Doctors’ and nurses’ (DNs) wellbeing in the National Health Service is important for ensuring safe healthcare delivery. However, demanding worker responsibilities, including irregular shift work, can significantly impact their health. These irregular working patterns are associated with higher sickness rates and stress among healthcare professionals due to the inherent challenges of the work (1,2). Shift work, in particular, disrupts sleep patterns and impairs cognitive function and performance, leading to poorer physiological and cardiovascular health (3). Furthermore, workforce shortages and difficulties adapting to a consistently demanding workload impact patient care delivery (4). Workplace nutrition can support health, offsetting some of these issues. However, there is a limited understanding of DNs’ dietary intake during shift work. Using the UK Biobank dataset, an open-access dataset of a prospective cohort study recruited from England, Scotland and Wales (5), this research aimed to understand DNs’ dietary intake against different shift work patterns.

To meet our research aim, Mann-Whitney U tests were used to explore the differences between doctors and nurses with different shift work patterns.

Of the 5,777 participants of doctors (n=1,962) and nurses (n=3,815) doing shift work, results indicated limited consumption of fruits, vegetables, fish and dietary fibre, as well as a high intake of meat, tea, coffee, and alcohol. Statistical significant differences in dietary intake were observed between DNs, with doctors consuming more unprocessed red meat per week (2.176 vs 2.053 portions, p<0.001), cups of coffee per day (1.57 vs 1.30 cups; p<0.001), and alcohol intake per week (63.146g vs 40.261g, p<0.001) than nurses. Meanwhile, nurses had a higher average consumption than doctors of fruit (2.840 vs 2.657 portions) and vegetables (2.415 vs 2.349 portions) (p<0.001), tea (3.14 vs 2.18 cups) and water (2.60 vs 1.40 cups) (p<0.001).

Various shift work factors influence dietary intake. Longer working hours and more frequent and consecutive night shifts were associated with poorer dietary behaviour, including reduced vegetable and meat intake and increased tea and coffee consumption. Doctors consumed less fruit when working over 30 hours per week (p=0.037) and on consecutive (p=0.020) and night shifts (p=0.048).

Our results suggest that DNs’ dietary intake is sub-optimal to recommended dietary guidelines. Shift work contributes to poorer workplace nutrition and health, especially during night shifts when access to nutritious food is limited. Doctors appeared to be more affected than nurses. Further research should explore practical strategies to consider the diverse working patterns to improve DN nutrition according to public health and dietary recommendations.

The Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) employs unique features of the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) to monitor dozens of the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) millisecond pulsars (MSPs), simultaneously in the 300-500 MHz and the 1260-1460 MHz bands. This dual-band approach ensures that any frequency-dependent delays are accurately characterized, significantly improving the timing precision for pulsar observations, which is crucial for pulsar timing arrays. We present details of InPTA’s second data release that involves 7 yrs of data on 27 IPTA MSPs. This includes sub-banded Times of Arrival (ToAs), Dispersion Measures (DM), and initial timing ephemerides for our MSPs. A part of this dataset, originally released in InPTA’s first data release, is being incorporated into IPTA’s third data release which is expected to detect and characterize nanohertz gravitational waves in the coming years. The entire dataset is reprocessed in this second data release providing some of the highest precision DM estimates so far and interesting solar wind related DM variations in some pulsars. This is likely to characterize the noise introduced by the dynamic inter-stellar ionised medium much better than the previous release thereby increasing sensitivity to any future gravitational wave search.

Collisions are crucial in governing particle and energy transport in plasmas confined in a magnetic mirror trap. Modern gyrokinetic codes model transport in magnetic mirrors, but some utilize approximate model collision operators. This study focuses on a Pastukhov-style method of images calculation of particle and energy confinement times using a Lenard-Bernstein model collision operator. Prior work on parallel particle and energy balances used a different Fokker-Planck plasma collision operator. The method must be extended in non-trivial ways to study the Lenard-Bernstein operator. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we compare our results with a modern finite element solver. Our findings reveal that the particle confinement time scales like a exp(a2) using the Lenard-Bernstein operator, in contrast to the more accurate scaling that the Coulomb collision operator would yield a2 exp(a2), where a2 is approximately proportional to the ambipolar potential. We propose that codes solving for collisional losses in magnetic mirrors utilizing the Lenard-Bernstein or Dougherty collision operator scale their collision frequency of any electrostatically confined species. This study illuminates the collision operator’s intricate role in the Pastukhov-style method of images calculation of collisional confinement.

We run a laboratory experiment to test the concept of coarse correlated equilibrium (Moulin and Vial in Int J Game Theory 7:201–221, 1978), with a two-person game with unique pure Nash equilibrium which is also the solution of iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies. The subjects are asked to commit to a device that randomly picks one of three symmetric outcomes (including the Nash point) with higher ex-ante expected payoff than the Nash equilibrium payoff. We find that the subjects do not accept this lottery (which is a coarse correlated equilibrium); instead, they choose to play the game and coordinate on the Nash equilibrium. However, given an individual choice between a lottery with equal probabilities of the same outcomes and the sure payoff as in the Nash point, the lottery is chosen by the subjects. This result is robust against a few variations. We explain our result as selecting risk-dominance over payoff dominance in equilibrium.

The Floquet exponents of periodic field lines are studied through the variations of the magnetic action on the magnetic axis, which is assumed to be elliptical. The near-axis formalism developed by Mercier, Solov'ev and Shafranov is combined with a Lagrangian approach. The on-axis Floquet exponent is shown to coincide with the on-axis rotational transform. A discrete solution suitable for numerical implementation is introduced, which gives the Floquet exponents as solutions to an eigenvalue problem. This discrete formalism expresses the exponents as the eigenvalues of a $6\times 6$ matrix.