Creative Movement Classes at the IOA: Pilot Program

Sienna Williams reflects on a recent directed study at the Institute on Aging (IOA). Williams worked with Jessica McCracken, the Arts Program Manager for the Center for Elders and Youth in the Arts (CEYA) and Bay Area artist, Eric Garcia to develop and facilitate creative movement classes for older adults. Classes were offered as alternatives to regularly scheduled group exercise programs. Theme development, physical story telling and music were integral in the development of each class. The experience Williams gained from this directed study prompted her design an upcoming psychological study. The study will measure exercise and creative self-efficacy levels as well as quality of life of older adults who partake in creative movement classes

Religious vs. Secular Communities: Sources of Social Support for Emerging Adult Black Gay and Bisexual Men

This research investigates factors that contribute to emerging adult black gay and bisexual men’s sources of social support. Participants were 20 Black, gay/bisexual men between 18-25 years old (Mage = 22.8, SD = 1.7). Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews and utilized grounded theory to determine intersectionality between participants’ religious upbringing as well as their racial, spiritual, sexual, and HIV identities. Participants who self-identified as bisexual continued to seek social support within churches despite having endured repeated exposure to negative religious rhetoric pertaining to same-sex behavior in religious settings. Participants who self-identified as queer did not seek social support within churches. While a majority of participants who self-identified as gay did not seek social support from churches, gay participants who did seek social support from churches were also HIV positive. A majority of participants indicated having to seek social support from communities that did not encompass all of their identities (racial, sexual, religious/spiritual, HIV) and expressed feelings of not belonging or being fully accepted by those communities as a result. Data from this research indicates a need for further research examining Black men’s sexual and religious identity self-labeling tendencies as well as HIV status as predictors of likelihood to seek social support in religious communities, specifically, black churches. A greater understanding of the factors that contribute to emerging adult, Black, gay/bisexual men’s selection of communities for social support may benefit community organizers in the development of groups that could act as sources of resiliency, especially for individuals who are living with HIV

A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change

Assessing global progress on human adaptation to climate change is an urgent priority. Although the literature on adaptation to climate change is rapidly expanding, little is known about the actual extent of implementation. We systematically screened >48,000 articles using machine learning methods and a global network of 126 researchers. Our synthesis of the resulting 1,682 articles presents a systematic and comprehensive global stocktake of implemented human adaptation to climate change. Documented adaptations were largely fragmented, local and incremental, with limited evidence of transformational adaptation and negligible evidence of risk reduction outcomes. We identify eight priorities for global adaptation research: assess the effectiveness of adaptation responses, enhance the understanding of limits to adaptation, enable individuals and civil society to adapt, include missing places, scholars and scholarship, understand private sector responses, improve methods for synthesizing different forms of evidence, assess the adaptation at different temperature thresholds, and improve the inclusion of timescale and the dynamics of responses

Biolink Model: A universal schema for knowledge graphs in clinical, biomedical, and translational science

<h2>What's Changed</h2> <ul> <li>Documentation and repo hierarchy refactoring by @sierra-moxon in https://github.com/biolink/biolink-model/pull/1418</li> </ul> <p>Summary: 4.0.0 is a major release that includes many changes to the documentation for Biolink Model as well as the reorganization of the repository to support the new documentation structure and comply with LinkML best practices. The model itself has not changed significantly, but the documentation has been updated to reflect the current state of the model, and includes new visualizations of the model, additional text-based documentation, and a new gh-pages documentation layout.</p> <p><strong>Full Changelog</strong>: https://github.com/biolink/biolink-model/compare/v3.6.0...v4.0.0</p>Please cite the following works when using this software