Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts

Worldwide, most people share scientists' concerns about environmental problems, but reject the solution that policy experts most strongly recommend: putting a price on pollution. Why? I show that this puzzling gap between the public’s positive concerns and normative preferences is due substantially to a lack of trust, particularly political trust. In multilevel models fitted to two international survey datasets, trust strongly predicts support for environmental protection within countries and, by some measures, among countries also. An influential competing theory holds that environmental attitudes correlate mostly with left versus right political ideology; the results here, however, show that this correlation is weaker and varies substantially from country to country—unlike that with trust. Theoretically, these results reflect that environmental degradation is a collective action problem and environmental protection a public good. Methodologically, they derive from the more flexible application of multilevel modeling techniques than in previous studies using such models

Where are the Schools? Children, Families and Food Practices

Reducing childhood obesity is an international priority and children's diets, food knowledge and practices have come under intense scrutiny in both policy and popular discourse. Notwithstanding evidence that health interventions which resonate with children's own views are the most effective, there is still relatively little research which mobilises children's everyday perspectives on food to inform public health policy. We report key findings from a qualitative study with 53 children aged 9–10, attending two socio-economically contrasting schools in the UK. The study explored children's understandings of food in everyday life and their ideas about the relationship between food and health. Throughout the study, despite recent attempts to position schools as key sites for public health interventions, children consistently emphasised families as the locus for enduring food practices. The research highlights the value of listening to children and applying our understanding of their perspectives to ensure that public health initiatives work with the important influences on their diet and health that they themselves identify

ensemblQueryR: fast, flexible and high-throughput querying of Ensembl LD API endpoints in R

We present ensemblQueryR, a package providing an R interface to the Ensembl REST API that facilitates flexible, fast, user-friendly and R workflow integrable querying of Ensembl REST API linkage disequilibrium (LD) endpoints, optimised for high-throughput querying. ensemblQueryR achieves this through functions that are intuitive and amenable to custom code integration, use of familiar R object types as inputs and outputs, code optimisation and optional parallelisation functionality. For each LD endpoint, ensemblQueryR provides two functions, permitting both single-query and multi-query modes of operation. The multi-query functions are optimised for large query sizes and provide optional parallelisation to leverage available computational resources and minimise processing time. We demonstrate that ensemblQueryR has improved performance in terms of random access memory (RAM) usage and speed, delivering a 10-fold speed increase over analogous software whilst using a third of the RAM. Finally, ensemblQueryR is near-agnostic to operating system and computational architecture through availability of Docker and singularity images, making this tool widely accessible to the scientific community

Molecular serotyping and virulence potential of Listeria monocytogenes isolated from bovine, swine and human in the province of Quebec

Listeria monocytogenes (L mono) cause rare but critical diseases, particularly for at risk population that include pregnant women. Food-borne origin of listeriosis is clearly recognised only since 1984. Since then, a great number of grouped cases occurred and milk or meat products, particularly pork meat, were implicated. Management of this zoonotic pathogen considers all strains as at equal risk. Recently a new perspective for characterisation of strain virulence was allowed since unaltered sequence of InlA was recognised as a key for strain virulence

Correlation between microstructure and magnetotransport in organic semiconductor spin valve structures

We have studied magnetotransport in organic-inorganic hybrid multilayer junctions. In these devices, the organic semiconductor (OSC) Alq$_3$ (tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminum) formed a spacer layer between ferromagnetic (FM) Co and Fe layers. The thickness of the Alq$_3$ layer was in the range of 50-150 nm. Positive magnetoresistance (MR) was observed at 4.2 K in a current perpendicular to plane geometry, and these effects persisted up to room temperature. The devices' microstructure was studied by X-ray reflectometry, Auger electron spectroscopy and polarized neutron reflectometry (PNR). The films show well-defined layers with modest average chemical roughness (3-5 nm) at the interface between the Alq$_3$ and the surrounding FM layers. Reflectometry shows that larger MR effects are associated with smaller FM/Alq$_3$ interface width (both chemical and magnetic) and a magnetically dead layer at the Alq$_3$/Fe interface. The PNR data also show that the Co layer, which was deposited on top of the Alq$_3$, adopts a multi-domain magnetic structure at low field and a perfect anti-parallel state is not obtained. The origins of the observed MR are discussed and attributed to spin coherent transport. A lower bound for the spin diffusion length in Alq$_3$ was estimated as $43 \pm 5$ nm at 80 K. However, the subtle correlations between microstructure and magnetotransport indicate the importance of interfacial effects in these systems.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures and 2 table

The decline in youth drinking in England – is everyone drinking less? A quantile regression analysis

Background and Aims: Youth alcohol consumption has declined significantly over the past 15 years in many high income countries, which may have significant public health benefits. However, if the reductions in drinking occur mostly among lighter drinkers who are at lower risk, then rates of alcohol-related harm among young people today and adults in future may not fall in line with consumption. There is conflicting evidence from Swedish school studies with some suggesting all young people are drinking less while others suggest alcohol consumption among heavier drinkers may be stable or rising while average consumption declines. This paper extends the geographic focus of previous research and examines whether the decline in youth drinking is consistent across the consumption distribution in England. Design: Quantile regression of 15 waves of repeat cross-sectional survey data. Setting: England, 2001-2016. Participants: 31, 882 schoolchildren (50.7% male) aged 11-15 who responded to the Smoking Drinking and Drug Use amongst Young People surveys. Measurements: Past-week alcohol consumption in UK units at each fifth percentile of the consumption distribution. Findings: Reductions in alcohol consumption occurred at all percentiles of the consumption distribution analysed between 2001 and 2016 but the magnitude of the decline differed across percentiles. The decline in consumption at the 90th percentile (β = -.21, CI = -.24, - .18) was significantly larger than among either lighter drinkers at the 50th percentile (β = - .02, CI = -.02, -.01) or heavier drinkers at the 95th percentile (β = -.16, CI = -.18, -.13). Conclusions: Alcohol consumption among young people in England appears to be declining across the consumption distribution, and peaks among heavy drinkers. The magnitude of this decline differs significantly between percentiles of the consumption distribution, with consumption falling proportionally less among the lightest, moderate and very heaviest youth drinkers

Splicing and the Evolution of Proteins in Mammals

It is often supposed that a protein's rate of evolution and its amino acid content are determined by the function and anatomy of the protein. Here we examine an alternative possibility, namely that the requirement to specify in the unprocessed RNA, in the vicinity of intron–exon boundaries, information necessary for removal of introns (e.g., exonic splice enhancers) affects both amino acid usage and rates of protein evolution. We find that the majority of amino acids show skewed usage near intron–exon boundaries, and that differences in the trends for the 2-fold and 4-fold blocks of both arginine and leucine show this to be owing to effects mediated at the nucleotide level. More specifically, there is a robust relationship between the extent to which an amino acid is preferred/avoided near boundaries and its enrichment/paucity in splice enhancers. As might then be expected, the rate of evolution is lowest near intron–exon boundaries, at least in part owing to splice enhancers, such that domains flanking intron–exon junctions evolve on average at under half the rate of exon centres from the same gene. In contrast, the rate of evolution of intronless retrogenes is highest near the domains where intron–exon junctions previously resided. The proportion of sequence near intron–exon boundaries is one of the stronger predictors of a protein's rate of evolution in mammals yet described. We conclude that after intron insertion selection favours modification of amino acid content near intron–exon junctions, so as to enable efficient intron removal, these changes then being subject to strong purifying selection even if nonoptimal for protein function. Thus there exists a strong force operating on protein evolution in mammals that is not explained directly in terms of the biology of the protein