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Positioning mindfulness as psychological capital
Get PDFPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the existing literature on workplace mindfulness
and suggest positive organizational behavior (POB) scholarship as a suitable domain to understand the
scientific and secular nature of mindfulness.
Design/methodology/approach – This conceptual paper is based on the critical analysis of the literature on
POB and contemporary mindfulness at work. This paper highlights the limitations of workplace mindfulness
in terms of its research and practice. Then, the limitations of workplace mindfulness are analyzed in relation to
POB scholarship to suggest a way forward for research and practice.
Findings – The findings imply that contemporary mindfulness meets the inclusion criteria of psychological
capital and thus it can be adopted and investigated in the workplace using the POB scholarship.
Practical implications – It suggests implications for research and practice by considering mindfulness as a
psychological capital construct in the workplace context.
Originality/value – Mindfulness is an interesting topic for organizational researchers, and many
organizations are adopting mindfulness to improve their workplace functioning. In recent years, scholars have
highlighted potential ethical issues with the adoption of the spiritual and religious nature of mindfulness for
workplace benefits. In this regard, the understanding of the scientific and secular nature of mindfulness is
limited in organizational literature. This paper advances the knowledge of the literature on contemporary
mindfulness and POB and argues the importance of the inclusion of mindfulness in psychological capital
Monitoring and modeling the soil-plant system toward understanding soil health
Get PDFThe soil health assessment has evolved from focusing primarily on agricultural productivity to an integrated evaluation of soil biota and biotic processes that impact soil properties. Consequently, soil health assessment has shifted from a predominantly physicochemical approach to incorporating ecological, biological and molecular microbiology indicators. This shift enables a comprehensive exploration of soil microbial community properties and their responses to environmental changes arising from climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. Despite the increasing availability of soil health indicators (physical, chemical, and biological) and data, a holistic mechanistic linkage has not yet been fully established between indicators and soil functions across multiple spatiotemporal scales. This article reviews the state-of-the-art of soil health monitoring, focusing on understanding how soil-microbiome-plant processes contribute to feedback mechanisms and causes of changes in soil properties, as well as the impact these changes have on soil functions. Furthermore, we survey the opportunities afforded by the soil-plant digital twin approach, an integrative framework that amalgamates process-based models, Earth Observation data, data assimilation, and physics-informed machine learning, to achieve a nuanced comprehension of soil health. This review delineates the prospective trajectory for monitoring soil health by embracing a digital twin approach to systematically observe and model the soil-plant system. We further identify gaps and opportunities, and provide perspectives for future research for an enhanced understanding of the intricate interplay between soil properties, soil hydrological processes, soil-plant hydraulics, soil microbiome, and landscape genomics
Glycerol immobilises anaerobic digestate supplied nitrogen
Get PDFAnaerobic digestate, a nutrient rich by-product of the biogas industry, is frequently applied to agricultural land as a fertiliser. However, nitrogen losses from its application negatively impact air and water quality. Therefore, methods are needed to reduce these losses. The aim of this study was to test the efficacy of applying digestate with glycerol, an organic carbon rich by-product of the biodiesel industry, on microbial nitrogen immobilisation and the soil microbial community. Soil was incubated with digestate, applied at a rate equivalent to 250 kg-N ha-1, in a laboratory experiment over 50 days with glycerol additions at either 0, 12, 24 or 36 kg-C m3 of digestate. The addition of glycerol resulted in significantly higher microbial biomass carbon and increased the relative abundance of Gram-negative bacteria. The 24 and 36 kg-C m3 doses of glycerol resulted in similarly greater and longer lasting effect on microbial biomass carbon, indicating that beyond 24 kg-C m3 digestate that nitrogen (or other essential nutrients) became the limiting factor for microbial growth instead of carbon. Soil available nitrogen decreased throughout the study and remained at lower concentrations in glycerol treatments than the digestate only treatment by the end of the study. These results demonstrate that glycerol has the potential to reduce nitrogen losses from digestate application by immobilising nitrogen in the microbial biomass. Therefore, the co-application of digestate and glycerol to soil is a potential mechanism for the biogas and biofuel industries to valorise their respective by-products. Further research is needed to verify that this method is viable under field conditions
Value co-creation: a metatheory unifying framework and fundamental propositions
Get PDFPurpose
Value co-creation (VCC) represents actors’ joint, communal or shared value-creating processes. However, while existing research has advanced important VCC-based insight, the use of differing metatheoretical lenses to study VCC incurs a risk of theoretical fragmentation, thus potentially hampering this research stream’s continued development. We, therefore, undertake an in-depth review of the corpus of VCC research that focuses on its common conceptual underpinnings as anchored in differing perspectives.
