Senioritis in repose

Media and other accounts of life after retirement suggest it to be “The Golden Years” of life, when the elderly have true leisure in the classic sense of freedom from responsibilities of work. However, like earlier time-diary studies, data from the 2003-07 Americans Time Use Project (ATUS) indicate that the great majority of seniors’ extra 20+ hours of free time is concentrated on three activities – TV, reading and rest. Only a few more hours are spent on sleep. Despite reports of increased work time among seniors, relatively few of those in Andy’s new age bracket remain in the labor force and they work fewer hours.Time use, elderly, retirement, free time, TV, aging

Potato Production near Glyphosate-resistant Crops — Injury Potential

The herbicide glyphosate is used in many countries because of low cost and effective weed control, but low levels of glyphosate on potato can reduce yield, marketability, and seed quality. Glyphosate is a phloem-mobile herbicide that can translocate to tubers, causing malformations that reduce the quality of current-season production. Potato plants are most susceptible to glyphosate at the hooking or tuber initiation stage. Tubers exposed at these stages often will become malformed and yield loss can occur. Seed production can be affected because glyphosate degradation is slow and it translocates to tubers. Seed potato exposed to glyphosate can store glyphosate residues until they are planted the next season. Tubers planted with glyphosate residues will have an erratic and slow emergence pattern, bending and twisting of leaves, multiple shoots from eyes, “candelabra” or “cauliflower” formation of shoots, or completely inhibited shoot growth, depending on the rate and cultivar. Glyphosate-affected seed tubers produce less tuber set and tubers with reduced weight. Tubers suspected to have glyphosate injury should be tested at a reputable laboratory to confirm glyphosate residues are present. Good management practices can help prevent potato from being exposed to glyphosate

Kripke Semantics for Intuitionistic Lukasiewicz Logic

This paper proposes a generalization of the Kripke semantics of intuitionistic logic IL appropriate for intuitionistic Łukasiewicz logicIŁL —a logic in the intersection between IL and (classical) Łukasiewicz logic. This generalised Kripke semantics is based on the poset sum construction, used in Bova and Montagna (Theoret Comput Sci 410(12):1143–1158, 2009). to show the decidability (and PSPACE completeness) of the quasiequational theory of commutative, integral and bounded GBL algebras. The main idea is that $w \Vdash \psi$—which for ILis a relation between worlds w and formulas $\psi$, and can be seen as a function taking values in the booleans $(w \Vdash \psi ) \in {{\mathbb {B}}}$—becomes a function taking values in the unit interval $(w \Vdash \psi ) \in [0,1]$. An appropriate monotonicity restriction (which we call sloping functions) needs to be put on such functions in order to ensure soundness and completeness of the semantics

Cost analysis of employing general practitioners within residential aged care facilities based on a prospective, stepped-wedge, cluster randomised trial

Objective: To assess the impacts of changing a model of care and employing general practitioners (GPs) within residential aged care facilities (RACFs) on costs to the aged care provider (ACP) and state and federal governments of Australia. Methods: This study was a cost analysis of a prospective, stepped-wedge, cluster randomised trial. All financial data from the ACP for every RACF involved, before and after implementation of the new model were obtained. Costs of hospital transfers, admissions, ambulance usage and GP consultations were calculated. Costs of new infrastructure, recruiting and training new staff were accounted for. Costs were standardised to 2019 Australian Dollars per occupied bed day (OBD). Results: Implementation of the new model of care resulted in overall cost savings of $9.7 per OBD to the ACP, with increased salary costs offset by increased federal government subsidies and Medicare claims income. Costs to the federal government increased by$19.6 per OBD, driven by increases in subsides. Costs savings of $3.0 per OBD to state governments were seen, driven by decreased costs of hospital transfers. Conclusions: Implementation of a model of care including GPs employed at RACFs had a mixed impact on costs depending on perspective, with overall savings to the ACP and state government perspective

Mass spectrometry captures off-target drug binding and provides mechanistic insights into the human metalloprotease ZMPSTE24.

Off-target binding of hydrophobic drugs can lead to unwanted side effects, either through specific or non-specific binding to unintended membrane protein targets. However, distinguishing the binding of drugs to membrane proteins from that of detergents, lipids and cofactors is challenging. Here, we use high-resolution mass spectrometry to study the effects of HIV protease inhibitors on the human zinc metalloprotease ZMPSTE24. This intramembrane protease plays a major role in converting prelamin A to mature lamin A. We monitored the proteolysis of farnesylated prelamin A peptide by ZMPSTE24 and unexpectedly found retention of the C-terminal peptide product with the enzyme. We also resolved binding of zinc, lipids and HIV protease inhibitors and showed that drug binding blocked prelamin A peptide cleavage and conferred stability to ZMPSTE24. Our results not only have relevance for the progeria-like side effects of certain HIV protease inhibitor drugs, but also highlight new approaches for documenting off-target drug binding

Development of a low-maintenance measurement approach to continuously estimate methane emissions: a case study

The chemical breakdown of organic matter in landfills represents a significant source of methane gas (CH4). Current estimates suggest that landfills are responsible for between 3% and 19% of global anthropogenic emissions. The net CH4 emissions resulting from biogeochemical processes and their modulation by microbes in landfills are poorly constrained by imprecise knowledge of environmental constraints. The uncertainty in absolute CH4 emissions from landfills is therefore considerable. This study investigates a new method to estimate the temporal variability of CH4 emissions using meteorological and CH4 concentration measurements downwind of a landfill site in Suffolk, UK from July to September 2014, taking advantage of the statistics that such a measurement approach offers versus shorter-term, but more complex and instantaneously accurate, flux snapshots. Methane emissions were calculated from CH4 concentrations measured 700 m from the perimeter of the landfill with observed concentrations ranging from background to 46.4 ppm. Using an atmospheric dispersion model, we estimate a mean emission flux of 709 μg m−2 s−1 over this period, with a maximum value of 6.21 mg m−2 s−1, reflecting the wide natural variability in biogeochemical and other environmental controls on net site emission. The emissions calculated suggest that meteorological conditions have an influence on the magnitude of CH4 emissions. We also investigate the factors responsible for the large variability observed in the estimated CH4 emissions, and suggest that the largest component arises from uncertainty in the spatial distribution of CH4 emissions within the landfill area. The results determined using the low-maintenance approach discussed in this paper suggest that a network of cheaper, less precise CH4 sensors could be used to measure a continuous CH4 emission time series from a landfill site, something that is not practical using far-field approaches such as tracer release methods. Even though there are limitations to the approach described here, this easy, low-maintenance, low-cost method could be used by landfill operators to estimate time-averaged CH4 emissions and their impact downwind by simultaneously monitoring plume advection and CH4 concentrations

Computing and Diagnosing Changes in Unit Test Energy Consumption

Many developers have reason to be concerned with with power consumption. For example, mobile app developers want to minimize how much power their applications draw, while still providing useful functionality. However, developers have few tools to get feedback about changes to their application\u27s power consumption behavior as they implement an application and make changes to it over time. We present a tool that, using a team\u27s existing test cases, performs repeated measurements of energy consumption based on instructions executed, objects generated, and blocking latency, generating a distribution of energy use estimates for each test run, recording these distributions in a time series of distributions over time. Then, when these distributions change substantially, we inform the developer of this change, and offer them diagnostic information about the elements of their code potentially responsible for the change and the inputs responsible. Through this information, we believe that developers will be better enabled to relate recent changes in their code to changes in energy consumption, enabling them to better incorporate changes in software energy consumption into their software evolution decisions