The importance of being adhesive

Phytonematodes cause annual crop losses of $100 billion per year. Pasteuria penetrans is a bacterium that has potential to be developed into a biological control agent as an alternative to nematicides. This poster is an overview of a collagen-like gene that is responsible for adhesion of the bacterium to the nematode's cuticle as the first step in the infection process.Non peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Future wireless applications for a networked city: services for visitors and residents

Future wireless networks will offer near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth communications to mobile users. In addition, the accurate position of users will be known, either through network services or via additional sensing devices such as GPS. These characteristics of future mobile environments will enable the development of location-aware and, more generally, context-sensitive applications. In an attempt to explore the system, application, and user issues associated with the development and deployment of such applications, we began to develop the Lancaster GUIDE system in early 1997, finishing the first phase of the project in 1999. In its entirety, GUIDE comprises a citywide wireless network based on 802.11, a context-sensitive tour guide application with, crucially, significant content, and a set of supporting distributed systems services. Uniquely in the field, GUIDE has been evaluated using members of the general public, and we have gained significant experience in the design of usable context-sensitive applications. We focus on the applications and supporting infrastructure that will form part of GUIDE II, the successor to the GUIDE system. These developments are designed to expand GUIDE outside the tour guide domain, and to provide applications and services for residents of the city of Lancaster, offering a vision of the future mobile environments that will emerge once ubiquitous high-bandwidth coverage is available in most cities

Mobile-awareness:designing for mobile interactive systems

In recent years, we have witnessed a significant increase in the availability and adoption of mobile devices with wireless communications capabilities. Such devices can be used as the end-system in network-based (single or multi

Distribution of Supernova Remnants in the Galaxy

The number of Supernova Remnants (SNRs) observable in the Galaxy is consistent with the number expected to be formed in a Universe that is 7,000 years old. The resulting problem of the missing Supernova Remnants is well known and is recognized by astronomers who work in this field

Emotional Dissonance Among UK Animal Technologists: Evidence, Impact and Management Implications

The care and welfare of laboratory animals born, nurtured and experimented upon within a research facility is the primary function for animal technologists. While discharging these responsibilities the emotional needs of the carers require consideration, balancing their perceptions of animal care against the purpose for which the animals exist. As little published information is available on the emotional challenges faced by UK animal technologists, this thesis redresses the balance, exploring the subject in detail through qualitative and quantitative methods. Emotional dissonance, often expressed as felt emotion versus enacted emotion, is a negative output from Emotional Labour. Animal technologists operate in a service environment and the results demonstrate that they ‘act’ under duress and self-regulate which emotions to display. Using exploratory factor analysis the results illustrate two key drivers on felt and enacted emotions. These include internal elements associated with daily tasks elements such as euthanasia and external factors such as budgets over which they have little or no control. Emotional dissonance is shown to occur within various employment grades. Resultant emotions include, guilt, shame and sadness. These can lead to affects upon job satisfaction propagating feelings of workplace alienation, isolation and fear, particularly from antivivisectionist organisations. When organisational support was not forthcoming or lacked empathy, individuals deployed various coping methods. This demonstrates both management and organisational implications including gender, educational attainment and whether a person has staff supervision responsibilities. Observations drawn through both qualitative and quantitative research clearly signpost a spectrum of indicators of emotional dissonance leading to individual, managerial and organisational theoretical implications. In doing so, emotion knowledge has been increased on a previously under researched occupational sector existing within a largely secretive environment. The research on a hitherto largely unknown employment grouping provides insights that had previously existed only mainly in anecdotal ways. The results provide strong evidence to further support existing research demonstrating how roles with significant emotional components directly impact upon individuals and the organisations that employ them

A comparison of methodologies for the staining and quantification of intracellular components of Arbuscular Mychorrizal (AM) fungi in the root cortex of two varieties of winter wheat

© 2019 The Authors. The definitive peer reviewed, edited version of this article is published in Access Microbiology, https://doi.org/10.1099/acmi.0.000083. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.Arbuscular Mychorrizal (AM) fungi are one of the most common fungal organisms to exist in symbiosis with terrestrial plants facilitating the growth and maintenance of arable crops. Wheat has been studied extensively for AM fungal symbiosis using the carcinogen trypan blue as the identifying stain for fungal components, namely arbuscles, vesicles and hyphal structures. The present study uses Sheaffer® blue ink with a lower risk as an alternative to this carcinogenic stain. Justification for this is determined by stained wheat root sections (n = 120), with statistically significant increases in the observed abundance of intracellular root cortical fungal structures stained with Sheaffer® blue ink compared to trypan blue for both Zulu (P = 0.003) and Siskin (P = 0.0003) varieties of winter wheat. This new alternative combines an improved quantification of intracellular fungal components with a lower hazard risk at a lower cost.Peer reviewe

Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications

As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements