Impact of climate change and bioenergy on nutrition

Food security has deteriorated since 1995 and reductions in child malnutrition are proceeding too slowly to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target for halving hunger by 2015. Three major challenges threaten to drastically complicate efforts to overcome food insecurity and malnutrition: climate change, the growing use of food crops as a source of fuel and soaring food prices. Food security has four dimensions: food availability, access to food, stability of supply and access and safe and healthy food utilization. It is a key factor in good nutrition, along with health, sanitation and care practices. Globally, one billion people are currently without access to safe water and over 2 billion lack adequate sanitation facilities. Present global food supplies are more than adequate to provide everyone with all the needed calories, if the food were equally distributed. But over 820 million people in developing countries have calorie-deficient diets; over 60 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.Climate change, Bioenergy, Nutrition, food security, Food prices, Sustainable development,

High Efficiency Power Management Unit for Implantable Optical-Electrical Stimulators

Battery-less active implantable devices are of interest because they offer longer life span and eliminate costly battery replacement surgical interventions. This is possible as a result of advances in inductive power transfer and development of power management circuits to maximize the overall power transfer and provide various voltage levels for multi-functional implantable devices. Rehabilitation therapy using optical stimulation of genetically modified peripheral neurons requires high current loads. Standard rectification topologies are inefficient and have associated voltage drops unsuited for miniaturized implants. This paper presents an integrated power management unit (PMU) for an optical-electrical stimulator to be used in the treatment of motor neurone disease. It includes a power-efficient regulating rectifier with a novel body biased high-speed comparator providing 3.3 V for the operation of the stimulator, a 3-stage latch-up charge pump with 12 V output for the input stage of the optical-electrical stimulator, and 1.8 V for digital control logic. The chip was fabricated in a 0.18 μm CMOS process. Measured results show that for a regulated output of 3.3 V delivering 30.3 mW power, the peak power conversion efficiency is 84.2% at 6.78 MHz inductive link tunable frequency reducing to 70.3% at 13.56 MHz. The charge pump with on chip capacitors has 90.9% measured voltage conversion efficiency

Closing a chapter? A protocol for a longitudinal mixed methods study on retirement from elite sport.

Retirement from elite sport represents a major life transition for athletes and requires them to redefine their central life projects, identities, and perhaps even sources of meaning in life. Although an extensive body of literature has identified risk and protective factors in career termination, little is known about the more subjective processes and individual pathways of athletes as they establish their new relationship with work-life and sport. The planned longitudinal mixed methods study follows Swiss elite athletes' transition with a focus on understanding (1) the relationship between psychological resources, life situations at the end of the sports career, and the retirement process; (2) how athletes' post-retirement vocational careers interact with their subjective careers and sense of meaningful work; (3) how athletes reconstruct their identities and relationship with sport over time; and (4) how gender shapes athletes' pathways and reorientation of their life design.Using a person-oriented approach combined with narrative inquiry, we expect to identify specific types and stories which demonstrate individual differences in career and personal development throughout the transitional period, an understanding of which can be targeted towards support programmes for retiring elite athletes. As the study centralises dimensions of positive psychological functioning (meaning and purpose in life/sport/work, resilience, life satisfaction), it complements previous studies focused on psychological distress and provides much needed knowledge that can be used to foster well-being in athletic retirement. Collaborating with the Swiss Olympic Association helps to ensure that the research findings will be disseminated to relevant end-users and used towards developing socially sustainable elite sport for the future generations

Cycling injuries and alcohol

Background: Most of the cycling accidents that occur in Finland do not end up in the official traffic accident statistics. Thus, there is minimal information on these accidents and their consequences, particularly in cases in which alcohol was involved. The focus of the present study is on cycling accidents and injuries involving alcohol in particular. Methods: Data on patients visiting the emergency department at North Kymi Hospital because of a cycling accident was prospectively collected for two years, from June 1, 2004 to May 31, 2006. Blood alcohol concentration (BAC) was measured on admission with a breath analyser. The severity of the cycling injuries was classified according to the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS). Results: A total of 217 cycling accidents occurred. One third of the injured cyclists were involved with alcohol at the time of visiting the hospital. Of these, 85% were males. A blood alcohol concentration of Conclusions: Cyclists involved with alcohol were, in most cases, heavily intoxicated and were not wearing a bicycle helmet. Head injuries were more common among these cyclists than among sober cyclists. As cycling continues to increase, it is important to monitor cycling accidents, improve the accident statistics and heighten awareness of the risks of head injuries when cycling under the influence of alcohol. (c) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Transmembrane Domain Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Impair Expression and Transport Activity of ABC Transporter ABCG2

