Urban agriculture during economic crisis: lessons from Cuba, Sri Lanka and Ukraine

Economic crises take different forms and occur for various reasons, such as political conflicts and pandemics. What all these crises have in common is that they cause disruption to rural-urban food supply chains, resulting in food shortages for the urban poor, with the most direct impact being an increase in food prices. It is within this challenging context that we present empirical examples of the role of urban agriculture

Agricultural knowledge from academy to farming communities: The role of higher education in enhancing food security in Syria

The dynamics of the Syrian conflict present a complex set of challenges that led to considering more than 10.5 million people food insecure and in need of urgent agricultural and livelihood assistance. This article investigates the role of higher education (HE) in food security. It considers how universities, graduates, and appropriate curriculum and research engagement can address challenges and provide innovative solutions in Syria

Afriflu2—Second international workshop on influenza vaccination in the African continent—8 November 2012, Cape Town (South Africa)

AbstractThe second meeting of the Afriflu conferences took place in Cape Town, South Africa, with over 60 participants from 15 countries in Africa and also outside the continent. Significant progress in surveillance has been made in better understanding the illness burden of influenza on the continent, which limited evidence suggests is greater than that in the developed world. In southern Africa HIV and TB coinfections play a major role in increasing hospitalisation and mortality, while elsewhere in Africa other cofactors still need to be determined.There is currently no indigenous vaccine production in sub-Saharan Africa and only one facility, based in South Africa, capable of filling imported bulk. Innovative vaccine strategies will need to be explored, such as maternal immunisation, and also the possibility of other influenza vaccine options, such as live attenuated influenza vaccine for young children. Sustained indigenous vaccine production is essential for the continent to have vaccine security in the event of a pandemic even though establishing local production faces considerable challenges especially ensuring adequate markets on the continent. There is an urgent need to develop effective communication messages for decision makers as well as healthcare workers addressing the importance of influenza even in the face of the major competing health burdens of the continent

Integration of Augmented Reality and Neuromuscular Control Systems for Remote Vehicle Operations

Traditional remotely operated vehicles (ROV’s) require extensive setup and unnatural control systems. Integrating wearable devices as a control system, operators gain mobility and situational awareness to execute additional tasks. Analysis is conducted to understand if wearable devices connected by Internet of Things (IoT) allows for a more natural control system. A gesture recognition armband is worn around the operator’s forearm reading surface electromyography (sEMG) signals produced by their muscles to recognize hand gestures. An Augmented Reality (AR) headset overlays supplemental information on a heads-up display (HUD). IoT enables each component of the system to transmit and receive data over a network. The AR headset serves as the central processing unit, processing sEMG signals and transmitting respective commands to a ROV. The ROV acts on the received commands and transmits data, describing its actions and environment, to be displayed. A library of electrical signals that relate to hand gestures defined in US Army Publication TC3-21.60 are developed as a control set of commands. Signal processing and machine learning methods are implemented to reduce cross-talk and interference of weak sEMG signals for accurate gesture recognition. Results provide insight on the effectiveness of neuromuscular control compared to human-to-human instruction, and how wearable control systems can increase operator situational awareness

Forecasting ground-based sensitivity to the Rayleigh scattering of the CMB in the presence of astrophysical foregrounds

The Rayleigh scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons off the neutral hydrogen produced during recombination effectively creates an additional scattering surface after recombination that encodes new cosmological information, including the expansion and ionization history of the universe. A first detection of Rayleigh scattering is a tantalizing target for next-generation CMB experiments. We have developed a Rayleigh scattering forecasting pipeline that includes instrumental effects, atmospheric noise, and astrophysical foregrounds (e.g., Galactic dust, cosmic infrared background, or CIB, and the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect). We forecast the Rayleigh scattering detection significance for several upcoming ground-based experiments, including SPT-3G+, Simons Observatory, CCAT-prime, and CMB-S4, and examine the limitations from atmospheric and astrophysical foregrounds as well as potential mitigation strategies. When combined with Planck data, we estimate that the ground-based experiments will detect Rayleigh scattering with a significance between 1.6 and 3.7, primarily limited by atmospheric noise and the CIB.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures (v2 additional author added

Relative sensitivity of magnetic resonance spectroscopy and quantitative magnetic resonance imaging to cognitive function among nondemented individuals infected with HIV

In the present study, we examined the relationships among cognitive function, magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) brain metabolite indices measured in the basal ganglia, and quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the caudate nucleus and the putamen in the earliest stages of HIV-related cognitive involvement. Participants included 22 HIV-positive individuals and 20 HIV-negative individuals. HIV-positive individuals performed significantly more poorly than the HIV-negative individuals on several cognitive measures. In addition, the choline/creatine ratio was significantly higher and the N-acetyl aspartate/choline ratio was significantly lower among HIV patients. The caudate and putamen sizes were smaller among HIV-positive patients compared with controls; however, the differences did not reach statistical significance. Correlation analyses revealed associations between cognitive function and select MRS indices. In addition, caudate size was significantly correlated with performances on higher-order thinking tests whereas putamen size was significantly correlated with performances on motor tests. The results suggest that MRS differences are more pronounced than area size differences between seropositive and seronegative individuals in mild stages of HIV-related cognitive impairment. However, basal ganglia size remains an important contributor to cognitive status in this population. Longitudinal studies are needed to determine the evolution of these imaging correlates of HIV-cognitive impairment in HIV

