Among Maimonides's many statements about extrascriptural laws in rabbinic literature, none has attracted as much attention as principle 2 in his Book of the Commandments. Modern scholars have largely understood this text to claim that very few of the laws found in rabbinic literature are Sinaitic in origin and of biblical status. Yet, until the twentieth century, principle 2 was primarily read as distinguishing between revealed laws that constitute enumerated commandments and revealed laws that do not. In fact, neither reading is consistent with other Maimonidean statements. By contextualizing principle 2 within the Book of the Commandments, this essay reconsiders Maimonides's enumeration of the commandments and argues that many of the problems that principle 2 was designed to address, and that it also generated, resulted from the incongruity of his project of enumerating precisely 613 commandments alongside his understanding of revelation as a corpus that included not only the Written Torah but innumerable extrascriptural traditions as well. An appendix evaluates pertinent aspects of the most recent monograph dedicated to Maimonides's scriptural hermeneutics.

A primary barrier to translation of clinical research discoveries into care delivery and population health is the lack of sustainable infrastructure bringing researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and communities together to reduce silos in knowledge and action. As National Institutes of Healthʼs (NIH) mechanism to advance translational research, Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) awardees are uniquely positioned to bridge this gap. Delivering on this promise requires sustained collaboration and alignment between research institutions and public health and healthcare programs and services. We describe the collaboration of seven CTSA hubs with city, county, and state healthcare and public health organizations striving to realize this vision together. Partnership representatives convened monthly to identify key components, common and unique themes, and barriers in academic–public collaborations. All partnerships aligned the activities of the CTSA programs with the needs of the city/county/state partners, by sharing resources, responding to real-time policy questions and training needs, promoting best practices, and advancing community-engaged research, and dissemination and implementation science to narrow the knowledge-to-practice gap. Barriers included competing priorities, differing timelines, bureaucratic hurdles, and unstable funding. Academic–public health/health system partnerships represent a unique and underutilized model with potential to enhance community and population health.

Innovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research for development projects and programmes. Their basic tenet is that stakeholders depend on one another to achieve agricultural development outcomes, and hence need a space where they can learn, negotiate and coordinate to overcome challenges and capture opportunities through a facilitated innovation process. Although much has been written on how to implement and facilitate innovation platforms efficiently, few studies support ex-ante appraisal of when and for what purpose innovation platforms provide an appropriate mechanism for achieving development outcomes, and what kinds of human and financial resource investments and enabling environments are required. Without these insights, innovation platforms run the risk of being promoted as a panacea for all problems in the agricultural sector. This study makes clear that not all constraints will require innovation platforms and, if there is a simpler and cheaper alternative, that should be considered first. Based on the review of critical design principles and plausible outcomes of innovation platforms, this study provides a decision support tool for research, development and funding agencies that can enhance more critical thinking about the purposes and conditions under which innovation platforms can contribute to achieving agricultural development outcomes.

The evolution of city growth is usually studied for relatively short time periods. The rise and decline of cities is, however, typically a process that takes many decades or even centuries. In this article we study the evolution of Italian cities over the period 1300–1861. Using an existing data set, we perform panel estimations where the development of city size and urban patterns can be explained by various geographical, institutional and other determinants of city size for the period under consideration. Although large shocks such as the plague epidemics are clearly visible in the data, our baseline estimation results show that the main determinants of Italian city growth are physical geography and the predominance of capital cities. With respect to geography, being a seaport or having access to navigable waterways increases city size whereas a city's relative location, measured by its urban potential, is not significant. Being a capital city also increases city size. The estimation results reveal strong century-specific effects on city growth and these effects differ markedly between the North and South of Italy. Additional estimations show that these time effects can be linked to the political and institutional developmental changes over time in Italy. Our findings that the capital city bonus increases and non-capital cities suffer when the political power and the institutions of the state are more centralised corroborate the idea that institutions are a key factor in explaining Italian city growth.

Hop-derived food supplements and beers contain the prenylflavonoids xanthohumol (X), isoxanthohumol (IX) and the very potent phyto-oestrogen (plant-derived oestrogen mimic) 8-prenylnaringenin (8-PN). The weakly oestrogenic IX can be bioactivated via O-demethylation to 8-PN. Since IX usually predominates over 8-PN, human subjects may be exposed to increased doses of 8-PN. A dietary intervention trial with fifty healthy post-menopausal Caucasian women was undertaken. After a 4 d washout period, participants delivered faeces, blank urine and breath samples. Next, they started a 5 d treatment with hop-based supplements that were administered three times per d and on the last day, a 24 h urine sample was collected. A semi-quantitative FFQ was used to estimate fat, fibre, alcohol, caffeine and theobromine intakes. The recoveries of IX, 8-PN and X in the urine were low and considerable inter-individual variations were observed. A five-fold increase in the dosage of IX without change in 8-PN concentration resulted in a significant lower IX recovery and a higher 8-PN recovery. Classification of the subjects into poor (60 %), moderate (25 %) and strong (15 %) 8-PN producers based on either urinary excretion or microbial bioactivation capacity gave comparable results. Recent antibiotic therapy seemed to affect the 8-PN production negatively. A positive trend between methane excretion and 8-PN production was observed. Strong 8-PN producers consumed less alcohol and had a higher theobromine intake. From this study we conclude that in vivoO-demethylation of IX increases the oestrogenic potency of hop-derived products.