SUSTAINABLE SOIL MANAGEMENT IN NEW ZEALAND: FARMER BELIEFS, ATTITUDES AND MOTIVATIONS

Land Economics/Use,

THE EFFECT OF REVOLUTION PER MINUTE (RPM) ON IRON OXIDE NANOPARTICLES (Fe3O4NPS) SYNTHESIS THROUGH DIRECT OXIDATIVE ALKALINE HYDROLYSIS

Iron oxide nanoparticles are useful particles in many fields such as medical, biomedical and environmental applications. The nature, sizes, purity and composition of these nanoparticles plays important role in their applications especially in biomedical application. This allows for the efficient use of the unique properties of iron oxide nanoparticles for analysis. This paper reports the effect of revolution per minute on the synthesis of iron oxide nanoparticles through oxidative alkaline hydrolysis of iron salt (iron II sulphate). X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) were used in the analysis of the nanoparticles. The result shows that increase revolution per minute decreases the iron oxide nanoparticles sizes (Fe₃O₄ Nps) with the smallest particle size of 50 nm at 1500 rpm and biggest size of 74 nm for the control sample (without rpm). The nanoparticles from TEM analysis have cubic structure at constant salt concentration of 0.035M. And no significant change in the composition of the nanoparticles synthesized at 200 rpm and the control was observed aside change in their particle size. Nanoparticles synthesized at high revolution per minute of 500 and 1500 rpm showed traces of hematite (α-Fe2O3) and iron oxy hydroxide (γ-FeOOH) as impurities mixed with iron oxide nanoparticles

Ending preventable child deaths in South Africa: What role can ward-based outreach teams play?

South Africa (SA) has emerged from the Millennium Development Goal era with a  mixture of success and failure. The successful national scale-up of prevention of  mother-to-child transmission of HIV services with increasingly efficacious   antiretroviral regimens has reduced the mother-to-child transmission rate dramatically; however, over the same period there appears to have been no progress in coverage of high-impact interventions for pneumonia and diarrhoea, which are now leading causes of under-5 mortality. SA embarked on a strategy to re-engineer the primary healthcare system in 2011, which included the creation of ward-based outreach teams consisting of community health workers (CHWs). In this article we argue that the proposed ratio of CHWs to population is too low for public health impact and that the role and scope of CHWs should be extended beyond giving of health information to include assessment and treatment of childhood illnesses (particularly diarrhoea and suspected pneumonia). Evidence and experience amply demonstrate that CHWs in sufficient density can have a rapid and positive impact on neonatal and young child mortality, especially when they are allowed to treat common acute conditions. SA’s mediocre performance in child survival could be dramatically improved if there were more CHWs who were allowed to do more

Diversification of the ruminant skull along an evolutionary line of least resistance.

Clarifying how microevolutionary processes scale to macroevolutionary patterns is a fundamental goal in evolutionary biology, but these analyses, requiring comparative datasets of population-level variation, are limited. By analyzing a previously published dataset of 2859 ruminant crania, we find that variation within and between ruminant species is biased by a highly conserved mammalian-wide allometric pattern, CREA (craniofacial evolutionary allometry), where larger species have proportionally longer faces. Species with higher morphological integration and species more biased toward CREA have diverged farther from their ancestors, and Ruminantia as a clade diversified farther than expected in the direction of CREA. Our analyses indicate that CREA acts as an evolutionary line of least resistance and facilitates morphological diversification due to its alignment with the browser-grazer continuum. Together, our results demonstrate that constraints at the population level can produce highly directional patterns of phenotypic evolution at the macroevolutionary scale. Further research is needed to explore how CREA has been exploited in other mammalian clades

A modified route to unsymmetrically substituted triphenylenes, new functionalised derivatives and twins, and the smallest reported triphenylene mesogen

We report the unexpected observation of columnar mesophase formation in a simple 2,7-dibromotetramethoxytriphenylene – by far the most lightly substituted discotic mesogen in this class. This derivative was prepared alongside the 3,6-dibromotriphenylene isomer to demonstrate an alternative, modified synthetic strategy that permits late-stage interchange of alkyl chain substituents. The new method is employed alongside the original route to deliver several new materials, including a conjugated ferrocene-triphenylene-ferrocene triad, a BODIPY-triphenylene-BODIPY triad and a new nematic twin linked through imine bridges

Cervical Antibodies to Herpes Simplex Virus Proteins in Pregnancy and Puerperium: A Pilot Study

Objective: This study was undertaken to evaluate the changes in total and anti-herpes simplex virus (HSV)-specific cervical IgA and IgG antibody profiles during and after pregnancy

Genetic Correlates of Brain Aging on MRI and Cognitive Test Measures: A Genome-Wide Association and Linkage Analysis in the Framingham Study

BACKGROUND: Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cognitive tests can identify heritable endophenotypes associated with an increased risk of developing stroke, dementia and Alzheimer's disease (AD). We conducted a genome-wide association (GWA) and linkage analysis exploring the genetic basis of these endophenotypes in a community-based sample. METHODS: A total of 705 stroke- and dementia-free Framingham participants (age 62 +9 yrs, 50% male) who underwent volumetric brain MRI and cognitive testing (1999–2002) were genotyped. We used linear models adjusting for first degree relationships via generalized estimating equations (GEE) and family based association tests (FBAT) in additive models to relate qualifying single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, 70,987 autosomal on Affymetrix 100K Human Gene Chip with minor allele frequency ≥ 0.10, genotypic call rate ≥ 0.80, and Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium p-value ≥ 0.001) to multivariable-adjusted residuals of 9 MRI measures including total cerebral brain (TCBV), lobar, ventricular and white matter hyperintensity (WMH) volumes, and 6 cognitive factors/tests assessing verbal and visuospatial memory, visual scanning and motor speed, reading, abstract reasoning and naming. We determined multipoint identity-by-descent utilizing 10,592 informative SNPs and 613 short tandem repeats and used variance component analyses to compute LOD scores. RESULTS: The strongest gene-phenotype association in FBAT analyses was between SORL1 (rs1131497; p = 3.2 × 10-6) and abstract reasoning, and in GEE analyses between CDH4 (rs1970546; p = 3.7 × 10-8) and TCBV. SORL1 plays a role in amyloid precursor protein processing and has been associated with the risk of AD. Among the 50 strongest associations (25 each by GEE and FBAT) were other biologically interesting genes. Polymorphisms within 28 of 163 candidate genes for stroke, AD and memory impairment were associated with the endophenotypes studied at p < 0.001. We confirmed our previously reported linkage of WMH on chromosome 4 and describe linkage of reading performance to a marker on chromosome 18 (GATA11A06), previously linked to dyslexia (LOD scores = 2.2 and 5.1). CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that genes associated with clinical neurological disease also have detectable effects on subclinical phenotypes. These hypothesis generating data illustrate the use of an unbiased approach to discover novel pathways that may be involved in brain aging, and could be used to replicate observations made in other studies.National Institutes of Health National Center for Research Resources Shared Instrumentation grant (ISI0RR163736-01A1); National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Framingham Heart Study (N01-HC-25195); National Institute of Aging (5R01-AG08122, 5R01-AG16495); National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (5R01-NS17950