Sequence-Dependent Guest Release Triggered by Orthogonal Chemical Signals.

Three Zn(II)4L4 coordination cages, assembled from trisiminopyridine ligands, exhibit differences in their guest-binding selectivities and reactivity with tris(2-aminoethyl)amine (tren), which enabled the design of a molecular network that responded in distinct ways to different chemical signals. When two of these cages were present in solution together, one of them was observed to selectively encapsulate chloroform, and the other was observed to selectively encapsulate cyclohexane. The two guests could be released sequentially, in a specified order defined by the input of two separate chemical signals: tren and perrhenate. Furthermore, the observed reactivity of tren with the initial cage mixture provided control over the uptake and release of perrhenate within the third cage formed in situ. One of these tetrahedral cages has been identified as a tight (K(a) > 10(7) M(-1)) and selective host for perrhenate, an anion of great physicochemical similarity to pertechnetate, both having uses in nuclear medicine.This work was supported by the European Research Council. We thank Diamond Light Source (UK) for synchrotron beamtime on I19 (MT8464) and Dr. Rana A. Bilbeisi for a preliminary screening of guests for cage 1.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Chemical Society via http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jacs.5b1301

Developing health-related indicators of climate change: Australian stakeholder perspectives

Published: 22 May 2017Climate-related health indicators are potentially useful for tracking and predicting the adverse public health effects of climate change, identifying vulnerable populations, and monitoring interventions. However, there is a need to understand stakeholders' perspectives on the identification, development, and utility of such indicators. A qualitative approach was used, comprising semi-structured interviews with key informants and service providers from government and non-government stakeholder organizations in South Australia. Stakeholders saw a need for indicators that could enable the monitoring of health impacts and time trends, vulnerability to climate change, and those which could also be used as communication tools. Four key criteria for utility were identified, namely robust and credible indicators, specificity, data availability, and being able to be spatially represented. The variability of risk factors in different regions, lack of resources, and data and methodological issues were identified as the main barriers to indicator development. This study demonstrates a high level of stakeholder awareness of the health impacts of climate change, and the need for indicators that can inform policy makers regarding interventions.Maryam Navi, Alana Hansen, Monika Nitschke, Scott Hanson-Easey and Dino Pisaniell

Estimation of GCM Temperature Trends for Different Emission Scenarios with the help of the Integrated Model to Assess the Greenhouse Effect (IMAGE)

How useful are General Circulation Models (GCMs) for policy makers? Of course, they are considered to be the most powerful models that are presently available for predicting future climates and for carrying out research. Their disadvantage is that they are very time-consuming and very expensive to run for any greenhouse gas emission or concentration scenario. For that reason, GCMs have been run only for a small number of scenarios. However, policy makers are interested in being able to analyze a large number of scenarios. The Integrated Model to Assess the Greenhouse Effect (IMAGE) developed by the National Institute for Public Health and Environmental Protection (RIVM) in the Netherlands is a scientifically based, policy oriented model that can calculate the effect of different greenhouse gas emissions on global surface air temperature and sea level rise. The major advantage of IMAGE is its quick turnaround time. Its disadvantage is that it gives only global values of surface temperature and sea level rise, which have insufficient spatial resolution to estimate ecological impacts on a regional basis. We propose a methodology for combining the fast turnaround time and time-dependent surface temperature results of IMAGE with the spatial resolution of GCMs to provide a linkage between IMAGE and models of ecological change that could provide policy-makers with valuable information about the consequences of different levels of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions

Controllability Modulates the Anticipatory Response in the Human Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

Research has consistently shown that control is critical to psychological functioning, with perceived lack of control considered to play a crucial role in the manifestation of symptoms in psychiatric disorders. In a model of behavioral control based on non-human animal work, Maier et al. (2006) posited that the presence of control activates areas of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which in turn inhibit the normative stress response in the dorsal raphe nucleus and amygdala. To test Maier’s model in humans, we investigated the effects of control over potent aversive stimuli by presenting video clips of snakes to 21 snake phobics who were otherwise healthy with no comorbid psychopathologies. Based on prior research documenting that disrupted neural processing during the anticipation of adverse events can be influenced by different forms of cognitive processing such as perceptions of control, analyses focused on the anticipatory activity preceding the videos. We found that phobics exhibited greater vmPFC activity during the anticipation of snake videos when they had control over whether the videos were presented as compared to when they had no control over the presentation of the videos. In addition, observed functional connectivity between the vmPFC and the amygdala is consistent with previous work documenting vmPFC inhibition of the amygdala. Our results provide evidence to support the extension of Maier’s model of behavioral control to include anticipatory function in humans