The impact of contextual family risks on prisoners' children's behavioural outcomes and the potential protective role of family functioning moderators.

Research suggests that children of prisoners have an increased risk for behavioural and emotional problems. However, in a resilience approach, one should expect heterogeneous outcomes and thus apply a contextualized perspective. As this is rarely acknowledged in empirical research, the present study sought to fill this gap using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study on 801 children of imprisoned fathers. We explored the extent to which cumulative family risks measured during the first year of life (e.g., poverty and mental health problems) predicted behavioural outcomes at age 9 and whether potentially protective aspects of family functioning moderated the impact of these risk factors. Cumulative risk significantly predicted behavioural outcomes, but the associations were weak. No strong evidence of moderation was found. At low risk, mother-child closeness moderated behavioural outcomes. There was also some evidence of moderation by accumulated protective factors. Potential implications for policy and practice and challenges for further research are discussed.The authors would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for providing funding for this research, the organisers of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study Summer Data Workshop 2013 for their introduction to the dataset and Steve Lainé for his technical support.This is the final version. It first appeared from Taylor & Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2015.105037

Synthetic Biology of Multicellular Systems: New Platforms and Applications for Animal Cells and Organisms

Like life itself, synthetic biology began with unicellular organisms. Early synthetic biologists built genetic circuits in model prokaryotes and yeast because of their relative biological simplicity and ease of genetic manipulation. With superior genetic tools, faster generation times, and betterunderstood endogenous gene expression machinery, prokaryotes and yeast were (and remain) appealing hosts for the engineering of synthetic systems. Now in its second decade, synthetic biology in unicellular organisms has produced myriad synthetic genetic circuits, a number of industrial applications, and fundamental new biological insights unlikely to have emerged from nonsynthetic approaches

Morphogen gradient reconstitution reveals Hedgehog pathway design principles

In developing tissues, cells estimate their spatial position by sensing graded concentrations of diffusible signaling proteins called morphogens. Morphogen-sensing pathways exhibit diverse molecular architectures, whose roles in controlling patterning dynamics and precision have been unclear. In this work, combining cell-based in vitro gradient reconstitution, genetic rewiring, and mathematical modeling, we systematically analyzed the distinctive architectural features of the Sonic Hedgehog pathway. We found that the combination of double-negative regulatory logic and negative feedback through the PTCH receptor accelerates gradient formation and improves robustness to variation in the morphogen production rate compared with alternative designs. The ability to isolate morphogen patterning from concurrent developmental processes and to compare the patterning behaviors of alternative, rewired pathway architectures offers a powerful way to understand and engineer multicellular patterning

Morphogen gradient reconstitution reveals Hedgehog pathway design principles

In developing tissues, cells estimate their spatial position by sensing graded concentrations of diffusible signaling proteins called morphogens. Morphogen-sensing pathways exhibit diverse molecular architectures, whose roles in controlling patterning dynamics and precision have been unclear. In this work, combining cell-based in vitro gradient reconstitution, genetic rewiring, and mathematical modeling, we systematically analyzed the distinctive architectural features of the Sonic Hedgehog pathway. We found that the combination of double-negative regulatory logic and negative feedback through the PTCH receptor accelerates gradient formation and improves robustness to variation in the morphogen production rate compared with alternative designs. The ability to isolate morphogen patterning from concurrent developmental processes and to compare the patterning behaviors of alternative, rewired pathway architectures offers a powerful way to understand and engineer multicellular patterning

Learning and Long-Term Retention of Large-Scale Artificial Languages

Recovering discrete words from continuous speech is one of the first challenges facing language learners. Infants and adults can make use of the statistical structure of utterances to learn the forms of words from unsegmented input, suggesting that this ability may be useful for bootstrapping language-specific cues to segmentation. It is unknown, however, whether performance shown in small-scale laboratory demonstrations of “statistical learning” can scale up to allow learning of the lexicons of natural languages, which are orders of magnitude larger. Artificial language experiments with adults can be used to test whether the mechanisms of statistical learning are in principle scalable to larger lexicons. We report data from a large-scale learning experiment that demonstrates that adults can learn words from unsegmented input in much larger languages than previously documented and that they retain the words they learn for years. These results suggest that statistical word segmentation could be scalable to the challenges of lexical acquisition in natural language learning.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF DDRIG #0746251

