The use and efficacy of question type and an attentive interviewing style in adult rape interviews

Police interviewers find the investigation of sexual crimes ‘technically difficult’ and ‘stressful’ to conduct by having to make sense of very powerful and painful emotions. In addition, such interviews often contain inappropriate as opposed to appropriate questions and interviewers often find it difficult to be ‘attentive’ to the specific needs of victims. Through the analysis of interviews with adult rape victims (N = 25) in England, we wanted to establish whether the ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’ of investigation relevant information (IRI) obtained would be impacted as a function of different question typologies (e.g. appropriate versus inappropriate), and overall interviewer attentiveness. We hypothesised that: (i) more inappropriate questions would be asked compared to appropriate questions; (ii) responses to appropriate questions would contain more items of IRI than responses to inappropriate questions; (iii) attentive interviews would contain more appropriate questions than non-attentive interviews, and; (iv) attentive interviews would contain more IRI than non-attentive interviews. Results found that interviewers asked significantly more appropriate questions that elicited significantly more items of IRI. However, there were no significant differences in the number of appropriate questions asked or the impact on the amount of IRI obtained between interviews as a function of interviewer attentiveness. Implications for practice are discussed

Nitric oxide, a survival factor for lens epithelial cells

Purpose: Nitric oxide (NO) is capable of promoting either cell death or cell survival depending on cell type and experimental conditions. In this study, the possible effects of NO on the viability of lens epithelial cells were investigated in an explant model used previously to identify cellular changes associated with posterior capsule opacification following cataract surgery. Methods: Rat lens epithelial explants prepared from weanling rats were cultured in a serum-free medium for five days with or without the addition of the nitric oxide synthase inhibitor, L-Nω-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME), using the inactive enantiomer D-NAME as a control. Alternatively, explants were cultured for nine days with or without the NO donor, sodium nitroprusside. Explants were assessed morphologically and immunohistochemically or by determining DNA content. Results: In the presence of L-NAME but not in controls, progressive rounding up and detachment of cells from the lens capsule occurred, leading to extensive cell loss. Affected cells showed apoptosis-like cell-surface blebbing and nuclear fragmentation. Conversely, inclusion of sodium nitroprusside suppressed the morphological changes and spontaneous cell loss that occurred when sparsely covered explants were cultured for nine days, increased cell coverage fourfold during that period, and prevented the expression of the transdifferentiation markers α-smooth muscle actin and fibronectin. In addition, whereas L-NAME exacerbated cell loss induced by culturing with 50 pg/ml transforming growth factor-β2, sodium nitroprusside offered protection. Conclusions: This study points to a previously unidentified role for NO as an endogenously produced survival factor for lens epithelial cells, raising the possibility of using NO deprivation as a means of removing residual lens cells following cataract surgery and thereby preventing posterior capsule opacification

Metabolomic evaluation of Mitomycin C and rapamycin in a personalized treatment of pancreatic cancer

In a personalized treatment designed for a patient with pancreatic cancer resistant to other treatments, the success of Mitomycin C (MMC) has been highlighted. This was revealed in a murine xenograft tumor model encompassing pancreatic adenocarcinoma cells extracted from the patient. The patient was found to exhibit a biallelic inactivation of the PALB2 gene, involved in DNA repair in addition to another mutation in the TSC2 gene that induces susceptibility of the tumor to therapeutic targets of the PI3K-mTOR pathway. The aim of the study was to apply metabolomics to elucidate the modes of action of each therapy, suggesting why MMC was so successful in this patient and why it could be a more popular choice in future pancreatic cancer treatment. The effectiveness of MMC compared to rapamycin (RM), another relevant therapeutic agent has been evaluated through liquid- and gas-chromatography mass spectrometry-based metabolomic analyses of the xenograft tumors. The relative concentrations of many metabolites in the xenograft tumors were found to be increased by MMC relative to other treatments (RM and a combination of both), including a number that are involved in central carbon metabolism (CCM). Metabolic fingerprinting revealed statistically significantly altered pathways including, but not restricted to, the pentose phosphate pathway, glycolysis, TCA cycle, purine metabolism, fatty acid biosynthesis, in addition to many significant lipid and amino acid alterations. Given the genetic background of the patient, it was expected that the combined therapy would be most effective; however, the most effective was MMC alone. It is proposed that the effectiveness of MMC is owed to its direct effect on CCM, a vital region of tumor metabolism

Drosophila olfactory receptors as classifiers for volatiles from disparate real world applications

Olfactory receptors evolved to provide animals with ecologically and behaviourally relevant information. The resulting extreme sensitivity and discrimination has proven useful to humans, who have therefore co-opted some animals' sense of smell. One aim of machine olfaction research is to replace the use of animal noses and one avenue of such research aims to incorporate olfactory receptors into artificial noses. Here, we investigate how well the olfactory receptors of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, perform in classifying volatile odourants that they would not normally encounter. We collected a large number of in vivo recordings from individual Drosophila olfactory receptor neurons in response to an ecologically relevant set of 36 chemicals related to wine ('wine set') and an ecologically irrelevant set of 35 chemicals related to chemical hazards ('industrial set'), each chemical at a single concentration. Resampled response sets were used to classify the chemicals against all others within each set, using a standard linear support vector machine classifier and a wrapper approach. Drosophila receptors appear highly capable of distinguishing chemicals that they have not evolved to process. In contrast to previous work with metal oxide sensors, Drosophila receptors achieved the best recognition accuracy if the outputs of all 20 receptor types were used

Características químicas e estoque de carbono dos solos sob diferentes coberturas vegetais e em sistemas tradicionais de uso da terra na região do Alto Solimões - Amazonas.

As atividades humanas transformam os ambientes naturais com diferentes intensidades de manejo e uso do solo. Com o objetivo de verificar as alterações causadas nos solos pelo manejo realizado por agricultores da região, foram feitas seis grades amostrais (janelas), com cento e um pontos ao todo, contendo os sistemas de uso da terra: floresta primária (FP), floresta secundária (FS > sete anos), florestas secundárias (CAP < sete anos), sistemas agroflorestais (SAF?s), roças (RÇ) e pastagens (PAS), no município de Benjamin Constant

Relações entre a temperatura do ar, a radiação solar e a temperatura das folhas de cafeeiros, em dia com alta nebulosidade.

Com o aumento da temperatura global, as condições climáticas podem se tornar de alto risco para diversas culturas agrícolas em regiões que são atualmente grandes produtoras. Esse é um fato que poderá atingir as regiões tradicionalmente cafeeiras no Brasil, pois alguns estudos indicam que o aumento da temperatura poderá acarretar uma redução de até 33% da área apta cafeeira no país, até 2070. Esse trabalho preliminar procura demonstrar a alta correlação da temperatura do ar e da radiação solar com a temperatura das folhas do cafeeiro. Utilizando-se uma técnica de manejo da cultura, o sombreamento de plantas, obteve-se uma diminuição da temperatura das folhas de até 2oC em comparação com cafeeiros cultivados tradicionalmente a pleno Sol.CBA 2009