Men's nutrition knowledge is important for women's and children's nutrition in Ethiopia.

In an effort to address undernutrition among women and children in rural areas of low-income countries, nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) and behaviour change communication (BCC) projects heavily focus on women as an entry point to effect nutritional outcomes. There is limited evidence on the role of men's contribution in improving household diets. In this Agriculture to Nutrition trial (Clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT03152227), we explored associations between men's and women's nutritional knowledge on households', children's and women's dietary diversity. At the midline evaluation conducted in July 2017, FAO's nutrition knowledge questionnaire was administered to male and female partners in 1396 households. There was a high degree of agreement (88%) on knowledge about exclusive breastfeeding between parents; however, only 56-66% of the households had agreement when comparing knowledge of dietary sources of vitamin A or iron. Factor analysis of knowledge dimensions resulted in identifying two domains, namely, 'dietary' and 'vitamin' knowledge. Dietary knowledge had a larger effect on women's and children's dietary diversities than vitamin knowledge. Men's dietary knowledge had strong positive associations with households' dietary diversity scores (0.24, P value = 0.001), children's dietary diversity (0.19, P value = 0.008) and women's dietary diversity (0.18, P value < 0.001). Distance to markets and men's education levels modified the effects of nutrition knowledge on dietary diversity. While previous NSA and BCC interventions predominantly focused on uptake among women, there is a large gap and strong potential for men's engagement in improving household nutrition. Interventions that expand the role of men in NSA may synergistically improve household nutrition outcomes

Climate Change Impacts on Rice Farming Systems in Northwestern Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has achieved tremendous progress since 1950 in crop production and food availability. Yields grew at an impressive rate until leveling off in the mid-eighties. Sri Lanka's population is anticipated to grow in the coming decades, creating an ever-greater demand for food security on the household, sub-district, regional, and national scales.The agricultural sector in Sri Lanka is vulnerable to climate shocks. An unusual succession of droughts and floods from 2008 to 2014 has led to both booms and busts in agricultural production, which were reflected in food prices. In both instances, the majority of farmers and consumers were adversely affected.At present the rice-farming systems are under stress due to inadequate returns for the farmers and difficulty in coping with shocks due to climate, pests, and diseases, and prices for produce. There are government price-support mechanisms, fertilizer-subsidy schemes, and crop insurance schemes, but the levels of the supports are modest and often do not effectively reach the farmers

Effect of coagulant protein from Parkinsonia aculeata seed and Citrus juice on bacteria isolated from Ruvu River in Tanzania 1

Abstract: A total of 126 bacterial strains were isolated from water samples collected from Ruvu River in Tanzania. Seventy strains were identified by morphological, biochemical and 16s rRNA gene sequence analysis. The strains were found to belong to Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas, Vibrio, Aeromonas or Bacillus spp. Coagulant protein was purified from Parkinsonia aculeata seed by ion exchange chromatography. Antibacterial effect of the purified P. aculeata coagulant protein (PAP) and Citrus fruit juice (CF) was tested on four bacterial strains that belonged to different genera. Bacterial cell flocculation analyses showed that, PAP and CF aggregate both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Growth studies of bacterial strains incubated with PAP and CF revealed that, inhibitory dosages of PAP ranged from 0.38 mg/L to 0.88 mg/L and growth inhibition occurred within two to four hours. The PACE and PAP showed high coagulation activities that were similar to those observed for chemical coagulant (alum) with turbidity removal efficiencies ranging from 93 to 98%. A simplified method used for purification of proteins together with high antimicrobial and water coagulation activity make proteins suitable for supplementing chemical coagulants in drinking water treatment. Also, CF is suitable for post disinfection of water treated with proteins prior drinking in poor communities

FuhSen: A federated hybrid search engine for building a knowledge graph on-demand

A vast amount of information about various types of entities is spread across the Web, e.g., people or organizations on the Social Web, product offers on the Deep Web or on the Dark Web. These data sources can comprise heterogeneous data and are equipped with different search capabilities e.g., Search API. End users such as investigators from law enforcement institutions searching for traces and connections of organized crime have to deal with these interoperability problems not only during search time but also while merging data collected from different sources. We devise FuhSen, a keyword-based federated engine that exploits the search capabilities of heterogeneous sources during query processing and generates knowledge graphs on-demand applying an RDF-Molecule integration approach in response to keyword-based queries. The resulting knowledge graph describes the semantics of entities collected from the integrated sources, as well as relationships among these entities. Furthermore, FuhSen utilizes ontologies to describe the available sources in terms of content and search capabilities and exploits this knowledge to select the sources relevant for answering a keyword-based query. We conducted a user evaluation where FuhSen is compared to traditional search engines. FuhSen semantic search capabilities allow users to complete search tasks that could not be accomplished with traditional Web search engines during the evaluation study

Microbial characterization of Holocene alluvial sediments in the Meghna flood plain of Matlab Upazila, Bangladesh

The presence of elevated levels of arsenic (As) in groundwater in Bangladesh, has undermined the decade long success of supplying 98% of its popu­lation with safe drinking water and an estimated population of 35 million in the country are at risk. The source of As is geogenic and redox condi­tions of the sedimentary aquifer are a dominant control on the mobility of As in natural sediment­ water system. Reductive dissolution of Fe oxyhy­droxides in the aquifer sediments is considered as a primary mechanism responsible for mobilization of absorbed As (Jonsson & Lundell, 2004; von Bromssen et al., 2007). Recent studies (Stollenwerk et al., 2007; von Bromssen et al., 2007) indicate that groundwater from reddish sediments, within shallower depth (<150m), would be As safe. von Bromssen et al., (2007) also demonstrated a distinct correlation between the color of the aquifer sands, groundwater redox-conditions and relative risk for mobilization of geogenic As