Iowa Women: The Kinds of Food They Eat

What does is take to keep nutritionally fit throughout life? Are Iowa women choosing the right kinds of foods? Here\u27s a picture of what Iowa women are eating every day and the nutritional worth of their meals

Determination of the Distribution of the Resident Inshore and Offshore Migratory Cod Populations Around Shetland (IVa) and Westwards into VIa

The current genetic analysis alludes to finer scale structuring of Atlantic cod stocks in the IVa and VIa stock units than had previously been reported by Heath et al. (2014). Consistent with previous studies of maturation, cod from Viking sampled in 2014 matured at a later age and larger size than other areas, providing a phenotypic population marker.  During spawning time there was no indication that the Viking group extended beyond the > 100 m waters of the northern North Sea. Indeed, the new genetic and maturity evidence suggests that Shetland coastal cod (ShIE) appear to extend into waters > 100 m east of Shetland.  The possible separation of cod from Scottish inshore waters from those offshore is also reminiscent of the inshore-offshore division seen in the northern North Sea.  There is some indication of mixing of populations outside the breeding season in the genetic analysis as well as the observation of large immature cod present in west coast samples.  The present study has considerably expanded our understanding of the Viking cod from northern IVa and when combined with the studies by Poulsen et al. (2011) and Heath et al. (2014), provides a good indication of population extent at spawning time and suggests a split around 0030 W

Customizing hybrid products

We explore how the convergence of the digital and physical into hybrid products leads to new possibilities for customization. We report on a technology probe, a hybrid advent calendar with both paper form and digital layers of content, both of which were designed to be customizable. We reveal how over two hundred active users adapted its physical and digital aspects in various ways, some anticipated and familiar, but others surprising. This leads us to contribute concepts to help understand and design for hybrid customization – the idea of broad customization spanning physical and digital; end-to-end customization by different stakeholders along the value chain for a product; and the combination of these into customization maps

Genome Sequence of the Chestnut Blight Fungus Cryphonectria parasitica EP155: A Fundamental Resource for an Archetypical Invasive Plant Pathogen.

Cryphonectria parasitica is the causal agent of chestnut blight, a fungal disease that almost entirely eliminated mature American chestnut from North America over a 50-year period. Here, we formally report the genome of C. parasitica EP155 using a Sanger shotgun sequencing approach. After finishing and integration with simple-sequence repeat markers, the assembly was 43.8 Mb in 26 scaffolds (L50 = 5; N50 = 4.0Mb). Eight chromosomes are predicted: five scaffolds have two telomeres and six scaffolds have one telomere sequence. In total, 11,609 gene models were predicted, of which 85% show similarities to other proteins. This genome resource has already increased the utility of a fundamental plant pathogen experimental system through new understanding of the fungal vegetative incompatibility system, with significant implications for enhancing mycovirus-based biological control

Letting Go: Working with the Rhythm of Participants

Abstract The focus of this study is a community of families separated by prison. Some parts of this community do not engage with the support offered to it, regardless of delivery mechanism. In this study, we used a participatory design approach to community informatics to explore why some do not engage with the support offered and the potential for service design to increase engagement. This is a community where on-line service delivery is a method used to deliver information and support and so taking a community informatics lens helps to inform both on and off-line service design. This paper explores the use of four participatory design principles selected to improve the extent and quality of participation: ceding control, segmentation, situation and envisioning control. In this first phase of the study we discovered how the principle of feedback between segmented participant groups helps to develop an understanding of the service design needs for the whole community and is a potential technique for community informatics and service design in general to improve the quality of input to community service design

