Psychosocial Correlates of Physical Activity in Children and Adolescents in a Rural Community Setting

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationships between selected psychosocial factors and the physical activity behaviors of children (grade 4-8) and adolescents (grades 9-12) in a rural community setting. The Children’s Physical Activity Scale (CPAC)was used to measure the psychosocial factors of physical activity, The Physical Activity Questionnaire-Children (PAQ-C), and Physical Activity Questionnaire-Adolescents (PAQ-A) were used to measure the physical activity behaviors of the 167 participants. Results indicated that male and female physical activity behaviors were not significantly different. However, physical activity declined with age [F(8,147) = 5.44, p \u3c 0.05, ES = 0.23]. All psychosocial factors were significantly correlated with physical activity in youth with the single highest correlation for males being “liking of exercise” (r = .61) and the highest correlation for females was “liking of games and sports”(r = .44). Stepwise regression analyses identified three subscales (liking of games and sport, liking of exercise, and parental support) in a significant prediction model of physical activity in both genders. The results indicate that children\u27s physical activity is associated with a variety of psychosocial variables that represent import predisposing and reinforcing factors

2013-2014 Kentucky & Tennessee Tobacco Production Guide

Tobacco growers in Kentucky and Tennessee have faced many challenges during the past two years, including weather, labor availability, and rising production costs. However, there have been opportunities as well. Some buying stations have closed or moved, but new buyers have come into the market and contract volumes have been stable overall. Good quality burley tobacco is in relatively short supply, and this has offered opportunities to those who have been able to overcome weather and labor challenges and produce good crops. These changes have had different impacts in different regions of both states, based largely on where buying stations closed and opened. Dark tobacco contract volumes have been more stable than burley, but dark tobacco growers have had challenges as well, including shortages of wood and quality sawdust needed to produce dark-fired tobacco. Labor costs have continued to rise as tobacco growers struggled to keep pace with changes in the H-2A labor program that allows them to legally employ migrant workers. Uncertainty about future regulatory action still hangs over the entire tobacco industry but does not seem as foreboding as two years ago. Overall, tobacco remains an important commodity in the agricultural economy of the region as growers prepare for future seasons

The Evolution of Medical Countermeasures for Ebola Virus Disease: Lessons Learned and Next Steps

The Ebola virus disease outbreak that occurred in Western Africa from 2013–2016, and subsequent smaller but increasingly frequent outbreaks of Ebola virus disease in recent years, spurred an unprecedented effort to develop and deploy effective vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics. This effort led to the U.S. regulatory approval of a diagnostic test, two vaccines, and two therapeutics for Ebola virus disease indications. Moreover, the establishment of fieldable diagnostic tests improved the speed with which patients can be diagnosed and public health resources mobilized. The United States government has played and continues to play a key role in funding and coordinating these medical countermeasure efforts. Here, we describe the coordinated U.S. government response to develop medical countermeasures for Ebola virus disease and we identify lessons learned that may improve future efforts to develop and deploy effective countermeasures against other filoviruses, such as Sudan virus and Marburg virus

The BUFFALO HST Survey

The Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields and Legacy Observations (BUFFALO) is a 101 orbit + 101 parallel Cycle 25 Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Treasury program taking data from 2018 to 2020. BUFFALO will expand existing coverage of the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) in Wide Field Camera 3/IR F105W, F125W, and F160W and Advanced Camera for Surveys/WFC F606W and F814W around each of the six HFF clusters and flanking fields. This additional area has not been observed by HST but is already covered by deep multiwavelength data sets, including Spitzer and Chandra. As with the original HFF program, BUFFALO is designed to take advantage of gravitational lensing from massive clusters to simultaneously find high-redshift galaxies that would otherwise lie below HST detection limits and model foreground clusters to study the properties of dark matter and galaxy assembly. The expanded area will provide the first opportunity to study both cosmic variance at high redshift and galaxy assembly in the outskirts of the large HFF clusters. Five additional orbits are reserved for transient followup. BUFFALO data including mosaics, value-added catalogs, and cluster mass distribution models will be released via MAST on a regular basis as the observations and analysis are completed for the six individual clusters