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Premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) – the loss of ovarian function before the age of 40 years, a decade before natural menopause – is a life-changing diagnosis for women. POI causes significant short-term and long-term morbidity related to estrogen deficiency. The condition is managed by providing exogenous estrogen replacement, usually as the oral contraceptive pill or hormone therapy. These preparations have different estrogen formulations and may have differing benefits and risks. At present, there are no robust data to inform clinical recommendations and women's decision-making about treatment that they may be taking for many years. The POISE study (Premature Ovarian Insufficiency Study of Effectiveness of hormonal therapy) has been designed to determine whether hormone therapy is superior to combined oral contraceptives on important clinical outcomes and patient-reported symptoms, based on the hypothesis that hormone therapy provides more physiological continuous hormone supplementation with natural estrogens. The study is an open and pragmatic, parallel, randomized controlled trial. The primary outcome is absolute bone mineral density assessed by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry of the lumbar spine after 2 years of treatment. The study will also investigate cardiovascular markers, symptom relief and acceptability of treatment, and will continue to collect long-term data on fractures and cardiovascular events. Results will inform future guidance on management of POI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropical peat swamp forests provide important ecosystem services, ranging from carbon storage and fire prevention to fish provision. In the Sebangau catchment of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, we completed the first detailed spatial and temporal assessments of local fish biodiversity in peat swamp forest and blackwater river habitats. Monthly environmental and fish data were collected over a 15-month period in both riverine and forest habitats. This resulted in a species list of 55 species from 16 different families. Species richness in the river was almost 1.5 times higher than in the forest, probably due to the sampling methods and trap selectivity. Average monthly river fish catches were negatively correlated with average monthly river depth. River fish surveys were conducted pre- and post- fire in 2015, with results showing increased river acidity and reduced fish catches post-fire. The fish and environmental data presented form a baseline for future monitoring projects and highlight a previously overlooked potential impact of fire on local biodiversity in Indonesia, namely that fire is likely to have negative impacts on the sizes of fish populations and catches. There are direct implications for human communities that depend on fishing for their livelihoods. Because peatlands and their rivers face continued human disturbance and degradation, assessments of fish biodiversity and water quality are of high priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When seeking near-optimal solutions for complex scheduling problems, meta-heuristics demonstrate good performance with affordable computational effort. This has resulted in a gravitation towards these approaches when researching industrial use-cases such as energy-efficient production planning. However, much of the previous research makes assumptions about softer constraints that affect planning strategies and about how human planners interact with the algorithm in a live production environment. This article describes a job-shop problem that focuses on minimizing energy consumption across a production facility of shared resources. The application scenario is based on real facilities made available by the Irish Center for Manufacturing Research. The formulated problem is tackled via harmony search heuristics with random keys encoding. Simulation results are compared to a genetic algorithm, a simulated annealing approach and a first-come-first-served scheduling. The superior performance obtained by the proposed scheduler paves the way towards its practical implementation over industrial production chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]