Confidence College – an online education tool for neurology patients

COVID-19 and its aftermath highlight the importance of patient self-care and involvement in monitoring and improving their health. Resources to guide this are essential. Our objective was to create a web-based patient education tool, to facilitate patient education and empowerment for people with epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, available without cost to patients, carers and clinicians. This project was conducted within community and secondary neurology services. Patients and their carers were involved in designing, reviewing and revising the tool, as equal partners with clinicians and digital engineers. A web-based design template was developed with graphics and links to enable patients to create personalised plans. Participants are patients, carers, clinicians (neurology consultants and specialist nurses), neurological charities, the London Neuroscience Clinical Network, NHS England and Shift.ms (a service design team with experience in creating digital services for individuals living with neurological conditions). Shift.ms conducted in-depth interviews. Clinicians used evidence from personal and PubMed databases. Shift.ms analysed and co-ordinated the responses, and designed the pilot tool. Confidence College provides a delivery model for patient education relating to multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. It requires follow-up evaluation regarding uptake. This web-based accessible patient empowerment tool has no limit on recurrent use, low maintenance costs and no additional costs in up-scaling the number of users. It is ideally suited for use during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Comment on "Evidence for dark matter in the inner Milky Way"

This is a brief rebuttal to arXiv:1502.03821, which claims to provide the first observational proof of dark matter interior to the solar circle. We point out that this result is not new, and can be traced back at least a quarter century.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures. In this version we add a figure from a 1998 paper that shows the same result that arXiv:1502.03821 claims to be novel. We also add a short note rebutting arXiv:1503.08784 which was written in response to the first versio

Assessing, quantifying and valuing the ecosystem services of coastal lagoons

The natural conservation of coastal lagoons is important not only for their ecological importance, but also because of the valuable ecosystem services they provide for human welfare and wellbeing. Coastal lagoons are shallow semi-enclosed systems that support important habitats such as wetlands, mangroves, salt-marshes and seagrass meadows, as well as a rich biodiversity. Coastal lagoons are also complex social-ecological systems with ecosystem services that provide livelihoods, wellbeing and welfare to humans. This study assessed, quantified and valued the ecosystem services of 32 coastal lagoons. The main findings of the study are: (i) the definitions of ecosystem services are still not generally accepted; (ii) the quantification of ecosystem services is made in many different ways, using different units; (iii) the evaluation in monetary terms of some ecosystem service is problematic, often relying on non-monetary evaluation methods; (iv) when ecosystem services are valued in monetary terms, this may represent very different human benefits; and, (v) different aspects of climate change, including increasing temperature, sea-level rise and changes in rainfall patterns threaten the valuable ecosystem services of coastal lagoons.DEVOTES project, from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration [308392]; networks and communities of Eurolag; Future Earth Coasts; SCOR; Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) Investigador Programme [IF/00331/2013]; Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia [UID/MAR/04292/2013]; CESAM by FCT/MEC national funds (PIDDAC) [UID/AMB/50017/2013 - POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007638]; FEDER; European Commission, under the 7th Framework Programme through the collaborative research project LAGOONS [283157]; FCT [SFRH/BPD/107823/2015, SFRH/BPD/91494/2012

Host- plasmid network structure in wastewater is linked to antimicrobial resistance genes

As mobile genetic elements, plasmids are central for our understanding of antimicrobial resistance spread in microbial communities. Plasmids can have varying fitness effects on their host bacteria, which will markedly impact their role as antimicrobial resistance vectors. Using a plasmid population model, we first show that beneficial plasmids interact with a higher number of hosts than costly plasmids when embedded in a community with multiple hosts and plasmids. We then analyse the network of a natural host-plasmid wastewater community from a Hi-C metagenomics dataset. As predicted by the model, we find that antimicrobial resistance encoding plasmids, which are likely to have positive fitness effects on their hosts in wastewater, interact with more bacterial taxa than non-antimicrobial resistance plasmids and are disproportionally important for connecting the entire network compared to non- antimicrobial resistance plasmids. This highlights the role of antimicrobials in restructuring host-plasmid networks by increasing the benefits of antimicrobial resistance carrying plasmids, which can have consequences for the spread of antimicrobial resistance genes through microbial networks. Furthermore, that antimicrobial resistance encoding plasmids are associated with a broader range of hosts implies that they will be more robust to turnover of bacterial strains