Climate, climate change and the global diversity of human houses.

Globally, human house types are diverse, varying in shape, size, roof type, building materials, arrangement, decoration and many other features. Here we offer the first rigorous, global evaluation of the factors that influence the construction of traditional (vernacular) houses. We apply macroecological approaches to analyse data describing house features from 1900 to 1950 across 1000 societies.

IV Diuresis in Alternative Treatment Settings for the Management of Heart Failure: Implications for Mortality, Hospitalizations and Cost.

Background: Recent advances in heart failure (HF) care have sought to shift management from inpatient to outpatient and observation settings. We evaluated the association among HF treatment in the (1) inpatient; (2) observation; (3) emergency department (ED); and (4) outpatient settings with 30-day mortality, hospitalizations and cost.

Methods: Using 100% Medicare inpatient, outpatient and Part B files from 2011-2018, 1,534,708 unique patient encounters in which intravenous (IV) diuretics were received for a primary diagnosis of HF were identified.

A Focus on the Right Atrium: Right Atrial Diverticulum and Atrial Flutter.

We report a case of a 70-year-old woman who presented for a cavotricuspid isthmus atrial flutter ablation that was aborted prematurely. On subsequent imaging, she was discovered to have a right atrial diverticulum, which was present on prior imaging but not reported, likely due to unfamiliarity with the entity. ().

Identifying socioeconomic and biophysical factors driving forest loss in protected areas.

Protected areas (PAs) are a commonly used strategy to confront forest conversion and biodiversity loss. Although determining drivers of forest loss is central to conservation success, understanding of them is limited by conventional modeling assumptions. We used random forest regression to evaluate potential drivers of deforestation in PAs in Mexico, while accounting for nonlinear relationships and higher order interactions underlying deforestation processes.

Prestige and content biases together shape the cultural transmission of narratives.

Cultural transmission biases such as prestige are thought to have been a primary driver in shaping the dynamics of human cultural evolution. However, few empirical studies have measured the importance of prestige relative to other effects, such as content biases present within the information being transmitted. Here, we report the findings of an experimental transmission study designed to compare the simultaneous effects of a model using a high- or low-prestige regional accent with the presence of narrative content containing social, survival, emotional, moral, rational, or counterintuitive information in the form of a creation story.

Cost-effectiveness of Dapagliflozin for the Treatment of Heart Failure With Reduced Ejection Fraction.

Importance: Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction produces substantial morbidity, mortality, and health care costs. Dapagliflozin is the first sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitor approved for the treatment of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction.

Objective: To examine the cost-effectiveness of adding dapagliflozin to guideline-directed medical therapy for heart failure with reduced ejection fraction in patients with or without diabetes.

Pathways to social inequality.

Social inequality is ubiquitous in contemporary human societies, and has deleterious social and ecological impacts. However, the factors that shape the emergence and maintenance of inequality remain widely debated. Here we conduct a global analysis of pathways to inequality by comparing 408 non-industrial societies in the anthropological record (described largely between 1860 and 1960) that vary in degree of inequality.

Cultural transmission and ecological opportunity jointly shaped global patterns of reliance on agriculture.

The evolution of agriculture improved food security and enabled significant increases in the size and complexity of human groups. Despite these positive effects, some societies never adopted these practices, became only partially reliant on them, or even reverted to foraging after temporarily adopting them. Given the critical importance of climate and biotic interactions for modern agriculture, it seems likely that ecological conditions could have played a major role in determining the degree to which different societies adopted farming.

Reframing the Wilderness Concept can Bolster Collaborative Conservation.

Indigenous territories represent ~45% of land categorized as wilderness in the Amazon, but account for <15% of all forest loss on this land. At a time when the Amazon faces unprecedented pressures, overcoming polarization and aligning the goals of wilderness defenders and Indigenous peoples is paramount, to avoid environmental degradation.

The Position-Reputation-Information (PRI) scale of individual prestige.

Prestige is a key concept across the social and behavioral sciences and has been implicated as an important driver in the processes governing human learning and behavior and the evolution of culture. However, existing scales of prestige fail to account for the full breadth of its potential determinants or focus only on collective social institutions rather than the individual-level perceptions that underpin everyday social interactions. Here, we use open, extensible methods to unite diverse theoretical ideas into a common measurement tool for individual prestige.

