The increase in aridity, mainly by decreases in precipitation but also by higher temperatures, is likely the main threat to the diversity and survival of Mediterranean forests. Changes in land use, including the abandonment of extensive crop activities, mainly in mountains and remote areas, and the increases in human settlements and demand for more resources with the resulting fragmentation of the landscape, hinder the establishment of appropriate management tools to protect Mediterranean forests and their provision of services and biodiversity. Experiments and observations indicate that if changes in climate, land use and other components of global change, such as pollution and overexploitation of resources, continue, the resilience of many forests will likely be exceeded, altering their structure and function and changing, mostly decreasing, their capacity to continue to provide their current services. A consistent assessment of the impacts of the changes, however, remains elusive due to the difficulty of obtaining simultaneous and complete data for all scales of the impacts in the same forests, areas and regions. We review the impacts of climate change and other components of global change and their interactions on the terrestrial forests of Mediterranean regions, with special attention to their impacts on ecosystem services. Management tools for counteracting the negative effects of global change on Mediterranean ecosystem- services are finally discussed.

Thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) is an essential cytokine for the initiation and development of allergic inflammation. Here, we have investigated the role of TSLP in the breakdown of immune tolerance and generation of inducible regulatory T cells (iTregs). Our results demonstrated that TSLP diverted airway tolerance against ovalbumin to Th2 sensitization and inhibited the generation of OVA-specific iTregs. TSLP exerted a direct inhibitory effect on both human and mouse iTreg development in vitro. Low doses of TSLP were capable of inhibiting iTreg induction without significantly promoting Th2 development, indicating that these two functions of TSLP are separable. Moreover, the TSLP-mediated inhibition of iTreg generation was only partially dependent on IL-4 and Stat6, and was effective when TSLP was present for the first 24 h of T cell activation. These results define a novel role for TSLP in regulating the balance of airway tolerance and allergic inflammation.

Research conducted in Western cultural contexts has discovered that people are more intolerant of moral than demographic diversity, prefer greater social and physical distance from morally dissimilar others, and actively discriminate against those who do not share their moral attitudes. The goal of the current work was to test whether (a) these findings generalize across cultural contexts and (b) similar patterns would emerge with not only social but also political intolerance. Strength of moral conviction associated with participants' most important issue was associated with higher and similar levels of social intolerance of attitudinally dissimilar others in both China and the United States but was only related to political intolerance in China. These results demonstrate that moral mandate effects are not unique to highly individualized cultural contexts and reveal a possible boundary condition on the links between moral conviction and intolerance. Implications are discussed.

Gallenene, an analogue of graphene composed of gallium, is epitaxially grown on Si(1 1 1) surface and studied by low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (LT-STM). The STM images display that the buffer layer has a superstructure with respect to the substrate lattice and the gallenene layer has a hexagonal honeycomb structure. The scanning tunneling spectra (STS) of the gallenene show that it behaves as a metallic layer. First-principles calculations give the proposed configuration. Our results provide a method to synthesize the gallenene and shed important light on the growth mechanism of it.