Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon(1-3). With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses(4-9). As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world's major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve `health': about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.

Overview of nano-drugs characteristics for clinical application: the journey from the entry to the exit point

The ever-increasing number of diseases worldwide requires comprehensive, efficient, and cost-effective modes of treatments. Among various strategies, nanomaterials fulfill most of these criteria. The unique physicochemical properties of nanoparticles have made them a premier choice as a drug or a drug delivery system for the purpose of treatment, and as bio-detectors for disease prognosis. However, the main challenge is the proper consideration of the physical properties of these nanomaterials, while developing them as potential tools for therapeutics and/or diagnostics. In this review, we focus mainly on the characteristics of nanoparticles to develop an effective and sensitive system for clinical purposes. This review will present an overview of the important properties of nanoparticles, through their journey from its route of administration until disposal from the human body after accomplishing targeted functionality. We have chosen cancer as our model disease to explain the potentiality of nano-systems for therapeutics and diagnostics in relation to several organs (intestine, lung, brain, etc.). Furthermore, we have discussed their biodegradability and accumulation probability which can cause unfavorable side effects in healthy human subjects.

Cross-section fluctuations in open microwave billiards and quantum graphs: The counting-of-maxima method revisited

The fluctuations exhibited by the cross sections generated in a compound-nucleus reaction or, more generally, in a quantum-chaotic scattering process, when varying the excitation energy or another external parameter, are characterized by the width Gamma(corr) of the cross-section correlation function. Brink and Stephen Phys. Lett. 5, 77 (1963)] proposed a method for its determination by simply counting the number of maxima featured by the cross sections as a function of the parameter under consideration. They stated that the product of the average number of maxima per unit energy range and Gamma(corr) is constant in the Ercison region of strongly overlapping resonances. We use the analogy between the scattering formalism for compound-nucleus reactions and for microwave resonators to test this method experimentally with unprecedented accuracy using large data sets and propose an analytical description for the regions of isolated and overlapping resonances.