Carabids for Natural-Enemy Pest Control: combining ecology and knowledge exchange to bridge the gaps

Carabid beetles are proven predators of crop pests and weed seeds. Agri-environmental measures, such as grass margins and beetle banks, are beneficial to the abundance and diversity of carabids. However, there is a lack of consensus over which measures are most effective in terms of Natural enemy Pest Control (NPC) by carabids, and interactions with the surrounding landscape. This thesis aimed to improve the efficacy and applicability of farm management interventions that increase the abundance and diversity of carabid species that contribute to NPC. I analysed data from the Farm Scale Evaluation experiment to determine the effects of landscape features and crop management on species abundance and diversity. To investigate further, I undertook trapping campaigns on a plot-scale and a farm-scale experiment. For this I used novel subterranean traps and standard pitfall traps to capture both above and below ground activity. Data were analysed with Linear Mixed Models, Generalised Linear Mixed Models, multivariate and spatial statistical methods. Central to my findings was that the response of key species varied differentially according to crop type, distance from field edge, adjacent habitat, and boundary feature. By incorporating below-ground sampling, I was able to deliver new understanding of the distribution of soil-dwelling carabid larvae relative to adults, and argue for the inclusion of predatory larvae in the estimation of ecosystem services provided by carabids. To incentivise farm management for NPC it is essential to understand the key motivations of farmers. To that end, I surveyed farmers to discover awareness, attitudes, and behavioural intent towards carabid beetles. Knowledge exchange interventions were also deployed. Farmer attitudes to carabids were positive, and experimental knowledge exchange treatments had a significant effect on behavioural intent. By drawing experimental and behaviour findings together, I was able to recommend specific actions favourable to farmers that were likely to boost NPC

Facilities for the Energy Frontier of Nuclear Physics

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL has been exploring the energy frontier of nuclear physics since 2001. Its performance, flexibility and continued innovative upgrading can sustain its physics output for years to come. Now, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is about to extend the frontier energy of laboratory nuclear collisions by more than an order of magnitude. In the coming years, its physics reach will evolve towards still higher energy, luminosity and varying collision species, within performance bounds set by accelerator technology and by nuclear physics itself. Complementary high-energy facilities will include fixed-target collisions at the CERN SPS, the FAIR complex at GSI and possible electron-ion colliders based on CEBAF at JLAB, RHIC at BNL or the LHC at CERN.Comment: Invited talk at the International Nuclear Physics Conference, Vancouver, Canada, 4-9 July 2010, to be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series. http://inpc2010.triumf.ca

Did the market force Subject Review?

This study sought to discover if staff in a university department believed the 1998 Subject Review to be a valid Quality Assurance process and if its findings could benefit the department. Fifteen academic staff members took part in semi-structured interviews and the content of their responses was analysed qualitatively. Respondents described how Subject Review arose from an emerging ethos of accountability in public services and the demand for performance indicators from stakeholders. By considering their own viewpoints, as non-academics, they identified with these pressures and accepted the need for Subject Review. The methodology of Subject Review was well understood by staff and they explained how it was unnecessarily bureaucratic for its aims. Respondents suspected that the outcome of Subject Review would have an effect on the Department’s place in the education marketplace and described why its impact would be minor. In explaining their views of Subject Review staff largely predicted the basis of the future quality assurance process

Beehives, Booze and Suffragettes: The “Sad Case” of Ellen S. Tupper (1822–1888), the “Bee Woman” and “Iowa Queen Bee”

