Cardio-metabolic impact of changing sitting, standing, and stepping in the workplace

According to cross-sectional and acute experimental evidence, reducing sitting time should improve cardio-metabolic health risk biomarkers. Furthermore, the improvements obtained may depend on whether sitting is replaced with standing or ambulatory activities. Based on data from the Stand Up Victoria multi-component workplace intervention, we examined this issue using compositional data analysis - a method that can examine and compare all activity changes simultaneously.Participants receiving the intervention (n=136 ≥0.6 full-time equivalent desk-based workers, 65% women, mean±SD age=44.6 ±9.1 years from seven worksites) were asked to improve whole-of-day activity by standing up, sitting less and moving more. Their changes in the composition of daily waking hours (activPAL-assessed sitting, standing, stepping) were quantified, then tested for associations with concurrent changes in cardio-metabolic risk (CMR) scores and 14 biomarkers concerning body composition, glucose, insulin and lipid metabolism. Analyses were by mixed models, accounting for clustering (3 months, n=105-120; 12 months, n=80-97).Sitting reduction was significantly (

Moving from piecemeal accounting to a pragmatic economic approach to water pricing in Australia

It is often said that water is under-priced and that if the full cost of water were charged, water use would be more sustainable. Moving from a statement to actual practice requires a shift in thinking about the fundamental economics. Australia has embarked on a process of economic reform and part of the reform package in the water sector has required States within Australia to report on progress towards full cost pricing, including the set of costs and, in some circumstances, benefits, through changes to the environment. Economists refer to these costs and benefits as externalities. Identifying the potential set of externalities is context-specific and requires a multidisciplinary approach. In this paper the environmental externalities related to water use are described for the River Murray, the largest river in Australia. A pragmatic approach, grounded in economic principles, is suggested to incorporate externality costs in the price of water

Quantifying groundwater discharge to Cockburn River, southeastern Australia, using dissolved gas tracers 222Rn and SF6.

Groundwater discharge to the Cockburn River, southeast Australia, has been estimated from comparison of natural Rn activities in groundwater and river water, interpreted using a numerical flow model that simulates longitudinal radon activities as a function of groundwater inflow, hyporheic exchange, evaporation, gas exchange with the atmosphere, and radioactive decay. An injection of SF into the river to estimate the gas transfer velocity assisted in constraining the model. Previous estimates of groundwater inflow using Rn activities have not considered possible input of radon due to exchange between river water and water in the hyporheic zone beneath the streambed. In this paper, radon input due to hyporheic exchange is estimated from measurements of radon production by hyporheic zone sediments and rates of water exchange between the river and the hyporheic zone. Total groundwater inflow to the Cockburn River is estimated to be 18500 m /d, although failure to consider hyporheic exchange would cause overestimation of the volume of groundwater inflow by approximately 70%. Copyright 2006 by the American Geophysical Union. 222 222 3

Daly River NT, riparian vegetation water use

Made available by the Northern Territory Library via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT).Date:200

Element and nutrient mass-balances in a large semi-arid riverine lake system (the Lower Lakes, South Australia)

Perran Cook, Kane T. Aldridge, Sébastien Lamontagne, Justin D. Brookeshttp://trove.nla.gov.au/work/374699

Monitoring RNA dynamics in native transcriptional complexes

This work was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. JCP wishes to thank the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for support. C. P. G. thanks EPSRC and the University of St Andrews for a PhD scholarship.Cotranscriptional RNA folding is crucial for the timely control of biological processes, but because of its transient nature, its study has remained challenging. While single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer (smFRET) is unique to investigate transient RNA structures, its application to cotranscriptional studies has been limited to nonnative systems lacking RNA polymerase (RNAP)–dependent features, which are crucial for gene regulation. Here, we present an approach that enables site-specific labeling and smFRET studies of kilobase-length transcripts within native bacterial complexes. By monitoring Escherichia coli nascent riboswitches, we reveal an inverse relationship between elongation speed and metabolite-sensing efficiency and show that pause sites upstream of the translation start codon delimit a sequence hotspot for metabolite sensing during transcription. Furthermore, we demonstrate a crucial role of the bacterial RNAP actively delaying the formation, within the hotspot sequence, of competing structures precluding metabolite binding. Our approach allows the investigation of cotranscriptional regulatory mechanisms in bacterial and eukaryotic elongation complexes.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Sub 1 μm Pitch Achievement for Cu/SiO2 Hybrid Bonding

With hybrid bonding pitch reduction, many challenges are arising especially the ones related to Cu-Cu connections with submicron Cu pads. A methodology is presented here to achieve submicron hybrid bonding pitch starting from single Cu pad thermomechanical behavior study to quantifying Cu-Cu contact resistivity. Depending on the single crystal Cu orientation, several nanometers difference in total deformation is obtained. The Cu dishing limit should be restricted with respect to the lowest deformation. Contact resistivity studies allow to further refine the Cu dishing to get a contribution of contact resistivity below 10−11 Ω.cm2 . By respecting these criteria, a 100 % yield was achieved down to 0.81 µm Cu/SiO 2 hybrid bonding pitch. A successful method for the capacitance increase compensation with pitch reduction is also presented based on the adaptation of the geometric parameters of the hybrid bonding interconnects