Executive functioning affects health behaviour in older people too

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Releasing the power: research led learning in a professional practice undergraduate curriculum

There is a challenge for vocational programmes in Higher Education in addressing the needs of a practice based discipline while developing enquiry based abilities in students. Ongoing research is being carried out into the use and suitability of student research-led learning within Built Environment curriculum at Northumbria University. This is aimed at undergraduate professional practice education and its perceived value by staff and students as compared to the use of the more traditional perceived transmission-based pedagogy. A focus group based survey of final years students was carried out to obtain an improved understanding of the value of research-led learning and to seek to highlight and extend staff opportunities and motivation to employ such methods across a wider range of curriculum activity, thus helping to justify the “release” of curriculum ownership to the student. It appears that students struggle to see the value of work which is not directly related to employment and it is suggested that more work is needed in measuring and understanding the enquiry based skills which are being used in the workplace already and using pedagogical approaches in language and practice which are more easily digested by students because research led learning is seen to be practical and have real results in what they perceive as the “real world”. Research-led learning needs to be carefully and sensitively embedded within the student learning experience at undergraduate level

Risk Sharing and Transactions Costs in Producer-Processor Supply Chains

Industrial Organization,

Agricultural Tenure in England and Wales 2007

The report presents a repeat of a 1989-90 postal survey to explore the land tenurial changes in England and Wales that have resulted from legislative and structural change. Clearly, since 1990, the introduction of Farm Business Tenancies means that the two sets of results, while not directly comparable, allows the occupancy of land under unconventional forms of tenancy to be explored and contrasted. Furthermore, many factors influence the occupancy of land including taxation, inheritance laws, the profitability of farming, and structural and policy changes within the industry. Therefore, the occupancy of agricultural land in 2007 should be set against this backcloth of socio-political changes that impact upon the industry. Finally, this report is split into two sections, the first focuses on the occupation of land in England and Wales using weighted sample data, while the second explores some of the dynamics behind land tenure using the unweighted sample data.Land Tenure, Farm Business Tenancies, Agricultural Occupancy, Informal Tenure Agreements, Agricultural and Food Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Restructuring of the Ag Lending Markets: The FCS Dilemma

Agricultural Finance,

Biophysical Fitness Landscapes for Transcription Factor Binding Sites

Evolutionary trajectories and phenotypic states available to cell populations are ultimately dictated by intermolecular interactions between DNA, RNA, proteins, and other molecular species. Here we study how evolution of gene regulation in a single-cell eukaryote S. cerevisiae is affected by the interactions between transcription factors (TFs) and their cognate genomic sites. Our study is informed by high-throughput in vitro measurements of TF-DNA binding interactions and by a comprehensive collection of genomic binding sites. Using an evolutionary model for monomorphic populations evolving on a fitness landscape, we infer fitness as a function of TF-DNA binding energy for a collection of 12 yeast TFs, and show that the shape of the predicted fitness functions is in broad agreement with a simple thermodynamic model of two-state TF-DNA binding. However, the effective temperature of the model is not always equal to the physical temperature, indicating selection pressures in addition to biophysical constraints caused by TF-DNA interactions. We find little statistical support for the fitness landscape in which each position in the binding site evolves independently, showing that epistasis is common in evolution of gene regulation. Finally, by correlating TF-DNA binding energies with biological properties of the sites or the genes they regulate, we are able to rule out several scenarios of site-specific selection, under which binding sites of the same TF would experience a spectrum of selection pressures depending on their position in the genome. These findings argue for the existence of universal fitness landscapes which shape evolution of all sites for a given TF, and whose properties are determined in part by the physics of protein-DNA interactions

A bidirectional relationship between physical activity and executive function in older adults

Michael Daly gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/L010437/1). David McMinn was funded by the Scottish Government, Rural and Environment Science & Analytical Services (RESAS) division. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, interpolation of these data, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The testing of concrete materials by precisely controlled uni-axial tension

Imperial Users onl