Solving the Childcare and Flexibility Puzzle: How Working Parents Make the Best Feasible Choices And What That Means for Public Policy

This monograph’s contribution to knowledge was two-fold: 1) reliable measures of the quality of childcare as perceived and assessed by the parents themselves; and 2) discovery that the quality of the care chosen by working parents depends upon the amount of flexibility they can muster from their immediate environment at work, at home, or from accommodating childcare providers. It doesn’t matter which source of flexibility works best for them. It’s the flexibility that allows optimum choice. The findings suggest that public policy should recognize the vast diversity of parental choices and the flexibility needed to improve their choices. That means improving workplace flexibility, strengthening the financial capacity of families, and protecting all of the wellsprings of flexibility for employed parents

The Stability of the Family Day Care Arrangement: A Longitudinal Study

This monograph tells of an era when an increasing numbers of working mothers found day care down the street with a mother who had a child or two of her own and was glad to add one or two more during the day. Informal family day care met with respect by a team of researchers in Portland, Oregon. They studied family day care and discovered ways to create “natural helping networks” in the neighborhood

EDITORIAL: Stuck in motion? Reconnecting questions and tools in movement ecology

In this editorial for the Special Feature, I firstly briefly review the major milestones in tool development for movement ecology research, from the first mark–recapture techniques to the current techniques allowing users to collect high-frequency movement data and high-resolution environmental data, as well as the methods for statistical and mathematical analyses. I then briefly describe the methods covered in the Special Feature and conclude with a brief outlook on ongoing and future developments

Human matrix metalloproteinases: An ubiquitarian class of enzymes involved in several pathological processes

Human matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) belong to the M10 family of the MA clan of endopeptidases. They are ubiquitarian enzymes, structurally characterized by an active site where a Zn(2+) atom, coordinated by three histidines, plays the catalytic role, assisted by a glutamic acid as a general base. Various MMPs display different domain composition, which is very important for macromolecular substrates recognition. Substrate specificity is very different among MMPs, being often associated to their cellular compartmentalization and/or cellular type where they are expressed. An extensive review of the different MMPs structural and functional features is integrated with their pathological role in several types of diseases, spanning from cancer to cardiovascular diseases and to neurodegeneration. It emerges a very complex and crucial role played by these enzymes in many physiological and pathological processes