Hand hygiene is a simple, low-cost intervention that may lead to substantial population-level effects in suppressing acute respiratory infection epidemics. However, quantification of the efficacy of hand hygiene on respiratory infection in the community is lacking. We searched PubMed for randomised controlled trials on the effect of hand hygiene for reducing acute respiratory infections in the community published before 11 March 2021. We performed a meta-regression analysis using a Bayesian mixed-effects model. A total of 105 publications were identified, out of which six studies reported hand hygiene frequencies. Four studies were performed in household settings and two were in schools. The average number of handwashing events per day ranged from one to eight in the control arms, and four to 17 in the intervention arms. We estimated that a single hand hygiene event is associated with a 3% (80% credible interval (−1% to 7%)) decrease in the daily probability of an acute respiratory infection. Three of these six studies were potentially at high risk of bias because the primary outcome depended on self-reporting of upper respiratory tract symptoms. Well-designed trials with an emphasis on monitoring hand hygiene adherence are needed to confirm these findings.

Life course research embraces the complexity of health and disease development, tackling the extensive interactions between genetics and environment. This interdisciplinary blueprint, or theoretical framework, offers a structure for research ideas and specifies relationships between related factors. Traditionally, methodological approaches attempt to reduce the complexity of these dynamic interactions and decompose health into component parts, ignoring the complex reciprocal interaction of factors that shape health over time. New methods that match the epistemological foundation of the life course framework are needed to fully explore adaptive, multilevel, and reciprocal interactions between individuals and their environment. The focus of this article is to (1) delineate the differences between lifespan and life course research, (2) articulate the importance of complex systems science as a methodological framework in the life course research toolbox to guide our research questions, (3) raise key questions that can be asked within the clinical and translational science domain utilizing this framework, and (4) provide recommendations for life course research implementation, charting the way forward. Recent advances in computational analytics, computer science, and data collection could be used to approximate, measure, and analyze the intertwining and dynamic nature of genetic and environmental factors involved in health development.

We document a positive and strong correlation between speciation and extinction rates in the Paleozoic zooplankton graptoloid clade, between 481 and 419 Ma. This correlation has a magnitude of ~0.35–0.45 and manifests at a temporal resolution of <50 kyr and, for part of our data set, <25 kyr. It cannot be explained as an artifact of the method used to measure rates, sampling bias, bias resulting from construction of the time series, autocorrelation, underestimation of species durations, or undetected phyletic evolution. Correlations are approximately equal during the Ordovician and Silurian, despite the very different speciation and extinction regimes prevailing during these two periods, and correlation is strongest in the shortest-lived cohorts of species.

We infer that this correlation reflects approximately synchronous coupling of speciation and extinction in the graptoloids on timescales of a few tens of thousands of years. Almost half of graptoloid species in our data set have durations of <0.5 Myr, and previous studies have demonstrated that, during times of background extinction, short-lived species were selectively targeted by extinction. These observations may be consistent with the model of ephemeral speciation, whereby new species are inferred to form constantly and at high rate, but most of them disappear rapidly through extinction or reabsorption into the ancestral lineage. Diversity dependence with a lag of ~1 Myr, also documented elsewhere, may reflect a subsequent and relatively slow, competitive dynamic that governed those species that dispersed beyond their originating water mass and escaped the ephemeral species filter.

We study the derived Hall algebra of the partially wrapped Fukaya category of a surface. We give an explicit description of the Hall algebra for the disk with $m$ marked intervals and we give a conjectural description of the Hall algebras of all surfaces with enough marked intervals. Then we use a functoriality result to show that a graded version of the HOMFLY-PT skein relation holds among certain arcs in the Hall algebras of general surfaces.

The new mineral species barlowite, ideally Cu4FBr(OH)6, has been found at the Great Australia mine, Cloncurry, Queensland, Australia. It is the Br and F analogue of claringbullite. Barlowite forms thin blue, platy, hexagonal crystals up to 0.5 mm wide in a cuprite-quartz-goethite matrix associated with gerhardtite and brochantite. Crystals are transparent to translucent with a vitreous lustre. The streak is sky blue. The Mohs hardness is 2–2.5. The tenacity is brittle, the fracture is irregular and there is one perfect cleavage on {001}. Density could not be measured; the mineral sinks in the heaviest liquid available, diluted Clerici solution (D &3.8 g/cm3). The density calculated from the empirical formula is 4.21 g/cm3. Crystals are readily soluble in cold dilute HCl. The mineral is optically non-pleochroic and uniaxial (–). The following optical constants measured in white light vary slightly suggesting a small variation in the proportions of F, Cl and Br: ω 1.840(4)–1.845(4) and ε 1.833(4)–1.840(4). The empirical formula, calculated on the basis of 18 oxygen atoms and H2O calculated to achieve 8 anions and charge balance, is Cu4.00F1.11Br0.95Cl0.09(OH)5.85. Barlowite is hexagonal, space group P63/mmc, a = 6.6786(2), c = 9.2744(3) Å , V = 358.251(19) Å3, Z = 2. The five strongest lines in the powder X-ray diffraction pattern are [d(Å )(I)(hkl)]: 5.790(100)(010); 2.889(40)(020); 2.707(55)(112); 2.452(40)(022); 1.668(30)(220).

