Diet has a major influence on the composition and metabolic output of the gut microbiome. Higher-protein diets are often recommended for older consumers; however, the effect of high-protein diets on the gut microbiota and faecal volatile organic compounds (VOC) of elderly participants is unknown. The purpose of the study was to establish if the faecal microbiota composition and VOC in older men are different after a diet containing the recommended dietary intake (RDA) of protein compared with a diet containing twice the RDA (2RDA). Healthy males (74⋅2 (sd 3⋅6) years; n 28) were randomised to consume the RDA of protein (0⋅8 g protein/kg body weight per d) or 2RDA, for 10 weeks. Dietary protein was provided via whole foods rather than supplementation or fortification. The diets were matched for dietary fibre from fruit and vegetables. Faecal samples were collected pre- and post-intervention for microbiota profiling by 16S ribosomal RNA amplicon sequencing and VOC analysis by head space/solid-phase microextraction/GC-MS. After correcting for multiple comparisons, no significant differences in the abundance of faecal microbiota or VOC associated with protein fermentation were evident between the RDA and 2RDA diets. Therefore, in the present study, a twofold difference in dietary protein intake did not alter gut microbiota or VOC indicative of altered protein fermentation.

Metabolic and cardiovascular health problems have become a major focus for clinical care and research in schizophrenia. To evaluate the content and quality of screening guidelines for cardiovascular risk in schizophrenia we performed a systematic review and quality assessment of guidelines/recommendations published between 2000–2010, using the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (AGREE). AGREE domain scores varied between 18 identified guidelines. Most guidelines scored best on the domains ‘Scope and Purpose’ and ‘Clarity of Presentation’. The domain ‘Rigour of Development’ was problematic in most guidelines, while the domains ‘Stakeholder Involvement’ and ‘Editorial Independence’ scored the lowest. The following parameters were recommended, in order of frequency: fasting glucose, BMI, fasting triglycerides, fasting cholesterol, waist, HDL/LDL, blood pressure, symptoms of diabetes. In terms of interventions most guidelines recommended advise on physical activity, advise on diet psycho-education of the patent, treatment of lipid abnormalities, treatment of diabetes, referral for advise and treatment, psycho-education of family and smoking cessation advice. Compared across all domains and content, 4 European guidelines could be recommended. Four of the evaluated guidelines are of good quality and should guide clinicians’ screening and monitoring practices. Future guideline development could be improved by increasing its rigour and assuring user and patient involvement. Although good guidelines are available research shows that the implementation in daily clinical practice remains poor.

This project will work closely with existing service partners involved in street level services and focus on testing and evaluating three approaches for street level interventions for youth who are homeless and who have severe or moderate mentally illness. Youth will be asked to choose their preferred service approach:

Housing First related initiatives focused on interventions designed to move youth to appropriate and available housing and ongoing housing supports.

Treatment First initiatives to provide Mental Health/Addiction supports and treatment solutions, and; Simultaneous attention to both Housing and Treatment Together

Our primary objective is to understand the service delivery preferences of homeless youth and understand the outcomes of these choices. Our research questions include:

1. 1. Which approaches to service are chosen by youth?

2. 2. What are the differences and similarities between groups choosing each approach?

3. 3. What are the critical ingredients needed to effectively implement services for homeless youth from the perspectives of youth, families and service providers?

Focus groups with staff and family members will occur to assist in understanding the nature of each of service approach, changes that evolve within services, & facilitators and barriers to service delivery. This work will be important in determining which approach is chosen by youth and why. Evaluating the outcomes with each choice will provide valuable information about outcomes for the service options chosen by youth. This assist in better identifying weaknesses in the services offered and inform further development of treatment options that youth will accept.

Dietary patterns describe the combination of foods and beverages in a diet and the frequency of habitual consumption. Better understanding of childhood dietary patterns and antenatal influences could inform intervention strategies to prevent childhood obesity. We derived empirical dietary patterns in 1142 children (average age 6·0 (sd 0·2) years) in New Zealand, whose mothers had participated in the Screening for Pregnancy Endpoints (SCOPE) cohort study and explored associations with measures of body composition. Participants (Children of SCOPE) had their diet assessed by FFQ, and dietary patterns were extracted using factor analysis. Three distinct dietary patterns were identified: ‘Healthy’, ‘Traditional’ and ‘Junk’. Associations between dietary patterns and measures of childhood body composition (waist, hip, arm circumferences, BMI, bioelectrical impedance analysis-derived body fat % and sum of skinfold thicknesses (SST)) were assessed by linear regression, with adjustment for maternal influences. Children who had higher ‘Junk’ dietary pattern scores had 0·24 (sd 0·08; 95 % CI 0·04, 0·13) cm greater arm and 0·44 (sd 0·05; 95 % CI 0·01, 0·10) cm greater hip circumferences and 1·13 (sd 0·07; 95 % CI 0·03, 0·12) cm greater SST and were more likely to be obese (OR 1·74; 95 % CI 1·07, 2·82); those with higher ‘Healthy’ pattern scores were less likely to be obese (OR 0·62; 95 % CI 0·39, 1·00). In a large mother–child cohort, a dietary pattern characterised by high-sugar and -fat foods was associated with greater adiposity and obesity risk in children aged 6 years, while a ‘Healthy’ dietary pattern offered some protection against obesity. Targeting unhealthy dietary patterns could inform public health strategies to reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity.

We present a velocity of galactic outflows in star-forming galaxies at the highest redshift, z ∼ 6, so far studied with metal absorption lines. Absorption-line studies of galactic outflows need well-determined redshifts, but there are few strong emission lines in the observed-frame optical spectra of galaxies at high redshifts. In this work, we use the systemic redshifts determined by the ALMA [CII]158 μm emission lines. The sample consists of seven Lyman break galaxies at 5.1 < z < 5.7 whose Keck/DEIMOS and ALMA data are available in the archive. The outflow maximum velocity (νmax) is estimated by a fitting of line profiles to metal absorption lines in a composite spectrum. We find that νmax monotonically increases from z ∼ 0 to 6 and that νmax tightly correlates with the halo circular velocity estimated from the stellar mass.

Little is known about the types of intestinal parasites that infected people living in prehistoric Britain. The Late Bronze Age archaeological site of Must Farm was a pile-dwelling settlement located in a wetland, consisting of stilted timber structures constructed over a slow-moving freshwater channel. At excavation, sediment samples were collected from occupation deposits around the timber structures. Fifteen coprolites were also hand-recovered from the occupation deposits; four were identified as human and seven as canine, using fecal lipid biomarkers. Digital light microscopy was used to identify preserved helminth eggs in the sediment and coprolites. Eggs of fish tapeworm (Diphyllobothrium latum and Diphyllobothrium dendriticum), Echinostoma sp., giant kidney worm (Dioctophyma renale), probable pig whipworm (Trichuris suis) and Capillaria sp. were found. This is the earliest evidence for fish tapeworm, Echinostoma worm, Capillaria worm and the giant kidney worm so far identified in Britain. It appears that the wetland environment of the settlement contributed to establishing parasite diversity and put the inhabitants at risk of infection by helminth species spread by eating raw fish, frogs or molluscs that flourish in freshwater aquatic environments, conversely the wetland may also have protected them from infection by certain geohelminths.

The Murchison Widefield Array is a low-frequency Square Kilometre Array precursor located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. Primarily designed as an imaging telescope, but with a flexible signal path, the capabilities of this telescope have recently been extended to include off-line incoherent and tied-array beam formation using recorded antenna voltages. This has provided the capability for high-time and frequency resolution observations, including a pulsar science program. This paper describes the algorithms and pipeline that we have developed to form the tied-array beam products from the summation of calibrated signals of the antenna elements, and presents example polarimetric profiles for PSRs J0437-4715 and J1900-2600 at 185 MHz.

We apply two methods to estimate the 21-cm bispectrum from data taken within the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR) project of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA). Using data acquired with the Phase II compact array allows a direct bispectrum estimate to be undertaken on the multiple redundantly spaced triangles of antenna tiles, as well as an estimate based on data gridded to the uv-plane. The direct and gridded bispectrum estimators are applied to 21 h of high-band (167–197 MHz; z = 6.2–7.5) data from the 2016 and 2017 observing seasons. Analytic predictions for the bispectrum bias and variance for point-source foregrounds are derived. We compare the output of these approaches, the foreground contribution to the signal, and future prospects for measuring the bispectra with redundant and non-redundant arrays. We find that some triangle configurations yield bispectrum estimates that are consistent with the expected noise level after 10 h, while equilateral configurations are strongly foreground-dominated. Careful choice of triangle configurations may be made to reduce foreground bias that hinders power spectrum estimators, and the 21-cm bispectrum may be accessible in less time than the 21-cm power spectrum for some wave modes, with detections in hundreds of hours.

