Life course outcomes and developmental pathways for children and young people with harmful sexual behaviour

Most outcome studies for children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour have focused on sexual recidivism as their primary outcome measure. Relatively little is known about broader life outcomes for children displaying such behaviours, nor about the processes involved with longer-term developmental success or failure. This paper examines long-term life course outcomes for 69 adults in the UK who presented with abusive sexual behaviour as children. Between 10 and 20 years after their childhood sexual behaviour problems, few in the sample had sexually reoffended, but general life course outcomes were much less positive. A range of individual, relational and social/environmental factors appeared to be associated with successful and unsuccessful outcomes. Successful outcomes were associated with stable partner relationships, wider supportive relationships, and educational opportunity and achievement. The findings highlight the importance of broad-based, developmental interventions in assisting those with childhood sexual behaviour problems to live successfully

Robustness and epistasis in mutation-selection models

We investigate the fitness advantage associated with the robustness of a phenotype against deleterious mutations using deterministic mutation-selection models of quasispecies type equipped with a mesa shaped fitness landscape. We obtain analytic results for the robustness effect which become exact in the limit of infinite sequence length. Thereby, we are able to clarify a seeming contradiction between recent rigorous work and an earlier heuristic treatment based on a mapping to a Schr\"odinger equation. We exploit the quantum mechanical analogy to calculate a correction term for finite sequence lengths and verify our analytic results by numerical studies. In addition, we investigate the occurrence of an error threshold for a general class of epistatic landscape and show that diminishing epistasis is a necessary but not sufficient condition for error threshold behavior.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figure

Methods for detecting and quantifying individual specialisation in movement and foraging strategies of marine predators

There is increasing realisation that individuals in many animal populations differ substantially in resource, space or habitat use. Differences that cannot be attributed to any a priori way of classifying individuals (i.e. age, sex and other group effects) are often termed ‘individual specialisation’. The aim of this paper is to assess the most common approaches for detecting and quantifying individual specialisation and consistencies in foraging behaviour, movement patterns and diet of marine predators using 3 types of data: conventional diet data, stable isotope ratios and tracking data. Methods using conventional diet data rely on a comparison between the proportions of each dietary source in the total diet and in the diet of individuals, or analyses of the statistical distribution of a prey metric (e.g. size); the latter often involves comparing ratios of individual and population variance. Approaches frequently used to analyse stable isotope or tracking data reduced to 1 dimension (trip characteristics, e.g. maximum trip distance or latitude/longitude at certain landmarks) include correlation tests and repeatability analysis. Finally, various spatial analyses are applied to other types of tracking data (e.g. distances between centroids of distributions or migratory routes, or overlap between distributions), and methods exist to compare habitat use. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches, issues arising from other effects unrelated to individual specialisation per se (in particular those related to temporal scale) and potential solutions

Seroprevalence of Zika virus in wild African green monkeys and baboons

ABSTRACT Zika virus (ZIKV) has recently spread through the Americas and has been associated with a range of health effects, including birth defects in children born to women infected during pregnancy. Although the natural reservoir of ZIKV remains poorly defined, the virus was first identified in a captive “sentinel” macaque monkey in Africa in 1947. However, the virus has not been reported in humans or nonhuman primates (NHPs) in Africa outside Gabon in over a decade. Here, we examine ZIKV infection in 239 wild baboons and African green monkeys from South Africa, the Gambia, Tanzania, and Zambia using combinations of unbiased deep sequencing, quantitative reverse transcription-PCR (qRT-PCR), and an antibody capture assay that we optimized using serum collected from captive macaque monkeys exposed to ZIKV, dengue virus, and yellow fever virus. While we did not find evidence of active ZIKV infection in wild NHPs in Africa, we found variable ZIKV seropositivity of up to 16% in some of the NHP populations sampled. We anticipate that these results and the methodology described within will help in continued efforts to determine the prevalence, natural reservoir, and transmission dynamics of ZIKV in Africa and elsewhere. IMPORTANCE Zika virus (ZIKV) is a mosquito-borne virus originally discovered in a captive monkey living in the Zika Forest of Uganda, Africa, in 1947. Recently, an outbreak in South America has shown that ZIKV infection can cause myriad health effects, including birth defects in the children of women infected during pregnancy. Here, we sought to investigate ZIKV infection in wild African primates to better understand its emergence and spread, looking for evidence of active or prior infection. Our results suggest that up to 16% of some populations of nonhuman primate were, at some point, exposed to ZIKV. We anticipate that this study will be useful for future studies that examine the spread of infections from wild animals to humans in general and those studying ZIKV in primates in particular. Podcast: A podcast concerning this article is available

