The Hawaiian archipelago was formerly home to one of the most species-rich land snail faunas (> 752 species), with levels of endemism > 99%. Many native Hawaiian land snail species are now extinct, and the remaining fauna is vulnerable. Unfortunately, lack of information on critical habitat requirements for Hawaiian land snails limits the development of effective conservation strategies. The purpose of this study was to examine the plant host preferences of native arboreal land snails in Puʻu Kukui Watershed, West Maui, Hawaiʻi, and compare these patterns to those from similar studies on the islands of Oʻahu and Hawaiʻi. Concordant with studies on other islands, we found that four species from three diverse families of snails in Puʻu Kukui Watershed had preferences for a few species of understorey plants. These were not the most abundant canopy or mid canopy species, indicating that forests without key understorey plants may not support the few remaining lineages of native snails. Preference for Broussaisia arguta among various island endemic snails across all studies indicates that this species is important for restoration to improve snail habitat. As studies examining host plant preferences are often incongruent with studies examining snail feeding, we suggest that we are in the infancy of defining what constitutes critical habitat for most Hawaiian arboreal snails. However, our results indicate that preserving diverse native plant assemblages, particularly understorey plant species, which facilitate key interactions, is critical to the goal of conserving the remaining threatened snail fauna.

At present, analysis of diet and bladder cancer (BC) is mostly based on the intake of individual foods. The examination of food combinations provides a scope to deal with the complexity and unpredictability of the diet and aims to overcome the limitations of the study of nutrients and foods in isolation. This article aims to demonstrate the usability of supervised data mining methods to extract the food groups related to BC. In order to derive key food groups associated with BC risk, we applied the data mining technique C5.0 with 10-fold cross-validation in the BLadder cancer Epidemiology and Nutritional Determinants study, including data from eighteen case–control and one nested case–cohort study, compromising 8320 BC cases out of 31 551 participants. Dietary data, on the eleven main food groups of the Eurocode 2 Core classification codebook, and relevant non-diet data (i.e. sex, age and smoking status) were available. Primarily, five key food groups were extracted; in order of importance, beverages (non-milk); grains and grain products; vegetables and vegetable products; fats, oils and their products; meats and meat products were associated with BC risk. Since these food groups are corresponded with previously proposed BC-related dietary factors, data mining seems to be a promising technique in the field of nutritional epidemiology and deserves further examination.

Galactic post-AGB stars show a large diversity in chemical compositions as well as in the kinematical and geometrical properties of their circumstellar material. The theoretical interpretation is hampered by the lack of good distances to almost all Galactic objects. We therefore initiated a large project to study systematically post-AGB stars in the Large and Small Magellanic Cloud (LMC, SMC respectively). Here we report on our preliminary results.

In a completely between subjects design 80 male and 80 female undergraduates evaluated targets which were male or female and 25, 45, 65, or 85 years old, on the Aging Semantic Differential (ASD; Rosencranz & McNevin, 1969). Findings indicated that older targets were rated less positively than younger targets on two of the three ASD dimensions and that Target Age × Target Sex × Subject Age interactions were significant for two of the dimensions. These results replicate the target age (between subjects) effects reported by O'Connell and Rotter (1979) but not those which involved target sex (within subjects) and subject sex. It was concluded that a) subject sex and target sex affect perceptions of targets of different ages elicited from young subjects and b) between subjects versus within subjects designs produce different characterizations of such targets.