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Objective: A matched, case?control study was conducted to examine the association between development of low birth weight (LBW) and maternal factors, including dietary intake, comorbidities, and socioeconomic factors, among women in Cap Haitien, Haiti. Design: Mothers who delivered LBW babies; defined as ?2.5?kg, were identified by review of the medical record and matched to mothers of similar age, parity, with normal birth weight (NBW) babies. A survey was administered consisting of Women's Dietary Diversity Score (WDDS), maternal reporting of comorbidities, income, and educational level. Subjects: Women were eligible if they delivered and had newborns weighed within the last 2 years. Total study participants consisted of 32 cases and 34 controls matched for age, parity, and month of delivery. Results: Mothers who consume eggs were 78% less likely to have given birth to a LBW infant (OR 0.22 (95% CI: 0.05?0.87). Mothers with NBW babies had a nonsignificant trend towards higher WDDS. The prevalence of hypertension in mothers who were seen in the clinic at least once over the past 2 years was found to be 27%, and 78% of mothers were not aware of their diagnosis. Conclusion: Enhancing maternal nutrition during pregnancy has broad implications for reducing LBW, improving fetal health and reducing fetal predilection for chronic diseases in adulthood. Longitudinal prospective studies are needed to evaluate the selective benefit of eggs and other high-quality foods in protecting fetal growth. Efforts to improve knowledge and awareness of hypertension in Haiti should be undertaken.

Correlational analysis, such as linear regression, does not imply causation. This paper introduces and applies a causal inference framework and a specific method, regression discontinuity, to thermal comfort field studies. The method utilizes policy thresholds in China, where the winter district heating policy is based on cities' geographical locations relative to the Huai River. The approximate latitude of the Huai River can be considered as a natural, geographical threshold, where cities near the threshold are quite similar, except for the availability of district heating in cities north of the threshold, creating a situation similar to a randomized experiment. Using the regression discontinuity method, we quantify the causal effects of the experiment treatment (district heating) on the physical indoor environments and subjective responses of building occupants. We found that mean indoor operative temperatures were 4.3 °C higher, and mean thermal sensation votes were 0.6 warmer due to the district heating. In contrast, using conventional correlational analysis, we demonstrate that the correlation between indoor operative temperature and thermal sensation votes does not accurately reflect the causal relationship between the two. We also show that the indoor operative temperature could be either positively or negatively correlated with occupants’ thermal satisfaction. However, we cannot conclude that increasing the indoor operative temperature in these circumstances will necessarily lead to higher or lower thermal satisfaction. This highlights the importance of causal inference methods in thermal comfort field studies and other observational studies in building science, where the regression discontinuity method might apply.

Abstract International building certification systems, such as the WELL and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, play a pivotal role in the design of healthy and sustainable buildings. While LEED adopts a holistic approach to designing healthy and sustainable buildings, the WELL standard has a strong emphasis on human health, comfort, and well-being. Although prior research has revealed inconsistent results for occupant satisfaction in office buildings with WELL certification compared to buildings without WELL certification, or are certified using another certification system (e.g., LEED), most of these comparisons tend to lack methodological rigor. This study used a statistical procedure to match and compare 1634 occupant surveys from LEED-certified buildings to 1634 surveys from WELL-certified buildings. Six important architectural and experiential parameters were matched, masking their influence on the outcome. Overall building and workspace satisfaction was high in both WELL-certified buildings (94% and 87%) and LEED-certified (73% and 71%). We found that there is a 39% higher probability of finding occupants who are more satisfied in WELL-certified buildings compared to LEED-certified buildings, indicating occupant satisfaction is higher in buildings with WELL certification. Although we were unable to pinpoint the reason for higher occupant satisfaction in WELL-certified buildings, the results consistently showed that perceived indoor environmental quality was enhanced across all parameters except for the amount of space.