Design/methodology/approach
To explore this objective, we undertake an extensive review of extant VCC literature, based on which we develop an integrative conceptual framework of VCC.
Findings
We propose an integrative, metatheory-unifying definition and framework of VCC that reflect its core hallmarks and dynamics across its adopted theoretical perspectives. Based on the framework, we also derive a set of fundamental propositions (FPs) that synthesize VCC’s core tenets.
Research limitations/implications
VCC conceptualizations grounded in differing metatheoretical perspectives reveal the concept’s core interactive, value-creating nature across metatheoretical perspectives. Though VCC emanates from interactivity between any actor constellation, unifying different metatheories of VCC uncovers important insight.
Practical implications
The study suggests that for effective value co-creation, managers need to establish agreed-upon institutional arrangements, facilitate positive actor relationships and experiences and address challenges like collaboration, transparency, empathy and skill development while ensuring that affective, cognitive, economic and social dimensions of success are met for all actors involved. Successful initiatives require seamless communication, mutual understanding, cost-benefit favorability and public recognition of contributions.
Originality/value
Given VCC’s rising strategic importance, a plethora of studies have investigated this concept from differing metatheoretical perspectives, yielding potential VCC-based fragmentation. Addressing this gap, we take stock of the VCC literature with a view to distilling the concept’s core, trans-metatheoretical hallmarks, as synthesized in the proposed framework and FPs of VCC
Predicting the ecological impacts of species on the move with climate change in the UK
Get PDFSpecies redistribution due to climate change poses significant challenges for biodiversity
conservation. Investigation of species’ shifts requires biological records; however, we have limited
information on how different sources vary and whether novel approaches which employ data from
social media offer any new insights. While Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are often employed to
project species’ distributions under the assumption of niche conservatism, that a species’ niche will
remain broadly consistent over time, this assumption has rarely been tested during periods of climate
change. Although the environmental consequences of species redistribution are recognised, there is
no established framework to assess these impacts; frameworks from invasion biology could provide
some insight, however, this has never been tested in practice. This research addresses these key areas
to provide crucial advancements to the field: to improve our understanding of the complementarity
between different types of biological recording, test whether species consistently track climate
changes to maintain their niche and evaluate the applicability of invasion frameworks for assessing
impacts of climate-tracking species. A case study of the Banded Demoiselle (Calopteryx splendens)
emphasises the importance of integrating diverse data types when determining species changing
distributions, with observations from Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr broadening the geographic scope
of occurrences and more fully capturing species’ habitat requirements. Several Odonata (dragonflies
and damselflies) exhibited temporal inconsistencies in their realised niche during a period of recent
climate change, contradicting assumptions of niche conservatism with important implications for the
application of SDMs. Finally, the applicability of invasion frameworks for climate-tracking species is
demonstrated, revealing both negative and positive ecological impacts of Odonata and Hymenoptera
(wasps, bees, ants, and sawflies) species shifting due to climate change. These findings provide insight
for conservation and management which must adapt to the uncertainty of species future distributions
and the associated ecological impacts
Climate models struggle to simulate observed North Pacific jet trends, even accounting for tropical Pacific sea surface temperature trends
Get PDFWe show that the wintertime (December‐January‐February) North Pacific jet in ERA5 has shiftednorthwards over the satellite‐era (1979–2023) at a faster rate than any of the state‐of‐the‐art coupled climatemodels used in this study. Differences in tropical sea surface temperature (SST) trends can only partially explainthe discrepancy in jet trends between models and observations and a small minority of simulations forced withobserved SSTs match the magnitude of the observed jet trend. However, analysis of longer‐term jet variability inreanalysis suggests that the jet trend has not clearly emerged from multi‐decadal internal climate variability.Consequently, it is unclear whether the difference in observed and modeled jet trends arises due to differingresponses to anthropogenic forcing or overly weak long‐term internal variability in models. These results haveimportant implications for future climate projections for North America and motivate further research into theunderlying causes of long‐term jet trends
Exploring a hybrid ensemble–variational data assimilation technique (4DEnVar) with a simple ecosystem carbon model
Get PDFThe study presented here evaluates the ability of the 4DEnVar data assimilation technique to estimate the parameters from synthetically generated observations from a simple carbon model. The method is particularly attractive in its speed and ease of use, and its avoidance in construction of adjoint or tangent linear model code. Additionally, the assimilation analysis step can be performed independently of ensemble generation; there is no need to integrate the 4DEnVar code with that of the underlying model, assuming parameters are static in time. The 4DEnVar method is capable of closely estimating the model parameters with increased certainty given that the ensemble produces a sufficient number of trajectories exhibiting behaviour seen in the observations. We find that the root mean squared error between trajectories and observations is significantly reduced when compared with the prior — in one case a 96% and 99% reduction in the biomass and soil pools respectively
