An exploratory cluster randomised trial of a university halls of residence based social norms marketing campaign to reduce alcohol consumption among 1st year students

<p>Aims: This exploratory trial examines the feasibility of implementing a social norms marketing campaign to reduce student drinking in universities in Wales, and evaluating it using cluster randomised trial methodology.</p> <p>Methods: Fifty residence halls in 4 universities in Wales were randomly assigned to intervention or control arms. Web and paper surveys were distributed to students within these halls (n = 3800), assessing exposure/contamination, recall of and evaluative responses to intervention messages, perceived drinking norms and personal drinking behaviour. Measures included the Drinking Norms Rating Form, the Daily Drinking Questionnaire and AUDIT-C.</p> <p>Results: A response rate of 15% (n = 554) was achieved, varying substantially between sites. Intervention posters were seen by 80% and 43% of students in intervention and control halls respectively, with most remaining materials seen by a minority in both groups. Intervention messages were rated as credible and relevant by little more than half of students, though fewer felt they would influence their behaviour, with lighter drinkers more likely to perceive messages as credible. No differences in perceived norms were observed between intervention and control groups. Students reporting having seen intervention materials reported lower descriptive and injunctive norms than those who did not.</p> <p>Conclusions: Attention is needed to enhancing exposure, credibility and perceived relevance of intervention messages, particularly among heavier drinkers, before definitive evaluation can be recommended. A definitive evaluation would need to consider how it would achieve sufficient response rates, whilst hall-level cluster randomisation appears subject to a significant degree of contamination.</p&gt

Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE)

Assessing the credibility of research claims is a central, continuous, and laborious part of the scientific process. Credibility assessment strategies range from expert judgment to aggregating existing evidence to systematic replication efforts. Such assessments can require substantial time and effort. Research progress could be accelerated if there were rapid, scalable, accurate credibility indicators to guide attention and resource allocation for further assessment. The SCORE program is creating and validating algorithms to provide confidence scores for research claims at scale. To investigate the viability of scalable tools, teams are creating: a database of claims from papers in the social and behavioral sciences; expert and machine generated estimates of credibility; and, evidence of reproducibility, robustness, and replicability to validate the estimates. Beyond the primary research objective, the data and artifacts generated from this program will be openly shared and provide an unprecedented opportunity to examine research credibility and evidence

Genome-Wide Analysis of Natural Selection on Human Cis-Elements

Background: It has been speculated that the polymorphisms in the non-coding portion of the human genome underlie much of the phenotypic variability among humans and between humans and other primates. If so, these genomic regions may be undergoing rapid evolutionary change, due in part to natural selection. However, the non-coding region is a heterogeneous mix of functional and non-functional regions. Furthermore, the functional regions are comprised of a variety of different types of elements, each under potentially different selection regimes. Findings and Conclusions: Using the HapMap and Perlegen polymorphism data that map to a stringent set of putative binding sites in human proximal promoters, we apply the Derived Allele Frequency distribution test of neutrality to provide evidence that many human-specific and primate-specific binding sites are likely evolving under positive selection. We also discuss inherent limitations of publicly available human SNP datasets that complicate the inference of selection pressures. Finally, we show that the genes whose proximal binding sites contain high frequency derived alleles are enriched for positive regulation of protein metabolism and developmental processes. Thus our genome-scale investigation provide

Dual coding with STDP in a spiking recurrent neural network model of the hippocampus.

The firing rate of single neurons in the mammalian hippocampus has been demonstrated to encode for a range of spatial and non-spatial stimuli. It has also been demonstrated that phase of firing, with respect to the theta oscillation that dominates the hippocampal EEG during stereotype learning behaviour, correlates with an animal's spatial location. These findings have led to the hypothesis that the hippocampus operates using a dual (rate and temporal) coding system. To investigate the phenomenon of dual coding in the hippocampus, we examine a spiking recurrent network model with theta coded neural dynamics and an STDP rule that mediates rate-coded Hebbian learning when pre- and post-synaptic firing is stochastic. We demonstrate that this plasticity rule can generate both symmetric and asymmetric connections between neurons that fire at concurrent or successive theta phase, respectively, and subsequently produce both pattern completion and sequence prediction from partial cues. This unifies previously disparate auto- and hetero-associative network models of hippocampal function and provides them with a firmer basis in modern neurobiology. Furthermore, the encoding and reactivation of activity in mutually exciting Hebbian cell assemblies demonstrated here is believed to represent a fundamental mechanism of cognitive processing in the brain

