Characteristics of female nonagenarian participants in an observational health study

Background: Inclusion of very elderly participants in health studies is limited, despite the increasing longevity in the population. We aimed to describe characteristics of female nonagenarians who had been retained for a decade in an ongoing, population-based cohort study.Methods: This study describes 14 female nonagenarians who participated in the 10-year follow-up phase of the Geelong Osteoporosis Study. Their baseline characteristics, from a decade earlier, were compared with 109 fellow participants lost to follow-up.Results: For nonagenarians at follow-up, mean BMI, relative appendicular mass and blood pressure were in the ideal ranges recommended for all adult ages, whereas mean BMD was in the osteopenic range for the hip and spine. Three (21.4%) of the nonagenarian women were underweight, four (28.6%) were overweight and one was obese; five (38.5%) had hypertension, two (14.3%) required assistance walking, nine (69.2%) had osteoporosis and two (15.4%) had low lean mass in the sarcopenic range. None of the women smoked or had fallen in the previous year, nine (64.3%) used three or more prescription medications and five (35.7%) used five or more. Comparisons of baseline data collected a decade earlier for the nonagenarians and their peers who were subsequently lost to followup, showed similarities in body habitus, falls, polypharmacy, education, marriage status, socioeconomic status and morbidity. However, the group lost to follow-up were more likely to have had osteoporosis and/or be hypertensive.Conclusion: We present health-related data for nonagenarian participants of a prospective cohort study. While few differences were found between these participants and age-matched peers for baseline data collected a decade earlier, the nonagenarians who participated in the 10-year follow-up were less likely to have had osteoporosis or hypertension than their peers at recruitment. Further involvement of the very elderly in health research is warranted, since data for this age group are rare

Are clinical psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors overlooking the needs of their male clients?

Around 75 per cent of suicides are male, yet men seek therapy less than women do. Is talking about feelings unappealing to men? Our interviews with 20 experienced therapists identified ways in which therapy might be made more male-friendly

Generating brilliant X-ray pulses from particle-driven plasma wakefields

This thesis presents a simulation campaign that demonstrates for the first time, that by micro-bunching the Diamond Light Source electron beam, X-ray pulses with peak brightnesses of B = 3.2 x 10^{28} photons^{-1}s^{-1}mm^{-2}mrad^{-2}0.1%BW$^{-1} at E = 50 keV are produced. The production mechanism ensures the pulses are radially polarized on creation. These properties allow for a smaller focal spot, overcoming the limit due to diffraction, providing a unique new probe for individual atomic excitations by the utilisation of the longitudinal component of the electric field. We also demonstrate that the micro-bunched electron beam is an effective wakefield driver in itself, able to accelerate a witness electron beam to higher energies, providing a potential new route to reliable X-ray free electron laser generation. An experiment was performed using the$E = 600$mJ,$\tau = 40$ fs Astra laser at the Central Laser Facility testing a novel single-shot parasitic plasma diagnostic. The photon acceleration effect on the driving laser pulse was utilised to determine the plasma density. Strong modulation to the long laser pulse's intensity profile were measured at the plasma wavelength, capturing the self-modulation effect on the long laser pulse. The results show a linear relationship between the diagnosed plasma density and the known pressure within the gas target and are supported by numerical simulations. The diagnostic requires no dedicated probe pulse but instead simply requires the driving laser pulse to be several plasma periods long, allowing for a cost effective, simple to implement diagnostic

The Lore of Low Methane Livestock:Co-Producing Technology and Animals for Reduced Climate Change Impact

Methane emissions from sheep and cattle production have gained increasing profile in the context of climate change. Policy and scientific research communities have suggested a number of technological approaches to mitigate these emissions. This paper uses the concept of co-production as an analytical framework to understand farmers’ evaluation of a 'good animal’. It examines how technology and sheep and beef cattle are co-produced in the context of concerns about the climate change impact of methane. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews, this paper demonstrates that methane emissions are viewed as a natural and integral part of sheep and beef cattle by farmers, rather than as a pollutant. Sheep and beef cattle farmers in the UK are found to be an extremely heterogeneous group that need to be understood in their specific social, environmental and consumer contexts. Some are more amenable to appropriating methane reducing measures than others, but largely because animals are already co-constructed from the natural and the technical for reasons of increased production efficiency

Characteristics of female nonagenarian participants in an observational health study

Abstract Background: Inclusion of very elderly participants in health studies is limited, despite the increasing longevity in the population. We aimed to describe characteristics of female nonagenarians who had been retained for a decade in an ongoing, population-based cohort study

Ozone and alkyl nitrate formation from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill atmospheric emissions

Ozone (O3), alkyl nitrates (RONO2), and other photochemical products were formed in the atmosphere downwind from the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill by photochemical reactions of evaporating hydrocarbons with NOx (=NO+NO2) emissions from spill response activities. Reactive nitrogen species and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were measured from an instrumented aircraft during daytime flights in the marine boundary layer downwind from the area of surfacing oil. A unique VOC mixture, where alkanes dominated the hydroxyl radical (OH) loss rate, was emitted into a clean marine environment, enabling a focused examination of O3 and RONO 2 formation processes. In the atmospheric plume from DWH, the OH loss rate, an indicator of potential O3 formation, was large and dominated by alkanes with between 5 and 10 carbons per molecule (C 5-C10). Observations showed that NOx was oxidized very rapidly with a 0.8h lifetime, producing primarily C6-C10 RONO2 that accounted for 78% of the reactive nitrogen enhancements in the atmospheric plume 2.5h downwind from DWH. Both observations and calculations of RONO2 and O3 production rates show that alkane oxidation dominated O3 formation chemistry in the plume. Rapid and nearly complete oxidation of NOx to RONO2 effectively terminated O3 production, with O3 formation yields of 6.0±0.5 ppbv O3 per ppbv of NOx oxidized. VOC mixing ratios were in large excess of NOx, and additional NOx would have formed additional O3 in this plume. Analysis of measurements of VOCs, O3, and reactive nitrogen species and calculations of O3 and RONO2 production rates demonstrate that NOx-VOC chemistry in the DWH plume is explained by known mechanisms. Copyright 2012 by the American Geophysical Union

