Mars Analog Site Study (MASS)

Many proposed missions to Mars involve landing vehicles, including the Mars 94/96 (Russia), Mars Environmental Survey (MESUR, US), and the Marsnet (ESA) missions. Most landers involve in situ measurements of rock and soil compositions, study of local geology by imaging, and establishment of seismic and meteorological networks. The selection of landing sites on Mars is a complex process that must meet engineering constraints and scientific objectives, using available and anticipated data. The goal of the MASS project is to conduct an 'end-to-end' test of the site selection process using Earth analogs

Increasing vegetable intakes: rationale and systematic review of published interventions

Purpose While the health benefits of a high fruit and vegetable consumption are well known and considerable work has attempted to improve intakes, increasing evidence also recognises a distinction between fruit and vegetables, both in their impacts on health and in consumption patterns. Increasing work suggests health benefits from a high consumption specifically of vegetables, yet intakes remain low, and barriers to increasing intakes are prevalent making intervention difficult. A systematic review was undertaken to identify from the published literature all studies reporting an intervention to increase intakes of vegetables as a distinct food group. Methods Databases—PubMed, PsychInfo and Medline—were searched over all years of records until April 2015 using pre-specified terms. Results Our searches identified 77 studies, detailing 140 interventions, of which 133 (81 %) interventions were conducted in children. Interventions aimed to use or change hedonic factors, such as taste, liking and familiarity (n = 72), use or change environmental factors (n = 39), use or change cognitive factors (n = 19), or a combination of strategies (n = 10). Increased vegetable acceptance, selection and/or consumption were reported to some degree in 116 (83 %) interventions, but the majority of effects seem small and inconsistent. Conclusions Greater percent success is currently found from environmental, educational and multi-component interventions, but publication bias is likely, and long-term effects and cost-effectiveness are rarely considered. A focus on long-term benefits and sustained behaviour change is required. Certain population groups are also noticeably absent from the current list of tried interventions

Reproducibility and Stability of Aqueous Metabolite Levels in Extracted Serum by NMR Spectroscopy

Background: Metabolomics offers the potential of correlating a macroscopic view of an organism to measured levels of small molecule reporters of metabolic pathways. Despite strong growth in metabolomics studies, questions on reproducibility and sample stability deserve a closer look. Objective: This work measured acetonitrile extractions of the aqueous components of fetal bovine serum (FBS) by 1H NMR spectroscopy to determine the stability and reproducibility of metabolite levels over time at storage temperatures of 20, 4, -30, and -80 °C. Method: First, mock sera, spiked sera, and pooled human sera were used to find the measurement precision and detection limits of the instrumentation used here (600 MHz, roomtemperature triple resonance probe). Next, using four replicates at each of four storage temperatures, 48 metabolites extracted (2:1 acetonitrile to serum) from FBS samples were profiled over several time scales. Results: Although most metabolites were found to be more stable than expected at room temperature, ca. two weeks, allantoin, creatinine, and glutamine degraded much more rapidly than others at both room temperature and 4 ˚C, measurably decreasing over a few hours or 1 day, respectively. Storing samples at 4 °C dramatically improves the lifetime of all metabolites, while the fidelity of extracted samples over very long term storage at -30 and -80 ˚C is supported by this work. Slight degradation of the cryogenically stored serum extracts is linked to freeze-thaw cycles. Conclusion: The poor stability of a few metabolites for short times supports vigilance in minimizing and standardizing room temperature handling and refrigeration of extracted samples, as inconsistent sample storage even on short time scales would introduce variation that would confound clustering