Optical Light Curve of the Type Ia Supernova 1998bu in M96 and the Supernova Calibration of the Hubble Constant

We present the UBVRI light curves of the Type Ia supernova SN 1998bu which appeared in the nearby galaxy M96 (NGC 3368). M96 is a spiral galaxy in the Leo I group which has a Cepheid-based distance. Our photometry allows us to calculate the absolute magnitude and reddening of this supernova. These data, when combined with measurements of the four other well-observed supernovae with Cepheid based distances, allow us to calculate the Hubble constant with respect to the Hubble flow defined by the distant Calan/Tololo Type Ia sample. We find a Hubble constant of 64.0 +/- 2.2(internal) +/- 3.5(external) km/s/Mpc, consistent with most previous estimates based on Type Ia supernovae. We note that the two well-observed Type Ia supernovae in Fornax, if placed at the Cepheid distance to the possible Fornax spiral NGC 1365, are apparently too faint with respect to the Calan/Tololo sample calibrated with the five Type Ia supernovae with Cepheid distances to the host galaxies.Comment: AAS LaTeX, 20 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. Figure 1 (finding chart) not include

Age-related variation in non-breeding foraging behaviour and carry-over effects on fitness in an extremely long-lived bird

Senescence has been widely documented in wild vertebrate populations, yet the proximate drivers of age‐related declines in breeding success, including allocation trade‐offs and links with foraging performance, are poorly understood. For long‐lived, migratory species, the non‐breeding period represents a critical time for investment in self‐maintenance and restoration of body condition, which in many species is linked to fitness. However, the relationships between age, non‐breeding foraging behaviour and fitness remain largely unexplored. We performed a cross‐sectional study, investigating age‐related variation in the foraging activity, distribution and diet of an extremely long‐lived seabird, the wandering albatross Diomedea exulans, during the non‐breeding period. Eighty‐two adults aged 8–33 years were tracked with geolocator‐immersion loggers, and body feathers were sampled for stable isotope analysis. We tested for variation in metrics of foraging behaviour and linked age‐related trends to subsequent reproductive performance. There was an age‐related decline in the number of landings (a proxy of foraging effort) during daylight hours, and a decrease in body feather δ¹³C values in older males but not females, yet this did not accompany an age‐related shift in distributions. Males conducted fewer landings than females, and the sexes showed some spatial segregation, with males foraging further south, likely due to their differential utilization of winds. Although younger (<20 years) birds had higher foraging effort, they all went on to breed successfully the following season. In contrast, among older (20+ years) birds, individuals that landed more often were more likely to defer breeding or fail during incubation, suggesting they have lower foraging success. As far as we are aware, this is the first demonstration of an age‐specific carry‐over effect of foraging behaviour in the non‐breeding period on subsequent reproductive performance. This link between foraging behaviour and fitness in late but not early adulthood indicates that the ability of individuals to forage efficiently outside the breeding period may be an important driver of fitness differences in old age. A plain language summary is available for this article

Beyond Bloom’s: Students’ Perception of Bloom’s Taxonomy and its Convolution with Cognitive Load

         Bloom’s taxonomy is widely used in educational research to categorize the cognitive skills required to answer exam questions. For this study, we analyzed how students categorize exam questions (high-level question or low-level question,) gathered data as to their rationale for categorization, and compared their categorizations to those of experts. We found that students consistently rank high-level questions incorrectly. We analyzed student reasons for their categorizations, and found that for many of the incorrectly categorized questions the students referred to reasons related to Cognitive Load Theory. This shows that cognitive load prevents students from accurately assessing the cognitive level of an exam question. Thus, extra cognitive load in exam questions may prevent those questions from accurately measuring the skills and knowledge of the student. This points to the need for instructors to eliminate cognitive load from their exams

Preterm infants harbour a rapidly changing mycobiota that includes Candida pathobionts

Fungi and the mycobiome are a fundamental part of the human microbiome that contributes to human health and development. Despite this, relatively little is known about the mycobiome of the preterm infant gut. Here, we have characterised faecal fungal communities present in 11 premature infants born with differing degrees of prematurity and mapped how the mycobiome develops during early infancy. Using an ITS1 sequencing-based approach, the preterm infant gut mycobiome was found to be often dominated by a single species, typically a yeast. Candida was the most abundant genus, with the pathobionts C.albicans and C.parapsilosis highly prevalent and persistent in these infants. Gestational maturity at birth affected the distribution and abundance of these Candida, with hospital-associated C.parapsilosis more prevalent and abundant in infants born at less than 31 weeks. Fungal diversity was lowest at 6 months, but increased with age and change of diet, with food-associated Saccharomycescerevisiae most abundant in infants post weaning. This study provides a first insight into the fungal communities present within the preterm infant gut, identifying distinctive features including the prominence of pathobiont species, and the influence age and environmental factors play in shaping the development of the mycobiome

Can quantum fractal fluctuations be observed in an atom-optics kicked rotor experiment?

We investigate the parametric fluctuations in the quantum survival probability of an open version of the delta-kicked rotor model in the deep quantum regime. Spectral arguments [Guarneri I and Terraneo M 2001 Phys. Rev. E vol. 65 015203(R)] predict the existence of parametric fractal fluctuations owing to the strong dynamical localisation of the eigenstates of the kicked rotor. We discuss the possibility of observing such dynamically-induced fractality in the quantum survival probability as a function of the kicking period for the atom-optics realisation of the kicked rotor. The influence of the atoms' initial momentum distribution is studied as well as the dependence of the expected fractal dimension on finite-size effects of the experiment, such as finite detection windows and short measurement times. Our results show that clear signatures of fractality could be observed in experiments with cold atoms subjected to periodically flashed optical lattices, which offer an excellent control on interaction times and the initial atomic ensemble.Comment: 18 pp, 7 figs., 1 tabl

A coding and non-coding transcriptomic perspective on the genomics of human metabolic disease

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS), relying on hundreds of thousands of individuals, have revealed > 200 genomic loci linked to metabolic disease (MD). Loss of insulin sensitivity (IS) is a key component of MD and we hypothesized that discovery of a robust IS transcriptome would help reveal the underlying genomic structure of MD. Using 1,012 human skeletal muscle samples, detailed physiology and a tissue-optimized approach for the quantification of coding (> 18,000) and non-coding (> 15,000) RNA (ncRNA), we identified 332 fasting IS-related genes (CORE-IS). Over 200 had a proven role in the biochemistry of insulin and/or metabolism or were located at GWAS MD loci. Over 50% of the CORE-IS genes responded to clinical treatment; 16 quantitatively tracking changes in IS across four independent studies (P = 0.0000053: negatively: AGL, G0S2, KPNA2, PGM2, RND3 and TSPAN9 and positively: ALDH6A1, DHTKD1, ECHDC3, MCCC1, OARD1, PCYT2, PRRX1, SGCG, SLC43A1 and SMIM8). A network of ncRNA positively related to IS and interacted with RNA coding for viral response proteins (P < 1 × 10−48), while reduced amino acid catabolic gene expression occurred without a change in expression of oxidative-phosphorylation genes. We illustrate that combining in-depth physiological phenotyping with robust RNA profiling methods, identifies molecular networks which are highly consistent with the genetics and biochemistry of human metabolic disease