Noise Producing Toys and the Efficacy of Product Standard Criteria to Protect Health and Education Outcomes

An evaluation of 28 commercially available toys imported into New Zealand revealed that 21% of these toys do not meet the acoustic criteria in the ISO standard, ISO 8124-1:2009 Safety of Toys, adopted by Australia and New Zealand as AS/NZS ISO 8124.1:2010. While overall the 2010 standard provided a greater level of protection than the earlier 2002 standard, there was one high risk toy category where the 2002 standard provided greater protection. A secondary set of toys from the personal collections of children known to display atypical methods of play with toys, such as those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), was part of the evaluation. Only one of these toys cleanly passed the 2010 standard, with the remainder failing or showing a marginal-pass. As there is no tolerance level stated in the standards to account for interpretation of data and experimental error, a value of +2 dB was used. The findings of the study indicate that the current standard is inadequate in providing protection against excessive noise exposure. Amendments to the criteria have been recommended that apply to the recently adopted 2013 standard. These include the integration of the new approaches published in the recently amended European standard (EN 71) on safety of toys

Milk whey protein concentration and mRNA associated with β-lactoglobulin phenotype

Two common genetic variants of β-lactoglobulin (β-lg), A and B, exist as co- dominant alleles in dairy cattle (Aschaffenburg, 1968). Numerous studies have shown that cows homozygous for β-lg A have more β-lg and less α-lactalbumin (α-la) and casein in their milk than cows expressing only the B variant of β-lg (Ng-Kwai-Hang et al. 1987; Graml et al. 1989; Hill, 1993; Hill et al. 1995, 1997). These differences have a significant impact on the processing characteristics of the milk. For instance, the moisture-adjusted yield of Cheddar cheese is up to 10% higher using milk from cows of the β-lg BB phenotype compared with milk from cows expressing only the A variant (Hill et al. 1997). All these studies, however, describe compositional differences associated with β-lg phenotype in established lactation only. No information is available on the first few weeks of lactation, when there are marked changes in the concentrations of β-lg and α-la (Pérez et al. 1990)

Low‐temperature crystallization of La0.15Sr0.775TiO3 using ionic liquids

The n‐type thermoelectric oxide La0.15Sr0.775TiO3 (LST) has been synthesized at 600°C using an ionic liquid method. The method uses the ionic liquid 1‐ethyl 3‐methylimidazolium acetate as the sole complexing agent: the lack of a second, carbon‐rich template decreases the quantity of reduced intermediate phases which form during heating. By suppressing these phases, greatly reduced temperatures can be used to crystallize the perovskite LST phase, on the nanoscale. These nanoparticles have the potential to be used to increase the figure of merit in n‐type thermoelectric oxide devices

Cryogenic STM in 3D vector magnetic fields realized through a rotatable insert

We acknowledge funding from EPSRC (EP/L505079/1 and EP/I031014/1).Spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy (SP-STM) performed in vector magnetic fields promises atomic scale imaging of magnetic structure, providing complete information on the local spin texture of a sample in three dimensions. Here, we have designed and constructed a turntable system for a low temperature STM which in combination with a 2D vector magnet provides magnetic fields of up to 5 T in any direction relative to the tip-sample geometry. This enables STM imaging and spectroscopy to be performed at the same atomic-scale location and field-of-view on the sample, and most importantly, without experiencing any change on the tip apex before and after field switching. Combined with a ferromagnetic tip, this enables us to study the magnetization of complex magnetic orders in all three spatial directions.PostprintPeer reviewe

Evaluating lithium diffusion mechanisms in the complex spinel Li2NiGe3O8

Lithium-ion diffusion mechanisms in the complex spinel Li2NiGe3O8 have been investigated using solid-state NMR, impedance, and muon spectroscopies. Partial occupancy of migratory interstitial 12d sites is shown to occur at lower temperatures than previously reported. Bulk activation energies for Li+ ion hopping range from 0.43 ± 0.03 eV for powdered samples to 0.53 ± 0.01 eV for samples sintered at 950 °C for 24 h, due to the loss of Li during sintering at elevated temperatures. A lithium diffusion coefficient of 3.89 × 10−12 cm2 s−1 was calculated from muon spectroscopy data for Li2NiGe3O8 at 300 K

