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Recent studies have shown that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have key functions during breast cancer development. Considering the complexity of IncRNAs regulatory network, the identification of novel and functional lncRNAs associated with breast cancer is thus very important. By using Agilent LncRNA Human Gene Expression Microarray, we identified a number of lncRNAs that were differentially expressed in breast cancer compared to their corresponding adjacent tissues. According to the microarray, the expression of p10247, henceforth named as lncRNA-BCHE (standing for lncRNA high expressed in breast cancer), was found to be uniformly higher in all the five breast cancer tissues tested, and this was further confirmed in 56 breast cancer tissues by real-time RT-PCR. The function of lncRNA-BCHE in breast cancer cells was tested by knockdown and over-expression experiments in vitro. We also analyzed the public cohorts of breast cancer patients on the Kaplan Meier plotter platform. Clinical analysis revealed that the expression of lncRNA-BCHE was significantly correlated with advanced clinical stage and lymph node metastasis. Our data indicate that lncRNA-BCHE regulates the growth, migration and invasion of breast cancer cells. In addition, we found that these functions are mediated, at least in part, by the regulation of integrin subunit beta 1 (ITGB1) levels. The expression of ITGB1 serves as a negative prognostic factor and metastasis risk predictor in breast cancer, irrespective of subtype and therapeutic regimen. In summary, our results suggest that lncRNA-BCHE is an oncogenic lncRNA enhancing the growth and metastatic potential of breast cancer cells, and a potential predictor of breast cancer metastatic progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congestible goods describe situations in which a group of people share or use a public good that becomes congested or overexploited when demand is low. We study experimentally a congestible goods problem of relevance for parking design, namely how people choose between a convenient parking lot with few spots and a less convenient one with unlimited space. We find that the Nash equilibrium predicts reasonably well the competition for the convenient parking when it has few spots, but not when it has more availability. We then show that the Rosenthal equilibrium, a bounded-rational approach, is a better description of the experimental results accounting for the randomness in the decision process. We introduce a dynamical model that shows how Rosenthal equilibria can be approached in a few rounds of the game. Our results give insights on how to deal with parking problems such as the design of parking lots in central locations in cities and open the way to better understand similar congestible goods problems in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of public good provision is central in economics and touches upon many challenging societal issues, ranging from climate change mitigation to vaccination schemes. However, results which are supposed to be applied to a societal scale have only been obtained with small groups of people, with a maximum group size of 100 being reported in the literature. This work takes this research to a new level by carrying out and analysing experiments on public good games with up to 1000 simultaneous players. The experiments are carried out via an online protocol involving daily decisions for extended periods. Our results show that within those limits, participants' behaviour and collective outcomes in very large groups are qualitatively like those in smaller ones. On the other hand, large groups imply the difficulty of conveying information on others' choices to the participants. We thus consider different information conditions and show that they have a drastic effect on subjects' contributions. We also classify the individual decisions and find that they can be described by a moderate number of types. Our findings allow to extend the conclusions of smaller experiments to larger settings and are therefore a relevant step forward towards the understanding of human behaviour and the organisation of our society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding whether the size of the interacting group has an effect on cooperative behavior has been a major topic of debate since the seminal works on cooperation in the 1960s. Half a century later, scholars have yet to reach a consensus, with some arguing that cooperation is harder in larger groups, while others that cooperation is easier in larger groups, and yet others that cooperation attains its maximum in intermediate size groups. Here we add to this field of work by reporting a two-treatment empirical study where subjects play a Public Goods Game with a Critical Mass, such that the return for full cooperation increases linearly for early contributions and then stabilizes after a critical mass is reached (the two treatments differ only on the critical mass). We choose this game for two reasons: it has been argued that it approximates real-life social dilemmas; previous work suggests that, in this case, group size might have an inverted-U effect on cooperation, where the pick of cooperation is reached around the critical mass. Our main innovation with respect to previous experiments is that we implement a within-subject design, such that the same subject plays in groups of different size (from 5 to 40 subjects). Groups are formed at random at every round and there is no feedback. This allows us to explore if and how subjects change their choice as a function of the size of the group. We report three main results, which partially contrast what has been suggested by previous work: in our setting (i) the critical mass has no effect on cooperation; (ii) group size has a positive effect on cooperation; (iii) the most chosen option (played by about 50% of the subjects) is All Defection, followed by All Cooperation (about 10% of the subjects), whereas the rest have a slight trend to switch preferentially from defection to cooperation as the group size increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the influence that resource availability has on cooperation in the context of hunter-gatherer societies. This paper proposes a model based on archaeological and ethnographic research on resource stress episodes, which exposes three different cooperative regimes according to the relationship between resource availability in the environment and population size. The most interesting regime represents moderate survival stress in which individuals coordinate in an evolutionary way to increase the probabilities of survival and reduce the risk of failing to meet the minimum needs for survival. Populations self-organise in an indirect reciprocity system in which the norm that emerges is to share the part of the resource that is not strictly necessary for survival, thereby collectively lowering the chances of starving. Our findings shed further light on the emergence and evolution of cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]