Urban-industrial shoreline restoration techniques: Duwamish Waterway and Elliott Bay

Title: Urban-industrial shoreline restoration techniques: Duwamish Waterway and Elliott Bay Seattle’s present-day Elliott Bay and south-harbor industrial area comprises approximately 5,300 acres, 80 percent of Seattle’s industrial area. This man-made landscape is enormously productive, providing approximately 225,000 regional jobs, totaling $7-9 billion in annual payroll. Seattle’s industrial environment displaced another highly productive landscape, eliminating 98 percent of native intertidal, shallow sub-tidal, and riparian fish and wildlife habitat in the former Green-Duwamish estuarine wetland and nearshore system. Working in this complex environment, the Port has restored, created or enhanced 31 acres of habitat at 16 sites during the past 25 years. The port’s “Century Agenda” commitment includes restoration of 40 acres of additional habitat by 2026. Recent port restoration actions emphasize replacing inert armored, steep industrial shorelines, with riparian slopes and emergent marsh area, protected with large-woody-debris. Shoreline restoration actions in rural and non-urban areas have been well documented; however, use of “living” urban-industrial shoreline restoration techniques has not been successfully demonstrated. Unique challenges associated with urban-industrial restoration include surface and buried infrastructure, contaminated industrial fill, incompatible land uses, vessel wake/prop wash erosion, adjacent armored shorelines, interrupted hydrology, and urban storm-water. The Port has designed and tested durable urban estuary shoreline restoration techniques, including re-shaping degraded bank-lines, to create inter-tidal and shoreline areas stabilized with native emergent and riparian vegetation. The Port has also integrated passive public shoreline access improvements with habitat restoration, encouraging public education and stewardship. The Port has confirmed six restoration designs, progressing from “partial restoration”, in sites constrained by adjacent features, to “full restoration”, for sites with adequate site conditions. The Port will be applying these designs in future, area-wide bank-line rehabilitation projects, including working with agencies to obtain programmatic approvals. Presenter: George Blomberg, [email protected], 206.787.319

In Florida, introducing civil citations for young offenders has met with mixed success

Punishing young offenders can often ensure that they have a long relationship with the criminal justice system. But more and more authorities have chosen diversion policies such as civil citation in order to reduce the likelihood of future offending. In new research, Melissa Nadel, George Pesta, Thomas Blomberg, William Bales, and Mark Greenwald look at Florida's civil citation program, finding that while there was little evidence of diversion being applied to those who would otherwise have received no sanction, most counties did not use the program to any meaningful extent. However, amongst those that did, juvenile arrests dropped significantly

The effect of HIV on morbidity and mortality in children with severe malarial anaemia

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Malaria and HIV are common causes of mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. The effect of HIV infection on morbidity and mortality in children with severe malarial anaemia was assessed.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Children <5 years old were followed as part of a prospective cohort study to assess the transfusion-associated transmission of blood-borne pathogens at Mulago Hospital, Kampala, Uganda. All children were hospitalized with a diagnosis of severe malarial anaemia requiring blood transfusion. Survival to different time points post-transfusion was compared between HIV-infected and uninfected children. Generalized estimating equations were used to analyse repeated measurement outcomes of morbidity, adjusting for confounders.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>Of 847 children, 78 (9.2%) were HIV-infected. Median follow-up time was 162 days (inter-quartile range: 111, 169). HIV-infected children were more likely to die within 7 days (Hazard ratio [HR] = 2.86, 95% Confidence interval [CI] 1.30–6.29, P = 0.009) and within 28 days (HR = 3.70, 95% CI 1.91–7.17, P < 0.001) of an episode of severe malarial anaemia, and were more likely to die in the 6 months post-transfusion (HR = 5.70, 95% CI 3.54–9.16, P < 0.001) compared to HIV-uninfected children. HIV-infected children had more frequent re-admissions due to malaria within 28 days (Incidence rate ratio (IRR) = 3.74, 95% CI 1.41–9.90, P = 0.008) and within 6 months (IRR = 2.66, 95% CI 1.17 – 6.07, P = 0.02) post-transfusion than HIV-uninfected children.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>HIV-infected children with severe malarial anaemia suffered higher all-cause mortality and malaria-related mortality than HIV-uninfected children. Children with HIV and malaria should receive aggressive treatment and further evaluation of their HIV disease, particularly with regard to cotrimoxazole prophylaxis and antiretroviral therapy.</p

Review of Issues Associated with Safe Operation and Management of the Space Shuttle Program

At the request of the President of the United States through the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the NASA Administrator tasked the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel with the responsibility to identify and review issues associated with the safe operation and management of the Space Shuttle program arising from ongoing efforts to improve and streamline operations. These efforts include the consolidation of operations under a single Space Flight Operations Contract (SFOC), downsizing the Space Shuttle workforce and reducing costs of operations and management. The Panel formed five teams to address the potentially significant safety impacts of the seven specific topic areas listed in the study Terms of Reference. These areas were (in the order in which they are presented in this report): Maintenance of independent safety oversight; implementation plan for the transition of Shuttle program management to the Lead Center; communications among NASA Centers and Headquarters; transition plan for downsizing to anticipated workforce levels; implementation of a phased transition to a prime contractor for operations; Shuttle flight rate for Space Station assembly; and planned safety and performance upgrades for Space Station assembly. The study teams collected information through briefings, interviews, telephone conversations and from reviewing applicable documentation. These inputs were distilled by each team into observations and recommendations which were then reviewed by the entire Panel

