Coverage as a misleading development goal: the concept of water-person-years

Large sums of money have been poured into developing countries by donors, aid agencies and NGOs to improve people’s access to water. However, many of the constructed water sources have broken down or are dysfunctional. At the same time, donors, governments and NGOs rush to achieve coverage targets, ambitiously set and inaccurately measured. This paper proposes a new way of measuring the impact of investments. Assessing investments in “waterpersonyears” over a defined period of time, allows for a more efficient allocation of resources, and calls for a rethinking of the current development approach. Measuring in waterpersonyears is necessary in order to shift focus from new infrastructure development to operation and maintenance of existing water systems, something that is crucial for sustainability

Live monitoring of rural drinking water schemes using mobile phone infrastructure

Post-installation monitoring of rural drinking water projects is costly and time consuming, but at the same time a necessity to ensure a project’s sustainability. Limited financial and human resources restrain the level at which facilitators can follow up on their projects, leaving them with little up to date information. The recent mobile phone revolution in Africa has drastically improved the qualitative information flow between remote project sites and facilitators. The solution presented here uses the same technology to improve the quantitative information flow. A specially developed solar powered unit, with a built in GSMmodem, collects daily data about sales, expenditures and production from the water committee which is operating the system. The data is instantly transmitted and presented to the facilitator by a web interface and any unexpected variations will alert the facilitator, allowing for a swift reaction

Replication and extension of rapid decompression of chimpanzees to a near vacuum

Decompression of chimpanzees to near vacuum and recover

Scanning Electron Microscopy in the Evaluation of Consolidation Treatments for Stone

The use of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) examination is shown to be an important tool in the evaluation of the effectiveness of consolidant treatments in stone. This implies the visualization of the attachment of the resin to the stone, the assessment of the degree of penetration and the distribution of the resin in the stone matrix. These factors can then be correlated with the chemical nature of the stone and the resin. A sample preparation technique for limestone, based on acid etching of the surface, is described. This technique improves the visualization of the resin within the stone

Engineering the Drosophila Genome for Developmental Biology.

The recent development of transposon and CRISPR-Cas9-based tools for manipulating the fly genome in vivo promises tremendous progress in our ability to study developmental processes. Tools for introducing tags into genes at their endogenous genomic loci facilitate imaging or biochemistry approaches at the cellular or subcellular levels. Similarly, the ability to make specific alterations to the genome sequence allows much more precise genetic control to address questions of gene function.BBSRC BB/L002817/1 and BB/N007069/

Absence of an embryonic stem cell DNA methylation signature in human cancer.

BackgroundDifferentiated cells that arise from stem cells in early development contain DNA methylation features that provide a memory trace of their fetal cell origin (FCO). The FCO signature was developed to estimate the proportion of cells in a mixture of cell types that are of fetal origin and are reminiscent of embryonic stem cell lineage. Here we implemented the FCO signature estimation method to compare the fraction of cells with the FCO signature in tumor tissues and their corresponding nontumor normal tissues.MethodsWe applied our FCO algorithm to discovery data sets obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and replication data sets obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) data repository. Wilcoxon rank sum tests, linear regression models with adjustments for potential confounders and non-parametric randomization-based tests were used to test the association of FCO proportion between tumor tissues and nontumor normal tissues. P-values of < 0.05 were considered statistically significant.ResultsAcross 20 different tumor types we observed a consistently lower FCO signature in tumor tissues compared with nontumor normal tissues, with 18 observed to have significantly lower FCO fractions in tumor tissue (total n = 6,795 tumor, n = 922 nontumor, P < 0.05). We replicated our findings in 15 tumor types using data from independent subjects in 15 publicly available data sets (total n = 740 tumor, n = 424 nontumor, P < 0.05).ConclusionsThe results suggest that cancer development itself is substantially devoid of recapitulation of normal embryologic processes. Our results emphasize the distinction between DNA methylation in normal tightly regulated stem cell driven differentiation and cancer stem cell reprogramming that involves altered methylation in the service of great cell heterogeneity and plasticity

Compassion, Dominance/Submission, and Curled Lips: A Thematic Analysis of Dacryphilic Experience

Paraphilias are often discussed in the psychological literature as pathological problems, yet relatively little research exists that looks into non-pathological paraphilias (i.e., non-normative sexual interests). Empirical evidence suggests that many individuals incorporate a range of non-normative sexual interests into their sexual lifestyles. Dacryphilia is a non-normative sexual interest that involves enjoyment or arousal from tears and crying, and to date has never been researched empirically. The present study set out to discover the different interests within dacryphilia and explore the range of dacryphilic experience. A set of online interviews was carried out with individuals with dacryphilic preferences and interests (six females and two males) from four countries. The data were analysed for semantic and latent themes using thematic analysis. The respondents' statements focused attention on three distinct areas that may be relevant to the experience of dacryphilia: (i) compassion; (ii) dominance/submission; and (iii) curled-lips. The data provided detailed descriptions of features within all three interests, which are discussed in relation to previous quantitative and qualitative research within emotional crying and tears, and the general area of non-normative sexual interests. The study suggests new directions for potential research both within dacryphilia and with regard to other non-normative sexual interests