The impact of superphosphate and surface-applied lime on the profitability and sustainability of wool production on the tablelands of NSW

Soil acidification is one of the major forms of soil degradation in higher rainfall areas of the tablelands of NSW. A grazing experiment was conducted near Sutton, NSW, to assess the effect of various rates of superphosphate, lime, sewage ash and stocking rates on wool production and sustainability between 1999 and 2008. The results from the discounted cash flow analysis show that the net present value of the treatment without lime, the lower rate of superphosphate and the lowest stocking rate returned the highest net present value of $266.30/ha. Raising the application of superphosphate from 125kg/ha every two to three years to 250kg/ha every year on un-limed and limed soil reduced the net present value by$278.70/ha and $249.30/ha, respectively. The addition of lime at the rate of 4t/ha on un-limed soil at the low superphosphate level reduced the net present value by about$234.60/ha. The net present value fell by $205.24/ha when the level of superphosphate rate increased to 250kg/ha every year. The net present value decreased as the level of stocking rate increased. We conclude that wool producers will be unlikely to use lime to ameliorate acid soil, even though production will not be sustainable, unless there are more favourable input and commodity prices in the market and government intervention.economic, acid soil, lime, superphosphate, sewage ash, stocking rate, policy,

Health First: An evidence-based alcohol strategy for the UK

Alcohol is taken for granted in the UK today. It is easy to get hold of, increasingly affordable, advertised everywhere and accepted by many as an integral part of daily life. Yet, despite this, the great majority of the population recognise the harm that alcohol causes. They believe that drinking damages health, drives anti social behaviour, harms children and families and creates huge costs for the NHS and the Police. They are right. Every year in the UK, there are thousands of deaths and over a million hospital admissions related to drinking. More than two in five (44%) violent crimes are committed under the influence of alcohol, as are 37% of domesti c violence incidents. One fifth of all violent crime occurs in or near pubs and clubs and 45% of adults avoid town centres at night because of drunken behaviour. The personal, social and economic cost of alcohol has been estimated to be up to £55bn for England and £7.5bn for Scotland. None of this should be taken for granted. The impact of drinking on public health and community safety is so great that radical steps are needed to change our relationship with alcohol. We need to imagine a society where low or no alcohol consumpti on is the norm, drunkenness is socially unacceptable and town centres are safe and welcoming places for everyone to use. Our vision is for a safer, healthier and happier world where the harm caused by alcohol is minimised. This vision is achievable. But only if we tackle the primary drivers of alcohol consumption. The evidence is clear: the most effective way to reduce the harm from alcohol is to reduce the affordability, availability and attractiveness of alcohol products. It is not enough to limit the damage once people are drunk, dependent, ill or dying. We need to intervene earlier in order to reduce consumption across the entire population. The tools are available. The ‘four Ps' of the marketing mix - price, product, promotion and place - are used by alcohol producers and retailers to increase their sales of alcohol. They can also be used by government to reduce alcohol sales, alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harm. Alcohol taxes are an effective public health measure as they raise prices and suppress demand. However, if they do not keep pace with both inflation and incomes, alcohol products will become more affordable over time. This has been the case in the UK. Deep discounting by retailers has also driven down the price of alcohol and encouraged heavy drinkers to maintain dangerous levels of consumption. These problems need to be tackled by a combinati on of more effective fiscal policy and controls on pricing and discounting. Alcohol products are an extraordinary anomaly. Unlike most food products, they are both remarkably harmful and excepti onally lightly regulated. As with other toxic products, the product label ought to communicate the content of the product and the risks of its consumpti on. Regulation should drive out products that appeal to young people while also incentivising the development and sale of lower strength products. The pervasive marketing of alcohol products in the UK is indefensible. Current restrictions are woefully inadequate: children and young people are regularly exposed to alcohol adverti sing in both old and new media. Only a complete ban on all alcohol advertising and sponsorship will make a lasting diff erence. Licensing practice in the UK is out of date. The focus on pubs and bars has allowed shops and supermarkets to become the dominant players in alcohol sales. Consequently, alcohol is now more available than it has ever been. This has driven pre-loading: getting drunk on cheap, shop-bought alcohol before heading out to late-opening night life. Licensing must focus on public health and seek to control the overall availability of alcohol as well as the effects of drunkenness. Beyond these populati on-level approaches, many more targeted measures are needed to reduce alcohol-related harm. Early interventi on by health and social care professionals is an important and underexploited opportunity to prevent problems developing. Stronger drink driving measures are also required. All these measures are needed. Together, they provide a template for an integrated and comprehensive strategy to tackle the harm from alcohol in the UK.Additional co-authors: Gerry McElwee, Dr Kieran Moriarty CBE, Dr Robin Purshouse, Dr Peter Rice, Alison Rogers, George Roycroft , Chit Selvarajah, Don Shenker, Eric Appleby, Dr Nick Sheron, and Colin Shevill

