Fruit, vegetable and vitamin C intakes and plasma vitamin C: cross-sectional associations with insulin resistance and glycaemia in 9-10 year-old children.

AIM: To examine whether low circulating vitamin C concentrations and low fruit and vegetable intakes were associated with insulin resistance and other Type 2 diabetes risk markers in childhood. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional, school-based study in 2025 UK children aged 9-10 years, predominantly of white European, South-Asian and black African origin. A 24-h dietary recall was used to assess fruit, vegetable and vitamin C intakes. Height, weight and fat mass were measured and a fasting blood sample collected to measure plasma vitamin C concentrations and Type 2 diabetes risk markers. RESULTS: In analyses adjusting for confounding variables (including socio-economic status), a one interquartile range higher plasma vitamin C concentration (30.9 μmol/l) was associated with a 9.6% (95% CI 6.5, 12.6%) lower homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance value, 0.8% (95% CI 0.4, 1.2%) lower fasting glucose, 4.5% (95% CI 3.2, 5.9%) lower urate and 2.2% (95% CI 0.9, 3.4%) higher HDL cholesterol. HbA1c concentration was 0.6% (95% CI 0.2, 1.0%) higher. Dietary fruit, vegetable and total vitamin C intakes were not associated with any Type 2 diabetes risk markers. Lower plasma vitamin C concentrations in South-Asian and black African-Caribbean children could partly explain their higher insulin resistance. CONCLUSIONS: Lower plasma vitamin C concentrations are associated with insulin resistance and could partly explain ethnic differences in insulin resistance. Experimental studies are needed to establish whether increasing plasma vitamin C can help prevent Type 2 diabetes at an early stage

A Novel, All-Optical Tool for Controllable and Non- Destructive Poration of Cells with Single-Micron Resolution

We demonstrate controllable poration within ≈1 µm regions of individual cells, mediated by a near-IR laser interacting with thin-layer amorphous silicon substrates. This technique will allow new experiments in single-cell biology, particularly in neuroscience. As our understanding of the fundamental mechanistic processes underpinning biology expands, so does the need for high-precision tools to allow the dissection of the heterogeneity and stochastic processes that dominate at the single- and sub-cellular level. Here, we demonstrate a highly controllable and reproducible optical technique for inducing poration within specific regions of a target cell’s plasma membrane, permitting localized delivery of payloads, depolarization and lysis experiments to be conducted in unprecedented detail. Experiments support a novel mechanism for the process, based upon a thermally-induced change triggered by the interactions of a near-IR laser with a biocompatible thin film substrate at powers substantially below that used in standard optoporation experiments

Tightly Secure Ring-LWE Based Key Encapsulation with Short Ciphertexts

We provide a tight security proof for an IND-CCA Ring-LWE based Key Encapsulation Mechanism that is derived from a generic construction of Dent (IMA Cryptography and Coding, 2003). Such a tight reduction is not known for the generic construction. The resulting scheme has shorter ciphertexts than can be achieved with other generic constructions of Dent or by using the well-known Fujisaki-Okamoto constructions (PKC 1999, Crypto 1999). Our tight security proof is obtained by reducing to the security of the underlying Ring-LWE problem, avoiding an intermediate reduction to a CPA-secure encryption scheme. The proof technique maybe of interest for other schemes based on LWE and Ring-LWE

The transcriptional response of Caenorhabditis elegans to ivermectin exposure identifies novel genes involved in the response to reduced food intake

We have examined the transcriptional response of Caenorhabditis elegans following exposure to the anthelmintic drug ivermectin (IVM) using whole genome microarrays and real-time QPCR. Our original aim was to identify candidate molecules involved in IVM metabolism and/or excretion. For this reason the IVM tolerant strain, DA1316, was used to minimise transcriptomic changes related to the phenotype of drug exposure. However, unlike equivalent work with benzimidazole drugs, very few of the induced genes were members of xenobiotic metabolising enzyme families. Instead, the transcriptional response was dominated by genes associated with fat mobilization and fatty acid metabolism including catalase, esterase, and fatty acid CoA synthetase genes. This is consistent with the reduction in pharyngeal pumping, and consequential reduction in food intake, upon exposure of DA1316 worms to IVM. Genes with the highest fold change in response to IVM exposure, cyp-37B1, mtl-1 and scl-2, were comparably up-regulated in response to short–term food withdrawal (4 hr) independent of IVM exposure, and GFP reporter constructs confirm their expression in tissues associated with fat storage (intestine and hypodermis). These experiments have serendipitously identified novel genes involved in an early response of C. elegans to reduced food intake and may provide insight into similar processes in higher organisms

