Patterns of resource use by milkweed insects in Sinai

Plant morphology and defensive chemistry are related to the insect community of herbivores on Gomphocarpus sinaicus (Boiss.) (Apocynaceae) in Sinai (Egypt). There appears to be significant variation among individual plants in the components of their chemical defences. The different components of the community respond differently to plant characters; plant defence appears to be an important determinant of the relative abundances of the insect species. The data showed an indications of different relationships of the insect herbivores to levels ofchemical defences, especially aphids. While weevil and bug densities covaried, those of aphids varied more independently, and possibly inversely. The community is compared with the much better known North American herbivore community on plants of the sister-genus Asclepias

Public health system integration of avoidable blindness screening and management, India.

In India, 73 million people have diabetes and 3.5 million infants are born preterm. Without timely screening, there is a risk of visual loss due to diabetic retinopathy and retinopathy of prematurity in these two groups, respectively. Both conditions are emerging causes of visual impairment in India but there is no public health programme for screening or management. Pilot projects were initiated in 2014 to integrate the screening and management of these conditions into existing public health systems, particularly in rural communities and their referral networks. The World Health Organization's health systems framework was used to develop the projects and strategies were developed with all stakeholders, including the government. Both projects involved hub-and-spoke models of care units around medical schools. For diabetic retinopathy, screening was established at primary health-care facilities and treatment was provided at district hospitals. For retinopathy of prematurity, screening was integrated into sick newborn care units at the district level and treatment facilities were improved at the closest publically funded medical schools. In the first two years, there were substantial improvements in awareness, screening, treatment and partnership between stakeholders, and changes in public health policy. By March 2018, diabetic retinopathy screening was established at 50 facilities in 10 states and treatment had been improved at 10 hospitals, whereas retinopathy of prematurity screening was established at 16 sick newborn care units in district hospital in four states and treatment had been improved at six medical schools. Advocacy within state governments was critical to the success of the initiative

Assessing the public acceptability of proposed policy interventions to reduce the misuse of antibiotics in Australia: A report on two community juries

Objective To elicit the views of well-informed community members on the acceptability of proposed policy interventions designed to improve community use of antibiotics in Australia. Design Two community juries held in 2016. Setting and participants Western Sydney and Dubbo communities in NSW, Australia. Twenty-nine participants of diverse social and cultural backgrounds, mixed genders and ages recruited via public advertising: one jury was drawn from a large metropolitan setting; the other from a regional/rural setting. Main outcome measure Jury verdict and rationale in response to a prioritization task and structured questions. Results Both juries concluded that potential policy interventions to curb antibiotic misuse in the community should be directed towards: (i) ensuring that the public and prescribers were better educated about the dangers of antibiotic resistance; (ii) making community-based human and animal health-care practitioners accountable for their prescribing decisions. Patient-centred approaches such as delayed prescribing were seen as less acceptable than prescriber-centred approaches; both juries completely rejected any proposal to decrease consumer demand by increasing antibiotic prices. Conclusion These informed citizens acknowledged the importance of raising public awareness of the risks, impacts and costs of antibiotic resistance and placed a high priority on increasing social and professional accountability through restrictive measures. Their overarching aim was that policy interventions should be directed towards creating collective actions and broad social support for changing antibiotic use through establishing and explaining the need for mechanisms to control and support better prescribing by practitioners, while not transferring the burdens, costs and risks of interventions to consumers.This work was supported by a seed grant from the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Disease and Biosecurity and NHMRC CRE 1102962. CD, JJ and GLG received funding support from a NHMRC Project grant (#1083079). SMC is funded through NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (#1032963)

Axion Protection from Flavor

The QCD axion fails to solve the strong CP problem unless all explicit PQ violating, Planck-suppressed, dimension n<10 operators are forbidden or have exponentially small coefficients. We show that all theories with a QCD axion contain an irreducible source of explicit PQ violation which is proportional to the determinant of the Yukawa interaction matrix of colored fermions. Generically, this contribution is of low operator dimension and will drastically destabilize the axion potential, so its suppression is a necessary condition for solving the strong CP problem. We propose a mechanism whereby the PQ symmetry is kept exact up to n=12 with the help of the very same flavor symmetries which generate the hierarchical quark masses and mixings of the SM. This "axion flavor protection" is straightforwardly realized in theories which employ radiative fermion mass generation and grand unification. A universal feature of this construction is that the heavy quark Yukawa couplings are generated at the PQ breaking scale.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure

Regenerative Response of Degenerate Human Nucleus Pulposus Cells to GDF6 Stimulation

Growth differentiation factor (GDF) family members have been implicated in the development and maintenance of healthy nucleus pulposus (NP) tissue, making them promising therapeutic candidates for treatment of intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration and associated back pain. GDF6 has been shown to promote discogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells, but its effect on NP cells remains largely unknown. Our aim was to investigate GDF6 signalling in adult human NP cells derived from degenerate tissue and determine the signal transduction pathways critical for GDF6-mediated phenotypic changes and tissue homeostatic mechanisms. This study demonstrates maintained expression of GDF6 receptors in human NP and annulus fibrosus (AF) cells across a range of degeneration grades at gene and protein level. We observed an anabolic response in NP cells treated with recombinant GDF6 (increased expression of matrix and NP-phenotypic markers; increased glycosaminoglycan production; no change in catabolic enzyme expression), and identified the signalling pathways involved in these responses (SMAD1/5/8 and ERK1/2 phosphorylation, validated by blocking studies). These findings suggest that GDF6 promotes a healthy disc tissue phenotype in degenerate NP cells through SMAD-dependent and -independent (ERK1/2) mechanisms, which is important for development of GDF6 therapeutic strategies for treatment of degenerate discs.</jats:p

Optimal use of reminders: Metacognition, effort, and cognitive offloading

Individuals frequently choose between accomplishing goals using unaided cognitive abilities or offloading cognitive demands onto external tools and resources. For example, in order to remember an upcoming appointment one might rely on unaided memory or create a reminder by setting a smartphone alert. Setting a reminder incurs both a cost (the time/effort to set it up) and a benefit (increased likelihood of remembering). Here we investigate whether individuals weigh such costs/benefits optimally or show systematic biases. In 3 experiments, participants performed a memory task where they could choose between (a) earning a maximum reward for each remembered item, using unaided memory; or (b) earning a lesser amount per item, using external reminders to increase the number remembered. Participants were significantly biased toward using external reminders, even when they had a financial incentive to choose optimally. Individual differences in this bias were stable over time, and predicted by participants' erroneous metacognitive underconfidence in their memory abilities. Bias was eliminated, however, when participants received metacognitive advice about which strategy was likely to maximize performance. Furthermore, we found that metacognitive interventions (manipulation of feedback valence and practice-trial difficulty) yielded shifts in participants' reminder bias that were mediated by shifts in confidence. However, the bias could not be fully attributed to metacognitive error. We conclude that individuals have stable biases toward using external versus internal cognitive resources, which result at least in part from inaccurate metacognitive evaluations. Finding interventions to mitigate these biases can improve individuals' adaptive use of cognitive tools

Mechanical Stress Inference for Two Dimensional Cell Arrays

Many morphogenetic processes involve mechanical rearrangement of epithelial tissues that is driven by precisely regulated cytoskeletal forces and cell adhesion. The mechanical state of the cell and intercellular adhesion are not only the targets of regulation, but are themselves likely signals that coordinate developmental process. Yet, because it is difficult to directly measure mechanical stress {\it in vivo} on sub-cellular scale, little is understood about the role of mechanics of development. Here we present an alternative approach which takes advantage of the recent progress in live imaging of morphogenetic processes and uses computational analysis of high resolution images of epithelial tissues to infer relative magnitude of forces acting within and between cells. We model intracellular stress in terms of bulk pressure and interfacial tension, allowing these parameters to vary from cell to cell and from interface to interface. Assuming that epithelial cell layers are close to mechanical equilibrium, we use the observed geometry of the two dimensional cell array to infer interfacial tensions and intracellular pressures. Here we present the mathematical formulation of the proposed Mechanical Inverse method and apply it to the analysis of epithelial cell layers observed at the onset of ventral furrow formation in the {\it Drosophila} embryo and in the process of hair-cell determination in the avian cochlea. The analysis reveals mechanical anisotropy in the former process and mechanical heterogeneity, correlated with cell differentiation, in the latter process. The method opens a way for quantitative and detailed experimental tests of models of cell and tissue mechanics