ELLEN S. TUPPER was a 19th century expert bee-keeper who was most active during and shortly after the end of the American Civil War. A vigorous writer and apiarist, primarily focused on business interests and opportunities, she became the first female editor of an entomological journal in 1869. Joining the mid-western suffragettes, who at this time were also strongly linked to the temperance societies, she was soon presented as a role model of a successful businesswoman the early feminist movement. Together with ANNIE NOWLIN SAVERY (1831-1891), a leading American suffragette of her time, she established the "Italian Bee Company". For a short period, ELLEN S. TUPPER successfully imported and distributed Italian queens and bees to an interested American audience, while she actively promoted bee keeping as a suitable endeavour for women. Her reports on successful fertilization of bee queens that were held in confinement sparked a lively and controversial discussion among entomologists not only in America but also in Europe. At the height of her career she became the first female lecturer in apiology and the first woman elected to serve as an officer in a national entomological society. At the same meeting more than 30 other suffragettes joined the "North American Beekeepers' Society". This was a symbolic and perhaps even defining moment of female activity in science during the 19th century. Her activities soon earned her nicknames such as "Iowa Queen Bee" or the "Bee Woman". However, financial difficulties put an end to most of her business endeavours. Her career as an apiarist and editor came to a disgraceful end when she was incarcerated for the forgery of notes presented at several banks, subsequently acquitted on the ground of insanity. The forgery trial though has overshadowed ELLEN S. TUPPER's legacy in the history of women in science: As a farmer's wife in one of the frontier towns of the Wild West, in a county, which on her first arrival did not even possess a printing press, she was able to start a successful and impressive career as an editress. With her work she and a few like-minded supporters practically single-handedly recruited more women for entomological societies than all other European and American societies and institutions in the 19th century together. For nearly two and a half decades she went on a stubborn and effective crusade to convince women to become bee-keepers

Communicating Carabids: Engaging farmers to encourage uptake of Integrated Pest Management.

BACKGROUND: Natural enemy pest control (NPC) is becoming more desirable as restrictions increase on pesticide use. Carabid beetles are proven agents of NPC, controlling pests and weeds in crop areas. Agro-ecological measures can be effective for boosting carabid abundance and associated NPC, however the benefits of specific interventions to production are seldom communicated to farmers. We explore pathways to improved NPC by engaging farmers and increasing knowledge about Farm Management Practices (FMPs) beneficial to carabids using engagement materials. We used a questionnaire to measure awareness, beliefs, and attitudes to carabids and analysed these within a framework of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), relative to a control group. RESULTS: We found awareness of carabid predation to be associated with beliefs of pest and weed control efficacy. Within the framework of TPB, we found that current implementation of FMPs was higher if farmers perceived them to be both important for carabids, and easy to implement. This was also true for future intention to implement, yet the perceived importance was influenced by engagement materials. Field margins/buffer strips and beetle banks (16% and 13% of responses) were the most favoured by farmers as interventions for carabids. CONCLUSION: The TPB is a valuable tool with which to examine internal elements of farmer behaviour. In this study self-selected participants were influenced by online engagement in a single intervention, proving this approach has the potential to change behaviour. Our results are evidence for the effectiveness of raising awareness of NPC to change attitudes and increase uptake of sustainable practices

Care homes education: what can we learn?

Medical care received by care home residents can be variable. Initiatives, such as matron-led community teams, ensure a timely response to alerts about unwell residents. But early recognition of deterioration is vital in accessing this help. The aim of this project was to design and deliver an education programme for carers. It was hypothesised that the implementation of a teaching programme may result in improved medical care for residents. By understanding the enablers and barriers to implementing teaching, we hoped to identify the components of a successful teaching programme. Four care homes in Enfield received training on topics such as deterioration recognition over a 1-year period. The project was evaluated at 3, 6 and 9 months. Each evaluation comprised: pre-and-post-teaching questionnaires, focus groups, analysis of percentages of staff trained, review of overall and potentially avoidable, hospital admission rates. A Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle structure was used. The programme was well-received by carers, who gave examples of application of learning. Modules about conditions frequently resulting in hospital admission, or concerning real cases, demonstrated the best pre-and-post lesson change scores. However, the reach of the programme was low, with attendance rates between 5% and 28%. Overall, the percentage of staff trained in deterioration recognition ranged from 35% (care home one) to 12% (care home three). Hospital admissions reduced from 37 hospital admissions to 20 over the duration of the project. Potentially avoidable admissions reduced from 16 to 5. Proving causality to the intervention was difficult. Factors facilitating delivery of training included a flexible approach, an activity-based curriculum, alignment of topics with real cases and embedding key messages in every tutorial. Barriers included: time pressures, shift work, low attendance rates, inequitable perception of the value of teaching and IT issues. Care home factors impacting on delivery included: stability of management and internal communication systems.please ensure space here

Evaluation of Osteogenic and Cementogenic Potential of Periodontal Ligament Fibroblast Spheroids Using a Three-Dimensional In Vitro

