Cholesterol is a vital component of the cell membrane and plays an essential role in mediating integral membrane protein function. Altered cholesterol regulation has been implicated in neurological diseases that are associated with blood–brain barrier breakdown. However, the role of brain barrier function in inherited disorders of cholesterol metabolism, such as Niemann-Pick disease C1 (NP-C1), remains unclear. In this study,...

Purpose An accurate mathematical model of intracranial aneurysm (IA) mechanics is of great value for its potential utility in assessing probability of IA rupture. Such a model for spherical IAs has been developed which predicts a wall-thickness-to-IA-radius ratio (WTR) of 6.1 × 10 −3 at which IAs rupture. To our knowledge, no further work has been done to validate this model with clinical data. We aim to assess the accuracy an...

Climate change models often assume similar responses to temperatures across the range of a species, but local adaptation or phenotypic plasticity can lead plants and animals to respond differently to temperature in different parts of their range. To date, there have been few tests of this assumption at the scale of continents, so it is unclear if this is a large‐scale problem. Here, we examined the assumption that insect taxa...

Theory predicts the occurrence of threshold levels of habitat in landscapes, below which ecological processes change abruptly. Simulation models indicate that below critical thresholds, fragmentation of habitat influences patch occupancy by decreasing colonization rates and increasing rates of local extinction. Uncovering such putative relationships is important for understanding the demography of species and in developing sou...