The late Miocene is a time of strong environmental change in SW Asia. Himalayan foreland stable isotope data show a shift in the dominant vegetation of the flood plains away from trees and shrubs towards more C4 grasslands at a time when oceanic upwelling increased along the Oman margin. We present integrated geochemical and colour spectral records from International Ocean Discovery Program Site U1456 in the eastern Arabian Sea to reconstruct changing chemical weathering and erosion, as well as relative humidity during this climatic transition. Increasing hematite/goethite ratios derived from spectral data are consistent with long-term drying after c. 7.7 Ma. Times of dry conditions are largely associated with weaker chemical alteration measured by K/Rb and reduced coarse clastic flux, constrained by Si/Al and Zr/Al. A temporary phase of increased humidity from 6.3 to 5.95 Ma shows a reversal to stronger weathering and erosion. Wetter conditions can result in both more and less alteration due to the nonlinear relationship between weathering rates, precipitation and sediment transport times. Trends in relative aridity do not follow existing palaeoceanographic records and are not apparently linked to changes in Tibetan or Himalayan elevation, but more closely correlate with global cooling. An apparent opposing trend in the humidity evolution in the Indus compared to southern China, as tracked by spectrally estimated hematite/goethite, likely reflects differences in the topography in the Indus compared to the Pearl River drainage basins, as well as the generally wetter climate in southern China.

The early village at Çatalhöyük (7100–6150 BC) provides important evidence for the Neolithic and Chalcolithic people of central Anatolia. This article reports on the use of lipid biomarker analysis to identify human coprolites from midden deposits, and microscopy to analyse these coprolites and soil samples from human burials. Whipworm (Trichuris trichiura) eggs are identified in two coprolites, but the pelvic soil samples are negative for parasites. Çatalhöyük is one of the earliest Eurasian sites to undergo palaeoparasitological analysis to date. The results inform how intestinal parasitic infection changed as humans modified their subsistence strategies from hunting and gathering to settled farming.

In this study, we have examined ceramic matrix composites with silicon carbide fibers in a melt-infiltrated silicon carbide matrix (SiC/SiC). We subjected samples to tensile loads while collecting micro X-ray computed tomography images. The results showed the expected crack slowing mechanisms and lower resistance to crack propagation where the fibers ran parallel and perpendicular to the applied load respectively. Cracking was shown to initiate not only from the surface but also from silicon inclusions. Post heat-treated samples showed longer fiber pull-out than the pristine samples, which was incompatible with previously proposed mechanisms. Evidence for oxidation was identified and new mechanisms based on oxidation or an oxidation assisted boron nitride phase transformation was therefore proposed to explain the long pull-out. The role of oxidation emphasizes the necessity of applying oxidation resistant coatings on SiC/SiC.

Essential variables to consider for an efficient control strategy for invasive plants include dispersion pattern (i.e., satellite or invasion front) and patch expansion rate. These variables were demonstrated for buffelgrass [Pennisetum ciliare (L.) Link], a C4 perennial grass introduced from Africa, which has invaded broadly around the world. The study site was along a roadway in southern Arizona (USA). The P. ciliare plant distributions show the pattern of clumping associated with the satellite (nascent foci) colonization pattern (average nearest neighbor test, z-score −47.2, P<0.01). The distance between patches ranged from 0.743 to 12.8 km, with an average distance between patches of 5.6 km. Median patch expansion rate was 271% over the 3-yr monitoring period versus 136% found in other studies of established P. ciliare patches. Targeting P. ciliare satellite patches as a control strategy may exponentially reduce the areal doubling time, while targeting the largest patches may have less effect on the invasion speed.

Large herbivores can act as keystone species that strongly influence their communities. During the Pliocene and Pleistocene, Australia was dominated by a number of large to gigantic marsupial herbivore taxa. Many of these have been understudied quantitatively with regard to their ecology; and identifying the diet of these species will improve our understanding of not only their ecologies, but also of past environments. Recent research has found that cranial morphology among kangaroos and wallabies corresponds with foraging behaviors and mechanical properties of preferred plant tissues. Here we apply shape analysis and computational biomechanics to test the hypothesis: that feeding ecology is associated with craniofacial morphology across a taxonomically broad sample of diprotodont herbivores. Based on our results we predict the diet of an extinct short-faced kangaroo, Simosthenurus occidentalis. We find that biting behaviors are reflected in craniofacial morphology, but that these are more a reflection of the hardest bites required for their lifestyle, rather than diet composition alone. A combination of a very short face, robust musculoskeletal features, and dental arrangements predict that S. occidentalis was a browser, capable of consuming particularly resistant, bulky plant matter. These features were largely conserved among other short-faced kangaroos and may have offset the unpredictable availability of quality forage during the climatically variable Pleistocene epoch, contributing to their prolific diversification during this time.