The world is facing a global plastics crisis with more than 50% of plastics produced only being used once and then discarded. If nothing is done to put an end to plastic pollution, it is projected that by 2050, there will be more plastic (by weight) than fish in the ocean, affecting natural ecosystems, biodiversity and human health. While solutions often target governments and corporations, a crucial group is frequently ignored: informal waste pickers. Despite the limitations of recycling alone, waste pickers significantly impact the plastic recycling chain. This review addresses the gap in our understanding of their role. It argues that waste pickers are an essential component of the larger portfolio of solutions for the plastic crisis but face significant challenges.

Gender is a socially constructed concept influenced by social practices, norms, and expectations. The impact of gender differences on mental health has been long recognized, with consequences such as over-diagnosis and pathologization or under-diagnosis of some disorders depending on gender. This also has implications for the treatments that each gender receives. In this narrative review, we will analyze (a) the gender differences in the prevalence of mental disorders, (b) the explanations for gender differences in mental health, including biological, social constructionist, and sociocultural risk factors, and (c) the gender differences in the treatment of mental disorders, including differences in health-seeking behavior and treatment outcomes. Overall, there is a consistent pattern of differences in prevalence, with women more likely to have internalizing disorders (e.g., anxiety or depression) and men more likely to have externalizing disorders (e.g., antisocial personality or substance use). The explanations aimed at disentangling the reasons for these gender differences are complex, and several approaches should be considered to achieve a comprehensive explanation. In addition to biological factors (e.g., hormonal changes), social constructionist factors (e.g., biased diagnostic criteria and clinicians’ gender bias) and sociocultural factors (e.g., feminization of poverty, gender discrimination, violence against women, and prescriptive beauty standards) should be considered. Future studies in the field of mental health should consider gender differences and explore the bio-psycho-socio-cultural factors that may underlie these differences.

In 2023, the UK government announced a Major Conditions Strategy, publishing ‘The case for change and our strategic framework’, which set out the focus on cancers, diabetes, dementia, mental ill health, musculoskeletal disorders, CVD and chronic respiratory diseases. Together, these conditions account for 60% of total disability-adjusted life years lost to early death or ill health in England, and one in four adults has at least two (multimorbidity). This review considers some of the key dietary risks for these major conditions and population policies that may improve diets and reduce risks. UK Government dietary recommendations, based on independent risk assessment and advice from the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, are encapsulated in the national food model, the Eatwell Guide. Based on key sources of dietary data – chiefly consumption data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey and consumer purchase data from Kantar – most people do not meet dietary recommendations. This review considers how science and evidence inform health improvement policy. This includes policies that encourage healthier food choices, such as labelling and public procurement standards to those that minimise the impact of the less healthy choice such as sugar and salt reduction and reformulation. The review also considers nutritional approaches to managing some non-communicable diseases. Given the role nutrition and excess weight play in the onset, prognosis and quality of life for those living with one or more of the major conditions, there are huge potential gains from even small dietary improvements across population groups.

We characterize Borel line graphs in terms of 10 forbidden induced subgraphs, namely the nine finite graphs from the classical result of Beineke together with a 10th infinite graph associated with the equivalence relation $\mathbb {E}_0$ on the Cantor space. As a corollary, we prove a partial converse to the Feldman–Moore theorem, which allows us to characterize all locally countable Borel line graphs in terms of their Borel chromatic numbers.

Enterococcus faecium is a difficult-to-treat gram positive organism with increasing rates of resistance to vancomycin which is commonly mediated through the vanA gene cluster. There have been international reports of E. faecium isolates that are genotypically positive for vanA but phenotypically vancomycin-susceptible. These isolates, commonly called vancomycin-variable enterococci (VVE), can convert to phenotypic vancomycin resistance upon exposure to vancomycin. Multiple mechanisms for this genotypic-phenotypic mismatch have been reported and most commonly involve the regulatory components of the vanA gene cluster. VVE are challenging to identify unless microbiology labs routinely implement both genotypic and phenotypic screening methods. VVE has been associated with outbreaks and has become a prevalent pathogen in several countries. In this review, we summarize the mechanisms, microbiology and epidemiology of VVE. Clinicians must remain vigilant for VVE as diagnosis can be challenging and treatment failure on vancomycin is possible.

Graph-based semi-supervised learning methods combine the graph structure and labeled data to classify unlabeled data. In this work, we study the effect of a noisy oracle on classification. In particular, we derive the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator for clustering a degree corrected stochastic block model when a noisy oracle reveals a fraction of the labels. We then propose an algorithm derived from a continuous relaxation of the MAP, and we establish its consistency. Numerical experiments show that our approach achieves promising performance on synthetic and real data sets, even in the case of very noisy labeled data.

We describe our experience implementing an intensive quality improvement cohort pilot focused on managing asymptomatic bacteriuria in 19 critical access hospitals. Participation in the pilot was high, and almost all sites identified an improvement goal and collected clinical data. Barriers to implementation included staffing shortages, turnover, and lack of bandwidth.

Prior studies have documented that working-class individuals rarely become parliamentarians. We know less about when in the career pipeline to parliament workers disappear, and why. We study these questions using detailed data on the universe of Swedish politicians’ careers over a 50-year period. We find roughly equal-sized declines in the proportion of workers on various rungs of the political career ladder ranging from local to national office. We reject the potential explanations that workers lack political ambition, public service motivation, honesty, or voter support. And while workers’ average high school grades and cognitive test scores are lower, this cannot explain their large promotion disadvantage, a situation that we label a class ceiling. Organizational ties to blue-collar unions help workers advance, but only to lower-level positions in left-leaning parties. We conclude that efforts to improve workers’ numerical representation should apply throughout the career ladder and focus on intra-party processes.

This study extends the upper echelons literature by shedding light on the role of top management team (TMT) dissimilarity, a specific conceptualization of team diversity. TMTs are typically composed of members from different functional areas who have unique information and values. The perception of the degree to which TMT members view themselves as dissimilar from other team members affects the TMT’s decision-making and, therefore, organizational outcomes. However, research does not address this perspective of TMT diversity. We examine how informational and value dissimilarity among TMT members is associated with incremental and radical innovation capability. We survey top managers from various industries and use partial least squares structural equation modeling analysis to explore the association between TMT dissimilarity and innovation capability empirically. The findings show that informational dissimilarity is positively associated with incremental innovation capability. Value dissimilarity is negatively associated with incremental innovation capability, whereas it is positively associated with radical innovation capability.

Temporal energy intake (EI) and physical activity (PA) patterns may be associated with obesity. We aimed to derive and characterise temporal EI and PA patterns, and assess their cross-sectional association with weight status, in 6-to-14-year-old Portuguese participants of the National Food, Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey 2015–2016. We extracted times and EI of all eating occasions from two 1-d food diaries/24-h recalls, while types and times of PA from 4-d PA diaries. We derived EI patterns (n 714) and PA patterns (n 595), using, respectively, a hierarchical and K-means cluster analysis, considering the average proportion of total daily EI (%TEI) and PA intensity (%TPA), within each 2-h interval across the 24-h day. Patterns were labelled based on the 2-h intervals of %TEI/TPA peaks. We assessed the association between patterns and overweight or obesity (BMI z-score ≥ +1 sd) using adjusted logistic regressions (OR (95 % CI)). Three EI patterns emerged: 1 – ‘Early afternoon and early evening’; 2 – ‘Early afternoon and late evening’; and 3 – ‘Late morning, early and mid-afternoon and late evening’. EI Pattern 3 v. Pattern 1 was negatively associated with overweight or obesity (0·49 (0·26, 0·92)). PA Pattern 1 – ‘Late morning, mid-afternoon and early evening’ v. Pattern 2 – ‘Late afternoon’, was not associated with weight status (0·95 (0·65, 1·38)). A daily EI pattern with more and even %TEI peaks at earlier daytime periods, rather than fewer and higher, may be negatively associated with overweight or obesity amongst this population whereas the identified PA patterns might have no relationship.