Designing climate resilient schools: a case study of St Faith’s School, Cambridge

Social and political concerns are frequently reflected in the design of school buildings, often in turn leading to the development of technical innovations. One example is a recurrent concern about the physical health of the nation, which has at several points over the last century prompted new design approaches to natural light and ventilation. The most critical concern of the current era is the global, rather than the indoor, environment. The resultant political focus on mitigating climate change has resulted in new regulations, and in turn considerable technical changes in building design and construction. The vanguard of this movement has again been in school buildings, set the highest targets for reducing operational carbon by the previous Government. The current austerity measures have moved the focus to the refurbishment and retrofit of existing buildings, in order to bring them up to the exacting new standards. Meanwhile there is little doubt that climate change is happening already, and that the impacts will be considerable. Climate scientists have increasing confidence in their predictions for the future; if today’s buildings are to be resilient to these changes, building designers will need to understand and design for the predicted climates in order to continue to provide comfortable and healthy spaces through the lifetimes of the buildings. This paper describes the decision processes, and the planned design measures, for adapting an existing school for future climates. The project is at St Faith’s School in Cambridge, and focuses on three separate buildings: a large Victorian block built as a substantial domestic dwelling in 1885, a smaller single storey 1970s block with a new extension, and an as-yet unbuilt single storey block designed to passivhaus principles and using environmentally friendly materials. The implications of climate change have been considered for the three particular issues of comfort, construction, and water, as set out in the report on Design for Future Climate: opportunities for adaptation in the built environment (Gething, 2010). The adaptation designs aim to ensure each of the three very different buildings remains fit for purpose throughout the 21st century, continuing to provide a healthy environment for the children. A fourth issue, the reduction of carbon and the mitigation of other negative environmental impacts of the construction work, is also a fundamental aim for the school and the project team. Detailed modelling of both the operational and embodied energy and carbon of the design options is therefore being carried out, in order that the whole life carbon costs of the adaptation design options may be minimised

Expression of autism spectrum disorder associated genes in non-diseased fetal brain and thymus

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly variable neurodevelopmental disorder. The main hallmarks of individuals with ASD are social communication impairments and repetitive sensory-motor behaviors, and they may present with additional comorbidities such as intellectual disability, epilepsy, anxiety, and/or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The underlying cause of ASD is similarly heterogeneous. More than a thousand associated genetic variants including chromosomal abnormalities and de novo rare genetic variants have been identified to be associated with ASD. However, there is a general lack of understanding of how genetic variants contribute to the fetal development of ASD. One interesting idea between the biological mechanism and ASD centers around immune associations and neurodevelopment. Many studies have found that a subset of genes are connected to immune pathways that converge on associated mechanisms of ASD. This work interrogates this idea by examining single cell expression of highly associated ASD genes in non-diseased human fetal thymus and brain. The high resolution of single cell expression highlights potential associations between specific cell types or pathways to ASD at a time point that is critical for neurodevelopment. Additionally, gene expression analysis has largely been focused on the brain, and this work investigates the thymus, a transient organ responsible for T cell development and a central component of the immune system. By analyzing highly associated ASD genes in non-diseased tissues of the fetal brain and thymus, the finding that a subset of genes are enriched in thymus tissue substantiates the reason for further interrogation of the possible associations of the thymus and ASD. This analysis also offers a baseline to compare to upon similar analyses of affected tissues of fetal brain and thymus from individuals with ASD

An exploration of the prescribing and administration of medicines in a sample of UK care homes

Residents of care homes are some of the most vulnerable members of society and are particularly susceptible to medicines harm. The safe and effective management of medicines helps to maintain or improve the quality of life of residents. However, there have been concerns surrounding poor prescribing and medicines administration practices within the setting. The aim of this thesis was to explore current prescribing and medicines administration practices in a sample of UK care homes, and to understand whether senior carers could administer medicines safely and effectively. Medicines administration data was extracted from a digital medication management system (PCS™) to explore prescribing patterns, and medicines administration by staff in nursing homes. Semi-structured interviews and surveys were used to explore staff perceptions of senior carers administering medicines under the delegation of nurses. Analysis showed that a significant number of residents were prescribed medicines commonly associated with adverse outcomes in older adults. These included anticholinergic drugs (50%), hypnotics and/or anxiolytics (30%), analgesics (49%), and antimicrobials (24%). Although senior carers were at least as competent as nurses in administering medicines (no statistically significant differences in error rates; pvalue> 0.05), 92% of residents were exposed to medication administration errors during the three-month study period. Interviews and surveys explored staff perceptions of medication administration errors in care homes and a number of themes were identified notably the need for medicines training by senior carers. The findings from this thesis have highlighted that the quality of prescribing and medicines administration remains suboptimal in care homes, and the issues identified may ultimately cause resident harm. New models of care, such as senior carers administering medicines in nursing homes may fail if systemic issues which give rise to such issues are not addressed. Therefore, exploring strategies to efficiently safeguard the quality of medicines management in this setting should be prioritised

Tetherin and Its Viral Antagonists

Restriction factors comprise an important layer of host defense to fight against viral infection. Some restriction factors are constitutively expressed whereas the majority is induced by interferon to elicit innate immunity. In addition to a number of well-characterized interferon-inducible antiviral factors such as RNaseL/OAS, ISG15, Mx, PKR, and ADAR, tetherin (BST-2/CD317/HM1.24) was recently discovered to block the release of enveloped viruses from the cell surface, which is regarded as a novel antiviral mechanism induced by interferon. Here, we briefly review the history of tetherin discovery, discuss how tetherin blocks virus production, and highlight the viral countermeasures to evade tetherin restriction

Quality Enhancement: Governing Student Learning

This article provides a critique of current debates about what quality enhancement is for and what it does. It outlines a conceptual framework drawing on different understandings of quality assurance and quality enhancement in higher education, which helps to refine the role of quality enhancement in improving student learning. The paper analyses existing debates on emerging trends in quality assurance and enhancement, particularly within European HE systems, with reference to the relationships between research, education, social and economic cohesion, the changing nature of student representation, and learning analytics. A new balance between assurance and enhancement could reconcile ways of thinking generated by higher education, knowledge structures emerging in research communities within the universities, and methods of enhancing learning and teaching which enable a degree of student-led demand

Can social inclusion be evaluated? Investigating the psychometric properties of the social inclusion intervention scale

The present study aims to validate a newly developed Social Inclusion Intervention Scale (SIIS) using Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The participants were 128 children aged 45-84 month-old from local integrated preschools in Hong Kong. The factor structure of the SIIS fit the data well (RMSEA = .08, NFI = .92, and TLI = .95, CFI = .96, SRMR = .04), with good convergent validity (all CR values > .92, all AVE values > .61). The internal consistency was good across items (all α values > .91) and factors (all CR values > .92). Hence, the sample obtained from the clinical trials of this study showed a good model fit, which suggested that the SIIS is adequate in measuring social inclusion among preschool children in social inclusion intervention programmes. The implications of the two emerged themes of social inclusion from the findings, Relationships and Acceptance, are further discussed to ascertain how they shed light on the design of social inclusion intervention

Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Cells Expressing CD44 Are Enriched for Stem Cell-Like Properties

Background: The cancer stem cell theory hypothesizes that cancers are perpetuated by cancer stem cells (CSC) or tumor initiating cells (TIC) possessing self-renewal and other stem cell-like properties while differentiated non-stem/initiating cells have a finite life span. To investigate whether the hypothesis is applicable to lung cancer, identification of lung CSC and demonstration of these capacities is essential. Methodology/Principal Finding: The expression profiles of five stem cell markers (CD34, CD44, CD133, BMI1 and OCT4) were screened by flow cytometry in 10 lung cancer cell lines. CD44 was further investigated by testing for in vitro and in vivo tumorigenecity. Formation of spheroid bodies and in vivo tumor initiation ability were demonstrated in CD44+ cells of 4 cell lines. Serial in vivo tumor transplantability in nude mice was demonstrated using H1299 cell line. The primary xenografts initiated from CD44+ cells consisted of mixed CD44+ and CD44- cells in similar ratio as the parental H1299 cell line, supporting in vivo differentiation. Semi-quantitative Real-Time PCR (RT-PCR) showed that both freshly sorted CD44+ and CD44+ cells derived from CD44+-initiated tumors expressed the pluripotency genes OCT4/POU5F1, NANOG, SOX2. These stemness markers were not expressed by CD44- cells. Furthermore, freshly sorted CD44+ cells were more resistant to cisplatin treatment with lower apoptosis levels than CD44- cells. Immunohistochemical analysis of 141 resected non-small cell lung cancers showed tumor cell expression of CD44 in 50.4% of tumors while no CD34, and CD133 expression was observed in tumor cells. CD44 expression was associated with squamous cell carcinoma but unexpectedly, a longer survival was observed in CD44-expressing adenocarcinomas. Conclusion/Significance: Overall, our results demonstrated that stem cell-like properties are enriched in CD44-expressing subpopulations of some lung cancer cell lines. Further investigation is required to clarify the role of CD44 in tumor cell renewal and cancer propagation in the in vivo environment.© 2010 Leung et al.published_or_final_versio

Masked Autoencoders are Scalable Learners of Cellular Morphology

Inferring biological relationships from cellular phenotypes in high-content microscopy screens provides significant opportunity and challenge in biological research. Prior results have shown that deep vision models can capture biological signal better than hand-crafted features. This work explores how self-supervised deep learning approaches scale when training larger models on larger microscopy datasets. Our results show that both CNN- and ViT-based masked autoencoders significantly outperform weakly supervised baselines. At the high-end of our scale, a ViT-L/8 trained on over 3.5-billion unique crops sampled from 93-million microscopy images achieves relative improvements as high as 28% over our best weakly supervised baseline at inferring known biological relationships curated from public databases. Relevant code and select models released with this work can be found at: https://github.com/recursionpharma/maes_microscopy.Comment: Spotlight at NeurIPS 2023 Generative AI and Biology (GenBio) Worksho

Oligodendrocyte-myelin glycoprotein (OMgp) is an inhibitor of neurite outgrowth

A protein fraction purified from bovine brain myelin, previously called arretin because of its ability to inhibit neurite outgrowth, has been identified as consisting predominantly of oligodendrocyte-myelin glycoprotein (OMgp). We show that it is a potent inhibitor of neurite outgrowth from rat cerebellar granule and hippocampal cells; from dorsal root ganglion explants in which growth cone collapse was observed; from rat retinal ganglion neurons; and from NG108 and PC12 cells. OMgp purified by a different procedure from both mouse and human myelin behaves identically in all bioassays tested.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66067/1/j.1471-4159.2002.01146.x.pd