A considerable body of evidence suggests that early caregiving may affect the short-term functioning and longer term development of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical axis. Despite this, most research to date has been cross-sectional in nature or restricted to relatively short-term longitudinal follow-ups. More important, there is a paucity of research on the role of caregiving in low- and middle-income countries, where the protective effects of high-quality care in buffering the child's developing stress regulation systems may be crucial. In this paper, we report findings from a longitudinal study (N = 232) conducted in an impoverished periurban settlement in Cape Town, South Africa. We measured caregiving sensitivity and security of attachment in infancy and followed children up at age 13 years, when we conducted assessments of hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenocortical axis reactivity, as indexed by salivary cortisol during the Trier Social Stress Test. The findings indicated that insecure attachment was predictive of reduced cortisol responses to social stress, particularly in boys, and that attachment status moderated the impact of contextual adversity on stress responses: secure children in highly adverse circumstances did not show the blunted cortisol response shown by their insecure counterparts. Some evidence was found that sensitivity of care in infancy was also associated with cortisol reactivity, but in this case, insensitivity was associated with heightened cortisol reactivity, and only for girls. The discussion focuses on the potentially important role of caregiving in the long-term calibration of the stress system and the need to better understand the social and biological mechanisms shaping the stress response across development in low- and middle-income countries.

A Late Quaternary sea-level curve for South Africa is presented on the basis of new and published data from a range of sea level indicators and a variety of locations. Available evidence suggests that sea level in South Africa broadly follows that described from the Caribbean but that deviations occur during sea-level highstands. During the last interglaciation (oxygen isotope stage 5) and the late Holocene, coastal emergence produced higher sea levels in South Africa than those identified in the Caribbean during the same time intervals. This is tentatively ascribed to predicted lithospheric deformation in continental margin settings.

Preamble: Executive Order (EO) 13112—defines an invasive species as “an alien species whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” In the Executive Summary of the National Invasive Species Management Plan (NISMP) the term invasive species is further clarified and defined as “a species that is non-native to the ecosystem under consideration and whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” To provide guidance for the development and implementation of the NISMP, the National Invasive Species Council (NISC) and the Invasive Species Advisory Committee (ISAC) adopted a set of principles outlined in Appendix 6 of the NISMP. Guiding Principle #1 provides additional context for defining the term invasive species and states “many alien species are non-invasive and support human livelihoods or a preferred quality of life.”

Although extinction risk has been found to have a consistent negative relationship with geographic range across wide temporal and taxonomic scales, the effect has been difficult to disentangle from factors such as sampling, ecological niche, or clade. In addition, studies of extinction risk have focused on benthic invertebrates with less work on planktic taxa. We employed a global set of 1114 planktic graptolite species from the Ordovician to lower Devonian to analyze the predictive power of species’ traits and abiotic factors on extinction risk, combining general linear models (GLMs), partial least-squares regression (PLSR), and permutation tests. Factors included measures of geographic range, sampling, and graptolite-specific factors such as clade, biofacies affiliation, shallow water tolerance, and age cohorts split at the base of the Katian and Rhuddanian stages.

The percent variance in durations explained varied substantially between taxon subsets from 12% to 45%. Overall commonness, the correlated effects of geographic range and sampling, was the strongest, most consistent factor (12–30% variance explained), with clade and age cohort adding up to 18% and other factors <10%. Surprisingly, geographic range alone contributed little explanatory power (<5%). It is likely that this is a consequence of a nonlinear relationship between geographic range and extinction risk, wherein the largest reductions in extinction risk are gained from moderate expansion of small geographic ranges. Thus, even large differences in range size between graptolite species did not lead to a proportionate difference in extinction risk because of the large average ranges of these species. Finally, we emphasize that the common practice of determining the geographic range of taxa from the union of all occurrences over their duration poses a substantial risk of overestimating the geographic scope of the realized ecological niche and, thus, of further conflating sampling effects on observed duration with the biological effects of range size on extinction risk.