The global EPTO database: Worldwide occurrences of aquatic insects

Motivation: Aquatic insects comprise 64% of freshwater animal diversity and are widely used as bioindicators to assess water quality impairment and freshwater ecosystem health, as well as to test ecological hypotheses. Despite their importance, a comprehensive, global database of aquatic insect occurrences for mapping freshwater biodiversity in macroecological studies and applied freshwater research is missing. We aim to fill this gap and present the Global EPTO Database, which includes worldwide geo-referenced aquatic insect occurrence records for four major taxa groups: Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera and Odonata (EPTO). Main type of variables contained: A total of 8,368,467 occurrence records globally, of which 8,319,689 (99%) are publicly available. The records are attributed to the corresponding drainage basin and sub-catchment based on the Hydrography90m dataset and are accompanied by the elevation value, the freshwater ecoregion and the protection status of their location. Spatial location and grain: The database covers the global extent, with 86% of the observation records having coordinates with at least four decimal digits (11.1 m precision at the equator) in the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84) coordinate reference system. Time period and grain: Sampling years span from 1951 to 2021. Ninety-nine percent of the records have information on the year of the observation, 95% on the year and month, while 94% have a complete date. In the case of seven sub-datasets, exact dates can be retrieved upon communication with the data contributors.Major taxa and level of measurement: Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera and Odonata, standardized at the genus taxonomic level. We provide species names for 7,727,980 (93%) records without further taxonomic verification. Software format: The entire tab-separated value (.csv) database can be downloaded and visualized at https://glowa bio.org/proje ct/epto_datab ase/. Fifty individual datasets are also available at https://fred.igb-berlin. de, while six datasets have restricted access. For the latter, we share metadata and the contact details of the authors

Phylodynamic Reconstruction Reveals Norovirus GII.4 Epidemic Expansions and their Molecular Determinants

Noroviruses are the most common cause of viral gastroenteritis. An increase in the number of globally reported norovirus outbreaks was seen the past decade, especially for outbreaks caused by successive genogroup II genotype 4 (GII.4) variants. Whether this observed increase was due to an upswing in the number of infections, or to a surveillance artifact caused by heightened awareness and concomitant improved reporting, remained unclear. Therefore, we set out to study the population structure and changes thereof of GII.4 strains detected through systematic outbreak surveillance since the early 1990s. We collected 1383 partial polymerase and 194 full capsid GII.4 sequences. A Bayesian MCMC coalescent analysis revealed an increase in the number of GII.4 infections during the last decade. The GII.4 strains included in our analyses evolved at a rate of 4.3–9.0×10−3 mutations per site per year, and share a most recent common ancestor in the early 1980s. Determinants of adaptation in the capsid protein were studied using different maximum likelihood approaches to identify sites subject to diversifying or directional selection and sites that co-evolved. While a number of the computationally determined adaptively evolving sites were on the surface of the capsid and possible subject to immune selection, we also detected sites that were subject to constrained or compensatory evolution due to secondary RNA structures, relevant in virus-replication. We highlight codons that may prove useful in identifying emerging novel variants, and, using these, indicate that the novel 2008 variant is more likely to cause a future epidemic than the 2007 variant. While norovirus infections are generally mild and self-limiting, more severe outcomes of infection frequently occur in elderly and immunocompromized people, and no treatment is available. The observed pattern of continually emerging novel variants of GII.4, causing elevated numbers of infections, is therefore a cause for concern

Efficient Physical Embedding of Topologically Complex Information Processing Networks in Brains and Computer Circuits

Nervous systems are information processing networks that evolved by natural selection, whereas very large scale integrated (VLSI) computer circuits have evolved by commercially driven technology development. Here we follow historic intuition that all physical information processing systems will share key organizational properties, such as modularity, that generally confer adaptivity of function. It has long been observed that modular VLSI circuits demonstrate an isometric scaling relationship between the number of processing elements and the number of connections, known as Rent's rule, which is related to the dimensionality of the circuit's interconnect topology and its logical capacity. We show that human brain structural networks, and the nervous system of the nematode C. elegans, also obey Rent's rule, and exhibit some degree of hierarchical modularity. We further show that the estimated Rent exponent of human brain networks, derived from MRI data, can explain the allometric scaling relations between gray and white matter volumes across a wide range of mammalian species, again suggesting that these principles of nervous system design are highly conserved. For each of these fractal modular networks, the dimensionality of the interconnect topology was greater than the 2 or 3 Euclidean dimensions of the space in which it was embedded. This relatively high complexity entailed extra cost in physical wiring: although all networks were economically or cost-efficiently wired they did not strictly minimize wiring costs. Artificial and biological information processing systems both may evolve to optimize a trade-off between physical cost and topological complexity, resulting in the emergence of homologous principles of economical, fractal and modular design across many different kinds of nervous and computational networks