Annual Reviews: Image of the Week

Understanding the Firearm Violence Epidemic in the U.S.

This graphic shows the mortality by firearm (suicide in red, homicide in blue) in the United States and other members of the OECD. The data was pulled from the web site GunPolicy.org.

Public health professionals argue that firearm violence in the United States can and should be treated like an epidemic. Understanding how and why firearm violence spreads makes prevention programs possible. 

Microrobots could change the way medical doctors approach treatment. These "remote" controlled devices will make existing therapy and diagnoses less invasive and will enable extremely targeted procedures that would be impossible otherwise. This image shows various different ways in which they could be used to treat patients, from drug delivery to biopsy.

Harmful algal blooms, more commonly known as red tides, are affecting most coastal regions of the world. There is a general scientific consensus that globally, the number of toxic blooms, the resulting economic losses, the types of resources affected, and the number of toxins and toxic species reported have all increased over the past few decades. The significant public health, tourism, fishery, and ecosystem impacts from HABs have led to major research programs worldwide that seek to understand these complex phenomena. Progress has been rapid in many areas, and new approaches and technologies for research and management are now available.

Figure 1 shows a Noctiluca scintillans red tide at a pristine tourism resort off the east coast of Tasmania, southeast Australia, believed to represent a recent climate-driven range extension from Sydney coastal waters. Figure 2 shows the distribution of events up to (a) 1970 and (b) 2009, where paralytic shellfish poisoning toxins were detected in shellfish or fish. 

Countries from the former Soviet Union experience high mortality among adult males. This makes their life expectancy a decade shorter than that of women. The consequences could be stark as this may translate into a growing number of widows without spousal support, leaving them lonely and destitute. For example, the first graph shows the sex and age distribution in the Ukraine in 2010.

The second one shows the sex and age distribution in Qatar in the same period. This can be explained by the fact that migration to Saudi Arabia and its neighboring countries has been overwhelmingly male, even though women from Sri Lanka and the Philippines have also started migrating to the Gulf.

Research shows that in the United States, the more educated you are, the happier you are likely to be. That’s not all. You are also more likely to be wealthier and healthier. In addition, you are more likely to create virtuous circles in your community. For example, in California and in Texas, for each dollar the state invests in education, it gets around four dollars back. People who are more educated are also more likely to be engaged citizens, to vote, and to participate in civic debate.

This graph shows happiness and health by education in the United States between 2006 and 2010. Abbreviations: GS, grade school (0–8 years completed, no diploma); SHS, some high school (9–12 years completed, no diploma); HSG, high school graduate (any number of years completed, high school diploma or GED); SC, some college; AA, degree from two-year college; BA, degree from four-year college; MA+, advanced degree (e.g., MA, MBA, PhD, MD). Source: author’s calculations from Smith et al. 2010, persons of between 25 and 64 years old, educated in the United States, 2006–2010 pooled.

The team of scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva are poised to announce that they have identified the footprint of the Higgs boson, also known as the "God Particle," on Wednesday, July 4, according to the Associated Press. This particle, whose existence has only been theorized about in the Standard Model, would explain why electrons have mass. The infrastructure for this research includes an extensive computing network, called the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. In addition to the physical resources and the middleware layer, the support and management structures are important for deploying and managing the service. Abbreviations: CA, certification authority; VO, virtual organization.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), a law also known as "Obamacare," in a 5 to 4 vote. This is a victory for the Obama administration who pushed this reform through Congress in 2010, one Republicans vowed to repeal. Health politics stands apart from other political arenas, enough that it would benefit from a separate subfield in political science. This is about equality and justice, but also about the roles of various players, private and public, and the identity questions illness poses as the populations of developed nations grow healthier and older. Above, you can see a scatterplot of percentages of government spending that have gone to health care in a sample of OECD countries from 1990 to 2007. As you can see, the United States spent more money in that time period than any of the others. How the ACA will change this remains to be seen.

Studying artists' pigments in works of art can give us great insight into the evolution of technology, materials, and trade over the centuries. It can also teach us about the significance of colors over different time periods. Technological innovation also gives us new means to look closely at the components of each pigment. For example, between approximately 1612 and 1620, Orazio Gentileschi painted the yellow dress in (a) The Lute Player (1962.8.1 Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), using yellow glass. This pigment, here used in oil paint, is associated with colored glass and ceramic glazes. Figure (b) shows a bright-field (with polarizer) image of a microscopic chip of yellow paint from the dress. (Inset) The back-scatter electron image of the area in the rectangle. Shards of leaded glass (medium gray) colored by the yellow compound are distributed through the paint film. (c) An energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy spectrum of a point within one of the shards shows the presence of both tin and antimony with lead and silicon.

In many species, social context modulates interactions among animals, which then tune their behavior accordingly. Social interactions clearly influence the brain and circulating hormonal levels, but how does the social environment regulate the physiological, cellular, and molecular processes of the brain? Elucidating this connection is critically important because social interactions, especially those related to reproduction, are essential for the evolutionary success of all species. Studying fish like the African cichlid, we may be able to find out more about these processes. It has numerous social skills and, perhaps most importantly, social interactions related to the fact that social dominance tightly controls reproductive physiology. By manipulating the social system we can essentially turn on or off an animal's reproductive competence, mimicking natural changes to identify key regulatory processes. The image above shows individual neurons filled with neurobiotin as the researchers intervene on the neural and hormonal system of that fish. 

