When chefs adopt a school? An evaluation of a cooking intervention in English primary schools

This article sets out the findings from research on the impact of a, UK based, chefs in schools teaching programme on food, health, nutrition and cookery. Professional chefs link with local schools, where they deliver up to three sessions to one class over a year. The research measured the impact of a standardised intervention package and changes in food preparation and consumption as well as measuring cooking confidence. The target group was 9–11 year olds in four schools. The main data collection method was a questionnaire delivered 2 weeks before the intervention and 2 weeks afterwards. There was a group of four matched control schools. Those taking part in the intervention were enthused and engaged by the sessions and the impact measures indicated an intention to change. There were gains in skills and confidence to prepare and ask for the ingredients to be purchased for use in the home. Following the session with the chef, the average reported cooking confidence score increased from 3.09 to 3.35 (by 0.26 points) in the intervention group – a statistically significant improvement. In the control group this change was not statistically significant. Children’s average reported vegetable consumption increased after the session with the chef, with the consumption score increasing from 2.24 to 2.46 points (0.22 points) again, a statistically significant increase with no significant changes in the control group. The research highlights the need to incorporate evaluation into school cooking initiatives as the findings can provide valuable information necessary to fine-tune interventions and to ensure consistency of the healthy eating messages

Multiple Changes in Peptide and Lipid Expression Associated with Regeneration in the Nervous System of the Medicinal Leech

peer reviewe

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms

Multi-Agent Role Allocation: Issues, Approaches, and Multiple Perspectives

In cooperative multi-agent systems, roles are used as a design concept when creating large systems, they are known to facilitate specialization of agents, and they can help to reduce interference in multi-robot domains. The types of tasks that the agents are asked to solve and the communicative capabilities of the agents significantly affect the way roles are used in cooperative multi-agent systems. Along with a discussion of these issues about roles in multi-agent systems, this article compares computational models of the role allocation problem, presents the notion of explicitly versus implicitly defined roles, gives a survey of the methods used to approach role allocation problems, and concludes with a list of open research questions related to roles in multi-agent systems