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There is increased interest in the provision of healthcare in a manner that is more convenient to the patient. The COVID-19 pandemic has further shifted this trend, driven by the [...]

There are a number of key characteristics of Ukrainian agriculture which are central to the discussion of the reform process. These include the predominance of state ownership and control, lack of commercial management skills, uneven commitment to reform in a decentralized system of responsibility, monopoly, a low level of technology and limited access to resources that facilitate efficient operation of the market. Necessary restructuring will involve three categories of measures including the establishment of a competitive environment, augmenting enterprise response, and macroeconomic stabilization. At present reform has proceeded extremely slowly and speeding the process appears to require Western aid, both financial and technical, to provide a demonstration of the benefits of reform in order to stimulate its more rapid uptake.

This paper explores the linkages between structural adjustment and the liberalization of agricultural marketing in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It examines the nature of structural problems, which have been manifested in stagnating output and balance of payments difficulties. Policy responses are described, in terms of short term macroeconomic stabilization and longer term growth-oriented adjustment policies. The process of structural adjustment in Africa is surveyed, and policies and stages in the liberalization of markets are considered. Debates on agricultural marketing in SSA are reviewed. This leads into an analysis of the specific issues which arise while marketing policy reform proceeds as an integral part of structural adjustment strategies.

Dried blood spot (DBS) cards are routinely used as simple, low cost microsampling tools for clinical and preclinical applications. In general, when using a typical DBS workflow, the dried blood sample is sub-punched to generate a disk which is assumed to contain a fixed volume of blood. This sub-punch is then extracted for analysis. The drawback of this approach is that viscosity of the collected blood will influence the extent to which the blood spot spreads across the DBS card. Thus, fixed volumes of blood which have different haematocrit (HCT) levels will generate different sized spots on the DBS card, and the resulting sub-punches will therefore contain different volumes of blood. This can lead to assay bias as a function of blood haematocrit levels. Here we describe a novel microsampling device that eliminates the volumetric assay bias seen with conventional DBS sub-punch sampling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physicists are very particular about balancing budgets. Energy charge and momentum all have to be conserved - and often money as well. Astronomers were therefore surprised and disturbed to learn in the 1930s that our own Milky Way galaxy behaved as if it contained more matter than could be seen with telescopes. This puzzling non-luminous matter became known as "dark matter" and we now know that over 90% of the matter in the entire universe is dark.