Physical, Psychological and Emotional Benefits of Green Physical Activity: An Ecological Dynamics Perspective

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland Increasing evidence supports the multiple benefits to physical, psychological and emotional wellbeing of green physical activity, a topic of increasing interest in the past decade. Research has revealed a synergistic benefit of green physical activity, which includes all aspects of exercise and physical activity in the presence of nature. Our theoretical analysis suggests there are three distinct levels of engagement in green physical activity, with each level reported to have a positive effect on human behaviours. However, the extent to which each level of green physical activity benefits health and wellbeing is assumed to differ, requiring confirmation in future research. This elucidation of understanding is needed because previous literature has tended to focus on recording empirical evidence rather than developing a sound theoretical framework to understand green physical activity effects. Here we propose an ecological dynamics rationale to explain how and why green physical activity might influence health and wellbeing of different population groups. This framework suggests a number of unexplored, interacting constraints related to types of environment and population groups, which shape reported levels of benefit of green physical activity. Further analysis is needed to clarify the explicit relationship between green physical activity and health and wellbeing, including levels of engagement, types of environmental constraints, levels of physical activity, adventure effects, skill effects and sampling of different populations

Microbial metagenomes from three aquifers in the Fennoscandian shield terrestrial deep biosphere reveal metabolic partitioning among populations

Microorganisms in the terrestrial deep biosphere host up to 20% of the earth's biomass and are suggested to be sustained by the gases hydrogen and carbon dioxide. A metagenome analysis of three deep subsurface water types of contrasting age (from &lt;20 to several thousand years) and depth (171 to 448 m) revealed phylogenetically distinct microbial community subsets that either passed or were retained by a 0.22 mu m filter. Such cells of &lt;0.22 mu m would have been overlooked in previous studies relying on membrane capture. Metagenomes from the three water types were used for reconstruction of 69 distinct microbial genomes, each with &gt;86% coverage. The populations were dominated by Proteobacteria, Candidate divisions, unclassified archaea and unclassified bacteria. The estimated genome sizes of the &lt;0.22 mu m populations were generally smaller than their phylogenetically closest relatives, suggesting that small dimensions along with a reduced genome size may be adaptations to oligotrophy. Shallow 'modern marine' water showed community members with a predominantly heterotrophic lifestyle. In contrast, the deeper, 'old saline' water adhered more closely to the current paradigm of a hydrogen-driven deep biosphere. The data were finally used to create a combined metabolic model of the deep terrestrial biosphere microbial community.Supplementary information available for this article at http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/v10/n5/suppinfo/ismej2015185s1.html</p

Virtual worlds as restorative environments

The overpopulation of our planet creates pressures, not only upon natural and human-created environments, but also upon human well-being. Responding to the Australian government’s focus upon education as a means for improved health, well-being and economic competitiveness, schools and universities strive to embed environmental sustainability and creativity in a crowded curriculum. The use of virtual worlds as restorative environments may help to realise this vision, which is shared by other nations with technologically rich, but time-poor and urbanised societies. This chapter draws upon the final stage of a three-stage study into pre-service teachers’ perceptions of personal well-being, sense of belonging, social connectedness and personal creativity and engagement. It considers how these senses were impacted by participants’ immersive experiences in a natural-seeming virtual world environment in Second Life and in their comparative experience in a formal garden setting. Findings suggest that Second Life may serve as a restorative environment if participants are sufficiently familiar with the user interface and virtual world environment

The BSUIN project

Baltic Sea Underground Innovation Network (BSUIN) is an European Union funded project that extends capabilities of underground laboratories. The aim of the project is to join efforts in making the underground laboratories in the Baltic Sea Region’s more accessible for innovation, business development and science by improving the availability of information about the underground facilities, service offerings, user experience, safety and marketing. The development of standards for the characterization of underground laboratories will allow to compared them with each other. This will help you choose the best places for physical measurements such as neutrino physics or searching for dark matter. The project concerns laboratories where so far no measurements have been made, and even undergrounds where there are no organized laboratories yet. The description of the BSUIN project and the first results of characterization of natural radioactive background in underground laboratories will be presented The BSUIN Project is funded by Interreg Baltic Sea funding cooperatio