9095 research outputs found
Sort by
Operating in a second language lowers cognitive interference during creative idea generation: Evidence from brain oscillations in bilinguals
Get PDFTasks measuring human creativity overwhelmingly rely on both language comprehension and production. Although most of the world's population is bilingual, few studies have investigated the effects of language of operation on creative output. This is surprising given that fluent bilinguals master inhibitory control, a mechanism also at play in creative idea evaluation. Here, we compared creative output in the two languages of Polish(L1)-English(L2) bilinguals engaged in a cyclic adaptation of the Alternative Uses Task increasing the contribution of idea evaluation (convergent thinking). We show that Polish-English bilinguals suffer less cognitive interference when generating unusual uses for common objects in the L2 than the L1, without incurring a significant drop in idea originality. Right posterior alpha oscillation power, known to reflect creative thinking, increased over cycles. This effect paralleled the increase in originality ratings over cycles, and lower alpha power (8–10 Hz) was significantly greater in the L1 than the L2. Unexpectedly, we found greater beta (16.5–28 Hz) desynchronization in the L2 than the L1, suggesting that bilingual participants suffered less interference from competing mental representations when performing the task in the L2. Whereas creative output seems unaffected by language of operation overall, the drop in beta power in the L2 suggests that bilinguals are not subjected to the same level of semantic flooding in the second language as they naturally experience in their native language
The nature gaze: Eye‐tracking experiment reveals well‐being benefits derived from directing visual attention towards elements of nature
Get PDFThe urban lifestyle has a profound effect on mental health, contributing significantly to the challenges faced by people who reside in urban areas. Growing empirical evidence underscores the potential of nature to alleviate these mental health burdens. However, we still lack understanding of which specific natural elements provide these benefits. Using eye‐tracking technology, we experimentally explored the relationships between intentional visual attention to natural (green) and human‐made (grey) elements in urban areas and their association with well‐being measures. Participants took a 45‐min outdoor walk that simulates a walk to and from work, in which we examined pre‐ and post‐measures of cognition, affect, anxiety and perceived restorativeness. Participants were prompted to direct their attention to green, grey or a mixture of both elements. By analysing participants' eye movements and patterns, we determined adherence to experimental conditions and related visual attention to natural elements. The experimental groups instructed to direct their visual attention to green, grey or a mix of both infrastructures exhibited differences in negative and positive affect, anxiety and perceived restorativeness, but not in cognition after a walk in an urban environment. The percentage of time spent viewing natural elements showed that people who focused more on green features reported a decrease in anxiety and higher perceived restorativeness. In contrast, those who spent more time viewing grey elements reported increased anxiety and lowered perceived restorativeness. The percentage of time viewing natural elements was not linked to affect or cognition. Viewing trees showed the strongest association with well‐being measures compared to other natural elements. Together, our results indicate that a simple behaviour change (directing visual attention to elements of nature instead of grey elements) can produce mental health benefits in the form of reducing anxiety and perceived restoration for people in urban areas. Thus, efforts to integrate nature, especially trees, in urban areas and promote city dwellers to visually interact with it during their daily routine can improve mental issues associated with urban lifestyle. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog
A hypoxia biomarker does not predict benefit from giving chemotherapy with radiotherapy in the BC2001 randomised controlled trial
Get PDFBC2001 showed combining chemotherapy (5-FU + mitomycin-C) with radiotherapy improves loco-regional disease-free survival in patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC). We previously showed a 24-gene hypoxia-associated signature predicted benefit from hypoxia-modifying radiosensitisation in BCON and hypothesised that only patients with low hypoxia scores (HSs) would benefit from chemotherapy in BC2001. BC2001 allowed conventional (64Gy/32 fractions) or hypofractionated (55Gy/20 fractions) radiotherapy. An exploratory analysis tested an additional hypothesis that hypofractionation reduces reoxygenation and would be detrimental for patients with hypoxic tumours. RNA was extracted from pre-treatment biopsies (298 BC2001 patients), transcriptomic data generated (Affymetrix Clariom-S arrays), HSs calculated (median expression of 24-signature genes) and patients stratified as hypoxia-high or -low (cut-off: cohort median). invasive loco-regional control (ILRC); secondary overall survival. Hypoxia affected overall survival (HR = 1.30; 95% CI 0.99-1.70; p = 0.062): more uncertainty for ILRC (HR = 1.29; 95% CI 0.82-2.03; p = 0.264). Benefit from chemotherapy was similar for patients with high or low HSs, with no interaction between HS and treatment arm. High HS associated with poor ILRC following hypofractionated (n = 90, HR 1.69; 95% CI 0.99-2.89 p = 0.057) but not conventional (n = 207, HR 0.70; 95% CI 0.28-1.80, p = 0.461) radiotherapy. The finding was confirmed in an independent cohort (BCON) where hypoxia associated with a poor prognosis for patients receiving hypofractionated (n = 51; HR 14.2; 95% CI 1.7-119; p = 0.015) but not conventional (n = 24, HR 1.04; 95% CI 0.07-15.5, p = 0.978) radiotherapy. Tumour hypoxia status does not affect benefit from BC2001 chemotherapy. Hypoxia appears to affect fractionation sensitivity. Use of HSs to personalise treatment needs testing in a biomarker-stratified trial. Cancer Research UK, NIHR, MRC. