Vermont Restaurant Owner & Manager Perspectives on Creating Heart-Healthy Kids Meals

Introduction: The prevalence of sugar sweetened beverages and fried foods combined with a lack of healthy children’s menu options has contributed to the obesity epidemic among young Americans. Recent legislation in New York City and San Francisco instituted strict nutritional requirements on children’s menu items. We performed a cross-sectional study that focused on independently owned restaurants with printed children’s menus in Vermont. We investigated the nutritional content of children’s menu items, restaurant owner and manager perspectives on customer ordering habits, and barriers that restaurants would face if they made children’s menu items healthier.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1220/thumbnail.jp

The Deep Propagating Gravity Wave Experiment (DEEPWAVE): An airborne and ground-based exploration of gravity wave propagation and effects from their sources throughout the lower and middle atmosphere

The Deep Propagating Gravity Wave Experiment (DEEPWAVE) was designed to quantify gravity wave (GW) dynamics and effects from orographic and other sources to regions of dissipation at high altitudes. The core DEEPWAVE field phase took place from May through July 2014 using a comprehensive suite of airborne and ground-based instruments providing measurements from Earth’s surface to ∼100 km. Austral winter was chosen to observe deep GW propagation to high altitudes. DEEPWAVE was based on South Island, New Zealand, to provide access to the New Zealand and Tasmanian “hotspots” of GW activity and additional GW sources over the Southern Ocean and Tasman Sea. To observe GWs up to ∼100 km, DEEPWAVE utilized three new instruments built specifically for the National Science Foundation (NSF)/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Gulfstream V (GV): a Rayleigh lidar, a sodium resonance lidar, and an advanced mesosphere temperature mapper. These measurements were supplemented by in situ probes, dropsondes, and a microwave temperature profiler on the GV and by in situ probes and a Doppler lidar aboard the German DLR Falcon. Extensive ground-based instrumentation and radiosondes were deployed on South Island, Tasmania, and Southern Ocean islands. Deep orographic GWs were a primary target but multiple flights also observed deep GWs arising from deep convection, jet streams, and frontal systems. Highlights include the following: 1) strong orographic GW forcing accompanying strong cross-mountain flows, 2) strong high-altitude responses even when orographic forcing was weak, 3) large-scale GWs at high altitudes arising from jet stream sources, and 4) significant flight-level energy fluxes and often very large momentum fluxes at high altitudes

Peripheral regulation of energy balance in the laboratory mouse

Obesity is a complex disease that is affected by varoiius contributing factors, including resting metabolic rate (RMR), which is genetically determined.  High RMR  has been implicated as protective against the development of obesity, hence genes linked to RMR are potential therapeutic targets in the treatment of obesity. Gene expression profiles of brown adipose tissue (BAT), liver and skeletal muscle were generated to compare mice grouped for high and low RMR.  BAT had the highest number of differential expressed genes, which were clustered and displayed two distinct clusters, corresponding to mice with either high or low RMR.  The genes up-regulated in BAT of the high RMR mice provided two possible mechanisms contributing to the elevated resting metabolism.  First was the potential increase in fatty acid oxidation.  The up-regulation of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) may have inhibited acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC2) via increased phosphorylation, which was verified by western blotting.  The inhibition of ACC2 activated fatty acid oxidation, as carnitine palmitoly transferase-1 (CPT1) was released from its inhibition by malonyl-CoA, thus allowing the entry of fatty acids to the mitochondria for fatty acid oxidation.  The second mechanism was associated with the calcium-regulatory proteins, which may be involved in the transport of calcium in and out of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER).  Decreased intracellular calcium levels, potentially through calcium-leak channels, may have elevated ATP hydrolysis of the sarco/endoplasmic Ca2+ ATPase (SERCA) for calcium reuptake, to maintain intracellular calcium levels at the ER.  Thus, increased ATP hydrolysis by SERCA and calcium regulatory genes, may be an additional or alternative process to UCP1-mediated thermogenesis in BAT which will boost RMR.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Keeping the stress off the sheep? Agricultural intensification, neoliberalism, and ‘good’ farming in New Zealand