Prisoners’ Families’ Research: Developments, Debates and Directions

After many years of relative obscurity, research on prisoners’ families has gained significant momentum. It has expanded from case-oriented descriptive analyses of family experiences to longitudinal studies of child and family development and even macro analyses of the effects on communities in societies of mass incarceration. Now the field engages multi-disciplinary and international interest although it arguably still remains on the periphery of mainstream criminological, psychological and sociological research agendas. This chapter discusses developments in prisoners’ families’ research and its positioning in academia and practice. It does not aim to provide an all-encompassing review of the literature rather it will offer some reflections on how and why the field has developed as it has and on its future directions. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first discusses reasons for the historically small body of research on prisoners’ families and for the growth in research interest over the past two decades. The second analyses patterns and shifts in the focus of research studies and considers how the field has been shaped by intersecting disciplinary interests of psychology, sociology, criminology and socio-legal studies. The final part reflects on substantive and ethical issues that are likely to shape the direction of prisoners’ families’ research in the future

Applications of electrified dust and dust devil electrodynamics to Martian atmospheric electricity

Atmospheric transport and suspension of dust frequently brings electrification, which may be substantial. Electric fields of 10 kVm-1 to 100 kVm-1 have been observed at the surface beneath suspended dust in the terrestrial atmosphere, and some electrification has been observed to persist in dust at levels to 5 km, as well as in volcanic plumes. The interaction between individual particles which causes the electrification is incompletely understood, and multiple processes are thought to be acting. A variation in particle charge with particle size, and the effect of gravitational separation explains to, some extent, the charge structures observed in terrestrial dust storms. More extensive flow-based modelling demonstrates that bulk electric fields in excess of 10 kV m-1 can be obtained rapidly (in less than 10 s) from rotating dust systems (dust devils) and that terrestrial breakdown fields can be obtained. Modelled profiles of electrical conductivity in the Martian atmosphere suggest the possibility of dust electrification, and dust devils have been suggested as a mechanism of charge separation able to maintain current flow between one region of the atmosphere and another, through a global circuit. Fundamental new understanding of Martian atmospheric electricity will result from the ExoMars mission, which carries the DREAMS (Dust characterization, Risk Assessment, and Environment Analyser on the Martian Surface)-MicroARES (Atmospheric Radiation and Electricity Sensor) instrumentation to Mars in 2016 for the first in situ measurements

Analysis of Livelihood of Rural Irrigated Crop Farmers in Kano State, Nigeria

This study provided an analysis of the livelihoods of rural irrigated crop farmers in Kano State, Nigeria. The study’s specific objectives were to; describe the socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents, assess their livelihood assets, household wellbeing, and constraints. The study adopted a multistage sampling technique to collect primary data from 251 respondents drawn from 18 communities in six Local Government Areas of the State. In the analysis of the data, descriptive statistics and the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measurement were used. The study revealed that irrigated crop farming in the area is male-dominated (78.1%), and the practitioners were mostly small-scale farmers (average farm size of 1.8 ha). In terms of assets, this study revealed that most of the respondents were limited in natural, human, and financial capital. Poverty incidence was about 51%, with the lack of access to formal loans, decline in soil productivity, poor access to market, and lack of access to farm mechanization being prominent challenges of the people. Therefore, there is a need for the government and other key actors in the agriculture and financial sectors to ease farmers’ access to credit facilities and agricultural extension services

Reconstitution of morphogen shuttling circuits

Here we provide raw data, code, and other supplementary material related to the manuscript, "Reconstitution of morphogen shuttling circuits," by Ronghui Zhu et al. This includes computer codes for implementing the shuttling model, maps of constructs used in this manuscript, raw imaging and flow cytometry data, and raw time-lapse images