Balancing people, planet, and profit in urban food waste management

Food waste is a complex problem and critical challenge for the sustainable development of circular economies, with interconnected social, environmental, and economic impacts. Supporting the identification of strategies that best minimise these impacts on people, planet and profit, this paper explores the dynamic impacts of food waste management options on the triple bottom lines of sustainable development in urban circular economies. We present a system dynamics model of the urban agri-food supply chain. This model simulates the fluxes of food and food waste throughout the supply chain, as well as their impacts on economy (i.e., costs and benefits for each sector and the broader economy), society (i.e., food insecurity) and environment (i.e., water, energy, and carbon footprints). Using Bristol city in the United Kingdom as a case-study, we evaluate the impacts of seven food waste management options (i.e., reduction, redistribution, animal feed, anaerobic digestion, composting, incineration, and landfilling). The results show that food waste reduction in consumer sectors (i.e., households and hospitality and food services) and redistribution in supply sectors (i.e., primary production and manufacture) offer the greatest benefits for the environment, society, and economy. For the retail sector, both reduction and redistribution options are highly favourable. Although these options can potentially have some adverse economic effects on the supply side due to a reduction in demand, their considerably high benefits make them high-reward, low-risk options. We thus conclude that food waste reduction and redistribution are the only options with a clear triple-win for people, planet and profit. This paper makes a significant contribution by introducing a robust quantitative model and a novel triple bottom line framework for sustainable food waste management in urban circular economies

The expansion of the metazoan microRNA repertoire

BACKGROUND: MicroRNAs have been identified as crucial regulators in both animals and plants. Here we report on a comprehensive comparative study of all known miRNA families in animals. We expand the MicroRNA Registry 6.0 by more than 1000 new homologs of miRNA precursors whose expression has been verified in at least one species. Using this uniform data basis we analyze their evolutionary history in terms of individual gene phylogenies and in terms of preservation of genomic nearness across species. This allows us to reliably identify microRNA clusters that are derived from a common transcript. RESULTS: We identify three episodes of microRNA innovation that correspond to major developmental innovations: A class of about 20 miRNAs is common to protostomes and deuterostomes and might be related to the advent of bilaterians. A second large wave of innovations maps to the branch leading to the vertebrates. The third significant outburst of miRNA innovation coincides with placental (eutherian) mammals. In addition, we observe the expected expansion of the microRNA inventory due to genome duplications in early vertebrates and in an ancestral teleost. The non-local duplications in the vertebrate ancestor are predated by local (tandem) duplications leading to the formation of about a dozen ancient microRNA clusters. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that microRNA innovation is an ongoing process. Major expansions of the metazoan miRNA repertoire coincide with the advent of bilaterians, vertebrates, and (placental) mammals

Investigating centrality in PTSD symptoms across diagnostic systems using network analysis*

Background: The posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis has been widely debated since it was introduced into the diagnostic nomenclature four decades ago. Recently, the debate has focused on consequences of having two different descriptions of PTSD: 20 symptoms belonging to four symptom clusters in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th edition (DSM-5), and three symptoms clusters in the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) most often operationalized by six symptoms in the International Trauma Questionnaire (ITQ) (2017) and Hansen, Hyland, Armour, Shevlin, & Elklit (). Research has provided support for both models of PTSD, but at the same time indicates differences in estimated prevalence rates of PTSD (Hansen et al., , ). A growing body of research has modelled PTSD both theoretically and statistically as a network of interacting symptoms (Birkeland, Greene, & Spiller, ), yet it remains more unclear how the two diagnostic systems perform regarding which symptoms are more central/interconnected. Objectives and methods: We estimated two 23-item Gaussian Graphical Models to investigate whether ICD-11 or DSM-5 PTSD symptoms are more central in two trauma-exposed samples: a community sample (N = 2,367) and a military veteran sample (N = 657). PTSD DSM-5 was measured with the PTSD checklist-5 (PCL-5) and the PTSD ICD-11 was measure by the ITQ PTSD subscale. Results: Five of the six most central symptoms estimated via the expected influence centrality metric across the two samples were identical and represented symptoms from both diagnostic systems operationalized by the PCL-5 and the ITQ. Conclusions: The results of the present study underline that symptoms from both diagnostic systems hold central positions. The implications of the results are discussed from the perspectives of an indexical (i.e. the diagnostic systems reflect both shared and different aspects of PTSD) and a constitutive view (i.e., the diagnostic systems represent different disorders and the results cannot be reconciled per se) of mental health diagnoses (Kendler, )