SOCIAL COHESION, TRANSPORTATION, AND PARTICIPATION IN SOCIAL ACTIVITIES AMONG OLDER ADULTS

Objectives: The purpose of this research is to examine the role that social cohesion and access (conceptualized as mobility and transportation) plays on participation in social activities (i.e., visiting friends/family, attending religious services, participating in organizations, and going out for enjoyment). Participation in valued, social activities promotes of well-being through social interactions and the maintenance of personally meaningful relationships and lifestyles. Methods: Data from the National Health and Aging Trends (NHATS) study were used. The NHATS is representative of U.S. Medicare recipients ages 65 and older. The NHATS collects information on health and participation as well as detailed environmental measures, which makes it well suited for this research. Results: Higher ratings of social cohesion were associated with higher cumulative odds of participating in social activities among older adults, net of sociodemographic characteristics, personal network size, neighborhood disorder, and health factors. Taking public transportation services and walking places were associated with higher cumulative odds of participating in social activities. An interaction between social cohesion and walking places was significant (p=0.002). Older adults who reported high levels of social cohesion and walked to get around their community were more likely to participate in social activities compared with those reporting low social cohesion and walking as a transportation. Discussion: This research provides evidence that socially cohesive neighborhoods enable greater access to social activities through transportation services. Offering a range of transportation services is only piece of creating an age-friendly community—older adults must also feel comfortable using these options

Interaction of amiodarone and desethylamiodarone with solubilized nuclear thyroid hormone receptors

The mechanisms of action of the potent antiarrhythmic drug amiodarone are unknown. However, amiodarone and its abundant metabolite, desethylamiodarone, bear a striking structural resemblance to thyroid hormones. In addition, certain cardiac electrophysiologic effects of amiodarone treatment are similar to those of hypothyroidism. These facts suggest that amiodarone or desethylamiodarone could be acting, in part, by blocking thyroid hormone action. Because thyroid hormones are known to act through nuclear receptor prqteins, the binding of amiodarone and desethylamiodarone was measured to nuclear extracts derived from human lymphocytes, bovine atrium and ventricle and rat liver.The capacity of increasing concentrations of amiodarone and desethylamiodarone nuclear extracts to block receptor binding of radiolabeled triiodothyronine (T3) in a standard in vitro competition assay was tested. Nuclear extracts demonstrated only minimal binding to amiodarone. However, all receptor preparations had substantial affinities (KD) for the desethyl analog: lymphocyte, 8.6 μM; atrium, 35.0 μM; ventricle, 26.9 μM and liver, 8.6 μM. Desethylamiodarone accumulates in very large quantities in parenchymatous organs during long-term amiodarone treatment. Taking its usual therapeutic serum level (about 4 μMor 2.7 μg/ml) as an estimate of intranuclear concentration, desethylamiodarone would partially saturate nuclear thyroid hormone receptors in several different tissues, including the heart.Thus, amiodarone treatment may exert some of its electrophysiologic effects by metabolic conversion to desethylamiodarone. This metabolite may then exclude thyroid hormone from nuclear receptor sites within the myocardium

Staying Connected: Alternative Transportation Use, Neighborhoods, and Social Participation Among Older Americans

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: A wealth of empirical evidence documents improved health among older adults who participate in social activities. Alternative transportation can serve as a bridge linking older adults to social activities and improving person-environment fit. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Using Waves 1-8 of the National Health and Aging Trends Study, this research examines whether alternative transportation use is associated with participation in diverse social activities among a sample of Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 or older. Additionally, this research explores whether the effect of transportation use varies across neighborhood environments. We analyzed individual trajectories of participation in social activities by estimating 2-level growth curve models. RESULTS: The use of public transportation, paratransit, getting a ride, or walking/using wheelchair/scooter to get places was associated with participating in more types of social activities. Respondents who used alternative transportation had less steep declines in participation. The effect of getting rides and using paratransit services was more pronounced among respondents living in disordered neighborhoods. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: This research underscores the importance of alternative transportation use and the neighborhood context for participation among older adults. Age-friendly initiatives aimed at fostering greater community engagement should think broadly about the role of multiple forms of transportation

