Consumer understanding of nutrition and health claims: sources of evidence

Provided that they are scientifically substantiated, nutrition and health (NH) claims linked to food products can help consumers make well-informed food choices. The new European legislation on NH claims made on foods entered into force on 19 January 2007. The law sets out conditions for their use, establishes a system for their scientific evaluation, and will create European lists of authorised claims. An important aspect of this proposed legislation is that it states, in article 5.2, ‘the use of nutrition and health claims shall only be permitted if the average consumer can be expected to understand the beneficial effects expressed in the claim'. The present review examines consumer understanding of NH claims from a consumer science perspective. It focuses on the type of data and information that could be needed to provide evidence that the average consumer adequately understands a particular NH claim. After exploring several different methodologies, it proposes a case-specific approach using a stepwise procedure for assessing consumer understanding of a NH clai

Francis Bacon, natural philosophy and the cultivation of the mind

This paper suggests that Bacon offers an Augustinian (rather than a purely Stoic) model of the “culture of the mind.” He applies this conception to natural philosophy in an original way, and his novel application is informed by two related theological concerns. First, the Fall narrative provides a connection between the cultivation of the mind and the cultivation of the earth, both of which are seen as restorative of an original condition. Second, the fruit of the cultivation of the mind is the virtue of charity, which is understood not only as curing the mind of the individual, but as contributing to human welfare and ameliorating some of the material losses that resulted from the Fall

The tRNAscan-SE, snoscan and snoGPS web servers for the detection of tRNAs and snoRNAs

Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) and small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are two of the largest classes of non-protein-coding RNAs. Conventional gene finders that detect protein-coding genes do not find tRNA and snoRNA genes because they lack the codon structure and statistical signatures of protein-coding genes. Previously, we developed tRNAscan-SE, snoscan and snoGPS for the detection of tRNAs, methylation-guide snoRNAs and pseudouridylation-guide snoRNAs, respectively. tRNAscan-SE is routinely applied to completed genomes, resulting in the identification of thousands of tRNA genes. Snoscan has successfully detected methylation-guide snoRNAs in a variety of eukaryotes and archaea, and snoGPS has identified novel pseudouridylation-guide snoRNAs in yeast and mammals. Although these programs have been quite successful at RNA gene detection, their use has been limited by the need to install and configure the software packages on UNIX workstations. Here, we describe online implementations of these RNA detection tools that make these programs accessible to a wider range of research biologists. The tRNAscan-SE, snoscan and snoGPS servers are available at , and , respectively

Identifying prognostic structural features in tissue sections of colon cancer patients using point pattern analysis

Diagnosis and prognosis of cancer is informed by the architecture inherent in cancer patient tissue sections. This architecture is typically identified by pathologists, yet advances in computational image analysis facilitate quantitative assessment of this structure. In this article we develop a spatial point process approach in order to describe patterns in cell distribution within tissue samples taken from colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. In particular, our approach is centered on the Palm intensity function. This leads to taking an approximate-likelihood technique in fitting point processes models. We consider two Neyman-Scott point processes and a void process, fitting these point process models to the CRC patient data. We find that the parameter estimates of these models may be used to quantify the spatial arrangement of cells. Importantly, we observe characteristic differences in the spatial arrangement of cells between patients who died from CRC and those alive at follow-up

Phenex: Ontological Annotation of Phenotypic Diversity

Phenex is a platform-independent desktop application designed to facilitate efficient and consistent annotation of phenotypic variation using Entity-Quality syntax, drawing on terms from community ontologies for anatomical entities, phenotypic qualities, and taxonomic names. Despite the centrality of the phenotype to so much of biology, traditions for communicating information about phenotypes are idiosyncratic to different disciplines. Phenotypes seem to elude standardized descriptions due to the variety of traits that compose them and the difficulty of capturing the complex forms and subtle differences among organisms that we can readily observe. Consequently, phenotypes are refractory to attempts at data integration that would allow computational analyses across studies and study systems. Phenex addresses this problem by allowing scientists to employ standard ontologies and syntax to link computable phenotype annotations to evolutionary character matrices, as well as to link taxa and specimens to ontological identifiers. Ontologies have become a foundational technology for establishing shared semantics, and, more generally, for capturing and computing with biological knowledge

Signal Structure of the Starlink Ku-Band Downlink

We develop a technique for blind signal identification of the Starlink downlink signal in the 10.7 to 12.7 GHz band and present a detailed picture of the signal's structure. Importantly, the signal characterization offered herein includes the exact values of synchronization sequences embedded in the signal that can be exploited to produce pseudorange measurements. Such an understanding of the signal is essential to emerging efforts that seek to dual-purpose Starlink signals for positioning, navigation, and timing, despite their being designed solely for broadband Internet provision