Characterization of MKIDs for CMB observation at 220 GHz with the South Pole Telescope

We present an updated design of the 220 GHz microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID) pixel for SPT-3G+, the next-generation camera for the South Pole Telescope. We show results of the dark testing of a 63-pixel array with mean inductor quality factor $Q_i = 4.8 \times 10^5$, aluminum inductor transition temperature $T_c = 1.19$ K, and kinetic inductance fraction $\alpha_k = 0.32$. We optically characterize both the microstrip-coupled and CPW-coupled resonators, and find both have a spectral response close to prediction with an optical efficiency of $\eta \sim 70\%$. However, we find slightly lower optical response on the lower edge of the band than predicted, with neighboring dark detectors showing more response in this region, though at level consistent with less than 5\% frequency shift relative to the optical detectors. The detectors show polarized response consistent with expectations, with a cross-polar response of $\sim 10\%$ for both detector orientations.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, ASC 2022 proceeding

GlobTherm, a global database on thermal tolerances for aquatic and terrestrial organisms

CITATION: Bennett, J. M., et al. 2018. GlobTherm, a global database on thermal tolerances for aquatic and terrestrial organisms. Scientific Data, 5:180022, doi:10.1038/sdata.2018.22.The original publication is available at https://www.nature.comHow climate affects species distributions is a longstanding question receiving renewed interest owing to the need to predict the impacts of global warming on biodiversity. Is climate change forcing species to live near their critical thermal limits? Are these limits likely to change through natural selection? These and other important questions can be addressed with models relating geographical distributions of species with climate data, but inferences made with these models are highly contingent on non-climatic factors such as biotic interactions. Improved understanding of climate change effects on species will require extensive analysis of thermal physiological traits, but such data are both scarce and scattered. To overcome current limitations, we created the GlobTherm database. The database contains experimentally derived species’ thermal tolerance data currently comprising over 2,000 species of terrestrial, freshwater, intertidal and marine multicellular algae, plants, fungi, and animals. The GlobTherm database will be maintained and curated by iDiv with the aim to keep expanding it, and enable further investigations on the effects of climate on the distribution of life on Earth.https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201822Publisher's versio

GlobTherm, a global database on thermal tolerances for aquatic and terrestrial organisms

This database includes thermal tolerance metrics for 2,133 species of multicellular algae, plants, fungi, and animals in 43 classes, 203 orders and 525 families from both aquatic, and terrestrial realms, extracted from published studies. Abbreviated citations are included in the 'REF_min' and 'REF_max' variable in the data file. For full citations, please see the attached workbook, "References_1_09_2017.xlsx". The data are available in both Excel and CSV formats in the Dryad Digital Repository (doi:10.5061/dryad.1cv08). Updates to the data and metadata will be curated through the iDiv data portal (https://idata.idiv.de/). For example, in the future we plan to include interspecific variation in the dataset, to provide multiple estimates of thermal tolerance limits for a given species where estimates determined using the best possible methods will be more highly ranked

Deep \u3cem\u3eChandra\u3c/em\u3e, \u3cem\u3eHST\u3c/em\u3e-Cos, and MegaCam Observations of the Phoenix Cluster: Extreme Star Formation and AGN Feedback on Hundred Kiloparsec Scales

We present new ultraviolet, optical, and X-ray data on the Phoenix galaxy cluster (SPT-CLJ2344-4243). Deep optical imaging reveals previously undetected filaments of star formation, extending to radii of ~50–100 kpc in multiple directions. Combined UV-optical spectroscopy of the central galaxy reveals a massive (2 x 109 M⊙), young (~4.5 Myr) population of stars, consistent with a time-averaged star formation rate of 610 ± 50 M⊙ yr−1. We report a strong detection of O ᴠɪ λλ1032,1038, which appears to originate primarily in shock-heated gas, but may contain a substantial contribution (\u3e1000 M⊙ yr−1) from the cooling intracluster medium (ICM). We confirm the presence of deep X-ray cavities in the inner ~10 kpc, which are among the most extreme examples of radio-mode feedback detected to date, implying jet powers of 2–7 x 1045 erg s−1. We provide evidence that the active galactic nucleus inflating these cavities may have only recently transitioned from quasar-mode to radio-mode, and may currently be insufficient to completely offset cooling. A model-subtracted residual X-ray image reveals evidence for prior episodes of strong radio-mode feedback at radii of ~100 kpc, with extended ghost cavities indicating a prior epoch of feedback roughly 100 Myr ago. This residual image also exhibits significant asymmetry in the inner ~200 kpc (0.15R500), reminiscent of infalling cool clouds, either due to minor mergers or fragmentation of the cooling ICM. Taken together, these data reveal a rapidly evolving cool core which is rich with structure (both spatially and in temperature), is subject to a variety of highly energetic processes, and yet is cooling rapidly and forming stars along thin, narrow filaments