A heuristic for discrete mean values of the derivatives of the Riemann zeta function

Shanks conjectured that $\zeta ' (\rho)$, where $\rho$ ranges over non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function, is real and positive in the mean. We present a history of this problem and its proof, including a generalisation to all higher-order derivatives $\zeta^{(n)}(s)$, for which the sign of the mean alternatives between positive for odd~$n$ and negative for even~$n$. Furthermore, we give a simple heuristic that provides the leading term (including its sign) of the asymptotic formula for the average value of $\zeta^{(n)}(\rho)$

Blood Leukocyte mRNA Expression for IL-10, IL-1Ra, and IL-8, but Not IL-6, Increases After Exercise

The primary purpose of this project was to study exercise-induced leukocyte cytokine mRNA expression. Changes in plasma cytokine levels and blood leukocyte mRNA expression for interleukin-6 (IL-6), IL-8, IL- 10, and IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra) were measured in 12 athletes following 2 h of intensive cycling (64% Wattsmax) while ingesting a carbohydrate or placebo beverage (randomized and double blinded). Blood samples were collected 30 min preexercise and immediately and 1 h postexercise. Carbohydate compared with placebo ingestion attenuated exercise-induced changes in plasma cortisol (8.8% vs. 62%, respectively), epinephrine (–9.2% vs. 138%), IL-6 (10-fold vs. 40-fold), IL-10 (8.9-fold vs. 26-fold, and IL-1Ra (2.1-fold vs. 5.6-fold). Significant time effects were measured for blood leukocyte IL-8 (2.4-fold increase 1 h postexercise), IL-10 (2.7-fold increase), IL-1Ra (2.2-fold increase), and IL-6 (0.8-fold decrease) mRNA content, with no significant differences between Cho and Pla test conditions. In summary, gene expression for IL-8, IL-10, and IL-1Ra, but not IL-6, is increased in blood leukocytes taken from athletes following 2 h of intensive cycling and is not influenced by carbohydrate compared with placebo ingestion. mRNA expression was high enough to indicate a substantial contribution of blood leukocytes to plasma levels of IL-8, IL-10, and IL-1Ra during prolonged exercise

Open labware: 3-D printing your own lab equipment

The introduction of affordable, consumer-oriented 3-D printers is a milestone in the current “maker movement,” which has been heralded as the next industrial revolution. Combined with free and open sharing of detailed design blueprints and accessible development tools, rapid prototypes of complex products can now be assembled in one’s own garage—a game-changer reminiscent of the early days of personal computing. At the same time, 3-D printing has also allowed the scientific and engineering community to build the “little things” that help a lab get up and running much faster and easier than ever before

Educating a culturally competent health workforce for Pasifika communities: A Wintec/K'aute Pasifika clinical partnership project

Introduction The connection between Wintec and K’aute Pasifika is long standing through health and education and the time is right for collaboration that lifts both organisations is the strongest possible partnership. Significant opportunity exists for Wintec’s CHASP/CSSHP and K’aute Pasifika to work together in developing innovative strategies to enhance opportunities for student engagement in the delivery of services offered through K’aute Pasifika and to evaluate these. Literature review Pacific Islanders typically have lower health status and life expectancy than other New Zealanders. Implementation of Māori initiatives are not always appropriate for Pasifika peoples and there is a need to develop Pacific-specific initiatives. Evidence suggests tailored teaching and learning interventions may be required to promote participation and academic success of underrepresented minority groups in New Zealand, such as Pasifika. However, the focus needs to be on more than just Pasifika students and also on increasing non-Pasifika student capacity to work with the Pasifika community in a culturally acceptable and competent manner. There is a consistent shortage of Pacific primary health care workers in New Zealand and Pasifika are underrepresented across all health occupations. The literature identifies a complex range of factors that may contribute to this including high levels of mobilization in the skilled professional workforce and blurring of boundaries. Student-led placements with Indigenous populations have been identified as a feasible and meaningful way of developing a workforce ready to serve Indigenous and minority populations. Method A mixed method study design incorporating Talanoa was implemented to address the following key objectives: 1. Map current Wintec student placement provision within K’aute Pasifika against regional population health needs 2. Identify educational opportunities available at K’aute Pasifika through consultation with K’aute Pasifika staff 3. In collaboration between Wintec and K’aute Pasifika, develop a 5-year strategic plan for enhancement of cultural competence of Wintec staff and students in working with Pasifika people Findings Our Talanoa identified three major themes through which current and potential student placements could be better understood: the student experience, vā/relationships, and transformation. The first theme, student experience, was divided into subthemes, which expressed how students are valued, quality experiences for students are important to K’aute Pasifika staff, cultural practices are significant in placements at K’aute Pasifika, authentic experiences and interprofessional practices are essential and readily occur at K’aute Pasifika. The second theme, vā/relationships, was conceptualised as a network, with K’aute Pasifika at the centre, surrounded by the relevant partnerships. Equally as important as who those partners were, was the connections and space - or vā - between them. The third theme, transformation, was divided into three sub-themes: growth, capacity for more, and workforce development. These themes were understood in the context of the health data to create a clearer picture of the health needs for the Pasifika community in Kirikiriroa/Hamilton. Recommendations A clear action plan for 2021 is outlined which was co-constructed and agreed between K’aute Pasifika and Wintec and derived from the Strategic Plan