Rethinking climate engineering categorization in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation

The portfolio of approaches to respond to the challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change has broadened beyond mitigation and adaptation with the recent discussion of potential climate engineering options. How to define and categorize climate engineering options has been a recurring issue in both public and specialist discussions. We assert here that current definitions of mitigation, adaptation, and climate engineering are ambiguous, overlap with each other and thus contribute to confusing the discourse on how to tackle anthropogenic climate change. We propose a new and more inclusive categorization into five different classes: anthropogenic emissions reductions (AER), territorial or domestic removal of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases (D-GGR), trans-territorial removal of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases (T-GGR), regional to planetary targeted climate modification (TCM), and climate change adaptation measures (including local targeted climate and environmental modification, abbreviated CCAM). Thus, we suggest that techniques for domestic greenhouse gas removal might better be thought of as forming a separate category alongside more traditional mitigation techniques that consist of emissions reductions. Local targeted climate modification can be seen as an adaptation measure as long as there are no detectable remote environmental effects. In both cases, the scale and intensity of action are essential attributes from the technological, climatic, and political viewpoints. While some of the boundaries in this revised classification depend on policy and judgement, it offers a foundation for debating on how to define and categorize climate engineering options and differentiate them from both mitigation and adaptation measures to climate change

Qatar-2: A K dwarf orbited by a transiting hot Jupiter and a more massive companion in an outer orbit

We report the discovery and initial characterization of Qatar-2b, a hot Jupiter transiting a V = 13.3 mag K dwarf in a circular orbit with a short period, P_ b = 1.34 days. The mass and radius of Qatar-2b are M_p = 2.49 M_j and R_p = 1.14 R_j, respectively. Radial-velocity monitoring of Qatar-2 over a span of 153 days revealed the presence of a second companion in an outer orbit. The Systemic Console yielded plausible orbits for the outer companion, with periods on the order of a year and a companion mass of at least several M_j. Thus Qatar-2 joins the short but growing list of systems with a transiting hot Jupiter and an outer companion with a much longer period. This system architecture is in sharp contrast to that found by Kepler for multi-transiting systems, which are dominated by objects smaller than Neptune, usually with tightly spaced orbits that must be nearly coplanar

The Kepler Smear Campaign: Light curves for 102 Very Bright Stars

We present the first data release of the Kepler Smear Campaign, using collateral 'smear' data obtained in the Kepler four-year mission to reconstruct light curves of 102 stars too bright to have been otherwise targeted. We describe the pipeline developed to extract and calibrate these light curves, and show that we attain photometric precision comparable to stars analyzed by the standard pipeline in the nominal Kepler mission. In this paper, aside from publishing the light curves of these stars, we focus on 66 red giants for which we detect solar-like oscillations, characterizing 33 of these in detail with spectroscopic chemical abundances and asteroseismic masses as benchmark stars. We also classify the whole sample, finding nearly all to be variable, with classical pulsations and binary effects. All source code, light curves, TRES spectra, and asteroseismic and stellar parameters are publicly available as a Kepler legacy sample.Comment: 35 pages, accepted ApJ

Producing interventions for AIDS-affected young people in Lesotho's schools: Scalar relations and power differentials

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Geoforum. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Children and youth are a key target group for interventions to address southern Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Such interventions are frequently implemented through schools, and are often complex products of negotiation between a range of institutional actors including international agencies, NGOs, government departments and individual schools. These institutions not only stand in different (horizontally scaled) spatial relationships to students in schools; they also appear to operate at different hierarchical levels. Empirical research with policy makers and practitioners in Lesotho, however, reveals how interventions are produced through flows of knowledge, funding and personnel within and between institutions that make it difficult to assert that any intervention is manifestly more international or more local than any other. Scale theory offers the metaphor of a network or web which usefully serves to move attention away from discrete organisations, sectors and scalar positionings and onto the relationships and flows between them. Nevertheless, organisations and development interventions are often partly structured in scalar hierarchical ways that express substantive power differentials and shape the forms of interaction that take place, albeit not binding them to strict binaries or nested hierarchies. A modified network metaphor is useful in aiding understanding of how particular interventions are produced through intermeshing scales and diverse fluid interactions, and why they take the form they do.RGS-IB