Under neoliberal schemes like audit systems, consumer demands born of concerns about food safety, the environment and animal welfare are theoretically poised to influence agricultural production systems (Campbell and Le Heron, 2007). Whether such influences might reverse or redirect the trend toward environmentally- damaging rampant productivism of the 20th century hinges in part on the subjective positions of farmers and the ways in which they inform how farmers respond to policy and market signals. In this paper we argue the need for a genuine engagement with both the complexities of farmer subjectivity and the interactions amongst farmer subjectivity and agro-ecologies, and animal bodies in particular. This paper presents a case study of sheep farmers on the South Island that reveals contestation and transitions in traditional markers of "good farming”, particularly animal health. We observe how such transitions arise from reconfigurations of the relationships between agro-ecological, political and social histories. In this paper’s formulation, neither state subsidies nor neoliberalism in agriculture is primary cause or ultimate effect of the transformation of agricultural practice. Rather, changes in the political economy expose contradictions in farmer subjectivities, the resolution of which may block or reinforce trends suggested by the political economy. We suggest that contested ideas about animal health within the social field of pastoral farming in New Zealand makes it possible that New Zealand’s sheep growers may take the high road of best environmental practice via highly audited environmental standards of production demanded by elite consumer markets, or that they may remain in the intensifying trajectory of continuing to drive the sheep’s body to its maximum possible intensity of production. The mixed legacy of neoliberal reform is that it has simultaneously enabled both of these contradictory trajectories in New Zealand pastoralism.Peer Reviewe

Phenology in higher education : Ground-based and spatial analysis tools

New spatial analysis methods and an increasing amount of remote sensing data are the necessary tools for scaling from ground-based phenological measurements to larger ecosystem, continental, and global processes. However, since remote sensing data and tools are not straightforward to master, training at the higher education level is often necessary. Curricula and training programs linking these integral components of phenological research are sorely needed because the number of people with requisite skills in the use of a growing array of sophisticated analytical tools and collected remote sensing data is still quite small. In this chapter we provide a series of examples of field-based approaches to college- and university-level phenological education. We then guide the reader through the resources that are available for the integration of remote sensing with land-based phenological monitoring and suggest potential ways of using these resources

Randomized controlled phase III trial of weekly paclitaxel ± ofranergene obadenovec (VB-111) for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer (OVAL Study/GOG 3018)

5505 Background: Ofranergene obadenovec (ofra-vec, VB-111) is a nonreplicating adenoviral vector with a murine pro-endothelin 1 (PPE-1-3X) promoter and pro-apoptotic Fas-tumor necrosis factor receptor 1 (TNFR1) chimeric transgene thought to have a dual mechanism of action: vascular disruption and immune activation. Methods: This is a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, multi-center randomized phase III trial (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03398655) of ofranergene obadenovec combined with paclitaxel vs paclitaxel with placebo for the treatment of patients with recurrent platinum resistant ovarian cancer (PROC). Patients were randomly assigned 1:1 to receive IV VB-111 1x10 13 viral particles (VPs) every 8 weeks with weekly IV paclitaxel 80 mg/m2 or placebo with paclitaxel until disease progression. The dual primary endpoints were overall survival (OS) and progression free survival (PFS) as assessed by Blinded Independent Central Review (BICR). Results: Between December 2017 and March 2022, 409 patients were randomized at 86 clinical sites in US, Israel, Spain, Poland and Japan. The median PFS was 5.29 months in the VB-111 arm and 5.36 months in the control arm; hazard ratio (HR) 1.03 (CI: 0.83-1.29, p = 0.7823), and median OS with was 13.37 months vs. 13.14 months HR 0.97 (CI: 0.75–1.27 p = 0.8440). Objective response rates (ORR) were similar in both arms: RECIST 1.1 ORR was 28.9% with VB-111 vs. 29.6% with control (CA-125 ORR 41.1% vs 49.4%). In both treatment arms response to CA-125 was a substantial prognostic factor for both PFS and OS. In the VB-111 arm, the HR in CA-125 responders compared to non-responders was for PFS HR 0.2428 (CI: 0.1642-0.3588), and for OS HR 0.3343 (CI: 0.2134-0.5238). Safety profile was consistent with the known safety profile of ofra-vec and was characterized by common transient flu like symptoms such as fever and chills. Conclusions: The addition of ofranergene obadenovec to paclitaxel did not improve PFS or OS. Clinical trial information: NCT03398655