Linking Population, Fertility and Family Planning with Adaptation to Climate Change: Views from Ethiopia

As global climate change unfolds, its effects are being felt disproportionately in the world's poorest countries and among the groups of people least able to cope. Many of the countries hardest hit by the effects of climate change also face rapid population growth, with their populations on track to double by 2050.Population Action International (PAI) and Miz-Hasab Research Center (MHRC), in collaboration with the Joint Global Change Research Institute (JGCRI), studied which groups are most vulnerable, what community members say they need to adapt, and the role of family planning and reproductive health in increasing resilience to climate change impacts.The study was carried out in 2008-2009 in peri-urban and rural areas of two regions in Ethiopia: the Oromia region and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People's (SNNP) region

Monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 promotes macrophage-mediated tubular injury, but not glomerular injury, in nephrotoxic serum nephritis

Monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) is upregulated in renal parenchymal cells during kidney disease. To investigate whether MCP-1 promotes tubular and/or glomerular injury, we induced nephrotoxic serum nephritis (NSN) in MCP-1 genetically deficient mice. Mice were analyzed when tubules and glomeruli were severely damaged in the MCP-1–intact strain (day 7). MCP-1 transcripts increased fivefold in MCP-1–intact mice. MCP-1 was predominantly localized within cortical tubules (90%), and most cortical tubules were damaged, whereas few glomerular cells expressed MCP-1 (10%). By comparison, there was a marked reduction (>40%) in tubular injury in MCP-1–deficient mice (histopathology, apoptosis). MCP-1–deficient mice were not protected from glomerular injury (histopathology, proteinuria, macrophage influx). Macrophage accumulation increased adjacent to tubules in MCP-1–intact mice compared with MCP-1–deficient mice (70%, P < 0.005), indicating that macrophages recruited by MCP-1 induce tubular epithelial cell (TEC) damage. Lipopolysaccharide-activated bone marrow macrophages released molecules that induced TEC death that was not dependent on MCP-1 expression by macrophages or TEC. In conclusion, MCP-1 is predominantly expressed by TEC and not glomeruli, promotes TEC and not glomerular damage, and increases activated macrophages adjacent to TEC that damage TEC during NSN. Therefore, we suggest that blockage of TEC MCP-1 expression is a therapeutic strategy for some forms of kidney disease.published_or_final_versio

Cremations, Dental Amalgams, and You

Introduction: In Vermont, cremation has increasingly become an alternative to interment of an intact body. Many of the bodies being cremated contain dental amalgams, which are commonly used by dentists to repair dental erosion and caries (cavities). They are an economical option for caries repair, and remain popular. Roughly one third of all caries fillings done in 2002 in the U.S. utilized amalgam. Amalgam is a metal alloy containing as much as 50% mercury by volume, a metal that is a known toxicant. Dental amalgams, may constitute a source of low level, continual exposure for those with these dental devices in situ and may be released to the atmosphere upon cremation. The goal of this project was to investigate: 1. The status of the scientific opinion on potential health effects that may be associated with having dental amalgams. 2. To help refine State estimates of potential mercury emissions from Vermont crematoria.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1075/thumbnail.jp

Reducing Costs in Human Assisted Speech Transcription

The only official documentation of the lawmaking process at the California Legislature is unedited video recordings of committee hearings, bill texts, votes and analyses. While the bills resulting from these hearings are clear, using video recordings to understand how a bill was created is far too laborious for the average citizen. To increase public transparency, a service that provides easier access to the bill creation process was needed. In response to this need, the Digital Democracy initiative was established at Cal Poly by the Honorable Sam Blakeslee, former California State Senator and founder of the Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy. The Digital Democracy initiative seeks to create a web platform that organizes, generates, and indexes large amounts of information about the legislative process. To accomplish this, automatic speech recognition is performed on the video recordings of committee hearings and the resulting text is manually improved and annotated with a web application called the Transcription Tool . Unfortunately, this process is costly, labor intensive, and prohibits the scaling and long term viability of the platform. Early efforts to reduce transcription costs involved the development of improved transcription tool UI and systems for speaker diarization and text correction. This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of these improvements on the human assisted transcription process employed by the Digital Democracy initiative. To facilitate this evaluation, a pipeline for automatic transcription improvement was developed, the improvements were incorporated into the transcription process, and a controlled experiment was run to measure the effects of these improvements. The results of the experiment demonstrate that the improvements reduced transcription editing costs by 16.89% while maintaining similar transcription quality