The Kepler-10 planetary system revisited by HARPS-N: A hot rocky world and a solid Neptune-mass planet

Kepler-10b was the first rocky planet detected by the Kepler satellite and con- firmed with radial velocity follow-up observations from Keck-HIRES. The mass of the planet was measured with a precision of around 30%, which was insufficient to constrain models of its internal structure and composition in detail. In addition to Kepler-10b, a second planet transiting the same star with a period of 45 days was sta- tistically validated, but the radial velocities were only good enough to set an upper limit of 20 Mearth for the mass of Kepler-10c. To improve the precision on the mass for planet b, the HARPS-N Collaboration decided to observe Kepler-10 intensively with the HARPS-N spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo on La Palma. In to- tal, 148 high-quality radial-velocity measurements were obtained over two observing seasons. These new data allow us to improve the precision of the mass determina- tion for Kepler-10b to 15%. With a mass of 3.33 +/- 0.49 Mearth and an updated radius of 1.47 +0.03 -0.02 Rearth, Kepler-10b has a density of 5.8 +/- 0.8 g cm-3, very close to the value -0.02 predicted by models with the same internal structure and composition as the Earth. We were also able to determine a mass for the 45-day period planet Kepler-10c, with an even better precision of 11%. With a mass of 17.2 +/- 1.9 Mearth and radius of 2.35 +0.09 -0.04 Rearth, -0.04 Kepler-10c has a density of 7.1 +/- 1.0 g cm-3. Kepler-10c appears to be the first strong evidence of a class of more massive solid planets with longer orbital periods.Comment: 44 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

A red giant orbiting a black hole

We report spectroscopic and photometric follow-up of a dormant black hole (BH) candidate from Gaia DR3. We show that the system, which we call Gaia BH2, contains a $\sim 1M_{\odot}$ red giant and a dark companion with mass $M_2 = 8.9\pm 0.3\,M_{\odot}$ that is very likely a BH. The orbital period, $P_{\rm orb} = 1277$ days, is much longer than that of any previously studied BH binary. Our radial velocity (RV) follow-up over a 6-month period spans most of the orbit's dynamic range in RV and is in excellent agreement with predictions of the Gaia solution. UV imaging and high-resolution optical spectra rule out all plausible luminous companions that could explain the orbit. The star is a bright ($G=12.3$), slightly metal-poor ($\rm [Fe/H]=-0.22$) low-luminosity giant ($T_{\rm eff}=4600\,\rm K$; $R = 7.9\,R_{\odot}$; $\log\left[g/\left({\rm cm\,s^{-2}}\right)\right] = 2.6$). The binary's orbit is moderately eccentric ($e=0.52$). The giant is strongly enhanced in $\alpha-$elements, with $\rm [\alpha/Fe] = +0.26$, but the system's Galactocentric orbit is typical of the thin disk. We obtained X-ray and radio nondetections of the source near periastron, which support BH accretion models in which the net accretion rate at the horizon is much lower than the Bondi-Hoyle-Lyttleton rate. At a distance of 1.16 kpc, Gaia BH2 is the second-nearest known BH, after Gaia BH1. Its orbit -- like that of Gaia BH1 -- seems too wide to have formed through common envelope evolution. Gaia BH1 and BH2 have orbital periods at opposite edges of the Gaia DR3 sensitivity curve, perhaps hinting at a bimodal intrinsic period distribution for wide BH binaries. Dormant BH binaries like Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2 likely significantly outnumber their close, X-ray bright cousins, but their formation pathways remain uncertain.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures. Submitted to MNRA

Briefing: Towards exploring profession-specific BIM challenges in the UK

Building information modelling (BIM) has been proposed as an enabler for greater efficiency and effectiveness within the UK construction industry, providing digital management of construction data throughout the project life cycle. The potential benefits of BIM have been widely discussed in published literature but relatively less attention has been paid to the discipline/profession-specific challenges of wider industry adoption. Further studies, such as the authors' ongoing research, could help to remedy this