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Microbial communities colonising plastics during transition from the wastewater treatment plant to marine waters
Get PDFBACKGROUND: Plastics pollution and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are two major environmental threats, but potential connections between plastic associated biofilms, the 'plastisphere', and dissemination of AMR genes are not well explored.RESULTS: We conducted mesocosm experiments tracking microbial community changes on plastic surfaces transitioning from wastewater effluent to marine environments over 16 weeks. Commonly used plastics, polypropylene (PP), high density polyethylene (HDPE), low density polyethylene (LDPE) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) incubated in wastewater effluent, river water, estuarine water, and in the seawater for 16 weeks, were analysed via 16S rRNA gene amplicon and shotgun metagenome sequencing. Within one week, plastic-colonizing communities shifted from wastewater effluent-associated microorganisms to marine taxa, some members of which (e.g. Oleibacter-Thalassolituus and Sphingomonas spp., on PET, Alcanivoracaceae on PET and PP, or Oleiphilaceae, on all polymers), were selectively enriched from levels undetectable in the starting communities. Remarkably, microbial biofilms were also susceptible to parasitism, with Saprospiraceae feeding on biofilms at late colonisation stages (from week 6 onwards), while Bdellovibrionaceae were prominently present on HDPE from week 2 and LDPE from day 1. Relative AMR gene abundance declined over time, and plastics did not become enriched for key AMR genes after wastewater exposure.CONCLUSION: Although some resistance genes occurred during the mesocosm transition on plastic substrata, those originated from the seawater organisms. Overall, plastic surfaces incubated in wastewater did not act as hotspots for AMR proliferation in simulated marine environments.</p
Chronic ozone exposure affects nitrogen remobilization in wheat at key growth stages
Get PDFThe interaction between nitrogen storage and translocation, senescence, and late phase photosynthesis is critical to the post-anthesis grain fill period in wheat, but ozone's effect on nitrogen dynamics within the wheat plant is not well understood. This study used solardomes to expose a widely grown elite spring wheat cultivar, cv. Skyfall, to four levels of ozone (30 ppb, 45 ppb, 70 ppb, 85 ppb) for 11 weeks, with two levels of nitrogen fertilization, 140 kg ha−1 and 160 kg ha−1, the higher rate including an additional 20 kg N ha−1 at anthesis. Chronic ozone exposure triggered earlier senescence in the 4th, 3rd and 2nd leaves but not the flag leaf, with a similar pattern of reduced chlorophyll content in the lower, older leaf cohorts, which started before senescence became visible. At anthesis there was no evidence of any effect of ozone on nitrogen storage in upper plant parts. However, high ozone increased levels of residual nitrogen found within plant parts at harvest, with concomitant reductions in C:N ratios and Nitrogen Remobilization Efficiency. Extra nitrogen fertilization applied at anthesis appeared to ameliorate the effect of ozone on nitrogen content and nitrogen translocation. The application of 15N ammonium nitrate at anthesis confirmed that the majority of post-anthesis nitrogen uptake had been translocated to the ear/grain by harvest, with no effect of ozone on the translocation of nitrogen around the plant. These data can inform future modelling of ozone's effect on nitrogen dynamics and global wheat yields
Experimental Demonstration of Soft-ROADMs with Dual-Arm Drop Elements for Future Optical-Wireless Converged Access Networks
Get PDFDigital signal processing (DSP)-enabled soft reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (Soft-ROADMs) offer flexible add/drop optical switching at wavelength, sub-wavelength and spectrally-overlapped orthogonal (I and Q) sub-band (SB) levels, which makes them highly desirable for enabling flexible reconfigurable optical-wireless converged access networks where both fixed and wireless access services are consolidated in a shared network, enabling network resource efficient and cost-effective connectivity solutions. However, the performance of the targeted sub-band (TSB) extracted by the soft-ROADM drop element is extremely sensitive to drop RF signal phase offset, which is a major limitation impacting the technical feasibility of soft-ROADMs. To overcome this challenge, in this paper, a phase-offset-insensitive soft-ROADM dual-arm IQ drop operation is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. A DSP implemented multi-input multi-output (MIMO)-based I/Q crosstalk mitigation technique is employed to achieve the insensitivity to drop RF signal phase offset. It is shown that, the traditional single-arm I/Q soft-ROADM drop element has a limited drop RF signal phase offset dynamic range of ~±/
