Transforum system innovation towards sustainable food. A review

Innovations in the agri-food sector are needed to create a sustainable food supply. Sustainable food supply requires unexpectedly that densely populated regions remain food producers. A Dutch innovation program has aimed at showing the way forward through creating a number of practice and scientific projects. Generic lessons from the scientific projects in this program are likely to be of interest to agricultural innovation in other densely populated regions in the world. Based on the executed scientific projects, generic lessons across the whole innovation program are derived. We found that the agricultural sector requires evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes to reshaping institutions. Measuring sustainability is possible against benchmarks and requires stakeholder agreement on sustainability values. Results show the importance of multiple social views and multiple stakeholder involvement in agricultural innovation. Findings call for flexible goal rather than process-oriented management of innovation. Findings also emphasise the essential role of profit in anchoring sustainable development in business. The results agree with concepts of evolutionary innovation. We conclude that there is no single best solution to making the agri-food sector more sustainable densely populated areas, but that the combination of a range of solutions and approaches is likely to provide the best way forward

Prevalence and management of iron overload in pyruvate kinase deficiency: report from the Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency Natural History Study

Pyruvate kinase (PK) deficiency is the most common red cell glycolytic enzyme defect causing hereditary non-spherocytic hemolytic anemia. Current treatments are mainly supportive and include red cell transfusions and splenectomy.11 Regular red cell transfusions are known to result in iron overload; however, the prevalence and spectrum of transfusion-independent iron overload in the overall PK deficient population has not been well defined. This analysis describes the prevalence and clinical characteristics of iron overload in patients enrolled in the PK Deficiency Natural History Study (NHS) with a focus on those patients who are not regularly transfused.

Alignment to natural and imposed mismatches between the senses

Does the nervous system continuously realign the senses so that objects are seen and felt in the same place? Conflicting answers to this question have been given. Research imposing a sensory mismatch has provided evidence that the nervous system realigns the senses to reduce the mismatch. Other studies have shown that when subjects point with the unseen hand to visual targets, their end points show visual-proprioceptive biases that do not disappear after episodes of visual feedback. These biases are indicative of intersensory mismatches that the nervous system does not align for. Here, we directly compare how the nervous system deals with natural and imposed mismatches. Subjects moved a hand-held cube to virtual cubes appearing at pseudorandom locations in threedimensional space. We alternated blocks in which subjects moved without visual feedback of the hand with feedback blocks in which we rendered a cube representing the hand-held cube. In feedback blocks, we rotated the visual feedback by 5° relative to the subject's head, creating an imposed mismatch between vision and proprioception on top of any natural mismatches. Realignment occurred quickly but was incomplete. We found more realignment to imposed mismatches than to natural mismatches. We propose that this difference is related to the way in which the visual information changed when subjects entered the experiment: the imposed mismatches were different from the mismatch in daily life, so alignment started from scratch, whereas the natural mismatches were not imposed by the experimenter, so subjects are likely to have entered the experiment partly aligned. © 2013 the American Physiological Society

Food & Biobased Research : topics 2012

Dit Engelstalige blad beschrijft aansprekende projecten die het onderzoeksinstituut Wageningen UR Food & Bioabased Research samen met haar partners uitvoert: van het terugdringen van voedselverspilling en slimme logistieke oplossingen, via voeding op maat, tot aan het gebruik van restproducten uit oliepalmplantages, biobased chemicaliën voor PET-flessen, en van productie van hoogwaardige groene materialen

Reframing the future: the role of reflexivity in governance networks in sustainability transitions

Contains fulltext : 183569.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)30 november 201

How does our motor system determine its learning rate?

Motor learning is driven by movement errors. The speed of learning can be quantified by the learning rate, which is the proportion of an error that is corrected for in the planning of the next movement. Previous studies have shown that the learning rate depends on the reliability of the error signal and on the uncertainty of the motor system’s own state. These dependences are in agreement with the predictions of the Kalman filter, which is a state estimator that can be used to determine the optimal learning rate for each movement such that the expected movement error is minimized. Here we test whether not only the average behaviour is optimal, as the previous studies showed, but if the learning rate is chosen optimally in every individual movement. Subjects made repeated movements to visual targets with their unseen hand. They received visual feedback about their endpoint error immediately after each movement. The reliability of these error-signals was varied across three conditions. The results are inconsistent with the predictions of the Kalman filter because correction for large errors in the beginning of a series of movements to a fixed target was not as fast as predicted and the learning rates for the extent and the direction of the movements did not differ in the way predicted by the Kalman filter. Instead, a simpler model that uses the same learning rate for all movements with the same error-signal reliability can explain the data. We conclude that our brain does not apply state estimation to determine the optimal planning correction for every individual movement, but it employs a simpler strategy of using a fixed learning rate for all movements with the same level of error-signal reliability

The Dynamical Status of the Cluster of Galaxies 1E0657-56

We present the results of a new spectroscopic and photometric survey of the hot X-ray cluster 1E0657-56, at z=0.296. We determine the presence of a low velocity dispersion subcluster, which is offset from the main cluster position by 0.7 Mpc and about 600 km/s. We determine the virial masses and total luminosities of the cluster and its subcluster, and solve for the two-body dynamical model. With additional constraints from the results of the analysis of the cluster X-ray emission by Markevitch et al. (2001), we find that the subcluster passed through the cluster centre about 0.15 Gyr ago. Taken at face value the mass of the subcluster is typical of a loose group. It is however difficult to establish the pre-merger mass of the colliding system. We provide tentative evidence that the subcluster is in fact the remnant core of a moderately massive cluster, stripped by the collision with 1E0657-56. The main cluster dynamics does not seem to have suffered from this collision. On the contrary, the cluster X-ray properties seem to have been significantly affected. We also discuss the effect of the subcluster collision in relation to starburst events and the cluster radio halo.Comment: Accepted for publication on A&

Дослідження підходів до оцінки стану конкурентоспроможності підприємств

Мета статті – наведення підходів до оцінки стану конкурентоспроможності підприємств