One policy tool that could affect organ donation rates is legislative defaults. In this study, we examine how presumed consent impacts cadaveric donations and kidney transplantations, using a panel dataset from the EU-27 countries plus Croatia in the period 2000-2010. We find that presumed consent countries have 28% to 32% higher cadaveric donation and 27% to 31% higher kidney transplant rates in comparison to informed consent countries, after accounting for potential confounding factors. After studying willingness to donate one's organs and registering preferences for organ donation, we find that presumed consent could increase cadaveric donation rates, because people fail to register their preferences and many have no preference for organ donation.
Tumors acquire alterations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes in an adaptive walk through the fitness landscape of tumorigenesis. However, the features of this landscape remain poorly understood and cannot be revealed by human cancer genotyping alone. Here, we use a multiplexed, autochthonous mouse platform to model and quantify the initiation and growth of more than one hundred genotypes of lung tumors across four oncogenic contexts: KRAS G12D, KRAS G12C, BRAF V600E, and EGFR L858R. The resulting fitness landscape is rugged (the effect of tumor suppressor inactivation often switches between beneficial and deleterious depending on the oncogenic context), shows no evidence of diminishing-returns epistasis within variants of the same oncogene, and is inconsistent with expectations of a simple linear signaling relationship among these three oncogenes. Our findings suggest that tumor suppressor effects are strongly context-specific, which limits the set of evolutionary paths that can be taken through the fitness landscape.
The lunar month of Ramadan is an important time period for Muslims around the world. In this study, we examine whether Ramadan brings happiness to individuals. For this purpose, we conducted a survey once before Ramadan, three times during Ramadan, and once after Ramadan. Our results show that with every week in Ramadan, a small boost of happiness is reported. Yet, two weeks after Ramadan, people seem to return to their baseline level of happiness. We suggest that Ramadan is associated with higher well-being due to increased socialization as non-fasting and those who fast partially also has statistically higher happiness scores than pre-Ramadan sample. Yet, those who have highest happiness scores are those who fasted fully.
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