Atmospheric carbon dioxide likely will increase to close to 1,000 ppmv over this century, and global temperatures are widely anticipated to increase by 2–4°C and possibly beyond. Sea levels will rise. The subtropics will become drier, whereas other regions, such as portions of the tropics and higher latitudes, will become wetter. Increases in climate variability and frequency of extreme weather events are also predicted. The spatial variation in warming will be pronounced; areas such as the Arctic will experience the highest magnitudes and most rapid rates of warming. In general, land areas likely will experience increases in annual temperature of 2 to 4.5°C by the end of the century. This map shows the projected surface temperature increases for the late twenty-first century (2090–2099) relative to the 1980-1999 period. What does a warmer world mean for global biodiversity? 

How does Western governments' handling of the Great Recession (2008-2009) differ from their response to the recession that occurred between 1974 and 1982? Looking at France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the authors of this paper have found states relied more heavily on fiscal stimulus by cutting taxes and raising spending, albeit not enough. Comparatively, during the 1974-1982 period, a broader range of measures was put into place, including increased trade protectionism, devaluation of currencies for greater competitiveness of domestic products abroad, and an increase in the compensation of the unemployed, as the chart above shows. The authors argue that governments have moved away from a more social brand of keynesianism to a liberal one. 

Plants produce a plethora of compounds that some biologists refer to, rather illogically, as “natural compounds” or as “phytochemicals” (illogical to plant biologists because all compounds made in plant cells fit this definition; these terms come from the field of pharmacology, where they do make sense as a way of distinguishing them from synthetic medicines). These compounds have also been misleadingly called “secondary metabolites,” an anachronistic term that was coined when scientists did not know the biological functions of such compounds and suspected that they had no function at all but were waste products. Their general intent was to define compounds that are present in some plant species and not in others, and therefore could not logically be involved in the basic, primary metabolism operating in all plants. As more evidence concerning their functions accumulates, it has become clear that the ability to synthesize such compounds evolved in different plant lineages, and these compounds represent adaptations to specific ecological situations, for example, attraction of specific pollinators or defense against specific herbivores. For this reason, these compounds have recently been termed “specialized metabolites”

The essence of convergent evolution is that the same biological function evolves independently more than once. The evolution of eyes (for sight) of vertebrates and insects is an often cited example. On any level—anatomical, cellular, molecular—there may or may not be resemblance, but the function is judged to be the same. The evolution of wings (for flying) of birds and bats is also an example of convergent evolution. 

Mimicry is a category of convergent evolution. In this case, the ability of plants to synthesize a compound appears to have evolved because another organism interacting with these plants also synthesizes an identical compound or a compound with properties in common. Sometimes, as is the case in the examples above, plants mimic neurostransmitters as a defense mechanism. THC possesses analgesic, anti-inflammatory, appetite-stimulating, and antiemetic properties. Ephedrine has a powerful psychedelic effect on humans. Mescaline binds to and activates the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor

Risk markets aren't run by climate-change skeptics: of the 25 most costly insured catastrophes in the world between 1970 and 2008, all of them occurred after 1987 and 17 of them since 2001. Except for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, all of these events were natural disasters. As a result, there has been a growing need to find tools that will increase financial coverage to complement insurance and reinsurance and limit losses. Natural catastrophe bonds, or cat bonds, are one of those tools. The chart above shows the evolution of that market between 1997 and 2007 in the United States and abroad. The vertical axis on the left shows billions of dollars. The vertical axis on the right shows years to maturity. 

Animals pollinate 87% of the world's flowering plant species. Therefore, how pollinators respond to human-induced land-use change has important implications for plants and the species that depend on them. Many scientists are concerned that pollinators are in decline globally, but more data is needed to confirm these conclusions. In the image above, you can see (a) a bumblebee (Bombussp.), (b) a solitary bee in the tribe Augochlorini, (c) a hawk moth (Macroglossum stellatarum, Sphingidae), (d) a monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus, Nymphalidae), (e) a syrphid fly (Syrphidae), (f) a sunbird (Aethopyga bella, Nectariniidae), (g) a bat (Glossophaga soricina, Phyllostomidae), and (h) a hummingbird.

Humans, as omnivores, have had a profound impact on food webs, bringing about enormous and disproportionate losses of large apex predators on land and in water. The losses have modified or even eliminated concatenations of indirect interactions propagating from predators to herbivores to plants. This image shows alligators being shot by humans in the swamps bordering the Mississippi River, Louisiana. Excessive hunting between 1850 and 1960 resulted in dramatic reductions in alligator abundance. It was reproduced with permission from Corbis, New York; name of figure is Bettmann BK003214.

It's understood that dinosaurs evolved from a common ancestor with birds as living descendants. Dinosauria is defined as a node-based group composed of two stem-based groups, Ornithischia and Saurischia. Above, you can see a graphic depicting the phylogeny of Ornithischia and another of the phylogeny of Saurischia. Dinosaurian faunas, which were initially relatively uniform in character when breakup of the supercontinent Pangea began in the Middle Jurassic, became markedly differentiated by the close of the Cretaceous.

How do we represent accurately the views of the public? What kinds of questions must we ask, and how must we phrase them? How do we interpret the results? What are the empirical problems pollsters encounter in the process of gathering opinions? Using polling on attitudes about same-sex marriage since 1985, we can point at a few issues. First, while same-sex marriage has become more salient in public debate, the exact same number of people say that they "don't know" how they feel about it. Second, the wording matters: more people support "marriage between partners of the same sex" than they do "marriage between two men or two women." Third, this is often framed as a social issue, like abortion, rather than a civil rights issue or a morality issue. This also affects the outcome.