A comparative effectiveness study of the breaking the cycle and Maxxine Wright intervention programs for substance-involved mothers and their children: study protocol

Abstract Background Children of substance-involved mothers are at especially high risk for exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and poor mental health and development. Early interventions that support mothers, children, and the mother-child relationship have the greatest potential to reduce exposure to early adversity and the mental health problems associated with these exposures. Currently, there is a lack of evidence from the real-world setting demonstrating effectiveness and return on investment for intervention programs that focus on the mother-child relationship in children of substance-involved mothers. Methods One hundred substance-involved pregnant and/or parenting women with children between the ages of 0–6 years old will be recruited through the Breaking the Cycle and Maxxine Wright intervention programs, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, respectively. Children’s socioemotional development and exposure to risk and protective factors, mothers’ mental health and history of ACEs, and mother-child relationship quality will be assessed in both intervention programs. Assessments will occur at three time points: pre-intervention, 12-, and 24-months after engagement in the intervention program. Discussion There is a pressing need to identify interventions that promote the mental health of infants and young children exposed to early adversity. Bringing together an inter-disciplinary research team and community partners, this study aligns with national strategies to establish strong evidence for infant mental health interventions that reduce child exposure to ACEs and support the mother-child relationship. This study was registered with clinicaltrials.gov (NCT05768815) on March 14, 2023

Characterising patterns of engagement of different participants in a public STEM-based analysis project

An analysis project undertaken in the context of a historic visitor site is described. The project offered different types of opportunity for scientific working, and involved four distinct groups of participants. Two distinguishing features of the different groups of participants were their primary motivation for engagement with the activity, and their level of previous engagement with formal science education. Participants in different parts of the project were assessed as to their level of science capital (Archer et al., 2015). Drawing upon engagement theory, the observable behaviours were used as an indicator of engagement and then categorised according to Pearson's (2010) taxonomy. The analysis showed that learner engagement was exhibited at different levels by the different categories of participants, with higher levels of engagement exhibited by participants with a higher level of science capital. Although there was general correlation between the level of science capital and the proportion of higher engagement learning behaviours, one group of participants deviated from this trend. The findings indicate that the level of science capital is a key determinant of engagement and associated learning behaviours, but did not completely account for participants’ engagement in the science outreach activity

SPLASH: the Southern Parkes Large-Area Survey in Hydroxyl – first science from the pilot region

The Southern Parkes Large-Area Survey in Hydroxyl (SPLASH) is a sensitive, unbiased, and fully sampled survey of the southern Galactic plane and Galactic Centre in all four ground-state transitions of the hydroxyl (OH) radical. The survey provides a deep census of 1612-, 1665-, 1667-, and 1720-MHz OH absorption and emission from the Galactic interstellar medium, and is also an unbiased search for maser sources in these transitions. We present here first results from the SPLASH pilot region, which covers Galactic longitudes 334° to 344° and latitudes ±2?. Diffuse OH is widely detected in all four transitions, with optical depths that are always small (averaged over the Parkes beam), and with departures from local thermodynamic equilibrium common even in the 1665- and 1667-MHz main lines. To a 3σ sensitivity of ~30 mK, we find no evidence of OH envelopes extending beyond the CO-bright regions of molecular cloud complexes, and conclude that the similarity of the OH excitation temperature and the level of the continuum background is at least partly responsible for this. We detect masers and maser candidates in all four transitions, approximately 50 per cent of which are new detections. This implies that SPLASH will produce a substantial increase in the known population of ground-state OH masers in the southern Galactic plane

Multiwavelength observations of cirrus clouds in the North Celestial Loop: the transition from atomic to molecular gas

International audienceTwo potential sites of H2 formation have been discovered in diffuse gas at high Galactic latitude through examining the far-infrared (FIR) HI ratio and looking for an excess over that expected from an atomic medium. We call these the Spider and Ursa Major fields. New 12CO and 13CO Five College Radio Astronomical Observatory observations are presented for both regions (53936 spectra in the Spider and 23517 spectra in Ursa Major). Although there is a correlation between FIR excess and CO emission, we find that the FIR excess peaks do not coincide with the 12CO emission peaks, indicating that CO might be a poor tracer of H2 in diffuse regions. This implies (i) that the density is too small to allow CO excitation, (ii) that the CO self-shielding is insufficient or (iii) local variations of the dust properties. The 12CO observations are compared with HI observations from the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory. We decompose the 10000 HI profiles of the Spider and the 20 302 HI profiles of Ursa Major into Gaussian components. We always find at most two narrow components and one broad component. CO always seems to appear where two HI velocity components merge or where there is a HI velocity-shear