Cooperative Methodologies for the Lookaside Buffer

Information theorists agree that low-energy the- ory are an interesting new topic in the field of cyberinformatics and scholars concur In our research we prove the deployment of redun- dancy In order to fulfill this objective we dis- prove not only that von Neumann machines and von Neumann machines are generally incompat- ible but that the same is true for 802 11

Urinary TWEAK as a biomarker of lupus nephritis: a multicenter cohort study

Introduction: TNF-like weak inducer of apoptosis (TWEAK) has been implicated as a mediator of chronic inflammatory processes via prolonged activation of the NF-κB pathway in several tissues, including the kidney. Evidence for the importance of TWEAK in the pathogenesis of lupus nephritis (LN) has been recently introduced. Thus, TWEAK levels may serve as an indication of LN presence and activity. Methods: Multicenter cohorts of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients and controls were recruited for cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of urinary TWEAK (uTWEAK) and/or serum TWEAK (sTWEAK) levels as potential biomarkers of LN. The performance of TWEAK as a biomarker for nephritis was compared with routinely used laboratory tests in lupus patients, including anti-double stranded DNA antibodies and levels of C3 and C4. Results: uTWEAK levels were significantly higher in LN patients than in non-LN SLE patients and other disease control groups (P = 0.039). Furthermore, uTWEAK was better at distinguishing between LN and non-LN SLE patients than anti-DNA antibodies and complement levels, while high uTWEAK levels predicted LN in SLE patients with an odds ratio of 7.36 (95% confidence interval = 2.25 to 24.07; P = 0.001). uTWEAK levels peaked during LN flares, and were significantly higher during the flare than at 4 and 6 months prior to or following the flare event. A linear mixed-effects model showed a significant association between uTWEAK levels in SLE patients and their disease activity over time (P = 0.008). sTWEAK levels, however, were not found to correlate with the presence of LN or the degree of nephritis activity. Conclusions: High uTWEAK levels are indicative of LN, as opposed to non-LN SLE and other healthy and disease control populations, and reflect renal disease activity in longitudinal follow-up. Thus, our study further supports a role for TWEAK in the pathogenesis of LN, and provides strong evidence for uTWEAK as a candidate clinical biomarker for LN

Design challenges, and outcomes of building a satellite the size of a soda can

A Mach contest is part of an annual event, organized by UKLSL, which combines both CanSat and rocket competitions. The first Mach event in 2021 was focused on the design of “Simple and Advance CanSats”, and culminated on a 3-day activity at Machrihanish Airbase in Scotland. It involved setup, pre-flight checks, and system adjustments. This paper focuses on the design challenges, and outcomes from building a satellite the size of a soda can by reviewing the event, the mission designed for the competition, and students’ feedback on what could have been improved to prepare the next team competing in Mach-22 which would involve developing a Rocket design and launching an “Advance CanSat”. The competition allowed undergraduate students at The University of Nottingham to experience a practical learning style by solving real engineering problems and practicing professional development skills through design review presentations and providing a flight readiness review to the launch providers of the competition. The proposed mission statement was part of the “PEAK” category, which involved atmospheric studies, where it acts as a simulation model for measuring the atmosphere on different planets and as a deployable probe from rovers to measure varying atmospheric levels. The competition exposed students to perform AITV (Assembly, Integration, Testing, Verification) processes to their CanSat and constructed procedures to test and validate the recovery system. Results from the first Mach event prove a solid starting point for future CanSat competition and space activities within our university. In the future, there are aspirations to grow a student space society and get students involved in extra-curricular STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) projects, and allow them to apply the theory and concepts learned in their academic

Efficacy and Safety of Epratuzumab in Moderately to Severely Active Systemic Lupus Erythematosus: results From Two Phase III Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trials

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