The correlation between reading and mathematics ability at age twelve has a substantial genetic component

Dissecting how genetic and environmental influences impact on learning is helpful for maximizing numeracy and literacy. Here we show, using twin and genome-wide analysis, that there is a substantial genetic component to children’s ability in reading and mathematics, and estimate that around one half of the observed correlation in these traits is due to shared genetic effects (so-called Generalist Genes). Thus, our results highlight the potential role of the learning environment in contributing to differences in a child’s cognitive abilities at age twelve

Demystifying academics to enhance university-business collaborations in environmental science

In countries globally there is intense political interest in fostering effective university-business collaborations, but there has been scant attention devoted to exactly how an individual scientist's workload (i.e. specified tasks) and incentive structures (i.e. assessment criteria) may act as a key barrier to this. To investigate this an original, empirical dataset is derived from UK job specifications and promotion criteria, which distil universities' varied drivers into requirements upon academics. This work reveals the nature of the severe challenge posed by a heavily time-constrained culture; specifically, tension exists between opportunities presented by working with business and non-optional duties (e.g. administration and teaching). Thus, to justify the time to work with business, such work must inspire curiosity and facilitate future novel science in order to mitigate its conflict with the overriding imperative for academics to publish. It must also provide evidence of real-world changes (i.e. impact), and ideally other reportable outcomes (e.g. official status as a business' advisor), to feed back into the scientist's performance appraisals. Indicatively, amid 20-50 key duties, typical full-time scientists may be able to free up to 0.5 day per week for work with business. Thus specific, pragmatic actions, including short-term and time-efficient steps, are proposed in a "user guide"to help initiate and nurture a long-term collaboration between an early- to mid-career environmental scientist and a practitioner in the insurance sector. These actions are mapped back to a tailored typology of impact and a newly created representative set of appraisal criteria to explain how they may be effective, mutually beneficial and overcome barriers. Throughout, the focus is on environmental science, with illustrative detail provided through the example of natural hazard risk modelling in the insurance sector. However, a new conceptual model of academics' behaviour is developed, fusing perspectives from literature on academics' motivations and performance assessment, which we propose is internationally applicable and transferable between sectors. Sector-specific details (e.g. list of relevant impacts and user guide) may serve as templates for how people may act differently to work more effectively together

Genome-wide association study identifies a variant in HDAC9 associated with large vessel ischemic stroke

Genetic factors have been implicated in stroke risk but few replicated associations have been reported. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in ischemic stroke and its subtypes in 3,548 cases and 5,972 controls, all of European ancestry. Replication of potential signals was performed in 5,859 cases and 6,281 controls. We replicated reported associations between variants close to PITX2 and ZFHX3 with cardioembolic stroke, and a 9p21 locus with large vessel stroke. We identified a novel association for a SNP within the histone deacetylase 9(HDAC9) gene on chromosome 7p21.1 which was associated with large vessel stroke including additional replication in a further 735 cases and 28583 controls (rs11984041, combined P = 1.87×10−11, OR=1.42 (95% CI) 1.28-1.57). All four loci exhibit evidence for heterogeneity of effect across the stroke subtypes, with some, and possibly all, affecting risk for only one subtype. This suggests differing genetic architectures for different stroke subtypes