The aim of this study was to develop a three-dimensional in vitro model of periodontium to investigate the osteogenic and cementogenic differentiation potential of the periodontal ligament fibroblast (PDLF) spheroids within a dentin-membrane complex. PDLFs were cultured in both spheroid forms and monolayers and were seeded onto two biological collagen-based and synthetic membranes. Cell-membrane composites were then transferred onto dentin slices with fibroblasts facing the dentin surface and further cultured for 20 days. The composites were then processed for histology and immunohistochemical analyses for osteocalcin, Runx2, periostin, and cementum attachment protein (CAP). Both membranes seeded with PDLF-derived cells adhered to dentin and fibroblasts were present at the dentin interface and spread within both membranes. All membrane-cell-dentine composites showed positive staining for osteocalcin, Runx2, and periostin. However, CAP was not expressed by any of the tissue composites. It can be concluded that PDLFs exhibited some osteogenic potential when cultured in a 3D matrix in the presence of dentin as shown by the expression of osteocalcin. However the interaction of cells and dentin in this study was unable to stimulate cementum formation. The type of membrane did not have a significant effect upon differentiation, but fibroblast seeded-PGA membrane demonstrated better attachment to dentin than the collagen membrane

Design of beam optics for the Future Circular Collider e+e- -collider rings

A beam optics scheme has been designed for the Future Circular Collider-e+e- (FCC-ee). The main characteristics of the design are: beam energy 45 to 175 GeV, 100 km circumference with two interaction points (IPs) per ring, horizontal crossing angle of 30 mrad at the IP and the crab-waist scheme [1] with local chromaticity correction. The crab-waist scheme is implemented within the local chromaticity correction system without additional sextupoles, by reducing the strength of one of the two sextupoles for vertical chromatic correction at each side of the IP. So-called "tapering" of the magnets is applied, which scales all fields of the magnets according to the local beam energy to compensate for the effect of synchrotron radiation (SR) loss along the ring. An asymmetric layout near the interaction region reduces the critical energy of SR photons on the incoming side of the IP to values below 100 keV, while matching the geometry to the beam line of the FCC proton collider (FCC-hh) [2] as closely as possible. Sufficient transverse/longitudinal dynamic aperture (DA) has been obtained, including major dynamical effects, to assure an adequate beam lifetime in the presence of beamstrahlung and top-up injection. In particular, a momentum acceptance larger than +/-2% has been obtained, which is better than the momentum acceptance of typical collider rings by about a factor of 2. The effects of the detector solenoids including their compensation elements are taken into account as well as synchrotron radiation in all magnets. The optics presented in this paper is a step toward a full conceptual design for the collider. A number of issues have been identified for further study

Factors associated with costs and health outcomes in patients with Back and leg pain in primary care: a prospective cohort analysis

Background There is limited research on the economic burden of low back-related leg pain, including sciatica. The aim of this study was to describe healthcare resource utilisation and factors associated with cost and health outcomes in primary care patients consulting with symptoms of low back-related leg pain including sciatica. Methods This study is a prospective cohort of 609 adults visiting their family doctor with low back-related leg pain, with or without sciatica in a United Kingdom (UK) Setting. Participants completed questionnaires, underwent clinical assessments, received an MRI scan, and were followed-up for 12-months. The economic analysis outcome was the quality-adjusted life year (QALY) calculated from the EQ-5D-3 L data obtained at baseline, 4 and 12-months. Costs were measured based on patient self-reported information on resource use due to back-related leg pain and results are presented from a UK National Health Service (NHS) and Societal perspective. Factors associated with costs and outcomes were obtained using a generalised linear model. Results Base-case results showed improved health outcomes over 12-months for the whole cohort and slightly higher QALYs for patients in the sciatica group. NHS resource use was highest for physiotherapy and GP visits, and work-related productivity loss highest from a societal perspective. The sciatica group was associated with significantly higher work-related productivity costs. Cost was significantly associated with factors such as self-rated general health and care received as part of the study, while quality of life was significantly predicted by self-rated general health, and pain intensity, depression, and disability scores. Conclusions Our results contribute to understanding the economics of low back- related leg pain and sciatica and may provide guidance for future actions on cost reduction and health care improvement strategies. Trial registration 13/09/2011 Retrospectively registered; ISRCTN62880786