Places to Swim: Perspectives Report

People love to recreate around, on and in the water. As part of the Department of Planning and Open Spaces Program, Places to Swim provides an opportunity to improve access to natural waterways for recreation across NSW. This report investigates the issues, barriers and benefits associated with opening waterways for recreation. NSW is enriched with a range of beautiful and healthy waterways providing opportunities for people to swim and recreate safely, create places that people can visit, and help build better communities. A key attribute for all swimming sites is ensuring they are safe to use. Recreation involving waterways inherently involves risks, including exposure to waterborne contaminants and the risk of injury and drowning. As new swimming sites are opened the risks need to be identified, monitored, and managed

NHS Brain Cancer Healthcare and Research: Does It Matter Where You Are Treated?

This report presents extensive insights, collected in 2020-2022,  into 28 of the 30 NHS brain cancer centres in the UK.  It highlights significant geographical variation in treatment and care and sets out how to level up services. The report presents the most comprehensive dataset on NHS brain cancer services ever collected, providing the Mission with a unique strategic overview on how to drive change and innovation nationally.It reveals striking variation in brain cancer services across the UK, with disparities in the design, quality and extent of the treatment and care pathway. In all hospitals reviewed, treatment was delivered according to internationally recognised standards by a motivated team: however there was notable variability in access to genetic testing of tumour samples, involvement in clinical studies and the extent of nurse and allied health-led services. All of which have the potential to impact patient experience and outcomes

Coney: Better Than Life

We are in a period of significant change. The interconnectivity that the web offers and the quick rise of pervasive media has changed how we communicate with each other, how we access information, how we experience news, stories and the world. These changes have had a deep impact on storytellers of all kinds. The tools we use to tell tales are evolving, becoming more modular and tailored, more participatory and more engaging than just the printed word or the moving image. These new forms of digitally-enabled storytelling move beyond reinterpreting a text for radio or screen. We need to find new structures, and new relationships with audiences. Better Than Life, led by Coney, an immersive theatre company that specialises in creating new forms of responsive playing theatre, brought together an extraordinary multidisciplinary team involving award-winning interactive theatre makers, digital broadcasters, developers, multi-platform creatives, academics, VR experts, a magician and many more. We wanted to create a project that focused, in particular, on how live performance fits into the landscape of this terra nova. The aim was to see how to create an event for a large online audience that combined digital connectivity and interactivity with the liveness and shared experience of theatre. In particular, we wished to understand what kinds of agency and control audiences might want and enjoy when engaging with this new form of live performance, and we set up a system that allowed both audiences - in the live space and online - to participate in and comment upon the show in several new ways. A total of eight public rehearsals and performances took places in June 2014, with over 300 people taking part either in the live space or online. At the end of the R&D process there emerged a narrative of a new medium. The material in the R&D wasn’t normal theatre and it wasn’t quite broadcast and it wasn’t a game. It was a cultural experience that built on the live-storytelling and visceral nature of theatre, but combined it with the social interaction of MMO (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games) and the delivery infrastructure of online broadcast. The show was held at a ‘secret’ location in London, with 12 people attending and entering the fictional world of the “Positive Vision Movement” (PVM). In the live space, the audience promenaded through the storyworld of the PVM, following three actors, playing, solving puzzles, chatting, debating and witnessing magic as they went. Online, people spoke and instructed characters, found commentary, spoke to each other, made choices and switched camera views at will. At points, the online audience could even take control of lighting in the space in order to create specific atmospheres, or shine light on a particular place or person. In every show the audiences were monitored carefully, questioned at various stages within the show and, in some cases, interviewed in depth about the experience. Interestingly interactivity - the ability to ‘take control’ of a situation, make a decision about plot or performance or change the mood through lighting or sound - was not rated as highly, by either audience, as the opportunities to socialise and engage with each other. Data suggests that the online audience, in particular, enjoyed the ability to form strong social bonds each other, and that they favoured elements of the show in which they were able to connect and communicate directly with performers in the show. This would suggest that this new kind of hybridised digitally-driven storytelling and play environment is seen first and foremost, as an opportunity to connect with others in a theatrical context - interacting with each other more as one might at a music festival or a house party. This is not then simply theatre with an online component bolted on. For the three R&D partners, the project was also a great ‘social’ success in terms of what we learned from each other. The project genuinely worked within the gaps of the knowledge overlaps between Coney, Goldsmiths and Showcaster, and we pushed each other to deliver a project with as many interesting new features as we could cram into one production space. Better Than Life explored what is possible - and proved that hybridised models of entertainment and performance can open up experiences to audiences that genuinely span beyond the geographic boundaries of a single location or building

Community infrastructure and repository for marine magnetic identifications

Magnetic anomaly identifications underpin plate tectonic reconstructions and form the primary data set from which the age of the oceanic lithosphere and seafloor spreading regimes in the ocean basins can be determined. Although these identifications are an invaluable resource, their usefulness to the wider scientific community has been limited due to the lack of a central community infrastructure to organize, host, and update these interpretations. We have developed an open-source, community-driven online infrastructure as a repository for quality-checked magnetic anomaly identifications from all ocean basins. We provide a global sample data set that comprises 96,733 individually picked magnetic anomaly identifications organized by ocean basin and publication reference, and provide accompanying Hellingerformat files, where available. Our infrastructure is designed to facilitate research in plate tectonic reconstructions or research that relies on an assessment of plate reconstructions, for both experts and nonexperts alike. To further enhance the existing repository and strengthen its value, we encourage others in the community to contribute to this effort

EEG functional connectivity in infants at elevated familial likelihood for autism spectrum disorder

Background Many studies have reported that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with atypical structural and functional connectivity. However, we know relatively little about the development of these differences in infancy. Methods We used a high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) dataset pooled from two independent infant sibling cohorts, to characterize such neurodevelopmental deviations during the first years of life. EEG was recorded at 6 and 12 months of age in infants at typical (N = 92) or elevated likelihood for ASD (N = 90), determined by the presence of an older sibling with ASD. We computed the functional connectivity between cortical sources of EEG during video watching using the corrected imaginary part of phase-locking values. Results Our main analysis found no significant association between functional connectivity and ASD, showing only significant effects for age, sex, age-sex interaction, and site. Given these null results, we performed an exploratory analysis and observed, at 12 months, a negative correlation between functional connectivity and ADOS calibrated severity scores for restrictive and repetitive behaviors (RRB). Limitations The small sample of ASD participants inherent to sibling studies limits diagnostic group comparisons. Also, results from our secondary exploratory analysis should be considered only as potential relationships to further explore, given their increased vulnerability to false positives. Conclusions These results are inconclusive concerning an association between EEG functional connectivity and ASD in infancy. Exploratory analyses provided preliminary support for a relationship between RRB and functional connectivity specifically, but these preliminary observations need corroboration on larger samples

PGC-1 alpha and PGC-1 beta increase protein synthesis via ERR alpha in C2C12 myotubes

The transcriptional coactivators peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ coactivator-1α (PGC-1α) and PGC-1β are positive regulators of skeletal muscle mass and energy metabolism; however, whether they influence muscle growth and metabolic adaptations via increased protein synthesis is not clear. This study revealed PGC-1α or PGC-1β overexpression in C2C12 myotubes increased protein synthesis and myotube diameter under basal conditions and attenuated the loss in protein synthesis following the treatment with the catabolic agent, dexamethasone. To investigate whether PGC-1α or PGC-1β signal through the Akt/mTOR pathway to increase protein synthesis, treatment with the PI3K and mTOR inhibitors, LY294002 and rapamycin, respectively, was undertaken but found unable to block PGC-1α or PGC-1β’s promotion of protein synthesis. Furthermore, PGC-1α and PGC-1β decreased phosphorylation of Akt and the Akt/mTOR substrate, p70S6K. In contrast to Akt/mTOR inhibition, the suppression of ERRα, a major effector of PGC-1α and PGC-1β activity, attenuated the increase in protein synthesis and myotube diameter in the presence of PGC-1α or PGC-1β overexpression. To characterize further the biological processes occurring, gene set enrichment analysis of genes commonly regulated by both PGC-1α and PGC-1β was performed following a microarray screen. Genes were found enriched in metabolic and mitochondrial oxidative processes, in addition to protein translation and muscle development categories. This suggests concurrent responses involving both increased metabolism and myotube protein synthesis. Finally, based on their known function or unbiased identification through statistical selection, two sets of genes were investigated in a human exercise model of stimulated protein synthesis to characterize further the genes influenced by PGC-1α and PGC-1β during physiological adaptive changes in skeletal muscle