Foodshift 2030: A Citizen-Driven Transition of the European Food System (EU Horizon Project)

Food poses major challenges for European citizens; be it attaining nutrient rich diets or the disproportionate contribution the food system makes to climate change. Currently, food system innovations don’t sufficiently address these challenges, nor do they take advantage of the opportunities and barriers for scaling up successful food system solutions. The FoodSHIFT 2030 project takes departure in the EU Food 2030 Research and Innovation Policy Framework, the EU’s commitment under the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to launch an ambitious citizen-driven transition of the European food system towards a low carbon circular future, including a shift to less meat and more plant-based diets. It does so by creating a framework and efficient mechanisms for maturing, combining, upscaling and multiplying existing food system innovations through the operationalisation of nine citizen-driven FoodSHIFT Accelerator Labs and a further 27 FoodSHIFT Enabler Labs to be established in city-regions distributed across Europe

Effect of introducing the mucosal atomization device for fentanyl use in out-of-hospital pediatric trauma patients

Background: Pain associated with pediatric trauma is often under-assessed and undertreated in the out-of-hospital setting. Administering an opioid such as fentanyl via the intranasal route is a safe and efficacious alternative to traditional routes of analgesic delivery and could potentially improve pain management in pediatric trauma patients. Objective: The study sought to examine the effect of introducing the mucosal atomization device (MAD) on analgesia administration as an alternative to intravenous fentanyl delivery in pediatric trauma patients. The hypothesis for the study is that the introduction of the MAD would increase the administration of fentanyl in pediatric trauma patients. Methods: The research utilized a 2-group design (pre-MAD and post-MAD) to study 946 pediatric trauma patients (age ,16) transported by a large, urban EMS agency to one of eight hospitals in Marion County, which is located in Indianapolis Indiana. Two emergency medicine physicians independently determined whether the patient met criteria for pain medication receipt and a third reviewer resolved any disagreements. A comparison of the rates of fentanyl administration in both groups was then conducted. Results: There was no statistically significant difference in the rate of fentanyl administration between the pre-MAD (30.4%) and post-MAD groups (37.8%) (P5.238). A subgroup analysis showed that age and mechanism of injury were stronger predictors of fentanyl administration. Conclusion: Contrary to the hypothesis, the addition of the MAD device did not increase fentanyl administration rates in pediatric trauma patients. Future research is needed to address the barriers to analgesia administration in pediatric trauma patients

The check of QCD based on the tau-decay data analysis in the complex q^2-plane

The thorough analysis of the ALEPH data on hadronic tau-decay is performed in the framework of QCD. The perturbative calculations are performed in 3 and 4-loop approximations. The terms of the operator product expansion (OPE) are accounted up to dimension D=8. The value of the QCD coupling constant alpha_s(m_tau^2)=0.355 pm 0.025 was found from hadronic branching ratio R_tau. The V+A and V spectral function are analyzed using analytical properties of polarization operators in the whole complex q^2-plane. Borel sum rules in the complex q^2 plane along the rays, starting from the origin, are used. It was demonstrated that QCD with OPE terms is in agreement with the data for the coupling constant close to the lower error edge alpha_s(m_tau^2)=0.330. The restriction on the value of the gluonic condensate was found =0.006 pm 0.012 GeV^2. The analytical perturbative QCD was compared with the data. It is demonstrated to be in strong contradiction with experiment. The restrictions on the renormalon contribution were found. The instanton contributions to the polarization operator are analyzed in various sum rules. In Borel transformation they appear to be small, but not in spectral moments sum rules.Comment: 24 pages; 1 latex + 13 figure files. V2: misprints are corrected, uncertainty in alpha_s is explained in more transparent way, acknowledgement is adde

Exposure Patterns Driving Ebola Transmission in West Africa:A Retrospective Observational Study

BackgroundThe ongoing West African Ebola epidemic began in December 2013 in Guinea, probably from a single zoonotic introduction. As a result of ineffective initial control efforts, an Ebola outbreak of unprecedented scale emerged. As of 4 May 2015, it had resulted in more than 19,000 probable and confirmed Ebola cases, mainly in Guinea (3,529), Liberia (5,343), and Sierra Leone (10,746). Here, we present analyses of data collected during the outbreak identifying drivers of transmission and highlighting areas where control could be improved.Methods and findingsOver 19,000 confirmed and probable Ebola cases were reported in West Africa by 4 May 2015. Individuals with confirmed or probable Ebola ("cases") were asked if they had exposure to other potential Ebola cases ("potential source contacts") in a funeral or non-funeral context prior to becoming ill. We performed retrospective analyses of a case line-list, collated from national databases of case investigation forms that have been reported to WHO. These analyses were initially performed to assist WHO's response during the epidemic, and have been updated for publication. We analysed data from 3,529 cases in Guinea, 5,343 in Liberia, and 10,746 in Sierra Leone; exposures were reported by 33% of cases. The proportion of cases reporting a funeral exposure decreased over time. We found a positive correlation (r = 0.35, p ConclusionsAchieving elimination of Ebola is challenging, partly because of super-spreading. Safe funeral practices and fast hospitalisation contributed to the containment of this Ebola epidemic. Continued real-time data capture, reporting, and analysis are vital to track transmission patterns, inform resource deployment, and thus hasten and maintain elimination of the virus from the human population

Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure