Non-Binary in Higher Education Survey Findings Report and Recommendations

This report contains the findings from the Non-Binary in Higher Education: Lived Experiences, Imagined Futures project survey conducted in 2019. It also makes recommendations based on the findings

”I was meant to be able to do this”: women’s experiences of breastfeeding. A phenomenological study

Introduction. There is strong evidence demonstrating that human breastmilk provides complete nutrition for human infants. While the rate of initiation of breastfeeding in the UK has increased steadily over the last 25 years, rates of exclusive breastfeeding in the early weeks and months over the same time period have shown only marginal increases. Method. An interpretive phenomenological approach informed by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger was adopted. The aim was to understand women’s experience of breastfeeding. Women were recruited from one city in the East Midlands in the UK, where the prevalence of breastfeeding is decreasing. Potential participants were recruited via health visitors at the primary birth visit. Ethical approval was received from the university and NHS research ethics committees. Data were collected between three and six months after the birth of their youngest child and analysis was guided by interpretive phenomenological principles. Findings. The women were found to be ill-prepared for the realities of breastfeeding and, for most women, the shock of this experience was overwhelming. In particular there was a lack of understanding and preparation for common problems and a lack of awareness of newborn behaviour. Misunderstandings of newborn behaviour resulted in the women blaming infantfeeding behaviours, such as crying, wakeful states and cluster feeding, on the specific method of infant-feeding. Frequent feeding cues were overwhelming and the women felt overawed by the sense of responsibility. It also led them to question their ability to provide an adequate milk supply. Discussion. The extent to which inadequate preparation for breastfeeding had a negative impact on the breastfeeding experiences of women in this study was a surprise. Antenatal education should focus more on preparing women for the realities. Education and support for breastfeeding women need to encompass infant-feeding cues and infant behaviours

Effect of folic acid supplementation in pregnancy on preeclampsia: The folic acid clinical trial study

Copyright © 2013 Shi Wu Wen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Preeclampsia (PE) is hypertension with proteinuria that develops during pregnancy and affects at least 5% of pregnancies. The Effect of Folic Acid Supplementation in Pregnancy on Preeclampsia: the Folic Acid Clinical Trial (FACT) aims to recruit 3,656 high risk women to evaluate a new prevention strategy for PE: supplementation of folic acid throughout pregnancy. Pregnant women with increased risk of developing PE presenting to a trial participating center between 80/7 and 166/7 weeks of gestation are randomized in a 1: 1 ratio to folic acid 4.0 mg or placebo after written consent is obtained. Intent-to-treat population will be analyzed. The FACT study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in 2009, and regulatory approval from Health Canada was obtained in 2010. A web-based randomization system and electronic data collection system provide the platform for participating centers to randomize their eligible participants and enter data in real time. To date we have twenty participating Canadian centers, of which eighteen are actively recruiting, and seven participating Australian centers, of which two are actively recruiting. Recruitment in Argentina, UK, Netherlands, Brazil, West Indies, and United States is expected to begin by the second or third quarter of 2013. This trial is registered with NCT01355159. © 2013 Shi Wu Wen et al.The Canadian Institutes of Healt

Interactions between groundwater and surface water at river banks and the confluence of rivers

Riparian vegetation depends on hydrological resources and has to adapt to changes in water levels and soil moisture conditions. The origin and mixing of water in the streamside corridor were studied in detail. The development of riparian woodland often reflects the evolution of hydrological events. River water levels and topography are certainly the main causes of the exchange between groundwater and river water through the riverbank. Stable isotopes, such as 18O, are useful tools that allow water movement to be traced. Two main water sources are typically present: (i) river water, depleted of heavy isotopes, originating upstream, and (ii) groundwater, which comes mainly from the local rainfall. On the Garonne River bank field site downstream of Toulouse, the mixing of these two waters is variable, and depends mainly on the river level and the geographical position. The output of the groundwater into the river water is not diffuse on a large scale, but localised at few places. At the confluence of two rivers, the water-mixing area is more complex because of the presence of a third source of water. In this situation, groundwater supports the hydrologic pressure of both rivers until they merge, this pressure could influence its outflow. Two cases will be presented. The first is the confluence of the Garonne and the Ariège Rivers in the south-west of France, both rivers coming from the slopes of the Pyrénées mountains. Localised groundwater outputs have been detected about 200 m before the confluence. The second case presented is the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna Rivers in the north of India, downstream of the city of Allahabad. These rivers are the two main tributaries of the Ganges, and both originate in the Himalayas. A strong stream of groundwater output was measured at the point of confluence

