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The science of statistics contributes to the development and application of tools for the design, analysis, and interpretation of empirical medical studies [...]

Human energy harvesting is envisioned as a remedy to the weight, the size, and the poor energy density of primary batteries in medical implants. The first implant to have necessarily raised the idea of a biological power supply was the pacemaker in the early 1960s. So far, review articles on human energy harvesting have been rather unspecific and no tribute has been given to the early role of the pacemaker and the cardiovascular system in triggering research in the field. The purpose of the present article is to provide an up-to-date review of research efforts targeting the cardiovascular system as an alternative energy source for active medical implants. To this end, a chronological survey of the last 14 most influential publications is proposed. They include experimental and/or theoretical studies based on electromagnetic, piezoelectric, or electrostatic transducers harnessing various forms of energy, such as heart motion, pressure gradients, and blood flow. Technical feasibility does not imply clinical applicability: although most of the reported devices were shown to harvest an interesting amount of energy from a physiological environment, none of them were tested in vivo for a longer period of time.Human energy harvesting is envisioned as a remedy to the weight, the size, and the poor energy density of primary batteries in medical implants. The first implant to have necessarily raised the idea of a biological power supply was the pacemaker in the early 1960s. So far, review articles on human energy harvesting have been rather unspecific and no tribute has been given to the early role of the pacemaker and the cardiovascular system in triggering research in the field. The purpose of the present article is to provide an up-to-date review of research efforts targeting the cardiovascular system as an alternative energy source for active medical implants. To this end, a chronological survey of the last 14 most influential publications is proposed. They include experimental and/or theoretical studies based on electromagnetic, piezoelectric, or electrostatic transducers harnessing various forms of energy, such as heart motion, pressure gradients, and blood flow. Technical feasibility does not imply clinical applicability: although most of the reported devices were shown to harvest an interesting amount of energy from a physiological environment, none of them were tested in vivo for a longer period of time.

Liver fluke infection (fascioliasis) is a parasitic disease which affects the health and welfare of ruminants. It is a concern for the livestock industry and is considered as a growing threat to the industry because changing climatic conditions are projected to be more favorable to increased frequency and intensity of liver fluke outbreaks. Recent reports highlighted that the incidence and geographic range of liver fluke has increased in the UK over the last decade and estimated to increase the average risk of liver fluke in the UK due to increasing temperature and rainfall. This paper explores financial impacts of the disease with and without climate change effects on Scottish livestock farms using a farm-level economic model. The model is based on farming system analysis and uses linear programming technique to maximize farm net profit within farm resources. Farm level data from a sample of 160 Scottish livestock farms is used under a no disease baseline scenario and two disease scenarios (with and without climate change). These two disease scenarios are compared with the baseline scenario to estimate the financial impact of the disease at farm levels. The results suggest a 12% reduction in net profit on an average dairy farm compared to 6% reduction on an average beef farm under standard disease conditions. The losses increase by 2-fold on a dairy farm and 6-fold on a beef farm when climate change effects are included with disease conditions on farms. There is a large variability within farm groups with profitable farms incurring relatively lesser economic losses than non-profitable farms. There is a substantial increase in number of vulnerable farms both in dairy (+20%) and beef farms (+27%) under the disease alongside climate change conditions.

Abstract. The impact of air pollution on human health and the associated external costs in Europe and the United States (U.S.) for the year 2010 is modelled by a multi-model ensemble of regional models in the frame of the third phase of the Air Quality Modelling Evaluation International Initiative (AQMEII3). This is the first study known to use a common health assessment approach across the two continents. The modelled surface concentrations of O3, CO, SO2 and PM2.5 from each model are used as input to the Economic Valuation of Air Pollution (EVA) system to calculate the resulting health impacts and the associated external costs. Along with a base case simulation, additional runs were performed introducing 20 % emission reductions both globally and regionally in Europe, North America and East Asia. Health impacts estimated by different models can vary up to a factor of three in Europe (twelve models) and the United States (three models). In Europe, the multi-model mean number of premature deaths is calculated to be 414 000 while in the U.S., it is estimated to be 160 000, in agreement with previous global and regional studies. In order to estimate the impact of biases coming from each model, two multi-model ensembles were produced, the first attributing an equal weight to each member of the ensemble, and the second where the subset of models that produce the smallest error compared to the surface observations at each time step. The latter results in increase of health impacts by up to 30 % in Europe, thus giving significantly higher mortality estimates compared to available literature. This is mostly due to a 27 % increase in the domain mean PM2.5 levels, along with a slight increase in O3 by ~ 1 %. Over the U.S., the mean PM2.5 and O3 levels decrease by 11 % and 2 %, respectively, when the optimal ensemble mean is used, leading to a decrease in the calculated health impacts by ~ 11 %. These differences encourage the use of optimal-reduced multi-model ensembles over traditional all model-mean ensembles, in particular for policy applications. Finally, the role of domestic versus foreign emission sources on the related health impacts is investigated using the 20 % emission reduction scenarios applied over the source regions as defined in the frame of HTAP2. The differences are calculated based on the models that are common in the basic multi-model ensemble and the perturbation scenarios, resulting in five models in Europe and all three models in the U.S. A 20 % reduction of global anthropogenic emissions avoids 54 000 and 27 500 premature deaths in Europe and the U.S., respectively. A 20 % reduction of North American emissions foreign emissions avoids ~ 1000 premature deaths in Europe and 25 000 premature deaths in the U.S. A 20 % decrease of emissions within the European source region avoids 47 000 premature deaths in Europe. Reducing the East Asian emission by 20 % avoids ~ 2000 premature deaths in the U.S. These results show that the domestic emissions make the largest impacts on premature death, while foreign sources make a minor contributing to adverse impacts of air pollution.

Our study aims at comparing in C57/Bl male mice, the impact of repeated injections of baclofen (an agonist of GABAB receptor) or diazepam (a benzodiazepine acting through a positive allosteric modulation of GABAA receptor) administered during the alcohol-withdrawal period on hippocampus-dependent memory impairments and brain regional glucocorticoid dysfunction after a short (1-week) or a long (4-week) abstinence. Hence, mice were submitted to a 6-month alcohol consumption (12%v/v) and were progressively withdrawn to water. Then, after a 1- or 4-weeks abstinence, they were submitted to a contextual memory task followed by measurements of corticosterone concentrations in the dorsal hippocampus (dHPC), the ventral hippocampus (vHPC) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Results showed that 1- and 4-week withdrawn mice exhibited a severe memory deficit and a significant abnormal rise of the test-induced increase of corticosterone (TICC) in the dHPC, as compared to water-controls or to mice still under alcohol consumption. Repeated daily systemic administrations of decreasing doses of diazepam (ranged from 0.5 to 0.12 mg/kg) or baclofen (ranged from 1.5 to 0.37 mg/kg) during the last 15 days of the withdrawal period, normalized both memory and TICC scores in the dHPC in 1-week withdrawn animals; in contrast, only baclofen-withdrawn mice showed both normal memory performance and TICC scores in the dHPC after a 4-week withdrawal period. In conclusion, the memory improvement observed in 4-week withdrawn mice administered with baclofen stem from the protracted normalization of glucocorticoid activity in the dHPC, a phenomenon encountered only transitorily in diazepam-treated withdrawn mice.

Abstract Aims Alcohol exposure during adolescence is associated with both increased risk for alcohol use disorders and anxiety in adulthood. Our present experiments examined this association using alcohol-preferring AA (Alko Alcohol) rats selected for high voluntary alcohol drinking. Methods Two groups of female AA rats acquired alcohol drinking at different ages. We gave the adolescent-onset group free choice to 10% alcohol and water for seven weeks, starting on post-natal day 42 (PND 42), whereas the adult-onset group started drinking alcohol on PND 112. After the 7-week drinking, we withdrew the adolescent group from alcohol for two weeks, followed by another voluntary 7-week drinking period, started at the same age as the adult-onset group. We assessed anxiety-like behaviour repeatedly during alcohol drinking with open field and elevated plus maze tests. At the end of alcohol drinking, we also tested the rats using the light/dark box, stress-induced body temperature test and social dominance test. Results During the first 7-week alcohol drinking, adolescent rats exhibited significantly slower acquisition of alcohol drinking and lower alcohol preference than the adult-onset group. However, when tested at the same age as the adult-onset rats, they displayed identical alcohol intake and preference. We found no alcohol-induced effects on anxiety- or stress-related behaviour in the experimental groups at any time points. Conclusions These data show that the genetically determined phenotype of high alcohol drinking of the female alcohol-preferring AA rats is not associated with a predisposition to develop anxiety-like behaviour following voluntary alcohol exposure, even when initiated during adolescence.

Humans have always lived in eras of more or less obvious crises and risks. When Ulrich Beck wrote about the risk society in 1986, he talked about risks as invisibility lacking spatial and temporal boundaries. The environmental risks of the modern society may often appear diffuse, even if, for example, the climate change dilemma has progressively become noticeable. However, this year, people on Earth have had to face a most obvious risk. The effects of Covid-19 have reached such proportions that the human world probably will never be the same again. However, the extent of jeopardies is not similar for all world inhabitants, neither are the tools to handle the risks. To face the threat and learn from it, humans need to change manners on many levels and in many social and physical areas. Some of the main questions to reflect on and discuss in this feature issue of Sustainability are: What will the most urgent role of sustainability education be now and in the future? What kind of teaching, learning and educational policies are most relevant? What issues are most crucial in sustainability education research?

Abstract How animals, particularly livestock, adapt to various climates and environments over short evolutionary time is of fundamental biological interest. Further, understanding the genetic mechanisms of adaptation in indigenous livestock populations is important for designing appropriate breeding programs to cope with the impacts of changing climate. Here, we conducted a comprehensive genomic analysis of diversity, interspecies introgression, and climate-mediated selective signatures in a global sample of sheep and their wild relatives. By examining 600K and 50K genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism data from 3,447 samples representing 111 domestic sheep populations and 403 samples from all their seven wild relatives (argali, Asiatic mouflon, European mouflon, urial, snow sheep, bighorn, and thinhorn sheep), coupled with 88 whole-genome sequences, we detected clear signals of common introgression from wild relatives into sympatric domestic populations, thereby increasing their genomic diversities. The introgressions provided beneficial genetic variants in native populations, which were significantly associated with local climatic adaptation. We observed common introgression signals of alleles in olfactory-related genes (e.g., ADCY3 and TRPV1) and the PADI gene family including in particular PADI2, which is associated with antibacterial innate immunity. Further analyses of whole-genome sequences showed that the introgressed alleles in a specific region of PADI2 (chr2: 248,302,667–248,306,614) correlate with resistance to pneumonia. We conclude that wild introgression enhanced climatic adaptation and resistance to pneumonia in sheep. This has enabled them to adapt to varying climatic and environmental conditions after domestication.