Happy to Share Cards

Happy to Share Cards (HtSC) are a simple, low-cost initiative aimed at reducing loneliness in the community. By placing a card on their table, a customer can indicate they are happy to share their table with someone else. The present study explores the use of HtSC among early adopters of this initiative and is the first evaluation of their use. An online survey was distributed to businesses known to use HtSC, to ask questions about why they chose to join the initiative, how staff and customers had been interacting with the cards (what was and was not working well), and how/whether they plan to engage with the cards following the Covid-19 pandemic

Black hole thermodynamics with conical defects

Recently we have shown [1] how to formulate a thermodynamic first law for a single (charged) accelerated black hole in AdS space by fixing the conical deficit angles present in the spacetime. Here we show how to generalise this result, formulating thermodynamics for black holes with varying conical deficits. We derive a new potential for the varying tension defects: the thermodynamic length, both for accelerating and static black holes. We discuss possible physical processes in which the tension of a string ending on a black hole might vary, and also map out the thermodynamic phase space of accelerating black holes and explore their critical phenomena

Dispersal assembly of rain forest tree communities across the Amazon basin

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from National Academy of Sciences via the DOI in this record.We investigate patterns of historical assembly of tree communities across Amazonia using a newly developed phylogeny for the species-rich neotropical tree genus Inga. We compare our results with those for three other ecologically important, diverse, and abundant Amazonian tree lineages, Swartzia, Protieae, and Guatteria. Our analyses using phylogenetic diversity metrics demonstrate a clear lack of geographic phylogenetic structure, and show that local communities of Inga and regional communities of all four lineages are assembled by dispersal across Amazonia. The importance of dispersal in the biogeography of Inga and other tree genera in Amazonian and Guianan rain forests suggests that speciation is not driven by vicariance, and that allopatric isolation following dispersal may be involved in the speciation process. A clear implication of these results is that over evolutionary timescales, the metacommunity for any local or regional tree community in the Amazon is the entire Amazon basin.We thank Terry Pennington for help with Inga species identification, and Paul Fine and Hans ter Steege for helpful comments and discussions. R.T.P. thanks the Leverhulme Trust for Study Abroad Fellowship RF/2/2006/0142, which supported DNA sequencing and the development of ideas in this paper in the M.L. laboratory. K.G.D., P.D.C., and T.A.K. thank the Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture for permission to conduct research in Peru, and the Nouragues Research Station for grants to fund fieldwork in French Guiana (2009 Call for Research at Nouragues). K.G.D. and R.T.P. acknowledge the Natural Environment Research Council for Support via NE/I028122/1. Field research by P.D.C. and T.A.K. was supported by National Science Foundation Grants DEB-0640630 and Dimensions 1125733. A.D.T. is supported by Natural Environment Research Council Fellowship NE/L011336/1

Brief intervention to reduce risky drinking in pregnancy: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Risky drinking in pregnancy by UK women is likely to result in many alcohol-exposed pregnancies. Studies from the USA suggest that brief intervention has promise for alcohol risk reduction in antenatal care. However, further research is needed to establish whether this evidence from the USA is applicable to the UK. This pilot study aims to investigate whether pregnant women can be recruited and retained in a randomized controlled trial of brief intervention aimed at reducing risky drinking in women receiving antenatal care.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The trial will rehearse the parallel-group, non-blinded design and procedures of a subsequent definitive trial. Over 8 months, women aged 18 years and over (target number 2,742) attending their booking appointment with a community midwife (n = 31) in north-east England will be screened for alcohol consumption using the consumption questions of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT-C). Those screening positive, without a history of substance use or alcohol dependence, with no pregnancy complication, and able to give informed consent, will be invited to participate in the trial (target number 120). Midwives will be randomized in a 1:1 ratio to deliver either treatment as usual (control) or structured brief advice and referral for a 20-minute motivational interviewing session with an alcohol health worker (intervention). As well as demographic and health information, baseline measures will include two 7-day time line follow-back questionnaires and the EuroQoL EQ-5D-3 L questionnaire. Measures will be repeated in telephone follow-ups in the third trimester and at 6 months post-partum, when a questionnaire on use of National Health Service and social care resources will also be completed. Information on pregnancy outcomes and stillbirths will be accessed from central health service records before the follow-ups. Primary outcomes will be rates of eligibility, recruitment, intervention delivery, and retention in the study population, to inform power calculations for a definitive trial. The health-economics component will establish how cost-effectiveness will be assessed, and examine which data on health service resource use should be collected in a main trial. Participants’ views on instruments and procedures will be sought to confirm their acceptability.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>The study will produce a full trial protocol with robust sample-size calculations to extend evidence on effectiveness of screening and brief intervention.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN43218782</p

Ripe for reassessment: A synthesis of available molecular data for the speciose diatom family Bacillariaceae

International audienceThe Bacillariaceae is a very species-rich family of raphid diatoms and includes the large and taxonomically difficult genus Nitzschia, whose species are often small-celled and finely structured and have few discrete morphological characters visible in the light microscope. The classification of Nitzschia is still mostly based on one developed in the second half of the 19th century by Grunow, who separated the genus into a series of sections largely on cell shape and symmetry, the position of the raphe, transverse extension of the fibulae, and folding of the valve. We assembled and analysed single-gene and concatenated alignments of nSSU, nLSU, rbcL, psbC and cox1 to test Grunow?s and subsequent classifications and to examine selected morphological characters for their potential to help define monophyletic groups. The maximum likelihood trees were equivocal as to monophyly of the family itself but showed good support for each of eight main clades of Bacillariaceae, three of which corresponded more or less to existing genera (Hantzschia, Cylindrotheca and Bacillaria). The other five main clades and some subclades comprised groups of Nitzschia species or assemblies of Nitzschia species with other genera (Pseudo-nitzschia, Fragilariopsis, Neodenticula, Tryblionella, Psammodictyon). Relationships between most of the eight main clades were not resolved robustly but all analyses recovered Nitzschia as non-monophyletic. The Grunowian classification of Nitzschia into sections was not supported, though in some respects (e.g. treatment of sigmoid species) it is better than subsequent reclassifications. Several of the main clades and subclades are cryptic (lacking morphological synapomorphies) and homoplasy is common in both light microscopical and ultrastructural characters (to the extent that organisms initially assigned to the same species sometimes prove to belong to a different main clade). Nevertheless, some characters, including the structure of the raphe canal and girdle, seem to be sufficiently conservative evolutionarily to give a provisional estimate of relationships if mo-lecular data are unavailable. No new formal classifications are proposed but various options are explored and research needs identified