Relic densities including Sommerfeld enhancements in the MSSM

We have developed a general formalism to compute Sommerfeld enhancement (SE) factors for a multi-state system of fermions, in all possible spin configurations and with generic long-range interactions. We show how to include such SE effects in an accurate calculation of the thermal relic density for WIMP dark matter candidates. We apply the method to the MSSM and perform a numerical study of the relic abundance of neutralinos with arbitrary composition and including the SE due to the exchange of the W and Z bosons, photons and Higgses. We find that the relic density can be suppressed by a factor of a few in a seizable region of the parameter space, mostly for Wino-like neutralino with mass of a few TeV, and up to an order of magnitude close to a resonance.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures; table 1 corrected and rearranged, numerical results practically unchanged, matches published versio

(One) Failure Is Not an Option:Bootstrapping the Search for Failures in Lattice-Based Encryption Schemes

Lattice-based encryption schemes are often subject to the possibility of decryption failures, in which valid encryptions are decrypted incorrectly. Such failures, in large number, leak information about the secret key, enabling an attack strategy alternative to pure lattice reduction. Extending the failure boosting\u27\u27 technique of D\u27Anvers et al. in PKC 2019, we propose an approach that we call directional failure boosting\u27\u27 that uses previously found failing ciphertexts\u27\u27 to accelerate the search for new ones. We analyse in detail the case where the lattice is defined over polynomial ring modules quotiented by and demonstrate it on a simple Mod-LWE-based scheme parametrized à la Kyber768/Saber. We show that, using our technique, for a given secret key (single-target setting), the cost of searching for additional failing ciphertexts after one or more have already been found, can be sped up dramatically. We thus demonstrate that, in this single-target model, these schemes should be designed so that it is hard to even obtain one decryption failure. Besides, in a wider security model where there are many target secret keys (multi-target setting), our attack greatly improves over the state of the art

Ideal and actual involvement of community pharmacists in health promotion and prevention: a cross-sectional study in Quebec, Canada

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>An increased interest is observed in broadening community pharmacists' role in public health. To date, little information has been gathered in Canada on community pharmacists' perceptions of their role in health promotion and prevention; however, such data are essential to the development of public-health programs in community pharmacy. A cross-sectional study was therefore conducted to explore the perceptions of community pharmacists in urban and semi-urban areas regarding their ideal and actual levels of involvement in providing health-promotion and prevention services and the barriers to such involvement.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Using a five-step modified Dillman's tailored design method, a questionnaire with 28 multiple-choice or open-ended questions (11 pages plus a cover letter) was mailed to a random sample of 1,250 pharmacists out of 1,887 community pharmacists practicing in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) and surrounding areas. It included questions on pharmacists' ideal level of involvement in providing health-promotion and preventive services; which services were actually offered in their pharmacy, the employees involved, the frequency, and duration of the services; the barriers to the provision of these services in community pharmacy; their opinion regarding the most appropriate health professionals to provide them; and the characteristics of pharmacists, pharmacies and their clientele.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In all, 571 out of 1,234 (46.3%) eligible community pharmacists completed and returned the questionnaire. Most believed they should be very involved in health promotion and prevention, particularly in smoking cessation (84.3%); screening for hypertension (81.8%), diabetes (76.0%) and dyslipidemia (56.9%); and sexual health (61.7% to 89.1%); however, fewer respondents reported actually being very involved in providing such services (5.7% [lifestyle, including smoking cessation], 44.5%, 34.8%, 6.5% and 19.3%, respectively). The main barriers to the provision of these services in current practice were lack of: time (86.1%), coordination with other health care professionals (61.1%), staff or resources (57.2%), financial compensation (50.8%), and clinical tools (45.5%).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Although community pharmacists think they should play a significant role in health promotion and prevention, they recognize a wide gap between their ideal and actual levels of involvement. The efficient integration of primary-care pharmacists and pharmacies into public health cannot be envisioned without addressing important organizational barriers.</p