Prodigious polyphyly in Pleuroceridae (Gastropoda: Cerithioidea)

Phylogenomic studies with hundreds or thousands of loci are rare for most invertebrate groups, including freshwater gastropods. This can prevent understanding of phylogeny, which hinders many areas of research. Pleuroceridae is a family of freshwater snails that is highly imperiled and plays an essential role in the ecology of many freshwater systems of the eastern United States. However, the evolutionary history of the family is not understood, and the systematics of the family has not been revised in a modern framework. Pleurocerids display a variety of egg-deposition behaviors and shell shapes, making the family an ideal system for studying evolution of invertebrate life history and morphology. However, past mitochondrial-based phylogenetic analyses have failed to produce meaningful phylogenetic hypotheses, preventing conclusions about pleurocerid systematics and evolution. Here, we generated a novel anchored hybrid enrichment probe set with phylogenetic utility for Pleuroceridae. We sampled pleurocerids from across their range to test the probe set and generated a backbone phylogeny. Our analyses uncovered striking levels of polyphyly among currently accepted genera. Numerous species were also polyphyletic, indicative of unrecognized diversity. Phylogenetic patterns also revealed considerable convergence of shell morphologies. In contrast, anatomical and life history features appeared to be much less homoplastic. Despite generic paraphyly, high support for most major clades and phylogenetic cohesiveness of non-shell characters indicate utility of the AHE probe set for studying pleurocerid evolution

Calibration of the Spectrometer aboard the INTEGRAL satellite

SPI, the Spectrometer on board the ESA INTEGRAL satellite, to be launched in October 2002, will study the gamma-ray sky in the 20 keV to 8 MeV energy band with a spectral resolution of 2 keV for photons of 1 MeV, thanks to its 19 germanium detectors spanning an active area of 500 cm2. A coded mask imaging technique provides a 2 deg angular resolution. The 16 deg field of view is defined by an active BGO veto shield, furthermore used for background rejection. In April 2001 the flight model of SPI underwent a one-month calibration campaign at CEA in Bruy\`eres le Ch\^atel using low intensity radioactive sources and the CEA accelerator for homogeneity measurements and high intensity radioactive sources for imaging performance measurements. After integration of all scientific payloads (the spectrometer SPI, the imager IBIS and the monitors JEM-X and OMC) on the INTEGRAL satellite, a cross-calibration campaign has been performed at the ESA center in Noordwijk. A set of sources has been placed in the field of view of the different instruments in order to compare their performances and determine their mutual influence. Some of those sources had already been used in Bruy\`eres during the SPI standalone test. For the lowest energy band calibration an X-ray generator has been used. We report on the scientific goals of this calibration activity, and present the measurements performed as well as some preliminary results.Comment: 12 pages, 19 figures, Published in Proceedings of SPIE conference, 24-28 August 2002, Waikoloa, Hawaii, US

Healthcare providers' views on the acceptability of financial incentives for breastfeeding:a qualitative study

BACKGROUND: Despite a gradual increase in breastfeeding rates, overall in the UK there are wide variations, with a trend towards breastfeeding rates at 6–8 weeks remaining below 40% in less affluent areas. While financial incentives have been used with varying success to encourage positive health related behaviour change, there is little research on their use in encouraging breastfeeding. In this paper, we report on healthcare providers’ views around whether using financial incentives in areas with low breastfeeding rates would be acceptable in principle. This research was part of a larger project looking at the development and feasibility testing of a financial incentive scheme for breastfeeding in preparation for a cluster randomised controlled trial. METHODS: Fifty–three healthcare providers were interviewed about their views on financial incentives for breastfeeding. Participants were purposively sampled to include a wide range of experience and roles associated with supporting mothers with infant feeding. Semi-structured individual and group interviews were conducted. Data were analysed thematically drawing on the principles of Framework Analysis. RESULTS: The key theme emerging from healthcare providers’ views on the acceptability of financial incentives for breastfeeding was their possible impact on ‘facilitating or impeding relationships’. Within this theme several additional aspects were discussed: the mother’s relationship with her healthcare provider and services, with her baby and her family, and with the wider community. In addition, a key priority for healthcare providers was that an incentive scheme should not impact negatively on their professional integrity and responsibility towards women. CONCLUSION: Healthcare providers believe that financial incentives could have both positive and negative impacts on a mother’s relationship with her family, baby and healthcare provider. When designing a financial incentive scheme we must take care to minimise the potential negative impacts that have been highlighted, while at the same time recognising the potential positive impacts for women in areas where breastfeeding rates are low