An interactive visualization and data portal tool (PALTIDE) for relative sea level and palaeotidal simulations of the northwest European shelf seas since the Last Glacial Maximum
Get PDFABSTRACTRelative sea level (RSL) predictions based on glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) simulations and palaeotidal predictions generated by hydrodynamic models using GIA‐generated palaeotopographies are available in the published literature, and datasets are available via data repositories. However, these data are often difficult to extract for specific locations or timeslices, requiring users to request datasets from corresponding authors. To overcome the intractability of these data and to enable users to interrogate datasets themselves without requiring offline requests, we have developed PALTIDE, an online visualization tool with intuitive user interface accessible at https://shiny.bangor.ac.uk/paleotidal/. The model domain for this interactive visualization tool is the northwest European continental shelf, covering the period from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to the present day, and is based on previous GIA simulations by Bradley and colleagues and hydrodynamic simulations using Regional Ocean Modelling System (ROMS) published by Ward and colleagues. The tool is developed in R and utilizes a number of packages including shiny and bslib for the frontend, and arrow, raster and the tidyverse for backend data processing. The tool enables visualizations and data downloads for RSL, tidal amplitude and tide‐dependent parameters for any location within the model domain over 1000‐year timesteps from the LGM to the present
Comparative sanitation data from high-frequency phone surveys across 3 countries.
Get PDFWith less than half of the world's urban population having safely managed sanitation due to the high cost and difficulty of building sewers and treatment plants, many rely on off-grid options like pit latrines and septic tanks, which are hard to empty and often lead to illegal waste dumping; this research focuses on container-based sanitation (CBS) as an emerging off-grid solution. Off-grid sanitation refers to waste management systems that operate independently of centralized infrastructure and CBS is a service providing toilets that collect human waste in sealable containers, which are regularly emptied and safely disposed of. These data relate to a project investigating CBS in Kenya, Peru, and South Africa, focusing on how different user groups access and utilize sanitation – contrasting CBS with other types. Participants, acting as citizen scientists, collected confidential data through a dedicated smartphone app designed by the authors and external contractors. This project aimed to explore the effective scaling, management, and regulation of off-grid sanitation systems, relevant to academics in urban planning, water and sanitation services, institutional capability, policy and governance, and those addressing inequality and poverty reduction.The 12-month data collection period offered participants small incentives for weekly engagement, in a micro payment for micro tasks approach. Participants were randomly selected, attended a training workshop, and (where needed) were given a smartphone which they could keep at the end of the project. We conducted weekly smartphone surveys in over 300 households across informal settlements. These surveys aimed to understand human-environment interactions by capturing daily life, wellbeing, income, infrastructural service use, and socioeconomic variables at a weekly resolution, contributing to more informed analyses and decision-making. The smartphone-based approach offers efficient, cost-effective, and flexible data collection, enabling extensive geographical coverage, broad subject areas, and frequent engagement. The Open Data Kit (ODK) tools were used to support data collection in the resource-constrained environment with limited or intermittent connectivity
Exploring the Daily Hassles of Neophyte Cycling Coaches
Get PDFSport coaching is increasingly acknowledged as a stressful activity, especially for those coaching in community contexts. This highlights the significant need to identify the diverse sources of key stressors. The aim of this research was to explore the recurrent stressors experienced by novice coaches to better inform their coping strategies and reduce the dropout rate caused by stress. The novelty of this research lies in its longitudinal exploration of the daily hassles experienced by community sport coaches within their coaching role. Ontologically and epistemologically positioned within the interpretivist paradigm, we interviewed eight recently qualified cycling coaches over an 18-month period. Reflective thematic analysis developed three themes highlighting sources of stress over time: at the start of their participation, coaches discussed the hassles of accessing facilities and struggling to fit in; toward the end of their participation, coaches discussed feeling isolated. Results from this study can better inform the education and support delivered by national governing bodies of sport across the community and club landscape and increase sport psychology practitioners’ awareness of the daily hassles experienced by coaches