Long-term monitoring of the thermal environment in office buildings has become increasingly relevant with the rise of wireless sensor networks. However, there is a notable absence of explicit guidelines for implementing monitoring strategies in such contexts. This lack of direction can lead to inconsistent deployment of sensor networks, resulting in higher maintenance costs and inaccurate long-term assessments of thermal conditions. Based on data analyses of high-accuracy, high-frequency field measurements conducted over a year or longer across multiple offices in Sydney and Shanghai, this study proposes a strategy for long-term temperature monitoring. The strategy advises practitioners to prioritize considerations such as air-conditioning type, room size, and space function when selecting ''representative'' sensor locations. Typically, sampling every 30 min is deemed adequate for shared offices where an error margin of ±0.5°C is acceptable. For environments with stable indoor temperatures, less frequent sampling intervals suffice. A power regression model tailored for offices equipped with central AC and no operable windows was developed to predict the maximum allowable sampling interval based on several days of indoor temperature monitoring in winter. Regarding monitoring duration, the study advocates a preferred sampling period of one year to comprehensively capture seasonal variations. Alternatively, a minimum monitoring period of four to six months commencing in late spring or early summer is identified as potentially sufficient. These findings offer valuable insights for optimizing long-term thermal monitoring practices in offices and may contribute to expanding the scope of thermal comfort standards.

Abstract Sleep is a pillar of human health and wellbeing. In high- and middle-income countries, there is a great reliance on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems (HVAC) to control the interior thermal environment in the bedroom. However, these systems are expensive to buy, maintain, and operate while being energy and environmentally intensive—problems that may increase due to climate change. Easily-accessible passive and low-energy strategies, such as fans and electrical heated blankets, address these challenges but their comparative effectiveness for providing comfort in sleep environments has not been studied. We used a thermal manikin to experimentally show that many passive and low-energy strategies are highly effective in supplementing or replacing HVAC systems during sleep. Using passive strategies in combination with low-energy strategies that elevate air movement like ceiling or pedestal fans enhances the cooling effect by three times compared to using fans alone. We extrapolated our experimental findings to estimate heating and cooling effects in two historical case studies: the 2015 Pakistan heat wave and the 2021 Texas power crisis. Passive and low-energy strategies reduced sleep-time heat or cold exposure by 69–91%. The low-energy strategies we tested require one to two orders of magnitude less energy than HVAC systems, and the passive strategies require no energy input. These strategies can also help reduce peak load surges and total energy demand in extreme temperature events. This reduces the need for utility load shedding, which can put individuals at risk of hazardous heat or cold exposure. Our results may serve as a starting point for evidence-based public health guidelines on how individuals can sleep better during heat waves and cold snaps without relying on HVAC.

Identifying disease-specific imaging features of idiopathic Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (iNPH) is crucial to develop accurate diagnoses, although the abnormal brain anatomy of patients with iNPH creates challenges in neuroimaging analysis. We quantified cortical thickness and volume using FreeSurfer 7.3.2 in 19 patients with iNPH, 28 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 30 healthy controls (HC). We noted the frequent need for manual correction of the automated segmentation in iNPH and examined the effect of correction on the results. We identified statistically significant higher proportion of volume changes associated with manual edits in individuals with iNPH compared to both HC and patients with AD. Changes in cortical thickness and volume related to manual correction were also partly correlated with the severity of radiological features of iNPH. We highlight the challenges posed by the abnormal anatomy in iNPH when conducting neuroimaging analysis and emphasise the importance of quality checking and correction in this clinical population.

Abstract Wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs) are being used to quantify gait characteristics that are associated with increased fall risk, but the current limitation is the lack of contextual information that would clarify IMU data. Use of wearable video-based cameras would provide a comprehensive understanding of an individual’s habitual fall risk, adding context to clarify abnormal IMU data. Generally, there is taboo when suggesting the use of wearable cameras to capture real-world video, clinical and patient apprehension due to ethical and privacy concerns. This perspective proposes that routine use of wearable cameras could be realized within digital medicine through AI-based computer vision models to obfuscate/blur/shade sensitive information while preserving helpful contextual information for a comprehensive patient assessment. Specifically, no person sees the raw video data to understand context, rather AI interprets the raw video data first to blur sensitive objects and uphold privacy. That may be more routinely achieved than one imagines as contemporary resources exist. Here, to showcase/display the potential an exemplar model is suggested via off-the-shelf methods to detect and blur sensitive objects (e.g., people) with an accuracy of 88%. Here, the benefit of the proposed approach includes a more comprehensive understanding of an individual’s free-living fall risk (from free-living IMU-based gait) without compromising privacy. More generally, the video and AI approach could be used beyond fall risk to better inform habitual experiences and challenges across a range of clinical cohorts. Medicine is becoming more receptive to wearables as a helpful toolbox, camera-based devices should be plausible instruments.