Fast and automated biomarker detection in breath samples with machine learning

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in human breath can reveal a large spectrum of health conditions and can be used for fast, accurate and non-invasive diagnostics. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is used to measure VOCs, but its application is limited by expert-driven data analysis that is time-consuming, subjective and may introduce errors. We propose a machine learning-based system to perform GC-MS data analysis that exploits deep learning pattern recognition ability to learn and automatically detect VOCs directly from raw data, thus bypassing expert-led processing. We evaluate this new approach on clinical samples and with four types of convolutional neural networks (CNNs): VGG16, VGG-like, densely connected and residual CNNs. The proposed machine learning methods showed to outperform the expert-led analysis by detecting a significantly higher number of VOCs in just a fraction of time while maintaining high specificity. These results suggest that the proposed novel approach can help the large-scale deployment of breath-based diagnosis by reducing time and cost, and increasing accuracy and consistency

Development of GCP Ontology for Sharing Crop Information

The Generation Challenge Programme (GCP – "http://www.generationcp.org":http://www.generationcp.org) is a globally distributed crop research consortium directed toward crop improvement through the application of comparative biology and genetic resources characterization to plant breeding. GCP adopted the development paradigm of a ‘model-driven architecture’ to achieve the interoperability and integration of diverse GCP data types that are available through distributed data sources and consumed by end-user data analysis tools. Its objective is to ensure semantic compatibility across the Consortium that will lead to the creation of robust global public goods from GCP research results. 

The GCP scientific domain model is an object model that encapsulates key crop science concepts and is documented using Unified Modeling Language (see GCP Models on "http://pantheon.generationcp.org/index.php":http://pantheon.generationcp.org/index.php). 

At the core of the GCP architecture is a scientific domain model, which is heavily parameterized with GCP-indexed ontology terms. The GCP-indexed ontology reuses established international standards where available, converts other publicly available controlled vocabularies into formally managed ontology, and develops novel ontology if no public vocabularies yet exist. General and crop-specific GCP ontologies are being developed by crop teams involving GCP and external scientific experts – in particular, for crop-specific ontology relating to plant anatomy, developmental stage, trait and phenotype for selected GCP crops. Crop ontologies are being developed for chickpea, maize, Musa, potato, rice, sorghum and wheat. The Bioversity crop descriptor lists already loaded into OBO format files provide the primary structure to develop the crop ontologies. Then, terms to be mapped to the ontologies are extracted from the crop databases where trait values have been stored by crop scientists. These sources allow the ontology teams to identify the most commonly used concept names and their interrelations. Experts validate the selection of keywords that will build the controlled vocabulary. 

These GCP ontologies will allow researchers and end users to query keywords related to traits, plant structure, growth stage, and molecular function, and link them to associated phenotyping and genotyping data sets including data on germplasm, crop physiology, geographic information, genes, QTL, etc. To reach that stage, the crop ontologies will be integrated into the data-entry user interface or data templates as picklists facilitating data annotation and submission of new terms. In addition, the GCP ontologies will be integrated with Plant Ontology (PO) and Gramene (Trait Ontology, TO; Environment Ontology, EO) to develop a common, internationally shared crop trait and anatomy ontology. The team will initiate collaboration with SONet (Scientific Observations Network) and OBOE (Extensible Observation Ontology), which proposed to integrate the GCP ontology as a study case.
The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) edit tool has been used to develop the ontologies for rice, wheat and maize traits, which are currently available at "http://cropforge.org/projects/gcpontology/":http://cropforge.org/projects/gcpontology/ . The crop-specific work plans and ontologies related to other materials are published at "http://pantheon.generationcp.org":http://pantheon.generationcp.org. 
The development and curation of general-purpose ontologies will be continued and made available on the Pantheon and CropForge websites