The Contribution of Natural History Museums to Science Education

This is a report of a project titled ‘The Contribution of Natural History Museums to Science Education’, funded by the Wellcome Trust and ESRC with a Phase 1 grant from the Science Learning+ initiative. The project explored how Natural History Museums (NHMs) and schools can complement one another to maximise learning among school-age learners, and researched the long-term benefits to learning and engagement with science that NHMs can provide. During the course of our work, our team, which consisted of museum professionals and academics in the UK and the US, worked in the UK and the US with practitioners in NHMs and with school teachers and students. Our conclusions, as summarised in this Executive Summary, fall into two areas, one to do with the provision by museums of learning experiences for students, the other to do with how NHMs assess the effects of their provision. While our focus is on NHMs, a number of our conclusions apply more generally

The behaviour change technique ontology: transforming the behaviour change technique taxonomy v1

Background: The Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1 (BCTTv1) specifies the potentially active content of behaviour change interventions. Evaluation of BCTTv1 showed the need to extend it into a formal ontology, improve its labels and definitions, add BCTs and subdivide existing BCTs. We aimed to develop a Behaviour Change Technique Ontology (BCTO) that would meet these needs. Methods: The BCTO was developed by: (1) collating and synthesising feedback from multiple sources; (2) extracting information from published studies and classification systems; (3) multiple iterations of reviewing and refining entities, and their labels, definitions and relationships; (4) refining the ontology via expert stakeholder review of its comprehensiveness and clarity; (5) testing whether researchers could reliably apply the ontology to identify BCTs in intervention reports; and (6) making it available online and creating a machine-readable version. Results: Initially there were 282 proposed changes to BCTTv1. Following first-round review, 19 BCTs were split into two or more BCTs, 27 new BCTs were added and 26 BCTs were moved into a different group, giving 161 BCTs hierarchically organised into 12 logically defined higher-level groups in up to five hierarchical levels. Following expert stakeholder review, the refined ontology had 247 BCTs hierarchically organised into 20 higher-level groups. Independent annotations of intervention evaluation reports by researchers familiar and unfamiliar with the ontology resulted in good levels of inter-rater reliability (0.82 and 0.79, respectively). Following revision informed by this exercise, 34 BCTs were added, resulting in a final version of the BCTO containing 281 BCTs organised into 20 higher-level groups over five hierarchical levels. Discussion: The BCT Ontology provides a standard terminology and comprehensive classification system for the content of behaviour change interventions that can be reliably used to describe interventions

Characterization of PTZ-Induced Seizure Susceptibility in a Down Syndrome Mouse Model That Overexpresses CSTB

Down syndrome (DS) is a complex genetic syndrome characterized by intellectual disability, dysmorphism and variable additional physiological traits. Current research progress has begun to decipher the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive impairment, leading to new therapeutic perspectives. Pentylenetetrazol (PTZ) has recently been found to have positive effects on learning and memory capacities of a DS mouse model and is foreseen to treat DS patients. But PTZ is also known to be a convulsant drug at higher dose and DS persons are more prone to epileptic seizures than the general population. This raises concerns over what long-term effects of treatment might be in the DS population. The cause of increased propensity for epilepsy in the DS population and which Hsa21 gene(s) are implicated remain unknown. Among Hsa21 candidate genes in epilepsy, CSTB, coding for the cystein protease inhibitor cystatin B, is involved in progressive myoclonus epilepsy and ataxia in both mice and human. Thus we aim to evaluate the effect of an increase in Cstb gene dosage on spontaneous epileptic activity and susceptibility to PTZ-induced seizure. To this end we generated a new mouse model trisomic for Cstb by homologous recombination. We verified that increasing copy number of Cstb from Trisomy (Ts) to Tetrasomy (Tt) was driving overexpression of the gene in the brain, we checked transgenic animals for presence of locomotor activity and electroencephalogram (EEG) abnormalities characteristic of myoclonic epilepsy and we tested if those animals were prone to PTZ-induced seizure. Overall, the results of the analysis shows that an increase in Cstb does not induce any spontaneous epileptic activity and neither increase or decrease the propensity of Ts and Tt mice to myoclonic seizures suggesting that Ctsb dosage should not interfere with PTZ-treatment

Reconstructing Asian faunal introductions to eastern Africa from multi-proxy biomolecular and archaeological datasets

Human-mediated biological exchange has had global social and ecological impacts. In subS-aharan Africa, several domestic and commensal animals were introduced from Asia in the pre-modern period; however, the timing and nature of these introductions remain contentious. One model supports introduction to the eastern African coast after the mid-first millennium CE, while another posits introduction dating back to 3000 BCE. These distinct scenarios have implications for understanding the emergence of long-distance maritime connectivity, and the ecological and economic impacts of introduced species. Resolution of this longstanding debate requires new efforts, given the lack of well-dated fauna from high-precision excavations, and ambiguous osteomorphological identifications. We analysed faunal remains from 22 eastern African sites spanning a wide geographic and chronological range, and applied biomolecular techniques to confirm identifications of two Asian taxa: domestic chicken (Gallus gallus) and black rat (Rattus rattus). Our approach included ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis aided by BLAST-based bioinformatics, Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) collagen fingerprinting, and direct AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) radiocarbon dating. Our results support a late, mid-first millennium CE introduction of these species. We discuss the implications of our findings for models of biological exchange, and emphasize the applicability of our approach to tropical areas with poor bone preservation