This paper investigates the pattern of change in occupants’ satisfaction with the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) of their workspace over time. Analyses were performed on a cumulative (2012–2023) database of responses to a Post-Occupancy Evaluation survey in Australia. 20,400 questionnaire responses from 226 office buildings were classified into five groups based on the length of time respondents had occupied their workspace. Associations between workspace satisfaction and the length of time respondents had occupied their workspace were also analysed for different gender and age cohorts. Our results show that occupant satisfaction generally decreased with the length of time they had been allocated to their present workspaces (the ‘honeymoon-hangover’ effect). People who have occupied their workspace for more than 5 years expressed lower overall satisfaction with their workspace than those who have been there for less than 6 months. The same pattern was observed for occupants’ satisfaction with other IEQ dimensions including building image and maintenance, indoor air quality, spatial comfort, and thermal comfort. This ‘honeymoon-hangover’ effect was evident across genders and age groups. Furthermore, there was negligible difference between the two genders on the ‘honeymoon-hangover’ effect, although thermal comfort and indoor air quality were generally less satisfactory for women than men. Respondents aged 30 yrs or less showed a larger decline in satisfaction over time compared to those over 50-yrs old. Within the 30-year-or-under age group, occupants who had spent more than 5 years at their workspaces consistently registered the lowest satisfaction score across all IEQ dimensions. Implications and impacts: The findings in this study have significant implications for the design of Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) surveys and for facility managers aiming to enhance occupants' satisfaction with their workspace and workplace.

Previously unpublished data from over 600 office buildings in the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) Occupant Survey database are used to perform a systematic analysis of dissatisfaction in contemporary workspaces. A total of 81% of respondents expressed dissatisfaction with at least one aspect of their workspace, and 67% with more than one. Acoustics were the most common source of dissatisfaction, particularly related to people talking, speech privacy, and phones. Other challenges included a perceived lack of control over the temperature and insufficient space, along with other associated problems of densely populated offices. The analysis shows that context matters when understanding occupant dissatisfaction. Occupants of open-plan offices with low or no partitions were almost twice as likely to complain about their workspace than someone in a private, enclosed office. Being near a window decreased the likelihood of dissatisfaction compared with those who were not near a window. There was a clear relationship between self-perceived performance and satisfaction with the indoor environment. Dissatisfaction profiles found that acoustics, space, and privacy-related items co-occur for many occupants dissatisfied with more than one workspace aspect. 'Practical relevance' Post-occupancy surveys are a useful tool for evaluating whether an office environment supports occupants while conducting their work. While highlighting the successes is important, complaints from dissatisfied occupants can identify issues and pinpoint reasons why spaces do not meet expectations. The reported challenges generally relate to the simultaneous reduction in control and personalization with increasingly open and densely populated layouts. Occupant dissatisfaction may impact performance given the reported relationship between satisfaction with the environment and feeling supported by the workspace to complete work tasks. The themes emerging from this analysis identify common dissatisfaction sources that can serve as an empirical basis to identify common problems in contemporary workspace designs.

Abstract Growth in energy use for indoor cooling tripled between 1990 and 2016 to outpace any other end use in buildings. Part of this energy demand is wasted on excessive cooling of offices, a practice known as overcooling. Overcooling has been attributed to poorly designed or managed air-conditioning systems with thermostats that are often set below recommended comfort temperatures. Prior research has reported lower thermal comfort for women in office buildings, but there is insufficient evidence to explain the reasons for this disparity. We use two large and independent datasets from US buildings to show that office temperatures are less comfortable for women largely due to overcooling. Survey responses show that uncomfortable temperatures are more likely to be cold than hot regardless of season. Crowdsourced data suggests that overcooling is a common problem in warm weather in offices across the US. The associated impacts of this pervasive overcooling on well-being and performance are borne predominantly by women. The problem is likely to increase in the future due to growing demand for cooling in increasingly extreme climates. There is a need to rethink the approach to air-conditioning office buildings in light of this gender inequity caused by overcooling.

We have developed “Microscope-Cockpit” (Cockpit), a highly adaptable open source user-friendly Python-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) environment for precision control of both simple and elaborate bespoke microscope systems. The user environment allows next-generation near instantaneous navigation of the entire slide landscape for efficient selection of specimens of interest and automated acquisition without the use of eyepieces. Cockpit uses “Python-Microscope” (Microscope) for high-performance coordinated control of a wide range of hardware devices using open source software. Microscope also controls complex hardware devices such as deformable mirrors for aberration correction and spatial light modulators for structured illumination via abstracted device models. We demonstrate the advantages of the Cockpit platform using several bespoke microscopes, including a simple widefield system and a complex system with adaptive optics and structured illumination. A key strength of Cockpit is its use of Python, which means that any microscope built with Cockpit is ready for future customisation by simply adding new libraries, for example machine learning algorithms to enable automated microscopy decision making while imaging.

