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The negative impacts of COVID 19 on children's holistic development have been reported by researchers around the world. This qualitative study explored teachers' and parents' perspectives on the impact of physical/social distancing and school closure policies on children's socioemotional development. The study was conducted in fall 2020. The sample included four U.S. Preschools teachers (for 4-year-olds), four international preschool teachers (for 4, 5-year-olds), three U.S. Kindergarten teaches (for 5-year-olds), and 4 U.S. parents of 4 and 5-year-olds. Interviews were conducted over Zoom. Participants shared that the social deprivation experienced by children such as lack of friendships, absence of peer learning and peer communication, loss of play time, and lack of socialization impacted their children's socialization skills, higher order thinking development, mental health, and activity levels. Participants also shared that their children exhibited externalizing behaviors such as acting out, throwing tantrums, seeking negative attention, aggressiveness, lying, and showing disrespect. Participants reported children's life skills acquisition issues such as their over reliance on parents and difficulty in performing routine tasks. Participating teachers who taught 5-years-olds reported lower levels of fine motor skills among their students. The findings of the study suggest that although children have experienced severe academic learning loss during the pandemic, the post-pandemic ECE curriculum must keep a strong socio-emotional and practical life skills focus which contributes to children's overall well-being. Future studies may adopt a mixed method design in multi-country contexts to evaluate the impact of interventions implemented by early childhood programs on children's socioemotional health.

In 2019, a domestic raw coal ban (RCB) was introduced in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Coal-briquettes have since been promoted in Ger district households, however implications for carbon monoxide (CO) exposure remains uncertain. We obtained 48-hour indoor CO concentrations in 23 Ger district households and compared these to 10 raw-coal households. Information on household characteristics, fuel use behaviour and stove venting practices was collected by survey. Mean 48-hour CO concentrations in coal-briquette households was 6.1 ppm (range 1.5–35.8 ppm) with no signfiicant differences by household, stove or venting factors. Peak time-weighted average CO concentrations exceeded WHO Indoor Air Quality guidelines in 9 (39%) households; with all surpassing the 8-hour guideline (>8.6 ppm); 3(13%) the 24-hour guideline (>6 ppm) and 2(9%) the 1-hour guideline (>30 ppm). Median CO levels were significantly lower in coal-briquette compared to raw coal households (p = 0.049). Indoor CO reduction was associated with RCB implementation although hazardous levels persist in this setting.

Human modification of water and nutrient flows has resulted in widespread degradation of aquatic ecosystems. The resulting global water crisis causes millions of deaths and trillions of USD in economic damages annually. Semiarid regions have been disproportionately affected because of high relative water demand and pollution. Many proven water management strategies are not fully implemented, partially because of a lack of public engagement with freshwater ecosystems. In this context, we organized a large citizen science initiative to quantify nutrient status and cultivate connection in the semiarid watershed of Utah Lake (USA). Working with community members, we collected samples from ~200 locations throughout the 7,640 km2 watershed on a single day in the spring, summer, and fall of 2018. We calculated ecohydrological metrics for nutrients, major ions, and carbon. For most solutes, concentration and leverage (influence on flux) were highest in lowland reaches draining directly to the lake, coincident with urban and agricultural sources. Solute sources were relatively persistent through time for most parameters despite substantial hydrological variation. Carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus species showed critical source area behavior, with 10–17% of the sites accounting for most of the flux. Unlike temperate watersheds, where spatial variability often decreases with watershed size, longitudinal variability showed an hourglass shape: high variability among headwaters, low variability in mid-order reaches, and high variability in tailwaters. This unexpected pattern was attributable to the distribution of human activity and hydrological complexity associated with return flows, losing river reaches, and diversions in the tailwaters. We conclude that participatory science has great potential to reveal ecohydrological patterns and rehabilitate individual and community relationships with local ecosystems. In this way, such projects represent an opportunity to both understand and improve water quality in diverse socioecological contexts.

Climate change is creating widespread ecosystem disturbance across the permafrost zone, including a rapid increase in the extent and severity of tundra wildfire. The expansion of this previously rare disturbance has unknown consequences for lateral nutrient flux from terrestrial to aquatic environments. Lateral loss of nutrients could reduce carbon uptake and slow recovery of already nutrient-limited tundra ecosystems. To investigate the effects of tundra wildfire on lateral nutrient export, we analyzed water chemistry in and around the 10-year-old Anaktuvuk River fire scar in northern Alaska. We collected water samples from 21 burned and 21 unburned watersheds during snowmelt, at peak growing season, and after plant senescence in 2017 and 2018. After a decade of ecosystem recovery, aboveground biomass had recovered in burned watersheds, but overall carbon and nitrogen remained ~20% lower, and the active layer remained ~10% deeper. Despite lower organic matter stocks, dissolved organic nutrients were substantially elevated in burned watersheds, with higher flow-weighted concentrations of organic carbon (25% higher), organic nitrogen (59% higher), organic phosphorus (65% higher), and organic sulfur (47% higher). Geochemical proxies indicated greater interaction with mineral soils in watersheds with surface subsidence, but optical analysis and isotopes suggested that recent plant growth, not mineral soil, was the main source of organic nutrients in burned watersheds. Burned and unburned watersheds had similar δ15 N-NO3 - , indicating that exported nitrogen was of preburn origin (i.e., not recently fixed). Lateral nitrogen flux from burned watersheds was 2- to 10-fold higher than rates of background nitrogen fixation and atmospheric deposition estimated in this area. These findings indicate that wildfire in Arctic tundra can destabilize nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur previously stored in permafrost via plant uptake and leaching. This plant-mediated nutrient loss could exacerbate terrestrial nutrient limitation after disturbance or serve as an important nutrient release mechanism during succession.

This article is a fictocritical intervention in the patriarchal form of the elegy and a reflection on the expression of grief, anger and subjectivity by women writers. It uses Adrienne Rich’s writing on women’s self-destruction as a feminist methodological framework to explore two specific ideas. First, how we speak of the dead, which concerns the agency, subjectivity and anger with which we express our remembrance and our grief, and second, literary style and feminist interventions in the elegiac form. Taking a fictocritical approach, the article combines the objective style of the academic mode with a subjective treatment, resulting in a cut-up text that combines analysis and my own reflections. In this, the article is informed by work by Anna Gibbs (1998; 2005) and Ross Watkins (2014). This multivocal approach aims to answer the question: how does the approach to the elegy form employed by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath enable a nuanced representation of grief, mourning and agency, and how can other women writers build on this approach to write to and through each other in the context of a patriarchal literary tradition?

The growing prevalence of antibiotic resistance in numerous pathogenic bacteria is a major public health concern and urgently requires the development of new therapeutic approaches. Multidrug resistant species that remain sensitive to chloramphenicol (CAM) treatment have engendered renewed interest in using this drug as a modern day antimicrobial agent. High-level resistance to CAM commonly is mediated by chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) which catalyzes the acetylation of CAM and renders the drug inactive. Of the three main types (CATI, CATII and CATIII), CATI is of broad clinical significance. Despite this importance, understanding of the catalytic mechanism of CATI largely is extrapolated from studies of CATIII. Here, pentapeptide scanning mutagenesis was used to generate a library of random insertions in CATI to gain a better understanding of structure-function relationships in the enzyme. Pentapeptide insertions in secondary structure elements which contain residues that form part of the CATI active site abolished CAM resistance in Escherichia coli. Insertions in secondary structures that have key roles in protein folding and CAM binding led to a reduction in resistance. In contrast, insertions in loop regions between the major secondary structure features exerted modest, if any, effects on CAM resistance. The analysis pinpoints regions of CATI that may serve as targets for the design of novel inhibitors that prevent the spread of CAM-resistant pathogens thereby enabling the drug to be re-deployed as a broad range antimicrobial agent. Moreover, regions of CATI that are tolerant of insertions may be suitable for the construction of bifunctional enzymes in which peptides, mini-proteins or amino acid tags are introduced at the permissive sites.

Respiratory disease is a common cause of morbidity and mortality in children with Down's syndrome (DS). Causes range from those problems common to many children with DS, such as a narrow airway or impaired immunity, to rare structural lesions, such as tracheal bronchus. Additionally, other organ systems or extrinsic factors may play a role. A thorough understanding of the range of potential problems will aid in the evaluation and management of children with DS and respiratory symptoms.

BACKGROUND: A range of outcome measures has been developed to assess psychotic symptoms. Many of these are observer based assessments which rate the presence and severity of broad symptom types. There is a need for service-user generated multi-dimensional scales to assess psychosis. AIMS: To investigate the psychometric properties of a service user generated, self-report scale to assess recovery in relation to psychotic symptoms. METHOD: The reliability and validity of the Subjective Experiences of Psychosis Scale (SEPS) was investigated with 100 participants experiencing psychosis against observer rated assessments of psychosis and self report measures of affect, esteem, recovery and functioning. RESULTS: Two factors emerged representing positive and negative aspects of psychotic experiences. Test-retest reliability, internal consistency and sensitivity to change were good and the scales correlated with the PANSS, PSYRATS and measures of affect, esteem, recovery and functioning. CONCLUSIONS: The SEPS is a reliable and valid tool which can be used to evaluate outcome from treatment and which reflects the multi-dimensional experience of psychosis.