LaZn12.37 (1), a zinc-deficient variant of the NaZn13 structure type

The title compound (lanthanum dodecazinc), LaZn12.37 (1), is confirmed to be a nonstoichiometric (zinc-deficient) modification of the NaZn13 structure type, in which one Zn atom (Wyckoff site 8b, site symmetry m ) has a fractional site occupancy of 0.372 (11). The other Zn atom (96i, m) and the La atom (8a, 432) are fully occupied. The coordination polyhedra of the Zn atoms are distorted icosa­hedra, whereas the La atoms are surrounded by 24 Zn atoms, forming pseudo-Frank–Kasper polyhedra. Electronic structure calculations indicate that Zn—Zn bonding is much stronger than La—Zn bonding

Salicylaldehyde hydrazones: buttressing of outer sphere hydrogen-bonding and copper-extraction properties

Salicylaldehyde hydrazones are weaker copper extractants than their oxime derivatives, which are used in hydrometallurgical processes to recover ~20 % of the world’s copper. Their strength, based on the extraction equilibrium constant Ke, can be increased by nearly three orders of magnitude by incorporating electron-withdrawing or hydrogen-bond acceptor groups (X) ortho to the phenolic OH group of the salicylaldehyde unit. Density functional theory calculations suggest that the effects of the 3-X substituents arise from a combination of their influence on the acidity of the phenol in the pH-dependent equilibrium, Cu2+ + 2Lorg ⇌ [Cu(L–H)2]org + 2H+, and on their ability to ‘buttress’ interligand hydrogen bonding by interacting with the hydrazone N–H donor group. X-ray crystal structure determination and computed structures indicate that in both the solid state and the gas phase, coordinated hydrazone groups are less planar than coordinated oximes and this has an adverse effect on intramolecular hydrogen-bond formation to the neighbouring phenolate oxygen atoms

Crystallographic and Modelling Studies of Industrially Relevant Metal Complexes

Increasing the efficacy of ligands is crucial to many industrial processes and products. The design of new organic reagents which might find applications in automotive lubrication and extractive metallurgy are reported. Force-field based molecular modelling has been used in chapters 2 and 3 to investigate the structure of complexes of malonic acids and benzohydroxamic acids formed on binding to iron(III) oxide surfaces for which both have shown high affinity. Models were constructed in which the ligands were docked to planes in the lepidocrocite crystal structure to simulate their interaction with steel engine surfaces. The Cambridge Structural Database has been used to elucidate the structures of polynuclear complexes of carboxylic acids to define appropriate geometries for malonate complex models. The most plausible modes of surface binding involving malonic acid were modelled to establish which would show the most favourable ligand-surface and ligand-ligand secondary bonding. Modelling of hydroxamate surface binding was guided by structural motifs observed in a mononuclear trishydroxamato iron(III) complexes in a dinuclear complex [Fe2L2(μ2L)2Br2] where LH = benzohydroxamic acid. The resulting model predicted the surface activity of a range of hydroxamic acid derivatives which have been confirmed by measurements of adsorption isotherms carried out on high surface area goethite. The structures of square planar copper(II) complexes of 3-substituted salicylaldoxime ligands which are closely related to systems used in industrial hydrometallurgical processes have been investigated (chapter 4) to ascertain whether there are correlations between the solid state structures and the relative strengths of the ligands as copper extractants. It was expected that electronegative groups would enhance hydrogen bonding between ligands, pulling them towards one another with a consequent decrease in the binding cavity presented by the donor atoms. In practice the structures were found to be influenced by interactions present in the solid state. In particular, axial interactions were found to influence the inner coordination sphere geometry and these were also investigated (chapter 5) using high pressure X-ray crystal structures. Contrary to expectation, application of pressure was found to increase axial bond lengths in order to improve molecular packing efficiency so that the cell volume could decrease