Aging and Disability: The Paradoxical Positions of the Chronological Life Course

This paper explores aging and disability, problematizing the paradoxical tendency to separate and conflate these social locations in chronological understandings of the life course. Exploring how such thinking has shaped assumptions, responses, knowledge, policy and practice, we conclude with suggestions to reconsider disability across the life course and into late life

Species-specific, age-varying plant traits affect herbivore growth and survival.

Seasonal windows of opportunity represent intervals of time within a year during which organisms have improved prospects of achieving life history aims such as growth or reproduction, and may be commonly structured by temporal variation in abiotic factors, bottom-up factors, and top-down factors. Although seasonal windows of opportunity are likely to be common, few studies have examined the factors that structure seasonal windows of opportunity in time. Here, we experimentally manipulated host-plant age in two milkweed species (Asclepias fascicularis and Asclepias speciosa) in order to investigate the role of plant-species-specific and plant-age-varying traits on the survival and growth of monarch caterpillars (Danaus plexippus). We show that the two plant species showed diverging trajectories of defense traits with increasing age. These species-specific and age-varying host-plant traits significantly affected the growth and survival of monarch caterpillars through both resource quality- and quantity-based constraints. The effects of plant age on monarch developmental success were comparable to and sometimes larger than those of plant-species identity. We conclude that species-specific and age-varying plant traits are likely to be important factors with the potential to structure seasonal windows of opportunity for monarch development, and examine the implications of these findings for both broader patterns in the ontogeny of plant defense traits and the specific ecology of milkweed-monarch interactions in a changing world

Intended Use of the National Nursing and Midwifery Digital Health Capability Framework

To realise the benefits of digital health, the health workforce needs to evolve, adapt and develop their digital proficiency. As the largest workforce in health, nurses and midwives are well positioned to lead as an agile digital healthcare workforce. The objective of this work is to describe how individual nurses and midwives, organisations and education providers could use the newly developed National Nursing and Midwifery Digital Health Capability Framework to build digital health capability. The paper concludes with an international perspective on the framework

Fungal entomopathogens: new insights on their ecology

An important mechanism for insect pest control should be the use of fungal entomopathogens. Even though these organisms have been studied for more than 100 y, their effective use in the field remains elusive. Recently, however, it has been discovered that many of these entomopathogenic fungi play additional roles in nature. They are endophytes, antagonists of plant pathogens, associates with the rhizosphere, and possibly even plant growth promoting agents. These findings indicate that the ecological role of these fungi in the environment is not fully understood and limits our ability to employ them successfully for pest management. In this paper, we review the recently discovered roles played by many entomopathogenic fungi and propose new research strategies focused on alternate uses for these fungi. It seems likely that these agents can be used in multiple roles in protecting plants from pests and diseases and at the same time promoting plant growth

Methodology for the Development of the Australian National Nursing and Midwifery Digital Health Capability Framework.

Internationally healthcare organisations and governments are grappling with the issue of upskilling healthcare workforces in relation to digital health. Significant research has been undertaken in relation to documenting essential digital health capability requirements for the workforce. In 2019 the Australian Digital Health Agency funded work by the Australasian Institute of Digital Health to develop a National Nursing and Midwifery Digital Health Capability Framework. This paper describes the methodological approach used in the development of the Framework

Over 500 Days in the Life of the Photosphere of the Type Iax Supernova SN 2014dt

Type Iax supernovae (SN Iax) are the largest known class of peculiar white dwarf supernovae, distinct from normal Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia). The unique properties of SN Iax, especially their strong photospheric lines out to extremely late times, allow us to model their optical spectra and derive physical parameters for the long-lasting photosphere. We present an extensive spectral timeseries, including 21 new spectra, of SN Iax 2014dt from +11 to +562 days after maximum light. We are able to reproduce the entire timeseries with a self-consistent, nearly unaltered deflagration explosion model from Fink et al. (2014) using TARDIS, an open-source radiative transfer code (Kerzendorf & Sim 2014; Kerzendorf et al. 2023). We find that the photospheric velocity of SN 2014dt slows its evolution between +64 and +148 days, which closely overlaps the phase when we see SN 2014dt diverge from the normal spectral evolution of SN Ia (+90 to +150 days). The photospheric velocity at these epochs, ~400$-$1000 km s$^{-1}$, may demarcate a boundary within the ejecta below which the physics of SN Iax and normal SN Ia differ. Our results suggest that SN 2014dt is consistent with a weak deflagration explosion model that leaves behind a bound remnant and drives an optically thick, quasi-steady-state wind creating the photospheric lines at late times. The data also suggest that this wind may weaken at epochs past +450 days, perhaps indicating a radioactive power source that has decayed away.Comment: Accepted to ApJ, 22 pages, 8 figures, 3 table

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

Safety citizenship behavior (SCB) in the workplace: A stable construct? Analysis of psychometric invariance across four European countries

Safety citizenship behaviors (SCBs) are important participative organizational behaviors that emerge in work-groups. SCBs create a work environment that supports individual and team safety, encourages a proactive management of workplace safety, and ultimately, prevents accidents. In spite of the importance of SCBs, little consensus exists on research issues like the dimensionality of safety citizenship, and if any superordinate factor level of safety citizenship should be conceptualized, and thus measured. The present study addressed this issue by examining the dimensionality of SCBs, as they relate to behaviors of helping, stewardship, civic virtue, whistleblowing, voice, and initiating change in current practices. Data on SCBs were collected from four industrial plants (N = 1065) in four European countries (Italy, Russia, Switzerland, United Kingdom). The results show that SCBs structure around two superordinate second-order factors that reflect affiliation and challenge. Multi-group analyses supported the structure and metric invariance of the two-factor model across the four national subsamples