Levelling foods for priority micronutrient value can provide more meaningful environmental footprint comparisons

A growing literature in Life Cycle Assessment seeks to better inform consumers, food policymakers, food supply chain actors, and other relevant stakeholders about how individual foods contribute to sustainable diets. One major challenge involves accurately capturing potential trade-offs between nutritional provision and environmental impacts associated with food production. In response, food system sustainability literature has turned increasingly to nutritional Life Cycle Assessment, which assesses the environmental footprints of different foods while accounting for nutritional value. Here we provide examples that show how environmental footprints based on a priority micronutrient-focused functional unit can provide nutritionally meaningful insights about the complexities involved in sustainable food systems. We reinforce the idea that there are limitations in using single-value nutrition-environment scores to inform food guidance, as they do not adequately capture the complex multi-dimensionality and variation involved in healthy and sustainable food systems. In our discussion we highlight the need for future agri-food sustainability assessments to pay attention to regional nutritional and environmental variation within and between commodities, and to better interpret trade-offs involved in food substitutions

Quality of Life, Coping Styles, Stress Levels, and Time Use in Mothers of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Comparing Single Versus Coupled Households

This study aimed to examine the influence of differences in household status on the parental stress, coping, time use and quality of life (QoL) among mothers of children with autism spectrum disorders. Forty-three single and 164 coupled mothers completed the survey. Data were analysed using multivariate logistic regression. We found that single mothers were 1.05 times more likely to report lower levels of environmental QoL. Whilst they were 1.73 times more likely to use acceptance coping style, this association did not persist after adjusting for total number of children, household income and employment status. There was no difference in time use and stress between these mothers. Possible environmental issues for single mothers and implications for future research are discussed. © 2017 Springer Science+Business Media, LL

The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness

Humans have a deeply rooted sense of fairness, but its emotional foundation in early ontogeny remains poorly understood. Here, we asked if and when 4- to 10-year-old children show negative social emotions, such as shame or guilt, in response to advantageous unfairness expressed through a lowered body posture (measured using a Kinect depth sensor imaging camera). We found that older, but not younger children, showed more negative emotions, i.e. a reduced upper body posture, after unintentionally disadvantaging a peer on (4,1) trials than in response to fair (1,1) outcomes between themselves and others. Younger children, in contrast, expressed more negative emotions in response to the fair (1,1) split than in response to advantageous inequity. No systematic pattern of children's emotional responses was found in a non-social context, in which children divided resources between themselves and a non-social container. Supporting individual difference analyses showed that older children in the social context expressed negative emotions in response to advantageous inequity without directly acting on this negative emotional response by rejecting an advantageously unfair offer proposed by an experimenter at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional foundation of the human sense of fairness and suggest that children's negative emotional response to advantageous unfairness developmentally precedes their rejection of advantageously unfair resource distributions

Characterization of plant-derived lactococci on the basis of their volatile compounds profile when grown in milk

peer-reviewedA total of twelve strains of lactococci were isolated from grass and vegetables (baby corn and fresh green peas). Ten of the isolates were classified as Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis and two as Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris based on 16S rDNA sequencing. Most of the plant-derived strains were capable of metabolising a wide range of carbohydrates in that they fermented D-mannitol, amygdalin, potassium gluconate, l-arabinose, d-xylose, sucrose and gentibiose. None of the dairy control strains (i.e. L. lactis subsp. cremoris HP, L. lactis subsp. lactis IL1403 and Lactococcus lactis 303) were able to utilize any of these carbohydrates. The technological potential of the isolates as flavour-producing lactococci was evaluated by analysing their growth in milk and their ability to produce volatile compounds using solid phase micro-extraction of the headspace coupled to gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (SPME GC–MS). Principal component analysis (PCA) of the volatile compounds clearly separated the dairy strains from the plant derived strains, with higher levels of most flavour rich compounds. The flavour compounds produced by the plant isolates among others included; fatty acids such as 2- and 3-methylbutanoic acids, and hexanoic acid, several esters (e.g. butyl acetate and ethyl butanoate) and ketones (e.g. acetoin, diacetyl and 2-heptanone), all of which have been associated with desirable and more mature flavours in cheese. As such the production of a larger number of volatile compounds is a distinguishing feature of plant-derived lactococci and might be a desirable trait for the production of dairy products with enhanced flavour and/or aroma

© Author(s) 2008. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences

Abstract. A major impediment to an understanding of the links between climate and landscape change, has been the relatively coarse resolution of landscape response measures (rates of weathering, sediment production, erosion and transport) relative to the higher resolution of the climatic signal (precipitation and temperature on hourly to annual time scales). A combination of high temporal and spatial resolution dendroclimatic and dendrogeomorphic approaches were used to study relationships between climatic variability and hillslope and valley floor dynamics in a small drainage basin in the Colorado Plateau of northeastern Arizona, USA Dendrogeomorphic and vegetation evidence from slopes and valley bottoms, including root exposure, bending of trunks, change in plant cover and burial and exhumation of valley bottom trees and shrubs, suggest that the currently observe