Myostatin knockout mice have larger muscle fibres with normal function and morphology
Get PDFAim: We assessed whether muscle fibres in Myostatin knockout (MSTN-/-) mice are just larger, or also exhibit morphological, metabolic and functional differences from MSTN+/+ mice. Methods: We compared single fibre contractile properties and histological fibre properties in muscles from MSTN-/- and MSTN+/+ mice. Results: Even though in permeabilised muscle fibres from the extensor digitorum longus and soleus muscle maximal force was higher (P < 0.001) there were no significant differences in specific power (power per unit volume), specific tension (force per cross-sectional area), maximal shortening velocity, or curvature of the force-velocity relationship between MSTN-/- and MSTN+/+ mice. In histological sections of the soleus muscle, fibres were larger (P < 0.001), but the succinate dehydrogenase staining intensity and capillary density did not differ significantly between MSTN-/- and MSTN+/+ mice, which was explicable by the larger number of capillaries around a fibre (P < 0.001). A model showed no significant differences in soleus muscle oxygenation. Discussion: In conclusion, the larger force generating capacity of fibres from MSTN-/- mice is explicable by the larger fibre cross-sectional area. Combined with the similar fibre oxidative capacity, and the relationship between capillary supply and the size of a fibre in the soleus muscle, this indicates that muscle fibres from MSTN-/- mice are quantitatively, but not qualitatively different from muscle fibres from MSTN+/+ mice. This suggests that myostatin inhibition may help increase muscle mass in conditions accompanied by muscle weakness without detrimental impact on muscle quality, but systemic side effects need to be considered
Polymeric PEG-based bioorthogonal triggers for prodrug activation in breast cancer
Get PDFNon-toxic prodrugs have proved of great value in medicinal chemistry programmes for cancer, due to their ability to selectively deliver toxic components at tumour sites once they are activated by a localised mechanism. Since activation of the prodrug to afford the toxic drug is a prerequisite for success of the approach, much interest has focused on the localised chemical and enzymatic mechanisms for activating the prodrugs. Bioorthogonal chemistry has positively impacted this area by providing biocompatible reactions that enable on-demand prodrug activation and active drug release. However, to be effective, it is essential that one of the components of the bioorthogonal reaction is localised at the tumour, in order to initiate the on-demand and on-target activation of the prodrug. Polymers such as poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) are known to target solid tumours by passive targeting via the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect. In this paper, the feasibility of derivatising long PEG chains to afford bioorthogonal activators (PEG-azide and PEG-tetrazine) for prodrug activation via the Staudinger ligation and the tetrazine ligation reactions, respectively, is evaluated. The molecular weight of the PEG in the activator and the type of linkage in the prodrug moiety were shown to significantly affect the rate of prodrug activation and hence the rate of drug release. In vitro cytotoxicity studies on breast cancer cells (MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231) showed ~68-76% restoration of the parent drug’s cytotoxicity for the Staudinger ligation-based prodrug activation strategy, and 100% restoration of the parent drug’s cytotoxicity for the tetrazine ligation-based prodrug activation strategy. Restoration of doxorubicin’s ability to intercalate with DNA upon activation of the prodrug by the PEG-activators was also demonstrated via fluorescence spectroscopy. Moreover, conjugation of the tetrazine bioorthogonal activator to a 10 kDa PEG polymer improved its serum stability in comparison with other reported tetrazine activators that completely lose their stability in serum over the same period of time. The feasibility of the combined passive targeting / bioorthogonal prodrug activation approach has therefore been demonstrated using a range of prodrugs, activation mechanisms, and in vitro assays
Butterfly and moth conservation: results from a global synopsis of evidence
Get PDFButterflies and moths face a range of anthropogenic threats with many of the best-studied populations in decline. In response, butterfly and moth conservation programmes are implementing a diverse set of actions, but to date no study has synthesised evidence for their effectiveness. We present an overview of the recently published Conservation Evidence synopsis of butterfly and moth conservation, describe patterns and biases in the available evidence, and compare these to similar synopses on other taxa. We find that most evidence covers butterfly conservation, focuses on community-level responses, originates from the UK and the USA, comes from studies using the least robust designs, and assesses actions addressing the threat posed by agriculture. Far less evidence is available for moth conservation, for individual species’ responses, originates from Africa, Asia, Oceania and South America, comes from studies using the most robust designs, or tests actions designed to mitigate the impacts of pollution or climate change. While the geographic and study design biases reflect those found in evidence for the conservation of other taxa, the focus on community-level responses is higher than in any of the other synopses we examined. We suggest this may leave Lepidoptera conservation vulnerable to missing important, species-specific responses. We call for testing of conservation actions to be built into conservation projects for butterflies and moths, to build a robust evidence base for conserving Lepidoptera in a changing world