Flourishing ‘older-old’ (80+) adults: personal projects and their enabling places

This paper sets out a framework for exploring flourishing in older age through the lens of what older adults are doing in their lives. Applying a model from positive psychology called personal project analysis (PPA) our study captures a snapshot of older people's goals and their environmental context. Targeting older people aged 80+ we applied PPA methods in a semi-structured interview to elicit participants’ personal projects which were scored on eight wellbeing dimensions (e.g., fun, stress). Qualitative data analysis identified what types of personal projects are employed by this older demographic and the environments in which they are carried out. Results showed our participants were vitally engaged in a wide spectrum of projects exercised in a range of ‘enabling places’ which we categorised as (1) restorative niches (places that afford psychological restoration) such as nature settings (e.g. a garden, local park or riverside); (2) affinity niches (places that afford social opportunities) such as religious venues, social clubs, or cafés; and (3) flow niches (places that afford immersion in mental or physical tasks) such as the home (e.g. the kitchen) or a place associated with a previous career or amateur sport (e.g. cricket club). Our findings are discussed in relation to older people's wellbeing and the role of the built environment. Despite the increasingly negative stereotyping of the ‘older-old’ our study shows that the final decades of life can be a period of continuing growth and learning, a life stage with its own distinct character, rather than a period of decline

LoCoH: nonparameteric kernel methods for constructing home ranges and utilization distributions.

Parametric kernel methods currently dominate the literature regarding the construction of animal home ranges (HRs) and utilization distributions (UDs). These methods frequently fail to capture the kinds of hard boundaries common to many natural systems. Recently a local convex hull (LoCoH) nonparametric kernel method, which generalizes the minimum convex polygon (MCP) method, was shown to be more appropriate than parametric kernel methods for constructing HRs and UDs, because of its ability to identify hard boundaries (e.g., rivers, cliff edges) and convergence to the true distribution as sample size increases. Here we extend the LoCoH in two ways: "fixed sphere-of-influence," or r-LoCoH (kernels constructed from all points within a fixed radius r of each reference point), and an "adaptive sphere-of-influence," or a-LoCoH (kernels constructed from all points within a radius a such that the distances of all points within the radius to the reference point sum to a value less than or equal to a), and compare them to the original "fixed-number-of-points," or k-LoCoH (all kernels constructed from k-1 nearest neighbors of root points). We also compare these nonparametric LoCoH to parametric kernel methods using manufactured data and data collected from GPS collars on African buffalo in the Kruger National Park, South Africa. Our results demonstrate that LoCoH methods are superior to parametric kernel methods in estimating areas used by animals, excluding unused areas (holes) and, generally, in constructing UDs and HRs arising from the movement of animals influenced by hard boundaries and irregular structures (e.g., rocky outcrops). We also demonstrate that a-LoCoH is generally superior to k- and r-LoCoH (with software for all three methods available at http://locoh.cnr.berkeley.edu)

Discovery of Temperate Latitude Clouds on Titan

Until now, all the clouds imaged in Titan's troposphere have been found at far southern latitudes (60°-90° south). The occurrence and location of these clouds is thought to be the result of convection driven by the maximum annual solar heating of Titan's surface, which occurs at summer solstice (2002 October) in this south polar region. We report the first observations of a new recurring type of tropospheric cloud feature, confined narrowly to ~40° south latitude, which cannot be explained by this simple insolation hypothesis. We propose two classes of formation scenario, one linked to surface geography and the other to seasonally evolving circulation, which will be easily distinguished with continued observations over the next few years

Direct measurement of the size of 2003 UB313 from the Hubble Space Telescope

We have used the Hubble Space Telescope to directly measure the angular size of the large Kuiper belt object 2003 UB313. By carefully calibrating the point spread function of a nearby field star, we measure the size of 2003 UB313 to be 34.3$\pm$1.4 milliarcseconds, corresponding to a diameter of 2400$\pm$100 km or a size $\sim5$% larger than Pluto. The V band geometric albedo of 2003 UB313 is $86\pm7$%. The extremely high albedo is consistent with the frosty methane spectrum, the lack of red coloring, and the lack of observed photometric variation on the surface of 2003 UB313. Methane photolysis should quickly darken the surface of 2003 UB313, but continuous evaporation and redeposition of surface ices appears capable of maintaining the extreme alebdo of this body

Crystal structure of the catalytic fragment of murine poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-2.

Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1) has become an important pharmacological target in the treatment of cancer due to its cellular role as a 'DNA-strand break sensor', which leads in part to resistance to some existing chemo- and radiological treatments. Inhibitors have now been developed which prevent PARP-1 from synthesizing poly(ADP-ribose) in response to DNA-breaks and potentiate the cytotoxicity of DNA damaging agents. However, with the recent discoveries of PARP-2, which has a similar DNA-damage dependent catalytic activity, and additional members containing the 'PARP catalytic' signature, the isoform selectivity and resultant pharmacological effects of existing inhibitors are brought into question. We present here the crystal structure of the catalytic fragment of murine PARP-2, at 2.8 A resolution, and compare this to the catalytic fragment of PARP-1, with an emphasis on providing a possible framework for rational drug design in order to develop future isoform-specific inhibitors

Climate readiness in smallholder agricultural systems: lessons learned from REDD+

The debate around the role that agriculture should play in mitigating climate change and sequestering greenhouse gases is politically complex and technically complicated. In many countries, and particularly in developing countries with a large smallholder population, the agricultural sector faces competing priorities, such as national food security goals, poverty alleviation, addressing natural resource degradation and adapting to the already visible effects of climate change. Many of these goals are closer to the immediate, short-term priorities of national decision-makers, relegating climate change mitigation to a secondary priority. It is therefore essential to implement mitigation strategies in concert with strategies that increase the resilience and increase the productivity of agricultural systems. Despite differences in the forestry and the agricultural sectors, experiences from the REDD+ process, and particularly its readiness phase, can offer useful lessons for an agricultural readiness process. The REDD+ readiness process created an overall coherent structure, framework and process of guiding countries towards developing the technical and institutional ability to integrate mitigation activities into their forestry sectors. An overview of the lessons learned from REDD+ Readiness, organized by objectives, governance, process, scope and finance, is provided in this working paper

Including Systematic Uncertainties in Confidence Interval Construction for Poisson Statistics

One way to incorporate systematic uncertainties into the calculation of confidence intervals is by integrating over probability density functions parametrizing the uncertainties. In this note we present a development of this method which takes into account uncertainties in the prediction of background processes, uncertainties in the signal detection efficiency and background efficiency and allows for a correlation between the signal and background detection efficiencies. We implement this method with the Feldman & Cousins unified approach with and without conditioning. We present studies of coverage for the Feldman & Cousins and Neyman ordering schemes. In particular, we present two different types of coverage tests for the case where systematic uncertainties are included. To illustrate the method we show the relative effect of including systematic uncertainties the case of dark matter search as performed by modern neutrino tel escopes.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, replaced to match published versio

Characterisation of the effects of salicylidene acylhydrazide compounds on type three secretion in Escherichia coli O157:H7

Recent work has highlighted a number of compounds that target bacterial virulence by affecting gene regulation. In this work, we show that small-molecule inhibitors affect the expression of the type III secretion system (T3SS) of <i>Escherichia coli</i> O157:H7 in liquid culture and when the bacteria are attached to bovine epithelial cells. The inhibition of T3SS expression resulted in a reduction in the capacity of the bacteria to form attaching and effacing lesions. Our results show a marked variation in the ability of four structurally-related compounds to inhibit the T3SS of a panel of isolates. Using transcriptomics, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the conserved- and inhibitor-specific transcriptional responses to the four compounds. These analyses of gene expression show that numerous virulence genes, located on horizontally-acquired DNA elements, are affected by the compounds but the number of genes significantly affected varied markedly between the compounds. Overall, we highlight the importance of assessing the effect of such "anti-virulence" agents on a range of isolates and discuss the possible mechanisms which may lead to the co-ordinate down-regulation of horizontally acquired virulence genes