Supporting Positive Youth Development for At-Risk Youth

At risk youth is a sensitive but important topic to discuss, and a vital population to support. Through an extensive search of the available literature, a few core themes centered around eliciting change for these young men and women have emerged. The goal was to intricately weave these approaches into a community centered, occupation-based program to serve at-risk youth population in the greater Lewiston community.Systems change is defined as “change efforts that strive to shift the underlying infrastructure within a community or targeted context to support a desired outcome, including shifting existing policies and practices, resource allocations, relational structures, community norms and values, and skills and attitudes’’ (Foster-Fishman, 2000). The youth within our community are essential, and crucial individuals to our society. They are quite literally, the future. If many of the youth in our community are considered to be at risk, then ultimately, our community is also at risk. The studies reviewed, analyzed, and critiqued, eloquently discuss frameworks, models, and programs, that depict promising avenues upon which society can generate system wide changes to positively impact youth occupational development. Through an extensive search of the literature, these avenues exposed themselves in the forms of community based programs, and theoretical frameworks that are applicable, transferable, and fall within the occupational therapy scope of practice

Liver cell line derived conditioned medium enhances myofibril organization of primary rat cardiomyocytes

Cardiomyocytes are the fundamental cells of the heart and play an important role in engineering of tissue constructs for regenerative medicine and drug discovery. Therefore, the development of culture conditions that can be used to generate functional cardiomyocytes to form cardiac tissue may be of great interest. In this study, isolated neonatal rat cardiomyocytes were cultured with several culture conditions in vitro and characterized for cell proliferation, myofibril organization, and cardiac functionality by assessing cell morphology, immunocytochemical staining, and time-lapse confocal scanning microscopy. When cardiomyocytes were cultured in liver cell line derived conditioned medium without exogenous growth factors and cytokines, the cell proliferation increased, cell morphology was highly elongated, and subsequent myofibril organization was highly developed. These developed myofibril organization also showed high level of contractibility and synchronization, representing high functionality of cardiomyocytes. Interestingly, many of the known factors in hepatic conditioned medium, such as insulin-like growth factor II (IGFII), macrophage colony-stimulating factor (MCSF), leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF), did not show similar effects as the hepatic conditioned medium, suggesting the possibility of synergistic activity of the several soluble factors or the presence of unknown factors in hepatic conditioned medium. Finally, we demonstrated that our culture system could provide a potentially powerful tool for in vitro cardiac tissue organization and cardiac function study.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH DE019024)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH grant HL092836)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH grant EB007249)Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) (Institutional Program)United States. Army. Corps of Engineer

Knowledge, Attitudes, Beliefs and Behaviors Regarding Fruits and Vegetables among Cost-Offset Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) Applicants, Purchasers, and a Comparison Sample

Data were collected in August, amid the summer CSA season, when shares include many of the summer FV preferred by low-income caregivers and their children [33], which may have contributed to the magnitude of the differences in children’s FV consumption that we observed. Because resources to support the CO-CSA were limited and offsets were awarded on a first-come first-served basis, and because almost all KABs were equivalent for purchaser and non-purchaser sub-groups, selection bias into the purchaser sub-group is an unlikely explanation for differences observed between CO-CSA purchasers and non-purchasers. [...]the inclusion of some CO-CSA applicants who participated in a longitudinal study regarding CO-CSA may have biased upwards estimates of KAB and self-efficacy with respect to FV consumption in the applicant sample. [...]although selection of adults into the comparison group used similar eligibility criteria, they were not comparable to CO-CSA applicants who were older, more educated, and more often lived in food-secure households. [...]sample sizes were too small to permit exploration of observed associations in a multivariate context that controlled for key sample differences such as age, educational attainment, or self-efficacy for eating and cooking FV. 5

PCB Exposure and in Vivo CYP1A2 Activity among Native Americans

Cytochrome P-450 1A2 (CYP1A2) is an enzyme involved in the metabolic activation of some carcinogens and is believed to be induced by xenobiotics. Very few studies, however, have investigated the association between environmental exposures and in vivo CYP1A2 activity in humans. To address this issue, a study was conducted of CYP1A2 activity among Native Americans exposed to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from the consumption of fish from the St. Lawrence River. At the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne (in New York and in Ontario and Quebec, Canada), 103 adults were interviewed, and they donated blood for serum PCB analysis and underwent the caffeine breath test (CBT), a safe and noninvasive procedure that uses caffeine as a probe for CYP1A2 activity in vivo. The results supported the findings of other studies that CBT values are higher among smokers and men and lower among women who use oral contraceptives. Despite a relatively low average total PCB body burden in this population, the sum of serum levels for nine mono- or di-ortho-substituted PCB congeners showed positive associations with CBT values (p = 0.052 wet weight and p = 0.029 lipid adjusted), as did toxic equivalent quantities (TEQs; p = 0.091 for wet weight and 0.048 for lipid adjusted). Regarding individual congeners, serum levels of PCB-153, PCB-170, and PCB-180 were significantly correlated with CBT values. The results support the notion that CYP1A2 activity may be a marker of an early biological effect of exposure to PCBs in humans and that the CBT may be a useful tool to monitor such effects

Fourth Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE4)

This report records and discusses the Fourth Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE4). The report includes a description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, the mission and vision statements that were drafted at the workshop and finalized shortly after it, a set of idea papers, position papers, experience papers, demos, and lightning talks, and a panel discussion. The main part of the report covers the set of working groups that formed during the meeting, and for each, discusses the participants, the objective and goal, and how the objective can be reached, along with contact information for readers who may want to join the group. Finally, we present results from a survey of the workshop attendees

Anti-Inflammatory Activity of Chitooligosaccharides in Vivo

All the reports to date on the anti-inflammatory activity of chitooligosaccharides (COS) are mostly based on in vitro methods. In this work, the anti-inflammatory activity of two COS mixtures is characterized in vivo (using balb/c mice), following the carrageenan-induced paw edema method. This is a widely accepted animal model of acute inflammation to evaluate the anti-inflammatory effect of drugs. Our data suggest that COS possess anti-inflammatory activity, which is dependent on dose and, at higher doses, also on the molecular weight. A single dose of 500 mg/kg b.w. weight may be suitable to treat acute inflammation cases; however, further studies are needed to ascertain the effect upon longer inflammation periods as well as studies upon the bioavailability of these compounds

Optical Excitations and Field Enhancement in Short Graphene Nanoribbons

The optical excitations of elongated graphene nanoflakes of finite length are investigated theoretically through quantum chemistry semi-empirical approaches. The spectra and the resulting dipole fields are analyzed, accounting in full atomistic details for quantum confinement effects, which are crucial in the nanoscale regime. We find that the optical spectra of these nanostructures are dominated at low energy by excitations with strong intensity, comprised of characteristic coherent combinations of a few single-particle transitions with comparable weight. They give rise to stationary collective oscillations of the photoexcited carrier density extending throughout the flake, and to a strong dipole and field enhancement. This behavior is robust with respect to width and length variations, thus ensuring tunability in a large frequency range. The implications for nanoantennas and other nanoplasmonic applications are discussed for realistic geometries