SPI/INTEGRAL in-flight performance

The SPI instrument has been launched on-board the INTEGRAL observatory on October 17, 2002. SPI is a spectrometer devoted to the sky observation in the 20 keV-8 MeV energy range using 19 germanium detectors. The performance of the cryogenic system is nominal and allows to cool the 19 kg of germanium down to 85 K with a comfortable margin. The energy resolution of the whole camera is 2.5 keV at 1.1 MeV. This resolution degrades with time due to particle irradiation in space. We show that the annealing process allows the recovery of the initial performance. The anticoincidence shield works as expected, with a low threshold at 75 keV, reducing the GeD background by a factor of 20. The digital front-end electronics system allows the perfect alignement in time of all the signals as well as the optimisation of the dead time (12%). We demonstrate that SPI is able to map regions as complex as the galactic plane. The obtained spectrum of the Crab nebula validates the present version of our response matrix. The 3 $\sigma$ sensitivity of the instrument at 1 MeV is 8 10$^{-7}$ph$\cdot$cm$^{-2}\cdot$s$^{-1}\cdot$keV$^{-1}$ for the continuum and 3 10$^{-5}$ph$\cdot$cm$^{-2}\cdot$s$^{-1}$ for narrow lines.Comment: 10 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in A&A (special INTEGRAL volume

SPI: The spectrometer aboard INTEGRAL

SPI is a high spectral resolution gamma-ray telescope on board the ESA mission INTEGRAL (International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory). It consists of an array of 19 closely packed germanium detectors surrounded by an active anticoincidence shield of BGO. The imaging capabilities of the instrument are obtained with a tungsten coded aperture mask located 1.7 m from the Ge array. The fully coded field-of-view is 16º, the partially coded field of view amounts to 31º, and the angular resolution is 2.5º. The energy range extends from 20 keV to 8 MeV with a typical energy resolution of 2.5 keV at 1.3 MeV. Here we present the general concept of the instrument followed by a brief description of each of the main subsystems. INTEGRAL was successfully launched in October 2002 and SPI is functioning extremely well.Sanchez Martinez, Filomeno, [email protected]

INTEGRAL/SPI ground calibration

Three calibration campaigns of the spectrometer SPI have been performed before launch in order to determine the instrument characteristics, such as the effective detection area, the spectral resolution and the angular resolution. Absolute determination of the effective area has been obtained from simulations and measurements. At 1 MeV, the effective area is 65 cm^2 for a point source on the optical axis, the spectral resolution ~2.3 keV. The angular resolution is better than 2.5 deg and the source separation capability about 1 deg. Some temperature dependant parameters will require permanent in-flight calibration.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in A&AL (INTEGRAL Special issue

Equity in the delivery of community healthcare to older people: findings from 10/66 Dementia Research Group cross-sectional surveys in Latin America, China, India and Nigeria

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To describe patterns of recent health service utilisation, and consequent out-of-pocket expenses among older people in countries with low and middle incomes, and to assess the equity with which services are accessed and delivered.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>17,944 people aged 65 years and over were assessed in one-phase population-based cross-sectional surveys in geographically-defined catchment areas in nine countries - urban and rural sites in China, India, Mexico and Peru, urban sites in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, and a rural site in Nigeria. The main outcome was use of community health care services in the past 3 months. Independent associations were estimated with indicators of need (dementia, depression, physical impairments), predisposing factors (age, sex, and education), and enabling factors (household assets, pension receipt and health insurance) using Poisson regression to generate prevalence ratios and fixed effects meta-analysis to combine them.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The proportion using healthcare services varied from 6% to 82% among sites. Number of physical impairments (pooled prevalence ratio 1.37, 95% CI 1.26-1.49) and ICD-10 depressive episode (pooled PR 1.21, 95% CI 1.07-1.38) were associated with service use, but dementia was inversely associated (pooled PR 0.93, 95% CI 0.90-0.97). Other correlates were female sex, higher education, more household assets, receiving a pension, and health insurance. Standardisation for age, sex, physical impairments, depression and dementia did not explain variation in service use. There was a strong borderline significant ecological correlation between the proportion of consultations requiring out-of-pocket costs and the prevalence of health service use (r = -0.50, p = 0.09).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>While there was little evidence of ageism, inequity was apparent in the independent enabling effects of education and health insurance cover, the latter particularly in sites where out-of-pocket expenses were common, and private health insurance an important component of healthcare financing. Variation in service use among sites was most plausibly accounted for by stark differences in the extent of out-of-pocket expenses, and the ability of older people and their families to afford them. Health systems that finance medical services through out-of-pocket payments risk excluding the poorest older people, those without a secure regular income, and the uninsured.</p

Intercomparison of NO2, O4, O3 and HCHO slant column measurements by MAX-DOAS and zenith-sky UV¿visible spectrometers during CINDI-2

