Evidence-based physical activity promotion: HEPA Europe, the European network for the promotion of health-enhancing physical activity

There has been a world-wide increase in scientific interest in health-enhancing physical activity (HEPA). The importance of a physically active lifestyle has now been well established both on the individual and on the population level. At the same time, physical inactivity has become a global problem. While sports for all has a long history, only a few examples of long-term integrated physical activity promotion strategies have been in place in Europe until recently, namely in Finland, the Netherlands and England. A number of countries have now begun to develop their own activities. However, there has been a noticeable lack of a platform for sharing the development and implementation of evidence-based policies and strategies. In order to fill this gap, HEPA Europe, the European Network for the Promotion of Health-Enhancing Physical Activity, was founded in May 2005 in Gerlev, Denmark. The goal of the network is to strengthen and support efforts and actions that increase participation in physical activity and improve the conditions favourable to a healthy lifestyle, in particular with respect to HEPA. The Network is working closely with the WHO Regional Office for Europe (http://www.euro.who.int/hepa). The network focuses on population-based approaches for the promotion of HEPA, using the best-available scientific evidence, and is currently implementing its first projects. HEPA Europe has established collaboration with EU Commission projects and Agita Mundo. Priorities for future work have been defined, and interested organisations and institutions have the opportunity to join the network and participate in the process

The s Process: Nuclear Physics, Stellar Models, Observations

Nucleosynthesis in the s process takes place in the He burning layers of low mass AGB stars and during the He and C burning phases of massive stars. The s process contributes about half of the element abundances between Cu and Bi in solar system material. Depending on stellar mass and metallicity the resulting s-abundance patterns exhibit characteristic features, which provide comprehensive information for our understanding of the stellar life cycle and for the chemical evolution of galaxies. The rapidly growing body of detailed abundance observations, in particular for AGB and post-AGB stars, for objects in binary systems, and for the very faint metal-poor population represents exciting challenges and constraints for stellar model calculations. Based on updated and improved nuclear physics data for the s-process reaction network, current models are aiming at ab initio solution for the stellar physics related to convection and mixing processes. Progress in the intimately related areas of observations, nuclear and atomic physics, and stellar modeling is reviewed and the corresponding interplay is illustrated by the general abundance patterns of the elements beyond iron and by the effect of sensitive branching points along the s-process path. The strong variations of the s-process efficiency with metallicity bear also interesting consequences for Galactic chemical evolution.Comment: 53 pages, 20 figures, 3 tables; Reviews of Modern Physics, accepte

Language complexity in on-line health information retrieval

The number of people searching for on-line health information has been steadily growing over the years so it is crucial to understand their specific requirements in order to help them finding easily and quickly the specific in-formation they are looking for. Although generic search engines are typically used by health information seekers as the starting point for searching information, they have been shown to be limited and unsatisfactory because they make generic searches, often overloading the user with the provided amount of results. Moreover, they are not able to provide specific information to different types of users. At the same time, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and provide extracts from medical journals that are mainly useful for medical researchers and experts but not for non-experts. A question then arises: Is it possible to facilitate the search of on-line health/medical information based on specific user requirements? In this pa-per, after analysing the main characteristics and requirements of on-line health seeking, we provide a first answer to this question by exploiting the Web structured data for the health domain and presenting a system that allows different types of users, i.e., non-medical experts and medical experts, to retrieve Web pages with language complexity levels suitable to their expertise. Furthermore, we apply our methodology to the results of a generic search engine, such as Google, in order to re-rank them and provide different users with the proper health/medical Web pages in terms of language complexity

Data Integration for Open Data on the Web

In this lecture we will discuss and introduce challenges of integrating openly available Web data and how to solve them. Firstly, while we will address this topic from the viewpoint of Semantic Web research, not all data is readily available as RDF or Linked Data, so we will give an introduction to different data formats prevalent on the Web, namely, standard formats for publishing and exchanging tabular, tree-shaped, and graph data. Secondly, not all Open Data is really completely open, so we will discuss and address issues around licences, terms of usage associated with Open Data, as well as documentation of data provenance. Thirdly, we will discuss issues connected with (meta-)data quality issues associated with Open Data on the Web and how Semantic Web techniques and vocabularies can be used to describe and remedy them. Fourth, we will address issues about searchability and integration of Open Data and discuss in how far semantic search can help to overcome these. We close with briefly summarizing further issues not covered explicitly herein, such as multi-linguality, temporal aspects (archiving, evolution, temporal querying), as well as how/whether OWL and RDFS reasoning on top of integrated open data could be help

Evidence for Paternal Leakage in Hybrid Periodical Cicadas (Hemiptera: Magicicada spp.)

Mitochondrial inheritance is generally assumed to be maternal. However, there is increasing evidence of exceptions to this rule, especially in hybrid crosses. In these cases, mitochondria are also inherited paternally, so “paternal leakage” of mitochondria occurs. It is important to understand these exceptions better, since they potentially complicate or invalidate studies that make use of mitochondrial markers. We surveyed F1 offspring of experimental hybrid crosses of the 17-year periodical cicadas Magicicada septendecim, M. septendecula, and M. cassini for the presence of paternal mitochondrial markers at various times during development (1-day eggs; 3-, 6-, 9-week eggs; 16-month old 1st and 2nd instar nymphs). We found evidence of paternal leakage in both reciprocal hybrid crosses in all of these samples. The relative difficulty of detecting paternal mtDNA in the youngest eggs and ease of detecting leakage in older eggs and in nymphs suggests that paternal mitochondria proliferate as the eggs develop. Our data support recent theoretical predictions that paternal leakage may be more common than previously estimated