Bacterial infections in Lilongwe, Malawi: aetiology and antibiotic resistance

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Life-threatening infections present major challenges for health systems in Malawi and the developing world because routine microbiologic culture and sensitivity testing are not performed due to lack of capacity. Use of empirical antimicrobial therapy without regular microbiologic surveillance is unable to provide adequate treatment in the face of emerging antimicrobial resistance. This study was conducted to determine antimicrobial susceptibility patterns in order to inform treatment choices and generate hospital-wide baseline data.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Culture and susceptibility testing was performed on various specimens from patients presenting with possible infectious diseases at Kamuzu Central Hospital, Lilongwe, Malawi.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Between July 2006 and December 2007 3104 specimens from 2458 patients were evaluated, with 60.1% from the adult medical service. Common presentations were sepsis, meningitis, pneumonia and abscess. An etiologic agent was detected in 13% of patients. The most common organisms detected from blood cultures were <it>Staphylococcus aureus</it>, <it>Escherichia </it><it>coli</it>, Salmonella species and <it>Streptococcus pneumoniae</it>, whereas <it>Streptococcus pneumoniae </it>and <it>Cryptococcus neoformans </it>were most frequently detected from cerebrospinal fluid. <it>Haemophilus influenzae </it>was rarely isolated. Resistance to commonly used antibiotics was observed in up to 80% of the isolates while antibiotics that were not commonly in use maintained susceptibility.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>There is widespread resistance to almost all of the antibiotics that are empirically used in Malawi. Antibiotics that have not been widely introduced in Malawi show better laboratory performance. Choices for empirical therapy in Malawi should be revised accordingly. A microbiologic surveillance system should be established and prudent use of antimicrobials promoted to improve patient care.</p

Rates of Viral Evolution Are Linked to Host Geography in Bat Rabies

Rates of evolution span orders of magnitude among RNA viruses with important implications for viral transmission and emergence. Although the tempo of viral evolution is often ascribed to viral features such as mutation rates and transmission mode, these factors alone cannot explain variation among closely related viruses, where host biology might operate more strongly on viral evolution. Here, we analyzed sequence data from hundreds of rabies viruses collected from bats throughout the Americas to describe dramatic variation in the speed of rabies virus evolution when circulating in ecologically distinct reservoir species. Integration of ecological and genetic data through a comparative Bayesian analysis revealed that viral evolutionary rates were labile following historical jumps between bat species and nearly four times faster in tropical and subtropical bats compared to temperate species. The association between geography and viral evolution could not be explained by host metabolism, phylogeny or variable selection pressures, and instead appeared to be a consequence of reduced seasonality in bat activity and virus transmission associated with climate. Our results demonstrate a key role for host ecology in shaping the tempo of evolution in multi-host viruses and highlight the power of comparative phylogenetic methods to identify the host and environmental features that influence transmission dynamics

Absence of N addition facilitates B cell development, but impairs immune responses

The programmed, stepwise acquisition of immunocompetence that marks the development of the fetal immune response proceeds during a period when both T cell receptor and immunoglobulin (Ig) repertoires exhibit reduced junctional diversity due to physiologic terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT) insufficiency. To test the effect of N addition on humoral responses, we transplanted bone marrow from TdT-deficient (TdT−/−) and wild-type (TdT+/+) BALB/c mice into recombination activation gene 1-deficient BALB/c hosts. Mice transplanted with TdT−/− cells exhibited diminished humoral responses to the T-independent antigens α-1-dextran and (2,4,6-trinitrophenyl) hapten conjugated to AminoEthylCarboxymethyl-FICOLL, to the T-dependent antigens NP19CGG and hen egg lysozyme, and to Enterobacter cloacae, a commensal bacteria that can become an opportunistic pathogen in immature and immunocompromised hosts. An exception to this pattern of reduction was the T-independent anti-phosphorylcholine response to Streptococcus pneumoniae, which is normally dominated by the N-deficient T15 idiotype. Most of the humoral immune responses in the recipients of TdT−/− bone marrow were impaired, yet population of the blood with B and T cells occurred more rapidly. To further test the effect of N-deficiency on B cell and T cell population growth, transplanted TdT-sufficient and -deficient BALB/c IgMa and congenic TdT-sufficient CB17 IgMb bone marrow were placed in competition. TdT−/− cells demonstrated an advantage in populating the bone marrow, the spleen, and the peritoneal cavity. TdT deficiency, which characterizes fetal lymphocytes, thus appears to facilitate filling both central and peripheral lymphoid compartments, but at the cost of altered responses to a broad set of antigens

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. A diverse set of stakeholders—representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers—have come together to design and jointly endorse a concise and measureable set of principles that we refer to as the FAIR Data Principles. The intent is that these may act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings. Distinct from peer initiatives that focus on the human scholar, the FAIR Principles put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals. This Comment is the first formal publication of the FAIR Principles, and includes the rationale behind them, and some exemplar implementations in the community