wells experience extreme environmental circumstances. The presented patient survived an eight-hour exposure to calculated barometric pressures as low as 190 mmHg and ambient PO2 of 40 mmHg. Apart from creating awareness of this rare patient category, we want to stress the risk of altitude DCS in unpressurized flights. When DCS is suspected, immediate high-flow oxygen therapy should be initiated, followed by HBOT at the earliest opportunity. •Survival of airplane stowaways is rare, due to extreme environmental conditions.•Stowaways experience hypothermia and hypoxia, and risk decompression sickness.•The initial treatment of decompression sickness is high-flow oxygen therapy.•Definitive treatment of decompression sickness is hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Transposable elements (TEs) are DNA fragments that can be replicated or transposed within a genome. TEs make up a high proportion of the plant genome and contribute to genetic diversity and evolution, affecting genome structure or gene activity. Miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are short, non-autonomous class II DNA transposable elements. MITEs have specific sequences, target site duplications (TSDs), and terminal inverted repeats(TIRs), which are characteristics of the classification of MITE families. In this study, a Stowaway-like MITE, PTE-2, was activated in transgenic Chinese cabbage lines. PTE-2 was revealed by in silico analysis as the putative activated element in transgenic Chinese cabbage lines. To verify the in silico analysis data, MITE insertion polymorphism (MIP) PCR was conducted and PTE-2 was confirmed to be activated in transgenic Chinese cabbage lines. The activation tendency of the copy elements of PTE-2 at different loci was also analyzed and only one more element was activated in the transgenic Chinese cabbage lines. Analyzing the sequence of MIP PCR products, the TSD sequence and TIR motif of PTE-2 were identified and matched to the characteristics of the Stowaway-like MITE family. In addition, the flanking region of PTE-2 was modified when PTE-2 was activated.

The prevalence of non-autonomous class II transposable elements (TEs) in plant genomes may serve as a tool for relatively rapid and low-cost development of gene-associated molecular markers. Miniature inverted-repeat transposable element (MITE) copies inserted within introns can be exploited as potential intron length polymorphism (ILP) markers. ILPs can be detected by PCR with primers anchored in exon sequences flanking the target introns. Here, we designed primers for 209 ( -like) MITE insertion sites within introns along the carrot genome and validated them as candidate ILP markers in order to develop a set of markers for genotyping the carrot. As a proof of concept, 90 biallelic -ILP markers were selected and used to assess genetic diversity of 27 accessions comprising wild and cultivated carrot of different root shape. The number of effective alleles was 1.56, mean polymorphism informative content was 0.27, while the average observed and expected heterozygosity was 0.24 and 0.34, respectively. Sixty-seven loci showed positive values of Wright's fixation index. Using Bayesian approach, two clusters comprising four wild and 23 cultivated accessions, respectively, were distinguished. Within the cultivated carrot gene pool, four subclusters representing accessions from Chantenay, Danvers, Imperator, and Paris Market types were revealed. It is the first molecular evidence for root-type associated diversity structure in western cultivated carrot. -ILPs detected substantial genetic diversity among the studied accessions and, showing considerable discrimination power, may be exploited as a tool for germplasm characterization and analysis of genome relationships. The developed set of -ILP markers is an easily accessible molecular marker genotyping system based on TE insertion polymorphism.

•This study examined the fatalities of stowaways traveling in airplane wheel wells.•Possible causes of death are addressed and discussed.•Pertinent technical aspects of airplanes are taken into consideration.•The finding specifics and relevance of discovery site investigations are described. The earliest mention of a stowaway in the wheel well of an airplane dates back to 1947: A 30-year-old man chose this mode of travel for a trip from Lisbon to Brazil and survived (Véronneau et al., 1996). In a retrospective study, we evaluated cases with lethal outcome of stowaways in airplane wheel wells by focusing on forensic autopsy results, in particular, in regard to hypothermia, hypoxia, and injuries. In addition, the flight routes, flight altitudes, and flight durations were analyzed. Using the forensik® program, a search of all the autopsies performed between 1994–2017 at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, was conducted, using the key words “airplane,” “flights,” and “wheel well.” All of the thus retrieved autopsy reports, medicolegal expert reports, and police investigation reports were then evaluated. Five cases were included in our study. The decedents were all men, aged between 14 and 26 years. Four of the decedents had been discovered at the Frankfurt Main airport within airplane wheel wells; the fifth man had been discovered in a woods underlying one of the flight approach paths to the airport. Two stowaways had died of hypoxic asphyxiation, possibly in conjunction with hypothermia as a contributing factor. One stowaway died of the polytrauma he sustained when he was crushed by retracting landing gear. For a further stowaway, the cause of death could not be macroscopically determined at autopsy. In one case, only an external postmortem examination had been performed, without autopsy. Analysis of the flight routes, altitudes, and durations showed that the flights had been international flights, the flight altitudes had varied between 7000m (∼23,000ft) und 11,000m (∼36,000ft), and the flight duration had been between 4 and 9.5h. At high altitudes, the ambient conditions in wheel wells, which are not pressurized, are rarely survived by stowaways, with hypoxic asphyxiation likely posing greater peril than hypothermia. Further dangers are that of being crushed by retracting landing gear after takeoff, or of falling out of a wheel well, from a great height, when the landing gear is deployed. When it appears conceivable that a stowaway may have fallen from an aircraft wheel well during landing or takeoff, an autopsy and discovery scene investigation are essential to reconstructing the course of events.

