Aim  To assess whether eight factors thought to be involved in the extinction process can explain the pattern of recent decline in Australia's mammal fauna. Location  Australia. Methods  We compiled the first comprehensive lists of mammal species extant at the time of European settlement in each of Australia's 76 mainland regions, and assigned a current conservation status to each species in each region to derive an index of faunal attrition. We then sought to explain the observed region‐to‐region variation in attrition (the dependent variable) by building a series of models using variables representing the eight factors. Results  A strong geographically based pattern of attrition emerged, with faunal losses being greatest in arid regions and least in areas of high rainfall. The Akaike information criterion showed support for one model that explained 93% of the region‐to‐region variation in attrition. Its six variables all made independent contributions towards explaining the observed variation. Two were environmental variables, namely mean annual rainfall (a surrogate for regional productivity) and environmental change (a measure of post‐European disturbance). The other four were faunal variables, namely phylogenetic similarity, body‐weight distribution, area (as a surrogate for extent of occurrence), and proportion of species that usually shelter on the ground (rather than in rock piles, burrows or trees). Main conclusions  In combination with historical evidence, the analysis provides an explicit basis for setting priorities among regions and species. It also shows that the long‐term recovery of populations of many species of Australian mammals will require introduced predator suppression as well as extensive habitat management that includes controlling feral herbivores. Specifically, habitat management should restore aspects of productivity relevant to the types of species at risk and ensure the continual availability of suitable refuges from physiological stressors.

We investigated the performance of three user interfaces for restoration of cursor control in individuals with tetraplegia: head orientation, EMG from face and neck muscles, and a standard computer mouse (for comparison). Subjects engaged in a 2D, center-out, Fitts’ Law style task and performance was evaluated using several measures. Overall, head orientation commanded motion resembled mouse commanded cursor motion (smooth, accurate movements to all targets), although with somewhat lower performance. EMG commanded movements exhibited a higher average speed, but other performance measures were lower, particularly for diagonal targets. Compared to head orientation, EMG as a cursor command source was less accurate, was more affected by target direction and was more prone to overshoot the target. In particular, EMG commands for diagonal targets were more sequential, moving first in one direction and then the other rather than moving simultaneous in the two directions. While the relative performance of each user interface differs, each has specific advantages depending on the application.

Objectives: Genetic disorders are a leading contributor to mortality in the neonatal ICU and PICU in the United States. Although individually rare, there are over 6,200 single-gene diseases, which may preclude a genetic diagnosis prior to ICU admission. Rapid whole genome sequencing is an emerging method of diagnosing genetic conditions in time to affect ICU management of neonates; however, its clinical utility has yet to be adequately demonstrated in critically ill children. This study evaluates next-generation sequencing in pediatric critical care. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Single-center PICU in a tertiary children’s hospital. Patients: Children 4 months to 18 years admitted to the PICU who were nominated between July 2016 and May 2018. Interventions: Rapid whole genome sequencing with targeted phenotype-driven analysis was performed on patients and their parents, when parental samples were available. Measurements and Main Results: A molecular diagnosis was made by rapid whole genome sequencing in 17 of 38 children (45%). In four of the 17 patients (24%), the genetic diagnoses led to a change in management while in the PICU, including genome-informed changes in pharmacotherapy and transition to palliative care. Nine of the 17 diagnosed children (53%) had no dysmorphic features or developmental delay. Eighty-two percent of diagnoses affected the clinical management of the patient and/or family after PICU discharge, including avoidance of biopsy, administration of factor replacement, and surveillance for disorder-related sequelae. Conclusions: This study demonstrates a retrospective evaluation for undiagnosed genetic disease in the PICU and clinical utility of rapid whole genome sequencing in a portion of critically ill children. Further studies are needed to identify PICU patients who will benefit from rapid whole genome sequencing early in PICU admission when the underlying etiology is unclear.

We identify the effective field theory describing the physics of super-Hubble scales and show it to be a special case of a class of effective field theories appropriate to open systems. Open systems are those that allow information to be exchanged between the degrees of freedom of interest and those that are integrated out, such as would be appropriate for particles moving through a fluid. Strictly speaking they cannot in general be described by an effective lagrangian; rather the appropriate 'low-energy' limit is instead a Lindblad equation describing the time-evolution of the density matrix of the slow degrees of freedom. We derive the equation relevant to super-Hubble modes of quantum fields in de Sitter (and near-de Sitter) spacetimes and derive two of its implications. We show that the evolution of the diagonal density-matrix elements quickly approach the Fokker-Planck equation of Starobinsky's stochastic inflationary picture. This allows us both to identify the leading corrections and provide an alternative first-principles derivation of this picture's stochastic noise and drift. (As applications we show that the noise for massless fields is independent of the details of the window function used, and also compute how the noise changes for systems with a sub-luminal speed of sound, c s < 1.) We then argue that the presence of interactions drive the off-diagonal density-matrix elements to zero in the field JHEP03 (2015)090 basis. This shows why the field basis is generally the 'pointer basis' for the process that decoheres primordial quantum fluctuations while they are outside the horizon, thus allowing them to re-enter later as classical field fluctuations, as assumed when analyzing CMB data. The decoherence process is very efficient, occurring after several Hubble times even for interactions as weak as gravitational-strength. Crucially, the details of the interactions largely control only the decoherence time and not the nature of the final late-time stochastic state, much as interactions can control the equilibration time for thermal systems but are largely irrelevant to the properties of the resulting equilibrium state.