30 days wild: development and evaluation of a large-scale nature engagement campaign to improve well-being

There is a need to increase people’s engagement with and connection to nature, both for human well-being and the conservation of nature itself. In order to suggest ways for people to engage with nature and create a wider social context to normalise nature engagement, The Wildlife Trusts developed a mass engagement campaign, 30 Days Wild. The campaign asked people to engage with nature every day for a month. 12,400 people signed up for 30 Days Wild via an online sign-up with an estimated 18,500 taking part overall, resulting in an estimated 300,000 engagements with nature by participants. Samples of those taking part were found to have sustained increases in happiness, health, connection to nature and pro-nature behaviours. With the improvement in health being predicted by the improvement in happiness, this relationship was mediated by the change in connection to nature

An intergenerational study of perceptions of changes in active free play among families from rural areas of Western Canada

Background: Children's engagement in active free play has declined across recent generations. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine perceptions of intergenerational changes in active free play among families from rural areas. We addressed two research questions: (1) How has active free play changed across three generations? (2) What suggestions do participants have for reviving active free play? Methods: Data were collected via 49 individual interviews with members of 16 families (15 grandparents, 16 parents, and 18 children) residing in rural areas/small towns in the Province of Alberta (Canada). Interview recordings were transcribed verbatim and subjected to thematic analysis guided by an ecological framework of active free play. Results: Factors that depicted the changing nature of active free play were coded in the themes of less imagination/more technology, safety concerns, surveillance, other children to play with, purposeful physical activity, play spaces/organized activities, and the good parenting ideal. Suggestions for reviving active free play were coded in the themes of enhance facilities to keep kids entertained, provide more opportunities for supervised play, create more community events, and decrease use of technology. Conclusions: These results reinforce the need to consider multiple levels of social ecology in the study of active free play, and highlight the importance of community-based initiatives to revive active free play in ways that are consistent with contemporary notions of good parentin

Charge stripe order near the surface of 12-percent doped La2−xSrxCuO4La_{2-x}Sr_xCuO_4

A collective order of spin and charge degrees of freedom into stripes has been predicted to be a possible ground state of hole-doped CuO(2) planes, which are the building blocks of high-temperature superconductors. In fact, stripe-like spin and charge order has been observed in various layered cuprate systems. For the prototypical high-temperature superconductor La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO(4), no charge-stripe signal has been found so far, but several indications for a proximity to their formation. Here we report the observation of a pronounced charge-stripe signal in the near surface region of 12-percent doped La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO(4). We conclude that this compound is sufficiently close to charge stripe formation that small perturbations or reduced dimensionality near the surface can stabilize this order. Our finding of different phases in the bulk and near the surface of La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO(4) should be relevant for the interpretation of data from surface-sensitive probes, which are widely used for La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO(4) and similar systems