Preventing species extinctions: A global conservation consortium for Erica

Societal Impact Statement Human-caused habitat destruction and transformation is resulting in a cascade of impacts to biological diversity, of which arguably the most fundamental is species extinctions. The Global Conservation Consortia (GCC) are a means to pool efforts and expertise across national boundaries and between disciplines in the attempt to prevent such losses in focal plant groups. GCC Erica coordinates an international response to extinction threats in one such group, the heaths, or heathers, of which hundreds of species are found only in South Africa's spectacularly diverse Cape Floristic Region. Summary Effectively combating the biodiversity crisis requires coordinated conservation efforts. Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) and numerous partners have established Global Conservation Consortia (GCC) to collaboratively develop and implement comprehensive conservation strategies for priority threatened plant groups. Through these networks, institutions with specialised collections and staff can leverage ongoing work to optimise impact for threatened plant species. The genus Erica poses a challenge similar in scale to that of the largest other GCC group, Rhododendron, but almost 700 of the around 800 known species of Erica are concentrated in a single biodiversity hotspot, the Cape Floristic Region (CFR) of South Africa. Many species are known to be threatened, suffering the immediate impacts of habitat destruction, invasive species, changes in natural fire regimes and climate change. Efforts to counter these threats face general challenges: disproportionate burden of in situ conservation falling on a minority of the community, limited knowledge of species-rich groups, shortfalls in assessing and monitoring threat, lack of resources for in situ and limitations of knowledge for ex situ conservation efforts and in communicating the value of biological diversity to a public who may never encounter it in the wild. GCC Erica brings together the world's Erica experts, conservationists and the botanical community, including botanic gardens, seed banks and organisations in Africa, Madagascar, Europe, the United States, Australia and beyond. We are collaboratively pooling our unique sets of skills and resources to address these challenges in working groups for conservation prioritisation, conservation in situ, horticulture, seed banking, systematic research and outreach.publishedVersio

Haloes gone MAD: The Halo-Finder Comparison Project

[abridged] We present a detailed comparison of fundamental dark matter halo properties retrieved by a substantial number of different halo finders. These codes span a wide range of techniques including friends-of-friends (FOF), spherical-overdensity (SO) and phase-space based algorithms. We further introduce a robust (and publicly available) suite of test scenarios that allows halo finder developers to compare the performance of their codes against those presented here. This set includes mock haloes containing various levels and distributions of substructure at a range of resolutions as well as a cosmological simulation of the large-scale structure of the universe. All the halo finding codes tested could successfully recover the spatial location of our mock haloes. They further returned lists of particles (potentially) belonging to the object that led to coinciding values for the maximum of the circular velocity profile and the radius where it is reached. All the finders based in configuration space struggled to recover substructure that was located close to the centre of the host halo and the radial dependence of the mass recovered varies from finder to finder. Those finders based in phase space could resolve central substructure although they found difficulties in accurately recovering its properties. Via a resolution study we found that most of the finders could not reliably recover substructure containing fewer than 30-40 particles. However, also here the phase space finders excelled by resolving substructure down to 10-20 particles. By comparing the halo finders using a high resolution cosmological volume we found that they agree remarkably well on fundamental properties of astrophysical significance (e.g. mass, position, velocity, and peak of the rotation curve).Comment: 27 interesting pages, 20 beautiful figures, and 4 informative tables accepted for publication in MNRAS. The high-resolution version of the paper as well as all the test cases and analysis can be found at the web site http://popia.ft.uam.es/HaloesGoingMA

