Lost Gems: Identifying Rare and Unusual Monographs in a University\u27s Circulating Collection

Identifying and evaluating the oldest published content held by the library using a set of transfer criteria provided a means to systematically evaluate and, if necessary, move rare or unusual content into a more secure location. The process enabled us to correct cataloging errors, identify and address items with condition issues, be familiar with the library\u27s unique holdings and finally, to identify and add content distinctly associated with EMU\u27s history to the University Archives and Special Collections

Dance! Don’t Fall – Preventing Falls and Promoting Exercise at Home

Falling is a serious danger to older adults that is usually only addressed after a person has fallen, when doctors administer clinical tests to determine the patient´s risk of falling again. Having the technological capability of performing fall risk assessment tests with a smartphone, the authors set out to design a mobile application that would enable users to monitor their risk themselves and consequently prevent falls from occurring. The authors conducted a literature review and two observation sessions before beginning the iterative design process that resulted in the Dance! Don’t Fall (DDF) game, a mobile application that enables users to both monitor their fall risk and actively reduce it through fun and easy exercise

Floral sex ratios and gynomonoecy in Aster (Asteraceae)

Gynomonoecy is the sexual system in which female and bisexual flowers occur on the same plant. This system has received little attention despite the considerable work on other plant sexual systems in the past few decades. Our study examines one hypothesized advantage of having two flower types on a plant, namely that this arrangement permits flexibility in allocation of resources to male and female reproductive functions. We examined 16 species of Aster (Asteraceae), a genus of gynomonoecious, perennial herbs. Plants in this genus produce heads consisting of a whorl of female flowers around a cluster of bisexual flowers. Among field-grown plants we found no evidence that plant size, date, position of heads, rainfall, or shade influenced the proportion of female flowers. A series of greenhouse experiments likewise revealed no large or consistent effects of light, nutrients, or position of heads on the proportion of ray flowers. While floral ratios proved very stable in the face of environmental and physiological variables, they exhibited significant variation among plants and among sibships in most species. We conclude that the presence of two flower types in gynomonoecious asters is not advantageous in permitting flexibility in allocation of resources to male and female functions. We believe that the advantage of the female flowers in aster heads lies either in reducing pollen - pistil interference or in attracting pollinators

Investigating activity zones on smartphones: An empirical study with older adults

This paper investigates and extends existing knowledge on older adults' (65+) gestural interaction with smartphones. Specifically, it looks at the effect touch targets location has on older adults' performance of tap and swipe gestures. Two separate experiments, each with 40 participants, showed older adults' performance for tap is best toward the center, right edge, and bottom right corner of the smartphone's display. For horizontal swipe participants' performance is better with targets toward the bottom half of the display, while for vertical swipe performance is better with targets toward the right half of the display

Design recommendations for tv user interfaces for older adults: Findings from the eCAALYX project

While guidelines for designing websites and iTV applications for older adults exist, no previous work has suggested how to best design TV user interfaces UIsthat are accessible to older adults. Building upon pertinent guidelines from related areas, this paper presents thirteen recommendations for designing UIs for TV applications for older adults. These recommendations are the result of iterative design, testing, and development of a TV-based health system for older adults that aims to provide a holistic solution to improve quality of life for older adults with chronic conditions by fostering their autonomy and reducing hospitalization costs. The authors' work and experience shows that widely known UI design guidelines unsurprisingly apply to the design of TV-based applications for older adults, but acquire a crucial importance in this context

Spatial transcriptomics reveals novel genes during the remodelling of the embryonic human arterial valves.

Abnormalities of the arterial valves, including bicuspid aortic valve (BAV) are amongst the most common congenital defects and are a significant cause of morbidity as well as predisposition to disease in later life. Despite this, and compounded by their small size and relative inaccessibility, there is still much to understand about how the arterial valves form and remodel during embryogenesis, both at the morphological and genetic level. Here we set out to address this in human embryos, using Spatial Transcriptomics (ST). We show that ST can be used to investigate the transcriptome of the developing arterial valves, circumventing the problems of accurately dissecting out these tiny structures from the developing embryo. We show that the transcriptome of CS16 and CS19 arterial valves overlap considerably, despite being several days apart in terms of human gestation, and that expression data confirm that the great majority of the most differentially expressed genes are valve-specific. Moreover, we show that the transcriptome of the human arterial valves overlaps with that of mouse atrioventricular valves from a range of gestations, validating our dataset but also highlighting novel genes, including four that are not found in the mouse genome and have not previously been linked to valve development. Importantly, our data suggests that valve transcriptomes are under-represented when using commonly used databases to filter for genes important in cardiac development; this means that causative variants in valve-related genes may be excluded during filtering for genomic data analyses for, for example, BAV. Finally, we highlight "novel" pathways that likely play important roles in arterial valve development, showing that mouse knockouts of RBP1 have arterial valve defects. Thus, this study has confirmed the utility of ST for studies of the developing heart valves and broadens our knowledge of the genes and signalling pathways important in human valve development

DEGs in the combined CS16/19 cushion/valve cluster.

Genes are ordered from highest (most differentially expressed) to lowest. (XLSX)</p

Mapping back of perfect markers to CS19 human valve sections.

Perfect marker genes (see Fig 2) for a range of cardiac progenitor cell types (neural crest cells), differentiated cardiac cell types (cardiomyocytes, cushion tissue, fibrous tissue, endocardium, smooth muscle cells), haematopoietic cell types that are known to be found in the heart (red blood cells, lymphocytes, macrophages) and those that are known to be similar to cushion tissue (bone, cartilage), were mapped back to the CS19 human valve sections used for the ST analysis. (TIF)</p