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis

A Trouble Shared Is a Trouble Halved: Social Context and Status Affect Pain in Mouse Dyads

In mice behavioral response to pain is modulated by social status. Recently, social context also has been shown to affect pain sensitivity. In our study, we aimed to investigate the effects of interaction between status and social context in dyads of outbred CD-1 male mice in which the dominance/submission relationship was stable. Mice were assessed for pain response in a formalin (1% concentration) test either alone (individually tested-IT), or in pairs of dominant and subordinate mice. In the latter condition, they could be either both injected (BI) or only one injected (OI) with formalin. We observed a remarkable influence of social context on behavioral response to painful stimuli regardless of the social status of the mice. In the absence of differences between OI and IT conditions, BI mice exhibited half as much Paw-licking behavior than OI group. As expected, subordinates were hypoalgesic in response to the early phase of the formalin effects compared to dominants. Clear cut-differences in coping strategies of dominants and subordinates appeared. The former were more active, whereas the latter were more passive. Finally, analysis of behavior of the non-injected subjects (the observers) in the OI dyads revealed that dominant observers were more often involved in Self-grooming behavior upon observation of their subordinate partner in pain. This was not the case for subordinate mice observing the pain response of their dominant partner. In contrast, subordinate observers Stared at the dominant significantly more frequently compared to observer dominants in other dyads. The observation of a cagemate in pain significantly affected the observer's behavior. Additionally, the quality of observer's response was also modulated by the dominance/submission relationship

Trial baseline characteristics of a cluster randomised controlled trial of a school-located obesity prevention programme; the Healthy Lifestyles Programme (HeLP) trial

This is the final version of the article. Available from BioMed Central via the DOI in this record.Background We have developed a healthy lifestyles programme (HeLP) for primary school aged children (9–10 years), currently being evaluated in a definitive cluster randomised controlled trial. This paper descriptively presents the baseline characteristics of trial children (BMI, waist circumference, % body fat, diet and physical activity) by gender, cluster level socio-economic status, school size and time of recruitment into the trial. Methods Schools were recruited from across the South West of England and allocated 1:1 to either intervention (HeLP) or control (usual practice) stratified by the proportion of children eligible for free school meals (FSM, 1 Year 5 class). The primary outcome is change in body mass index standard deviation score (BMI sds) at 24 months post-randomisation. Secondary outcomes are BMI sds at 18 months, waist circumference and percentage body fat sds at 18 and 24 months, proportion of children classified as underweight, overweight and obese at 18 and 24 months, physical activity (for a sub-sample) and food intake at 18 months. Results At baseline 11.4% and 13.6% of children were categorised as overweight or obese respectively. A higher percentage of girls than boys (25.3% vs 24.8%) and children from schools in FSM category 2 (28.2% vs 23.2%) were overweight or obese. Children were consuming a mean (range) of 4.15 (0–13) energy dense snacks (EDS) and 3.23 (0–9) healthy snacks (HS) per day with children from schools in FSM category 2 consuming more EDS and negative food markers and less HS and positive food markers. Children spent an average 53.6 min per day (11.9 to 124.8) in MVPA and thirteen hours (779.3 min) per day (11 h to 15 h) doing less than ‘light’ intensity activity. Less than 5% of children achieved the Departments of Health’s recommendation of 60 min of MVPA every day. Conclusion We have excellent completeness of baseline data for all measures and have achieved compliance to accelerometry not seen before in other large scale studies. Our anthropometric baseline data is representative of local and national data for children this age and reflects the gender and socio-economic variations expected of children this age in relation to physical activity and weight status.The definitive trial of HeLP is funded by the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Public Health Research Programme (10/3010/01) and a full report will be published on the NIHR website. Intervention materials and delivery was funded by the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry. PenCLAHRC provided methodological support during the transition from the exploratory trial to the definitive evaluation