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Minor offenders are at risk for medico-psycho-social vulnerability, that impacts global health, schooling, professional future, and socio-familial environment; moreover, minors who are victims of violence and neglect are at greater risk of becoming offenders and minor offenders are at greater risk of suffering violence. Few data are currently available regarding global health and vulnerability factors for minors (i.e. those aged under 18) who have been placed in police custody. This study aimed to describe the judicial and social characteristics of these minors, their medical and psychological health status, with the hypothesis that most minors placed in police custody can be considered as abused or neglected, by presenting factors of vulnerability. We carried out a prospective study, including consecutive minors aged of 13 to 18 years old, who had been detained in custody at the Central Police Station of Nantes (France), from October 2012 to May 2013. The sociodemographic characteristics, scores for global health and the data collected from the welfare and judiciary services were analyzed, to identify abused or neglected minors. Ninety-nine teenagers were included: 78 males and 11 females (mean age±standard deviation: 16.5 years±1.01), who had been placed in custody for robbery, with a remarkable proportion of recidivist minors. Our study has highlighted several worrying characteristics of minors in police custody reflecting their vulnerability, as living conditions (no schooling, no fixed address) and irregular or absent medical follow-up; however their scores for global health were not different from the general population. While 49 minors (49.5 %) had already been identified by the welfare services, our study find that 35 added minors of this population should nonetheless be considered as being abused and/or neglected, based on a very high rate of minors already followed by child protection services and/or already penalized. Systematic health screening in custody could help to detect abused and/or neglected minors, in order to provide them access to appropriate medical and social cares. They could be referring to psychiatric or rehabilitation cares, and to the relevant welfare and judiciary services in order to assess if a specific protection measure is needed.

International audience; Astronauts experience post-flight disturbances in postural and locomotor control due to sensorimotor adaptations during spaceflight. These alterations may have adverse consequences if a rapid egress is required after landing. Although current exercise protocols can effectively mitigate cardiovascular and muscular deconditioning, the benefits to post-flight sensorimotor dysfunction are limited. Furthermore, some exercise capabilities like treadmill running are currently not feasible on exploration spaceflight vehicles. Thus, new in-flight operational countermeasures are needed to mitigate postural and locomotor control deficits after exploration missions. Data from spaceflight and from analog studies collectively suggest that body unloading decreases the utilization of proprioceptive input, and this adaptation strongly contributes to balance dysfunction after spaceflight. For example, on return to Earth, an astronaut's vestibular input may be compromised by adaptation to microgravity, but their proprioceptive input is compromised by body unloading. Since proprioceptive and tactile input are important for maintaining postural control, keeping these systems tuned to respond to upright balance challenges during flight may improve functional task performance after flight through dynamic reweighting of sensory input. Novel approaches are needed to compensate for the challenges of balance training in microgravity and must be tested in a body unloading environment such as head down bed rest. Here, we review insights from the literature and provide observations from our laboratory that could inform the development of an in-flight proprioceptive countermeasure.

Summary Soil infiltration is regularly practised downstream of wastewater treatment plants, particularly in areas without surface water systems. In France, stakeholders are considering the use of biodegradable and renewable material such as woodchips. This material has two main advantages: it has a high capillarity, thus a great capacity for water retention, and it amends the soil with carbon improving its structure. Moreover, woodchips have been told to promote biodiversity in particular for bioturbating species like earthworms, which play a major role regarding soil structure and organic matter transport into the soil. Such macrofaune is expected to promote water infiltration for poorly infiltrating capacity soils and to limit soil clogging caused by the infiltration of treated wastewater. In this study, we evaluate the interaction between woodchips and loamy soils on woodchip-filled trenches operated for 2 to 6 years using a non-destructive geophysical approach: Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) and Time Domain Induced Polarisation (TDIP). ERT provided information of the structure of the soil under the woodchip-filled trenches, but anything could be said about the impact of such system in the soil. By contrast, TDIP showed significant variations of the signal around the trenches which may result from the presence of organic matter.

Summary A major research effort in recent decades has led to the development of multi-electrodes, multi-channels, accurate, robust and versatile resistivity meters. This work has contributed to the emergence of the electrical resistivity tomography technique and has led to major advances in many fields such as geosciences or the environment or civil engineering. The main limitation of this equipment does not lie in its quality or robustness in the field. It concerns the cost of the equipment and its low adaptability for specific scientific problems. For these reasons, the method is underused for humanitarian applications, in developing countries and for non-profit applications (archaeology, environment). In the field of environment, civil engineering or geosciences, geophysical monitoring has become a key to assess natural systems and phenomena. For these problems, the immobilisation of one or more resistivity meters is not always technically and financially possible. Finally, many applications today require the ability to control the measurement with external information and thus optimise the measurement in the context of a “big data”. The OhmPi project aims at proposing an open source hardware and software resistivity meter to the community and the academic world.