Miniature inverted repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are widespread in eukaryotic genomes, where they can attain high copy numbers despite a lack of coding capacity. However, little is known about how they originate and amplify. We performed a genome-wide screen of functional interactions between Stowaway MITEs and potential transposases in the rice genome and identified a transpositionally active MITE that possesses key properties that enhance transposition. Although not directly related to its autonomous element, the MITE has less affinity for the transposase than does the autonomous element but lacks a motif repressing transposition in the autonomous element. The MITE contains internal sequences that enhance transposition. These findings suggest that MITEs achieve high transposition activity by scavenging transposases encoded by distantly related and self-restrained autonomous elements.

For more than thirty years now, thinking about the way we, humans, account for our past has taken place under the aegis of representationalism. In its first two decades, representationalism, inaugurated by Hayden White's Metahistory of 1973, has been remarkably successful, but by now it has lost much of its vigor and it lacks explanatory power when faced with recent phenomena such as memory, lieux de mémoire, remembrance, and trauma. It might be argued that many of the shortcomings of representationalism spring from the fact that it is exclusively geared to \"transfer of meaning.\" This essay posits that what may be called \"presence\" (\"the unrepresented way the past is present in the present\") is at least as important as \"meaning.\" \"Presence\" can be dealt with by employing a \"topical\" view of history (in the manner of, for example, Vico) in which the whole of history is stored in \"places\" (that is, \"institutions\") that can be \"visited\" on the plane of the present. Presence can be said to be stored in metonymy. Whereas metaphor is instrumental in the\"transfer of meaning,\" metonymy brings about a \"transfer of presence.\" A metonymy is a \"presence in absence\" not just in the sense that it presents something that isn't there, but also in the sense that in the absence (or at least the radical inconspicuousness) that is there, the thing that isn't there is still present. The presence of the past thus does not reside primarily in the intended story or the manifest metaphorical content of the text, but in what story and text contain in spite of the intentions of the historian. One might say that historical reality travels with historiography not as a paying passenger but as a stowaway. As a stowaway, as what is absently and unintentionally present on the plane of time, metonymy is a metaphor for discontinuity, or, rather, for the entwinement of continuity and discontinuity.

We investigated nine families of Stowaway -like miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) in the carrot genome, named DcSto 1 to DcSto 9. All of them were AT-rich and shared a highly conserved 6 bp-long TIR typical for Stowaway s. The copy number of DcSto 1 elements was estimated as ca. 5,000 per diploid genome. We observed preference for clustered insertions of DcSto and other MITEs. Distribution of DcSto 1 hybridization signals revealed presence of DcSto 1 clusters within euchromatic regions along all chromosomes. An arrangement of eight regions encompassing DcSto insertion sites, studied in detail, was highly variable among plants representing different populations of Daucus carota . All of these insertions were polymorphic which most likely suggests a very recent mobilization of those elements. Insertions of DcSto near carrot genes and presence of putative promoters, regulatory motifs, and polyA signals within their sequences might suggest a possible involvement of DcSto in the regulation of gene expression.

Human stowaways, who mount the landing gear above an aircraft wheel to crawl into the unpressurised wheel-well recess adjacent to where the gear retracts on takeoff, face potentially lethal environmental conditions of hypobaric hypoxia and extreme cold which deserve further consideration. Furthermore, forensic medical examination of presumed pedestrian victims of terrestrial automobile accidents in the vicinity of airports should consider the possibility of the fall of a wheel-well stowaway from a commercial aircraft [5].