The Workers' Compensation System of British Columbia: Still in Transition

This inventory addresses eight core issues in the British Columbia workers' compensation system:* How is the system administered?* How do claims flow through the system?* What dispute resolution procedures are used, and to what effect?* What benefits are paid?* How are vocational rehabilitation services provided?* How is the system financed?* What are the actual costs of administration, benefits, claims processing, and appeal?* What aspects of the system deserve further attention

Applications of stable water and carbon isotopes in watershed research: Weathering, carbon cycling, and water balances

Research on rivers has traditionally involved concentration and flux measurements to better understand weathering, transport and cycling of materials from land to ocean. As a relatively new tool, stable isotope measurements complement this type of research by providing an extra label to characterize origin of the transportedmaterial, its transfer mechanisms, and natural versus anthropogenic influences. These new stable isotope techniques are scalable across a wide range of geographic and temporal scales. This review focuses on three aspects of hydrological and geochemical river research that are of prime importance to the policy issues of climate change and include utilization of stable water and carbon isotopes: (i) silicate and carbonate weathering in river basins, (ii) the riverine carbon and oxygen cycles, and (iii) water balances at the catchment scale. Most studies at watershed scales currently focus on water and carbon balances but future applications hold promise to integrate sediment fluxes and turnover, ground and surface water interactions, as well as the understanding of contaminant sources and their effects in river systems

Linking gene expression in the intestine to production of gametes through the phosphate transporter PITR-1 in Caenorhabditis elegans

Inorganic phosphate is an essential mineral for both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell metabolism and structure. Its uptake into the cell is mediated by membrane bound transporters and coupled to Na+ transport. Mammalian sodium-dependent Pi co-transporters have been grouped into three families NaPi-I, NaPi-II, and NaPi-III. Despite being discovered more than 2 decades ago, very little is known about requirements for NaPi-III transporters in vivo, in the context of intact animal models. Here we find that impaired function of the C. elegans NaPi-III transporter, pitr-1, results in decreased brood size and dramatically increased expression of vitellogenin by the worm intestine. Unexpectedly, we found that the effects of pitr-1 mutation on vitellogenin expression in the intestine could only be rescued by expression of pitr-1 in the germline, and not by expression of pitr-1 in the intestine itself. Our results indicate the existence of a signal from the germline that regulates gene expression in the intestine, perhaps linking nutrient export from the intestine to production of gametes by the germline