Effects of mechanically separated dairy cow slurry on grazing performance

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A rank based social norms model of how people judge their levels of drunkenness whilst intoxicated

Background: A rank based social norms model predicts that drinkers’ judgements about their drinking will be based on the rank of their breath alcohol level amongst that of others in the immediate environment, rather than their actual breath alcohol level, with lower relative rank associated with greater feelings of safety. This study tested this hypothesis and examined how people judge their levels of drunkenness and the health consequences of their drinking whilst they are intoxicated in social drinking environments. Methods: Breath alcohol testing of 1,862 people (mean age = 26.96 years; 61.86 % male) in drinking environments. A subset (N = 400) also answered four questions asking about their perceptions of their drunkenness and the health consequences of their drinking (plus background measures). Results: Perceptions of drunkenness and the health consequences of drinking were regressed on: (a) breath alcohol level, (b) the rank of the breath alcohol level amongst that of others in the same environment, and (c) covariates. Only rank of breath alcohol level predicted perceptions: How drunk they felt (b 3.78, 95 % CI 1.69 5.87), how extreme they regarded their drinking that night (b 3.7, 95 % CI 1.3 6.20), how at risk their long-term health was due to their current level of drinking (b 4.1, 95 % CI 0.2 8.0) and how likely they felt they would experience liver cirrhosis (b 4.8. 95 % CI 0.7 8.8). People were more influenced by more sober others than by more drunk others. Conclusion: Whilst intoxicated and in drinking environments, people base judgements regarding their drinking on how their level of intoxication ranks relative to that of others of the same gender around them, not on their actual levels of intoxication. Thus, when in the company of others who are intoxicated, drinkers were found to be more likely to underestimate their own level of drinking, drunkenness and associated risks. The implications of these results, for example that increasing the numbers of sober people in night time environments could improve subjective assessments of drunkenness, are discussed

Cell vs. bacterial viability in the presence of host defence peptides and RGD

yesMore than 2 million people/year suffer a bone fracture in the UK1. Reconstruction of bone defects represents a major clinical challenge and is addressed using a number of medical devices. Although medical device compositions and applications may differ widely, all attract microorganisms and represent niches for medical device associated infections. For open fractures, the risk of infection can be 55%2. These infections are often resistant to many of the currently available antibiotics and represent a huge and growing financial and healthcare burden. The aim of this study was a fundamental understanding of how the presence of host defence peptides (HDPs)3 and/or RGD can influence the outcome of cell vs. bacterial viability and proliferation.Presented at the conference: eCM XVI - Bone and Implant Infection June 24-26, 2015, Convention Centre, Davos Platz, Switzerland

Modelling the future of the Hawaiian honeycreeper : an ecological and epidemiological problem

The Hawaiian honeycreeper (Drepanididae) faces the threat of extinction; this is believed to be due primarily to predation from alien animals, endemic avian malaria (Plasmodium relictum) and climate change. A deterministic SI modelling approach is developed, incorporating these three factors and a metapopulation approach in conjunction with a quasi-equilibrium assumption to simplify the vector populations. This enables the qualitative study of the behaviour of the system. Numerical results suggest that although (partial) resistance to avian malaria may be advantageous for individual birds, allowing them to survive infection, this allows them to become carriers of infection and hence greatly increases the spread of this disease. Predation obviously reduces the life-expectancy of honeycreepers, but in turn this reduces the spread of infection from resistant carriers; therefore the population-level impact of predation is reduced. Various control strategies proposed in the literature are also considered and it is shown that predation control could either help or hinter, depending upon resistance of the honeycreeper species. Captive propagation or habitat restoration may be the best feasible solution to the loss of both heterogeneity within the population and the loss of the species as a whole

Genetic determinants of cellular addiction to DNA polymerase theta

Polymerase theta (Pol θ, gene name Polq) is a widely conserved DNA polymerase that mediates a microhomology-mediated, error-prone, double strand break (DSB) repair pathway, referred to as Theta Mediated End Joining (TMEJ). Cells with homologous recombination deficiency are reliant on TMEJ for DSB repair. It is unknown whether deficiencies in other components of the DNA damage response (DDR) also result in Pol θ addiction. Here we use a CRISPR genetic screen to uncover 140 Polq synthetic lethal (PolqSL) genes, the majority of which were previously unknown. Functional analyses indicate that Pol θ/TMEJ addiction is associated with increased levels of replication-associated DSBs, regardless of the initial source of damage. We further demonstrate that approximately 30% of TCGA breast cancers have genetic alterations in PolqSL genes and exhibit genomic scars of Pol θ/TMEJ hyperactivity, thereby substantially expanding the subset of human cancers for which Pol θ inhibition represents a promising therapeutic strategy

A Hybrid Distributed Architecture for Indexing

This paper presents a hybrid scavenger grid as an underlying hardware architecture for search services within digital libraries. The hybrid scavenger grid consists of both dedicated servers and dynamic resources in the form of idle workstations to handle medium- to large-scale search engine workloads. The dedicated resources are expected to have reliable and predictable behaviour. The dynamic resources are used opportunistically without any guarantees of availability. Test results confirmed that indexing performance is directly related to the size of the hybrid grid and intranet networking does not play a major role. A system-efficiency and cost-effectiveness comparison of a grid and a multiprocessor machine showed that for workloads of modest to large sizes, the grid architecture delivers better throughput per unit cost than the multiprocessor, at a system-efficiency that is comparable to that of the multiprocessor