Alstonhein1133

84 mg g-1 and 94.72 mg g-1, and the corresponding removal efficiency was 72.03% and 63%, respectively. The pseudo-second order model was more suitable to depict the adsorption process. And the adsorption isotherm of Cu(II) accorded with the Langmuir model, while the Pb(II) conformed better to the Freundlich isotherm model. © 2020 The Authors.What is the relationship between environment and democracy? The framework of cultural evolution suggests that societal development is an adaptation to ecological threats. Pertinent theories assume that democracy emerges as societies adapt to ecological factors such as higher economic wealth, lower pathogen threats, less demanding climates and fewer natural disasters. However, previous research confused within-country processes with between-country processes and erroneously interpreted between-country findings as if they generalize to within-country mechanisms. We analyse a time-series cross-sectional dataset to study the dynamic relationship between environment and democracy (1949-2016), accounting for previous misconceptions in levels of analysis. By separating within-country processes from between-country processes, we find that the relationship between environment and democracy not only differs by country but also depends on the level of analysis. Economic wealth predicts increasing levels of democracy in between-country comparisons, but within-country comparisons show that democracy declines in years when countries become wealthier. This relationship is only prevalent among historically wealthy countries but not among historically poor countries, whose wealth also increased over time. By contrast, pathogen prevalence predicts lower levels of democracy in both between-country and within-country comparisons. Multi-level modelling also confirms that the within-country effect of pathogen prevalence remains robust even after considering a region-level analysis. Longitudinal analyses identifying temporal precedence reveal that not only reductions in pathogen prevalence drive future democracy, but also democracy reduces future pathogen prevalence and increases future wealth. MEK162 nmr These nuanced results contrast with previous analyses using narrow, cross-sectional data. Overall, our findings illuminate the dynamic process by which environment and democracy shape each other. © 2020 The Authors.Dung beetles provide crucial ecosystem services and serve as model organisms for various behavioural, ecological and evolutionary studies. However, dung beetles have received little attention as consumers of large cadavers. In this study, we trapped copronecrophagous dung beetles on above-ground exposed piglet cadavers in 61 forest plots distributed over three geographically distinct regions in Germany, Central Europe. We examined the effects of land use intensity, forest stand, soil characteristics, vascular plant diversity and climatic conditions on dung beetle abundance, species richness and diversity. In all three regions, dung beetles, represented mainly by the geotrupid species Anoplotrupes stercorosus and Trypocopris vernalis, were attracted to the cadavers. High beetle abundance was associated with higher mean ambient temperature. Furthermore, A. stercorosus and T. vernalis were more abundant in areas where soil contained higher proportions of fine sand. Additionally, an increased proportion of forest understorey vegetation and vascular plant diversity positively affected the species richness and diversity of dung beetles. Thus, even in warm dry monocultured forest stands exploited for timber, we found thriving dung beetle populations when a diverse understorey was present. Therefore, forestry practices that preserve the understorey can sustain stable dung beetle populations and ensure their important contribution to nutrient cycles. © 2020 The Authors.High levels of genetic variation are often observed in natural populations, suggesting the action of processes such as frequency-dependent selection, heterozygote advantage and variable selection. However, the maintenance of genetic variation in fitness-related traits remains incompletely explained. The extent of genetic variation in obligately self-fertilizing populations of Lobelia inflata (Campanulaceae L.) strongly implies balancing selection. Lobelia inflata thus offers an exceptional opportunity for an empirical test of genotype-environment interaction (G × E) as a variance-maintaining mechanism under fluctuating selection L. inflata is monocarpic and reproduces only by seed, facilitating assessment of lifetime fitness; genome-wide homozygosity precludes some mechanisms of balancing selection, and microsatellites are, in effect, genotypic lineage markers. Here, we find support for the temporal G × E hypothesis using a manipulated space-for-time approach across four environments a field environment, an outdoor experimental plot and two differing growth-chamber environments. High genetic variance was confirmed 83 field-collected individuals consisted of 45 distinct microsatellite lineages with, on average, 4.5 alleles per locus. Rank-order fitness, measured as lifetime fruit production in 16 replicated multilocus genotypes, changed significantly across environments. Phenotypic differences among microsatellite lineages were detected. Results thus support the G × E hypothesis in principle. However, the evaluation of the effect size of this mechanism and fitness effects of life-history traits will require a long-term study of fluctuating selection on labelled genotypes in the field. © 2020 The Authors.Previous experimental psychology studies based on visual search paradigms have reported that young adults detect emotional facial expressions more rapidly than emotionally neutral expressions. However, it remains unclear whether this holds in older adults. We investigated this by comparing the abilities of young and older adults to detect emotional and neutral facial expressions while controlling the visual properties of faces presented (termed anti-expressions) in a visual search task. Both age groups detected normal angry faces more rapidly than anti-angry faces. However, whereas young adults detected normal happy faces more rapidly than anti-happy faces, older adults did not. This suggests that older adults may not be easy to detect or focusing attention towards smiling faces appearing peripherally. © 2020 The Authors.