Determination of urban volatile organic compound emission ratios and comparison with an emissions database

During the NEAQS-ITCT2k4 campaign in New England, anthropogenic VOCs and CO were measured downwind from New York City and Boston. The emission ratios of VOCs relative to CO and acetylene were calculated using a method in which the ratio of a VOC with acetylene is plotted versus the photochemical age. The intercept at the photochemical age of zero gives the emission ratio. The so determined emission ratios were compared to other measurement sets, including data from the same location in 2002, canister samples collected inside New York City and Boston, aircraft measurements from Los Angeles in 2002, and the average urban composition of 39 U.S. cities. All the measurements generally agree within a factor of two. The measured emission ratios also agree for most compounds within a factor of two with vehicle exhaust data indicating that a major source of VOCs in urban areas is automobiles. A comparison with an anthropogenic emission database shows less agreement. Especially large discrepancies were found for the C2-C4 alkanes and most oxygenated species. As an example, the database overestimated toluene by almost a factor of three, which caused an air quality forecast model (WRF-CHEM) using this database to overpredict the toluene mixing ratio by a factor of 2.5 as well. On the other hand, the overall reactivity of the measured species and the reactivity of the same compounds in the emission database were found to agree within 30%. Copyright 2007 by the American Geophysical Union

'Open Marxism' against and beyond the 'Great Enclosure'? Reflections on How (Not) to Crack Capitalism

The main purpose of this article is to provide an in-depth discussion of John Holloway’s recent book, Crack Capitalism. To this end, the paper offers a detailed account of the key strengths and weaknesses of Holloway’s version of ‘open Marxism’. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on six significant strengths of Crack Capitalism: (1) its insistence upon the importance of autonomous forms of agenda-setting for both individual and collective emancipation; (2) its emphasis on the ordinary constitution of social struggles; (3) its fine-grained interpretation of the socio-ontological conditions underlying human agency; (4) its processual conception of radical social transformation; (5) its recognition of the elastic, adaptable, and integrative power of capitalism; and (6) its proposal for an alternative critical theory, commonly known as ‘open Marxism’ or ‘autonomous Marxism’. The second part of the study examines the principal weaknesses of Crack Capitalism: (1) the counterproductive implications of the preponderance of negativity, owing to a one-sided concern with critique, cracks, and crises; (2) conceptual vagueness; (3) an overuse of poetic and metaphorical language; (4) the absence of a serious engagement with the question of normativity; (5) a lack of substantive evidence; (6) a residual economic reductionism; (7) a simplistic notion of gender; (8) the continuing presence of various problematic ‘isms’; (9) the misleading distinction between ‘doing’ and ‘labour’; (10) a reductive understanding of capitalism; (11) an unrealistic view of society; and (12) socio-ontological idealis

Robotic milking technologies and renegotiating situated ethical relationships on UK dairy farms

Robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) are novel technologies that take over the labor of dairy farming and reduce the need for human-animal interactions. Because robotic milking involves the replacement of 'conventional' twice-a-day milking managed by people with a system that supposedly allows cows the freedom to be milked automatically whenever they choose, some claim robotic milking has health and welfare benefits for cows, increases productivity, and has lifestyle advantages for dairy farmers. This paper examines how established ethical relations on dairy farms are unsettled by the intervention of a radically different technology such as AMS. The renegotiation of ethical relationships is thus an important dimension of how the actors involved are re-assembled around a new technology. The paper draws on in-depth research on UK dairy farms comparing those using conventional milking technologies with those using AMS. We explore the situated ethical relations that are negotiated in practice, focusing on the contingent and complex nature of human-animal-technology interactions. We show that ethical relations are situated and emergent, and that as the identities, roles, and subjectivities of humans and animals are unsettled through the intervention of a new technology, the ethical relations also shift. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Atmospheric emissions from the deepwater Horizon spill constrain air-water partitioning, hydrocarbon fate, and leak rate

The fate of deepwater releases of gas and oil mixtures is initially determined by solubility and volatility of individual hydrocarbon species; these attributes determine partitioning between air and water. Quantifying this partitioning is necessary to constrain simulations of gas and oil transport, to predict marine bioavailability of different fractions of the gas-oil mixture, and to develop a comprehensive picture of the fate of leaked hydrocarbons in the marine environment. Analysis of airborne atmospheric data shows massive amounts (∼258,000 kg/day) of hydrocarbons evaporating promptly from the Deepwater Horizon spill; these data collected during two research flights constrain air-water partitioning, thus bioavailability and fate, of the leaked fluid. This analysis quantifies the fraction of surfacing hydrocarbons that dissolves in the water column (∼33% by mass), the fraction that does not dissolve, and the fraction that evaporates promptly after surfacing (∼14% by mass). We do not quantify the leaked fraction lacking a surface expression; therefore, calculation of atmospheric mass fluxes provides a lower limit to the total hydrocarbon leak rate of 32,600 to 47,700 barrels of fluid per day, depending on reservoir fluid composition information. This study demonstrates a new approach for rapid-response airborne assessment of future oil spills. Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union