Abstract Background Growing population and affluence coupled with climate change puts pressure on the supply of food, water and energy. The three are interconnected, conceptualised in the food-energy-water nexus. In this article, two innovative proposals for food production based on recirculating, multiloop systems are analysed in terms of risk and resilience to illuminate how such industrial symbiotic systems might contribute to food supply resilience, within nexus constraints. Method The proposals encompass greenhouses using waste heat and carbon dioxide combined with recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) with water, nutrient and energy loops between the two. The two cases are discussed in comparison with the existing major alternatives for production of the respective foodstuffs, using an inventory of global risks as a structure for the discussion. The analysis is relevant to understanding current and emerging risks posed by the unsustainable and interlinked supply of food, energy and water, particularly in the perspective of continued climate change. Results Based on the cases, the concept of distributed, symbiotic food production is discussed in comparison with centralization, i.e. the economies of symbiosis vs economies of scale, focusing especially on how these different economies affect risk and resilience. The discussion centres on a comparative risk analysis between food production in industrial symbiosis and conventional forms. Conclusions The results indicate that distributed symbiotic food production can contribute to resilience to the most threatening of the relevant risks identified and that, therefore, more in depth investigations of how symbiotic systems can contribute to resilience are merited. These, in turn, would warrant an informed discussion on food-production policy.

Heating and cooling indoor environments is responsible for the largest share of energy consumption in buildings [...]

Buildings influence diverse factors (e.g. health, wellbeing, productivity, and social connection). Occupants’ direct experiences with their indoor environments allow them to determine whether those spaces support or hinder the activities performed. However, most post-occupancy evaluations (POEs) focus solely on measuring people’s levels of comfort and environmental satisfaction. With increasing attention and interest in occupant health and wellness, there is a need to reassess whether occupant surveys are evaluating all they need to. An analysis is presented of data collected from a widely used online POE tool: The Center for the Built Environment’s (CBE) Occupant Survey (more than 90,000 respondents from approximately 900 buildings) in order to summarise its database and evaluate the survey’s structure and benchmarking metrics. A total of 68% of the respondents are satisfied with their workspace. Satisfaction is highest with spaces’ ease of interaction (75% satisfied), amount of light (74%), and cleanliness (71%). Dissatisfaction is highest with sound privacy (54% dissatisfied), temperature (39%), and noise level (34%). Correlation, principal component, and hierarchical clustering analyses identified seven distinct categories of measurement within the 16 satisfaction items. Results also revealed that a reduction in the scale may be possible. Based on these results, potential improvements and new directions are discussed for the future of POE tools. 'Practice relevance' Assessing the measurement properties in a widely used occupant satisfaction survey reveals what is still useful to include and what may be missing from occupant surveys. These insights are increasingly important as built-environment research evolves and an increasing emphasis is placed on the physical and mental wellbeing of occupants and their productivity. Typical occupant satisfaction rates are reported for indoor environmental quality parameters and benchmark values. These can be used as references by practitioners and other survey tools. Based on this analysis, recommendations are made for different clustering and themes of measurement categories, along with the scope of additional questions that can be posed to occupants.

Introduction Recent studies in in vitro fertilisation (IVF) patients have associated abnormal vaginal microbiota (AVM) with poor clinical pregnancy rates of 6%–9% per embryo transfer. The biological plausibility for this finding is hypothesised to be ascending infection to the endometrium which in turn hampers embryo implantation. New molecular based diagnosis may offer advantages compared to microscopical diagnosis of AVM which has huge inter-study variability ranging from 4 to 38%; however, the important question is whether screening and treatment of AVM would improve reproductive outcomes in IVF patients. Herein, we describe a protocol for an ongoing double-blind, placebo-controlled multicentre trial of IVF patients diagnosed with AVM and randomised in three parallel groups 1:1:1.Methods and analysis This is a drug intervention study where IVF patients will be screened for AVM, using a qPCR assay targeting Atopobium vaginae and Gardnerella vaginalis. If positive, patients will be randomised to one of the three study arms. The first arm consists of clindamycin 300 mg ×2 daily for 7 days followed by vaginal Lactobacillus crispatus CTV-05 until clinical pregnancy scan week 7–9. The second arm consists of clindamycin and placebo L. crispatus CTV-05, whereas patients in the third arm will be treated with placebo/placebo. We used a superiority design to estimate that active treatment in both arms will increase the primary outcome, clinical pregnancy rate per embryo transfer, from 20% to 40%. A potential difference between the two active arms was considered exploratory. With a power of 80% and an alpha at 5%, the sample size is estimated to be 333 patients randomised. A pre-planned interim analysis is scheduled at 167 patients randomised.Ethics and dissemination All patients have to give informed consent. Dissemination of results is ensured in clinical trial agreements whether they be positive or not. Ethics committee, Central Denmark Region approved this protocol.Trial registration number ICH-GCP monitored trial, EudraCT 2016-002385-31; Pre-results.

Since its 2013 release, Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible State has retained a central position in debates within the field of Islamic political thought. While Joseph Kaminski mostly agrees with Hallaq’s central thesis that an Islamic state is a contradiction in terms (as a modern state is in its very constitution immoral and ergo non-Islamic), he aims in his The Contemporary Islamic Governed State: A Reconceptualization to shift the discussion away from government to governance. To read the full book review, download the PDF file on the right.

Networks of neurons control feeding and activity patterns by integrating internal metabolic signals of energy balance with external environmental cues such as time-of-day. Proper circadian alignment of feeding behavior is necessary to prevent metabolic disease, and thus it is imperative that molecular players that maintain neuronal coordination of energy homeostasis are identified. Here, we demonstrate that mice lacking the p75 neurotrophin receptor, p75NTR, decrease their feeding and food anticipatory behavior (FAA) in response to daytime, but not nighttime, restricted feeding. These effects lead to increased weight loss, but do not require p75NTR during development. Instead, p75NTR is required for fasting-induced activation of neurons within the arcuate hypothalamus. Indeed, p75NTR specifically in AgRP neurons is required for FAA in response to daytime restricted feeding. These findings establish p75NTR as a novel regulator gating behavioral response to food scarcity and time-of-day dependence of circadian food anticipation.

Estimating the expectation value of an operator corresponding to an observable is a fundamental task in quantum computation. It is often impossible to obtain such estimates directly, as the computer is restricted to measuring in a fixed computational basis. One common solution splits the operator into a weighted sum of Pauli operators and measures each separately, at the cost of many measurements. An improved version collects mutually commuting Pauli operators together before measuring all operators within a collection simultaneously. The effectiveness of doing this depends on two factors. Firstly, we must understand the improvement offered by a given arrangement of Paulis in collections. In our work, we propose two natural metrics for quantifying this, operating under the assumption that measurements are distributed optimally among collections so as to minimise the overall finite sampling error. Motivated by the mathematical form of these metrics, we introduce $\large{S}$ORTED $\large{I}$NSERTION, a collecting strategy that exploits the weighting of each Pauli operator in the overall sum. Secondly, to measure all Pauli operators within a collection simultaneously, a circuit is required to rotate them to the computational basis. In our work, we present two efficient circuit constructions that suitably rotate any collection of $\boldsymbol{k}$ independent commuting $\boldsymbol{n}$-qubit Pauli operators using at most $\boldsymbol{kn-k(k+1)/2}$ and $\boldsymbol{O(kn/\log k)}$ two-qubit gates respectively. Our methods are numerically illustrated in the context of the Variational Quantum Eigensolver, where the operators in question are molecular Hamiltonians. As measured by our metrics, $\large{S}$ORTED $\large{I}$NSERTION outperforms four conventional greedy colouring algorithms that seek the minimum number of collections.

Dietary restriction (DR) and reduced insulin growth factor (IGF) signaling extend lifespan in Caenorhabditis elegans and other eukaryotic organisms. Autophagy, an evolutionarily conserved lysosomal degradation pathway, has emerged as a central pathway regulated by various longevity signals including DR and IGF signaling in promoting longevity in a variety of eukaryotic organisms. However, the mechanism remains unclear. Here we show that the autophagy protein ATG-18 acts cell non-autonomously in neuronal and intestinal tissues to maintain C. elegans wildtype lifespan and to respond to DR and IGF-mediated longevity signaling. Moreover, ATG-18 activity in chemosensory neurons that are involved in food detection sufficiently mediates the effect of these longevity pathways. Additionally, ATG-18-mediated cell non-autonomous signaling depends on the release of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides. Interestingly, our data suggest that neuronal and intestinal ATG-18 acts in parallel and converges on unidentified neurons that secrete neuropeptides to regulate C. elegans lifespan through the transcription factor DAF-16/FOXO in response to reduced IGF signaling.