40 pags., 22 figs., 13 tabs.In September 2016, 36 spectrometers from 24 institutes measured a number of key atmospheric pollutants for a period of 17¿d during the Second Cabauw Intercomparison campaign for Nitrogen Dioxide measuring Instruments (CINDI-2) that took place at Cabauw, the Netherlands (51.97¿¿N, 4.93¿¿E). We report on the outcome of the formal semi-blind intercomparison exercise, which was held under the umbrella of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC) and the European Space Agency (ESA). The three major goals of CINDI-2 were (1) to characterise and better understand the differences between a large number of multi-axis differential optical absorption spectroscopy (MAX-DOAS) and zenith-sky DOAS instruments and analysis methods, (2) to define a robust methodology for performance assessment of all participating instruments, and (3) to contribute to a harmonisation of the measurement settings and retrieval methods. This, in turn, creates the capability to produce consistent high-quality ground-based data sets, which are an essential requirement to generate reliable long-term measurement time series suitable for trend analysis and satellite data validation. The data products investigated during the semi-blind intercomparison are slant columns of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), the oxygen collision complex (O4) and ozone (O3) measured in the UV and visible wavelength region, formaldehyde (HCHO) in the UV spectral region, and NO2 in an additional (smaller) wavelength range in the visible region. The campaign design and implementation processes are discussed in detail including the measurement protocol, calibration procedures and slant column retrieval settings. Strong emphasis was put on the careful alignment and synchronisation of the measurement systems, resulting in a unique set of measurements made under highly comparable air mass conditions. The CINDI-2 data sets were investigated using a regression analysis of the slant columns measured by each instrument and for each of the target data products. The slope and intercept of the regression analysis respectively quantify the mean systematic bias and offset of the individual data sets against the selected reference (which is obtained from the median of either all data sets or a subset), and the rms error provides an estimate of the measurement noise or dispersion. These three criteria are examined and for each of the parameters and each of the data products, performance thresholds are set and applied to all the measurements. The approach presented here has been developed based on heritage from previous intercomparison exercises. It introduces a quantitative assessment of the consistency between all the participating instruments for the MAX-DOAS and zenith-sky DOAS techniques.CINDI-2 received funding from the Netherlands Space Office (NSO). Funding for this study was provided by ESA through the CINDI-2 (ESA contract no. 4000118533/16/ISbo) and FRM4DOAS (ESA contract no. 4000118181/16/I-EF) projects and partly within the EU 7th Framework Programme QA4ECV project (grant agreement no. 607405). The BOKU MAX-DOAS instrument was funded and the participation of Stefan F. Schreier was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): I 2296-N29. The participation of the University of Toronto team was supported by the Canadian Space Agency (through the AVATARS project) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (through the PAHA project). The instrument was primarily funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and is usually operated at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) by the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change (CANDAC). Funding for CISC was provided by the UVAS (“Ultraviolet and Visible Atmospheric Sounder”) projects SEOSAT/INGENIO, ESP2015-71299- R, MINECO-FEDER and UE. The activities of the IUP-Heidelberg were supported by the DFG project RAPSODI (grant no. PL 193/17-1). SAOZ and Mini-SAOZ instruments are supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). INTA recognises support from the National funding projects HELADO (CTM2013-41311-P) and AVATAR (CGL2014-55230-R). AMOIAP recognises support from the Russian Science Foundation (grant no. 16-17-10275) and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant nos. 16-05- 01062 and 18-35-00682). Ka L. Chan received transnational access funding from ACTRIS-2 (H2020 grant agreement no. 654109). Rainer Volkamer recognises funding from NASA’s Atmospheric Composition Program (NASA-16-NUP2016-0001) and the US National Science Foundation (award AGS-1620530). Henning Finkenzeller is the recipient of a NASA graduate fellowship. Mihalis Vrekoussis recognises support from the University of Bremen and the DFG Research Center/Cluster of Excellence “The Ocean in the Earth System-MARUM”. Financial support through the University of Bremen Institutional Strategy in the framework of the DFG Excellence Initiative is gratefully appreciated for Anja Schönhardt. Pandora instrument deployment was supported by Luftblick through the ESA Pandonia Project and NASA Pandora Project at the Goddard Space Flight Center under NASA Headquarters’ Tropospheric Composition Program. The article processing charges for this open-access publication were covered by BK Scientific

Competition and habitat quality influence age and sex distribution in wintering rusty blackbirds.

Bird habitat quality is often inferred from species abundance measures during the breeding and non-breeding season and used for conservation management decisions. However, during the non-breeding season age and sex classes often occupy different habitats which suggest a need for more habitat-specific data. Rusty Blackbird (Euphagus carolinus) is a forested wetland specialist wintering in bottomland hardwood forests in the south-eastern U. S. and belongs to the most steeply declining songbirds in the U.S. Little information is available to support priority birds such as the Rusty Blackbird wintering in this threatened habitat. We assessed age and sex distribution and body condition of Rusty Blackbirds among the three major habitats used by this species in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley and also measured food availability. Overall, pecan groves had the highest biomass mainly driven by the amount of nuts. Invertebrate biomass was highest in forests but contributed only a small percentage to overall biomass. Age and sex classes were unevenly distributed among habitats with adult males primarily occupying pecan groves containing the highest nut biomass, females being found in forests which had the lowest nut biomass and young males primarily staying in forest fragments along creeks which had intermediate nut biomass. Males were in better body condition than females and were in slightly better condition in pecan groves. The results suggest that adult males occupy the highest quality habitat and may competitively exclude the other age and sex classes