Early social distancing policies in Europe, changes in mobility & COVID-19 case trajectories: insights from Spring 2020

Background Social distancing have been widely used to mitigate community spread of SARS-CoV-2. We sought to quantify the impact of COVID-19 social distancing policies across 27 European counties in spring 2020 on population mobility and the subsequent trajectory of disease. Methods We obtained data on national social distancing policies from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and aggregated and anonymized mobility data from Google. We used a pre-post comparison and two linear mixed-effects models to first assess the relationship between implementation of national policies and observed changes in mobility, and then to assess the relationship between changes in mobility and rates of COVID-19 infections in subsequent weeks. Results Compared to a pre-COVID baseline, Spain saw the largest decrease in aggregate population mobility (~70%), as measured by the time spent away from residence, while Sweden saw the smallest decrease (~20%). The largest declines in mobility were associated with mandatory stay-at-home orders, followed by mandatory workplace closures, school closures, and non-mandatory workplace closures. While mandatory shelter-in-place orders were associated with 16.7% less mobility (95% CI: -23.7% to -9.7%), non-mandatory orders were only associated with an 8.4% decrease (95% CI: -14.9% to -1.8%). Large-gathering bans were associated with the smallest change in mobility compared with other policy types. Changes in mobility were in turn associated with changes in COVID-19 case growth. For example, a 10% decrease in time spent away from places of residence was associated with 11.8% (95% CI: 3.8%, 19.1%) fewer new COVID-19 cases. Discussion This comprehensive evaluation across Europe suggests that mandatory stay-at-home orders and workplace closures had the largest impacts on population mobility and subsequent COVID-19 cases at the onset of the pandemic. With a better understanding of policies’ relative performance, countries can more effectively invest in, and target, early nonpharmacological interventions

“Top-Down-Bottom-Up” Methodology as a Common Approach to Defining Bespoke Sets of Sustainability Assessment Criteria for the Built Environment

YesThe top-down-bottom-up (TDBU) methodology for defining bespoke sets of sustainability criteria for specific civil engineering project types is introduced and discussed. The need to define sustainability criteria for specific civil engineering project types occurs mainly in one or both of the following cases: (1) when a more comprehensive and indicative assessment of the sustainability of the project type in question is required; and/or (2) there is no readily available bespoke sustainability assessment tool, or set of criteria, for assessing the sustainability of the project type. The construction of roads, buildings, airports, tunnels, dams, flood banks, bridges, water supply, and sewage systems and their supporting systems are considered to be unique civil engineering/infrastructure project types. The normative definition of sustainable civil engineering/infrastructure projects and the framework for assessing its sustainability is defined and provided by the authors. An example of the TDBU methodology being applied to define sustainability criteria for transport noise reducing devices is presented and discussed. The end result of applying the methodology is a systematically researched and industry validated set of criteria that denotes assessing the sustainability of the civil engineering/infrastructure project type. The paper concludes that the top-down-bottom-up will support stakeholders and managers involved in assessing sustainability to consider all major research methods to define general and unique sustainability criteria to assess and so maximize sustainability

Botaniske hager går sammen for å stanse utryddelsen av arter: Global Conservation Consortium for Erica (lyng)

Botanic gardens unite to prevent species extinctions: the Global Conservation Consortium for Erica. Michael Pirie et al. describe an international project to prevent extinctions of species of Erica, the heaths or heathers. The ‘Global Conservation Consortium for Erica’ is coordinated at the Bergen University Gardens under the umbrella of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). The authors describe the challenges of understanding and protecting species rich plant groups where much of the diversity is concentrated in biodiversity hotspots. Around 700 Erica species are only found in South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region. They explain how GCC Erica will address those challenges, including through both ‘in situ’ and ‘ex situ’ conservation