To study the function and expression of nine naturally occurring single-nucleotide polymorphisms (G406R, F431L, S441N, P480L, F489L, M515R, L525R, A528T and T542A) that are predicted to reside in the transmembrane regions of the ABC transporter ABCG2. The transport activity of the variants was tested in inside-out membrane vesicles from Sf9 insect and human derived HEK293 cells overexpressing ABCG2. Lucifer Yellow and estrone sulfate were used as probe substrates of activity. The expression levels and cellular localization of the variants was compared to the wild-type ABCG2 by western blotting and immunofluorescence microscopy. All studied variants of ABCG2 displayed markedly decreased transport in both Sf9-ABCG2 and HEK293-ABCG2 vesicles. Impaired transport could be explained for some variants by altered expression levels and cellular localization. Moreover, the destructive effect on transport activity of variants G406R, P480L, M515R and T542A is, to our knowledge, reported for the first time. These results indicate that the transmembrane region of ABCG2 is sensitive to amino acid substitution and that patients harboring these ABCG2 variant forms could suffer from unexpected pharmacokinetic events of ABCG2 substrate drugs or have an increased risk for diseases such as gout where ABCG2 is implicated.Peer reviewe

Estimation of the Degree of Diversity for Some Iraqi Wheat Varieties through ISSR, SRAP and RAPD Markers

DNA-based molecular markers such as Inter Simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR), Sequence-Related Amplified polymorphism (SRAP) and Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) were used in this study to examine the genetic differences among sixteen Iraqi wheat varieties. Seventy three primers out of 177 were reproducible and showed clear amplified bands. The degree of genetic diversity, Polymorphism information content (PIC) and resolving power (RP) were estimated. All the studied molecular markers were informative and showed good ability to classify and distinguish 16 wheat varieties. Total number of polymorphic bands is 134, 221 and 55 for ISSR, SRAP and RAPD respectively. PIC and RP values were 0.259, 0.264 and 0.262 and 9.06, 7.87 and 2.7

The effect of deamidation and lipids on the interfacial and foaming properties of ultrafiltered oat protein concentrates

The aim of this study was to investigate the air-water interfacial and foaming properties of oat protein concentrates produced by an enzyme-aided ultrafiltration method with and without deamidation. A further aim was to determine the role of polar and non-polar lipids at the air-water interface and in foams. The deamidated and ultrafiltered oat protein concentrate (DE-UF-OPC) exhibited higher surface tension compared to the ultrafiltered oat protein concentrate (UF-OPC). DE-UF-OPC had a significantly higher negative zeta potential value (−50 mV) compared to the UF-OPC (−38 mV) at pH 7.0. The higher net charge of the DE-UF-OPC may have decreased the equilibrium concentration of oat proteins at the interfacial layer due to higher repulsion between them. Both of the ethanol extracted OPCs exhibited higher surface tension values most likely due to the partial denaturation of albumins and/or globulins. Removal of the majority of non-polar lipids had no effect on the equilibrium surface tension of OPCs. DE-UF-OPC and UF-OPC exhibited some, but limited foaming ability. The removal of non-polar lipids significantly improved the foamability and stability of DE-UF-OPC and UF-OPC, but the removal of polar lipids only improved the foamability of DE-UF-OPC.Peer reviewe

Dynamic Behavior of Sheet Pile in Sand under the Influence of Vibration

This article includes an experimental investigation into the behavior of a vibratory force-exposed sheet pile set in sand. The study goal is to provide a parametric study. Regarding how vibrations affect the sheet pile's movement and rotation after layering the soil in a steel container with internal dimensions of 900 mm length, 400 mm wide and 400 mm high, a steel sheet pile with the dimensions of 350 mm length, 20 mm width and 0.5 mm thickness was inserted into the soil. The results showed that the speed, acceleration, and displacement increased with increasing the frequency of the vibration source when the source of vibration was situated at a distance of (D distance = H height of the sheet pile) and exposed to varied frequencies (5, 10, 15) Hz. As frequency is a type of energy, increased frequency will thus eventually cause more disturbance. The disturbance and its consequences on the soil will eventually increase as the frequency rises

Will they take this offer? A machine learning price elasticity model for predicting upselling acceptance of premium airline seating

Employing customer information from one of the world's largest airline companies, we develop a price elasticity model (PREM) using machine learning to identify customers likely to purchase an upgrade offer from economy to premium class and predict a customer's acceptable price range. A simulation of 64.3 million flight bookings and 14.1 million email offers over three years mirroring actual data indicates that PREM implementation results in approximately 1.12 million (7.94%) fewer non-relevant customer email messages, a predicted increase of 72,200 (37.2%) offers accepted, and an estimated $72.2 million (37.2%) of increased revenue. Our results illustrate the potential of automated pricing information and targeting marketing messages for upselling acceptance. We also identified three customer segments: (1) Never Upgrades are those who never take the upgrade offer, (2) Upgrade Lovers are those who generally upgrade, and (3) Upgrade Lover Lookalikes have no historical record but fit the profile of those that tend to upgrade. We discuss the implications for airline companies and related travel and tourism industries.© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed