COMPACT AND ROBUST SINGLE-FREQUENCY DIODE-PUMPED VECSEL AT THE CESIUM D2 LINE FOR ATOMIC CLOCKS

This work reports on an optically-pumped vertical external-cavity surface­emitting laser emitting around 852 nm dedicated to atomic physics experiments with cold Cs atoms. The design of the semiconductor active structure has been optimized to provide a low threshold. A low-power diode-pumped compact prototype has been developed with improved stability. With this setup, we obtained a 17-mW single frequency emission exhibiting large tunability around the Cesium D2 line. The laser linewidth has been measured to less than 500 kHz on a 10 ms time

Associations between household and neighbourhood socioeconomic status and systolic blood pressure among urban South African adolescents.

Factors resulting in high risk for cardiovascular disease have been well studied in high income countries, but have been less well researched in low/middle income countries. This is despite robust theoretical evidence of environmental transitions in such countries which could result in biological adaptations that lead to increased hypertension and cardiovascular disease risk. Data from the South African Birth to Twenty cohort, Bone Health sub-sample (n = 358, 47% female), were used to model associations between household socioeconomic status (SES) in infancy, household/neighbourhood SES at age 16 years, and systolic blood pressure (multivariate linear regression) and risk for systolic pre-hypertension (binary logistic regression). Bivariate analyses revealed household/neighbourhood SES measures that were significantly associated with increased systolic blood pressure. These significant associations included improved household sanitation in infancy/16 years, caregiver owning the house in infancy and being in a higher tertile (higher SES) of indices measuring school problems/environment or neighbourhood services/problems/crime at 16 years of age. Multivariate analyses adjusted for sex, maternal age, birth weight, parity, smoking, term birth, height/body mass index at 16 years. In adjusted analyses, only one SES variable remained significant for females: those in the middle tertile of the crime prevention index had higher systolic blood pressure (β = 3.52, SE = 1.61) compared with the highest tertile (i.e. those with the highest crime prevention). In adjusted analyses, no SES variables were significantly associated with the systolic blood pressure of boys, or with the risk of systolic pre-hypertension in either sex. The lack of association between SES and systolic blood pressure/systolic pre-hypertension at age 16 years is consistent with other studies showing an equalization of adolescent health inequalities. Further testing of the association between SES and systolic blood pressure would be recommended in adulthood to see whether the lack of association persists

Readability of the Written Study Information in Pediatric Research in France

BACKGROUND: The aim was to evaluate the readability of research information leaflets (RIL) for minors asked to participate in biomedical research studies and to assess the factors influencing this readability. METHODS AND FINDINGS: All the pediatric protocols from three French pediatric clinical research units were included (N = 104). Three criteria were used to evaluate readability: length of the text, Flesch's readability score and presence of illustrations. We compared the readability of RIL to texts specifically written for children (school textbooks, school exams or extracts from literary works). We assessed the effect of protocol characteristics on readability. The RIL had a median length of 608 words [350 words, 25(th) percentile; 1005 words, 75(th) percentile], corresponding to two pages. The readability of the RIL, with a median Flesch score of 40 [30; 47], was much poorer than that of pediatric reference texts, with a Flesch score of 67 [60; 73]. A small proportion of RIL (13/91; 14%) were illustrated. The RIL were longer (p<0.001), more readable (p<0.001) and more likely to be illustrated (p<0.009) for industrial than for institutional sponsors. CONCLUSION: Researchers should routinely compute the reading ease of study information sheets and make greater efforts to improve the readability of written documents for potential participants

Early Toxicities After High Dose Rate Proton Therapy in Cancer Treatments

Background: The conventional dose rate of radiation therapy is 0.01-0.05 Gy per second. According to preclinical studies, an increased dose rate may offer similar anti-tumoral effect while dramatically improving normal tissue protection. This study aims at evaluating the early toxicities for patients irradiated with high dose rate pulsed proton therapy (PT). Materials and methods: A single institution retrospective chart review was performed for patients treated with high dose rate (10 Gy per second) pulsed proton therapy, from September 2016 to April 2020. This included both benign and malignant tumors with ≥3 months follow-up, evaluated for acute (≤2 months) and subacute (>2 months) toxicity after the completion of PT. Results: There were 127 patients identified, with a median follow up of 14.8 months (3-42.9 months). The median age was 55 years (1.6-89). The cohort most commonly consisted of benign disease (55.1%), cranial targets (95.1%), and were treated with surgery prior to PT (56.7%). There was a median total PT dose of 56 Gy (30-74 Gy), dose per fraction of 2 Gy (1-3 Gy), and CTV size of 47.6 ml (5.6-2,106.1 ml). Maximum acute grade ≥2 toxicity were observed in 49 (38.6%) patients, of which 8 (6.3%) experienced grade 3 toxicity. No acute grade 4 or 5 toxicity was observed. Maximum subacute grade 2, 3, and 4 toxicity were discovered in 25 (19.7%), 12 (9.4%), and 1 (0.8%) patient(s), respectively. Conclusion: In this cohort, utilizing high dose rate proton therapy (10 Gy per second) did not result in a major decrease in acute and subacute toxicity. Longer follow-up and comparative studies with conventional dose rate are required to evaluate whether this approach offers a toxicity benefit

The Readability of Information and Consent Forms in Clinical Research in France

BACKGROUND: Quantitative tools have been developed to evaluate the readability of written documents and have been used in several studies to evaluate information and consent forms. These studies all showed that such documents had a low level of readability. Our objective is to evaluate the readability of Information and Consent Forms (ICFs) used in clinical research. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Clinical research protocols were collected from four public clinical research centers in France. Readability was evaluated based on three criteria: the presence of an illustration, the length of the text and its Flesch score. Potential effects of protocol characteristics on the length and readability of the ICFs were determined. Medical and statutory parts of the ICF form were analyzed separately. The readability of these documents was compared with that of everyday contracts, press articles, literary extracts and political speeches. We included 209 protocols and the corresponding 275 ICFs. The median length was 1304 words. Their Flesch readability scores were low (median: 24), and only about half that of selected press articles. ICF s for industrially sponsored and randomized protocols were the longest and had the highest readability scores. More than half (52%) of the text in ICFs concerned medical information, and this information was statistically (p<0.05) more readable (Flesch: 28) than statutory information (Flesch: 21). CONCLUSION: Regardless of the field of research, the ICFs for protocols included had poor readability scores. However, a prospective analysis of this test in French should be carried out before it is put into general use

Pour une démocratie socio-environnementale : cadre pour une plate-forme participative « transition écologique »

Contribution publiée in Penser une démocratie alimentaire Volume II – Proposition Lascaux entre ressources naturelles et besoins fondamentaux, F. Collart Dutilleul et T. Bréger (dir), Inida, San José, 2014, pp. 87-111.International audienceL’anthropocène triomphant actuel, avec ses forçages environnementaux et sociaux, est à l’origine de l’accélération des dégradations des milieux de vie sur Terre et de l’accentuation des tensions sociales et géopolitiques. Passer à un anthropocène de gestion équitable, informé et sobre vis-à-vis de toutes les ressources et dans tous les secteurs d’activité (slow anthropocene), impose une analyse préalable sur l’ensemble des activités et des rapports humains. Cette transition dite « écologique », mais en réalité à la fois sociétale et écologique, est tout sauf un ajustement technique de secteurs dits prioritaires et technocratiques. Elle est avant tout culturelle, politique et philosophique au sens propre du terme. Elle est un horizon pour des trajectoires de développement humain, pour des constructions sociales et économiques, censées redéfinir socialement richesse, bien-être, travail etc. La dénomination « transition écologique » est largement véhiculée, mais ses bases conceptuelles ne sont pas entièrement acquises ni même élaborées. Dans ce contexte, les étudiants en première année de Master BioSciences à l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Lyon ont préparé une première étude analytique de ce changement radical et global de société pour mieux comprendre dans quelle société ils souhaitent vivre, en donnant du sens aux activités humaines présentes et à venir. Une trentaine de dossiers sur divers secteurs d’activités et acteurs de la société ont été produits et ont servis de support à cette synthèse. Plus largement, le but est de construire un socle conceptuel et une plate-forme de travail sur lesquels les questions de fond, mais aussi opérationnelles, peuvent être posées et étudiées en permanence. Cette démarche participative est ouverte à la collectivité sur le site http://institutmichelserres.ens-lyon.fr/

Greenland ice sheet surface mass loss: recent developments in observation and modeling

Surface processes currently dominate Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) mass loss. We review recent developments in the observation and modelling of GrIS surface mass balance (SMB), published after the July 2012 deadline for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5). Since IPCC AR5 our understanding of GrIS SMB has further improved, but new observational and model studies have also revealed that temporal and spatial variability of many processes are still poorly quantified and understood, e.g. bio-albedo, the formation of ice lenses and their impact on lateral meltwater transport, heterogeneous vertical meltwater transport (‘piping’), the impact of atmospheric circulation changes and mixed-phase clouds on the surface energy balance and the magnitude of turbulent heat exchange over rough ice surfaces. As a result, these processes are only schematically or not at all included in models that are currently used to assess and predict future GrIS surface mass loss

Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we investigate abundance patterns of common tree species using inventory data on 1,003,805 trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm across 1,568 locations1,2,3,4,5,6 in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. We estimate that 2.2%, 2.2% and 2.3% of species comprise 50% of the tropical trees in these regions, respectively. Extrapolating across all closed-canopy tropical forests, we estimate that just 1,053 species comprise half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm. Despite differing biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories7, we find notably consistent patterns of common species and species abundance distributions across the continents. This suggests that fundamental mechanisms of tree community assembly may apply to all tropical forests. Resampling analyses show that the most common species are likely to belong to a manageable list of known species, enabling targeted efforts to understand their ecology. Although they do not detract from the importance of rare species, our results open new opportunities to understand the world’s most diverse forests, including modelling their response to environmental change, by focusing on the common species that constitute the majority of their trees.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe