Promoting Public Health In The Context Of The “Obesity Epidemic”: False Starts And Promising New Directions

In the battle to combat obesity rates in the United States, several misconceptions have dominated policy initiatives. We address those misconceptions, including the notion that restrictive diets lead to long-term weight loss, that stigmatizing obesity is an effective strategy for promoting weight reduction, and that weight and physical health should be considered synonymous with one another. In offering correctives to each of these points, we draw on psychological science to suggest new policies that could be enacted at both the local and national levels. Instead of policies that rely solely on individual willpower, which is susceptible to failure, we recommend those that make use of environmental changes to reduce the amount of willpower necessary to achieve healthy behavior. Ultimately, the most effective policies will promote health rather than any arbitrary level of weight

Taking A Stand: The Effects Of Standing Desks On Task Performance And Engagement

Time spent sitting is associated with negative health outcomes, motivating some individuals to adopt standing desk workstations. This study represents the first investigation of the effects of standing desk use on reading comprehension and creativity. In a counterbalanced, within-subjects design, 96 participants completed reading comprehension and creativity tasks while both sitting and standing. Participants self-reported their mood during the tasks and also responded to measures of expended effort and task difficulty. In addition, participants indicated whether they expected that they would perform better on work-relevant tasks while sitting or standing. Despite participants’ beliefs that they would perform worse on most tasks while standing, body position did not affect reading comprehension or creativity performance, nor did it affect perceptions of effort or difficulty. Mood was also unaffected by position, with a few exceptions: Participants exhibited greater task engagement (i.e., interest, enthusiasm, and alertness) and less comfort while standing rather than sitting. In sum, performance and psychological experience as related to task completion were nearly entirely uninfluenced by acute (~30-min) standing desk use. View Full-Tex

Effects of a Large Fishing Closure on Benthic Communitites in the Western Gulf of Maine: Recovery from the Effects of Gillnets and Otter Trawls

The recovery of benthic communities inside the western Gulf of Maine fishing closure area was evaluated by comparing invertebrate assemblages at sites inside and outside of the closure four to six years after the closure was established. The major restriction imposed by the closure was a year-round prohibition of bottom gillnets and otter trawls. A total of 163 seafloor sites (~half inside and half outside the closure) within a 515-km2 study area were sampled with some combination of Shipek grab, Wildco box corer, or underwater video. Bottom types ranged from mud (silt and clay) to boulders, and the effects of the closure on univariate measures (total density, biomass, taxonomic richness) of benthos varied widely among sediment types. For sites with predominantly mud sediments, there were mixed effects on inside and outside infauna and no effect on epifauna. For sites with mainly sand sediments, there were higher density, biomass, and taxonomic richness for infauna inside the closure, but no significant effects on epifauna. For sites dominated by gravel (which included boulders in some areas), there were no effects on infauna but strong effects on epifaunal density and taxonomic richness. For fishing gear, the data indicated that infauna recovered in sand from the impacts of otter trawls operated inside the closure but that they did not recover in mud, and that epifauna recovered on gravel bottoms from the impact of gillnets used inside the closure. The magnitudes of impact and recovery, however, cannot be inferred directly from our data because of a confounding factor of different fishing intensities outside the closure for a direct comparison of preclosure and postclosure data. The overall negative impact of trawls is likely underestimated by our data, whereas the negative impact of gillnets is likely overestimated

The Fields of Interest of Lean Six Sigma through PDCA cycle and 4P Excellence Model

The aim of this paper is to review the focus of research carried out on Lean Six Sigma (LSS). A screening of 116 papers related to LSS from renowned and open database searches including DOAJ, ResearchGate, MDPI on the period of 2006 to 2021 have been done. This paper provides a review of Leans Six Sigma (LSS) in the context of the Plan Do Check Act cycle and the 4P Excellence Model to identify areas for future research and opportunities to deliver business excellence. 21% of the papers (25) contribute on Plan phase of using LSS, 62% of the papers (72) are focused on «DO» phase which is the practical deployment of LSS, 15% of the searches (17) related to Check phase which concerns the questioning of the methodology and 2% of the papers is looking for adapting and adopting the LSS, this is the Act phase. From the 72 papers classified as focused on «DO» phase, 70% of the papers are focused on processes which are using the LSS tools for achieving a specific goal of reducing waste and variation. How to innovate the Products by LSS approach took the second interest, it represents 26% of the various papers. People, Partnership and Leadership which are fundamentals for culture change share the last part. We have also seen a great interest in publications in the tangible parts of using LSS in processes and products during a visible period from 2006 to 2013, then several studies look more into the importance of the non-tangible parts of using LSS as an improvement process after 2013

Solid friction between soft filaments

Any macroscopic deformation of a filamentous bundle is necessarily accompanied by local sliding and/or stretching of the constituent filaments. Yet the nature of the sliding friction between two aligned filaments interacting through multiple contacts remains largely unexplored. Here, by directly measuring the sliding forces between two bundled F-actin filaments, we show that these frictional forces are unexpectedly large, scale logarithmically with sliding velocity as in solid-like friction, and exhibit complex dependence on the filaments' overlap length. We also show that a reduction of the frictional force by orders of magnitude, associated with a transition from solid-like friction to Stokes' drag, can be induced by coating F-actin with polymeric brushes. Furthermore, we observe similar transitions in filamentous microtubules and bacterial flagella. Our findings demonstrate how altering a filament's elasticity, structure and interactions can be used to engineer interfilament friction and thus tune the properties of fibrous composite materials

Biophysical Aspects of Resource Acquisition and Competition in Algal Mixotrophs

Mixotrophic organisms combine autotrophic and heterotrophic nutrition and are abundant in both freshwater and marine environments. Recent observations indicate that mixotrophs constitute a large fraction of the biomass, bacterivory, and primary production in oligotrophic environments. While mixotrophy allows greater flexibility in terms of resource acquisition, any advantage must be traded off against an associated increase in metabolic costs, which appear to make mixotrophs uncompetitive relative to obligate autotrophs and heterotrophs. Using an idealized model of cell physiology and community competition, we identify one mechanism by which mixotrophs can effectively outcompete specialists for nutrient elements. At low resource concentrations, when the uptake of nutrients is limited by diffusion toward the cell, the investment in cell membrane transporters can be minimized. In this situation, mixotrophs can acquire limiting elements in both organic and inorganic forms, outcompeting their specialist competitors that can utilize only one of these forms. This advantage can be enough to offset as much as a twofold increase in additional metabolic costs incurred by mixotrophs. This mechanism is particularly relevant for the maintenance of mixotrophic populations and productivity in the highly oligotro phic subtropical oceans.United States. National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationGordon and Betty Moore Foundatio

Utilisation de l’ATP- Métrie comme Mesure Instantanée de la Qualité de l’Eau dans un Système de Collecte des Eaux de Pluie

L’ATP-Métrie, par l’analyse instantanée de l’ATP libre, de l’ATP Total et par conséquent de l’ATP Microbien (ATP Total — ATP libre), permet une évaluation rapide de la quantité de cellules vivantes, de particules non microbiennes et de particules microbiennes dans un échantillon d’eau. Lors des deux visites sur site des installations de l’Entreprise Sociale Tatirano concernant le système de récupération d’eau de pluie dans le Sud Est de Madagascar, côté Fort-Dauphin, une recherche de remplacement des analyses longues a été menée. Il s’agissait du comptage des colonies de coliformes thermotolérants (TTC) par des analyses rapides d’ATP libre et d’ATP Total ; et l’analyse du chlore libre (CLR), du chlore total (CTR) par les mesures des solides dissouts totaux (SDT) et de la conductivité électrique (CE). 10 variables avec 32 échantillons analysés ont été regroupées en une base de données. Une analyse en composantes principales a été réalisée pour identifier une première tendance générale de la relation entre les variables. Ensuite, une analyse détaillée des proximités des groupes identifiés a été effectuée avec la matrice de similarité des coefficients de corrélation de Pearson et de Spearman. Globalement, à l’issue de l’analyse en composantes principales, 4 axes principaux sont identifiés permettant d’interpréter 88,4 % des données. En combinant l’analyse des cosinus carrés des variables avec la représentation graphique sur le biplot, 2 groupes naturels sont observés. D’abord, l’ATP libre, l’ATP Total, l’ATP Microbien, TTC et le Log(TTC) sont principalement portés par l’axe 1. Puis, le CLR, le CTR, le SDT et la CE sont principalement portés par l’axe 2. Dans l’analyse détaillée de chaque groupe, une faible corrélation linéaire et une corrélation monotone positive et modérée sont observées entre l’ATP microbien et le TTC dont le Rho de Pearson 0,142, p=0,445, et le Rho de Spearman 0,403, p=0,025. Une corrélation linéaire modérée et une corrélation monotone positive et modérée sont observées entre l’ATP microbien et le Log (TTC) dont le Rho de Pearson 0,392, p=0,029, et le Rho de Spearman 0,403, p=0,025. Puis, il a été montré qu’il y a une corrélation linéaire modérée négative entre le CE, le CTR et le CLR, avec un Rho de Pearson -0,346, p=0,056 et un Rho de Spearman de -0,422, p=0,018. Une corrélation linéaire modérée négative a également été observée entre le SDT, le CTR et le CLR dont le Rho de Pearson est -0,369, p=0,041 et le Rho de Spearman -0,521, p=0,003. Ces résultats montrent que les valeurs mesurées instantanément par l’ATP-Métrie telles que l’ATP libre et l’ATP Total combinées à la mesure des STD et CE permettent une lecture instantanée d’un niveau de qualité de l’eau comparable à d’autres appareils de mesure. À ce stade, cela peut être utilisé comme une pré-analyse pour identifier une tendance avant des analyses de plus longues durées. La raison est que certains contextes tels que le niveau réel de pollution de l’eau (matières organiques et inorganiques) n’ont pas été pris en compte. Cela permet également de conclure que la valeur calculée de l’ATP Microbien ne peut pas encore être utilisée et interprétée comme des éléments de mesure de la qualité de l’eau

Absence of FMLP Receptors on Rat Macrophages

Although rat peritoneal neutrophils in the presence of cytochalasin B demonstrate superoxide (O2‐) responses to the chemotactic peptide N’‐formyl‐met‐leu‐phe (FMLP), neither elicited rat peritoneal macrophages nor rat alveolar macrophages show an O2‐response to FMLP (in the presence or absence of cytochalasin B), although a good O2‐response to opsonized zymosan is demonstrated by both types of macrophages. Using Fura‐2 loaded cells, peritoneal macrophages failed to show an increase in intracellular calcium after exposure to FMLP, f‐nor‐leu‐phe, F‐met‐met‐met, or F‐norleu‐leu‐phe‐norleu‐lys. FMLP also failed to induce elevations in intracellular calcium in alveolar macrophages. In 3H‐FMLP binding studies, the lack of responsiveness of peritoneal and alveolar macrophages was associated with the lack of FMLP receptors on these cell types, in striking contrast to the presence of functional receptors on rat neutrophils.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141351/1/jlb0600.pd