Cardiovascular Risk Assessment in Renal and Liver Transplant Candidates: A Multidisciplinary Institutional Standardized Approach.

In the modern era, renal and liver transplant candidates present with a greater medical complexity driven in part by a higher prevalence of cardiovascular conditions, including coronary artery disease, valvular heart disease, and cardiomyopathies. In fact, cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death after kidney transplantation worldwide. Similarly, an increase in the number of patients being listed with end-stage liver disease from nonalcoholic steatohepatitis and a rising model for end-stage liver disease scores at the time of liver transplant in the United States parallel an increasing cardiovascular disease risk profile for liver transplant candidates.

Stable Ischemic Heart Disease.

Stable ischemic heart disease (SIHD) is a leading cause of death in the United States and many other countries. The defining pathobiology is an imbalance between the metabolic demands of the myocardium and its oxygen supply, which most often results from coronary artery atherosclerosis. The classic presenting symptom of SIHD is angina, but clinical presentation varies greatly among patients.

Impact of an Outpatient Cardiology-managed Urgent Access and Observation Unit on Hospital Admissions.

Introduction: Alternatives to the emergency department (ED) for expedient and high-value team-based cardiology care for patients with chest pain, volume overload, palpitations, and other urgent, but not life-threatening cardiac conditions are lacking. Here, we report on the development of the Cardiac Direct Access Unit (CDAc), an ambulatory cardiology unit with exam rooms, observation bays, and an advanced heart failure clinic.

Methods: Patients referred to the CDAc are seen same-day by an attending cardiologist in a space independent from the ED.

Hindcasting global population densities reveals forces enabling the origin of agriculture.

The development and spread of agriculture changed fundamental characteristics of human societies. However, the degree to which environmental and social conditions enabled the origins of agriculture remains contested. We test three hypothesized links between the environment, population density and the origins of plant and animal domestication, a prerequisite for agriculture: (1) domestication arose as environmental conditions improved and population densities increased (surplus hypothesis); (2) populations needed domestication to overcome deteriorating environmental conditions (necessity hypothesis); (3) factors promoting domestication were distinct in each location (regional uniqueness hypothesis).

Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity.

Although many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why humans speak so many languages and why languages are unevenly distributed across the globe, the factors that shape geographical patterns of cultural and linguistic diversity remain poorly understood. Prior research has tended to focus on identifying universal predictors of language diversity, without accounting for how local factors and multiple predictors interact. Here, we use a unique combination of path analysis, mechanistic simulation modelling, and geographically weighted regression to investigate the broadly described, but poorly understood, spatial pattern of language diversity in North America.

The global geography of human subsistence.

How humans obtain food has dramatically reshaped ecosystems and altered both the trajectory of human history and the characteristics of human societies. Our species' subsistence varies widely, from predominantly foraging strategies, to plant-based agriculture and animal husbandry. The extent to which environmental, social and historical factors have driven such variation is currently unclear.

Understanding the drivers of sensitive behavior using Poisson regression from quantitative randomized response technique data.

Understanding sensitive behaviors-those that are socially unacceptable or non-compliant with rules or regulations-is essential for creating effective interventions. Sensitive behaviors are challenging to study, because participants are unlikely to disclose sensitive behaviors for fear of retribution or due to social undesirability. Methods for studying sensitive behavior include randomized response techniques, which provide anonymity to interviewees who answer sensitive questions.

A New Approach to Identifying the Drivers of Regulation Compliance Using Multivariate Behavioural Models.

Non-compliance with fishing regulations can undermine management effectiveness. Previous bivariate approaches were unable to untangle the complex mix of factors that may influence fishers' compliance decisions, including enforcement, moral norms, perceived legitimacy of regulations and the behaviour of others. We compared seven multivariate behavioural models of fisher compliance decisions using structural equation modeling.

D-PLACE: A Global Database of Cultural, Linguistic and Environmental Diversity.

From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access repositories. In this paper we introduce D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment.