Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) is an important growth factor in childhood. We aimed to investigate the impact of food supplements for the treatment of moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) on serum IGF-1 (sIGF-1). Secondary analysis of a randomised 2 × 2 × 3 factorial nutrition trial was performed. Children aged 6–23 months with MAM received 2093 kJ/d as lipid-based nutrient supplement (LNS) or corn soy blend (CSB), containing either dehulled soya or soya isolate and different quantities of dried skimmed milk (0 %, 20 % or 50 % of total protein) for 12 weeks. The trial was double-blind with regard to soya and milk but not to matrix (LNS v. CSB). sIGF-1 was measured at inclusion and after 12 weeks of supplementation. Of 1609 children enrolled, 1455 (90 %) had sIGF-1 measured at both time points. During supplementation, sIGF-1 increased 6·7 (95 % CI 6·1, 7·3) ng/ml compared with an expected age-dependent decrease of 0·3 (95 % CI 0·2, 0·4) ng/ml. Children who received LNS v. CSB had a lower increase in sIGF-1 (–8 %, 95 % CI − 12, −3). The effect of LNS was partly attenuated when sIGF-1 was corrected for inflammation. Children who received soya isolate compared with dehulled soya had a higher increase in sIGF-1 (6 %, 95 % CI 1, 12). Milk content did not affect sIGF-1. Overall, sIGF-1 increased during supplementation. The lower increase with LNS v. CSB was only partly explained by increased inflammation with LNS and needs further investigation. Isolate v. dehulled soya led to a higher increase which may be due to antinutrients in dehulled soya.

This study explores challenges in decision-making for product design due to insufficient cost transparency because of product variety across the value chain. Utilizing a literature review and a case study on a company, it delves into issues such as value chain consideration, product family assessment, linking effects to specific product levels, and converting measured effects. Highlighting the critical need to address these challenges for decision-making. Future research should focus on a comprehensive costing framework, explore effect interdependencies, and expand the value chain analysis.

Democratic theorists have long emphasized the importance of participatory equality, that is, that all citizens should have an equal right to participate. It is still unclear, however, whether ordinary citizens view this principle as central to democracy and how different violations of this principle affect subjective democratic legitimacy. The attitudes of citizens are imperative when it comes to the subjective legitimacy of democratic systems, and it is therefore important to examine how participatory inequalities affect these attitudes. We here contribute to this research agenda with survey experiments embedded in two surveys (n = 324, n = 840). We here examine (1) whether citizens consider participatory inequality to be an important democratic principle, and (2) how gender and educational inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and the perceived usefulness of the participatory input. The results show that citizens generally consider participatory inequalities to be important, but only gender inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and usefulness. Hence it is important to consider the type of inequality to understand the implications.

The aim of this review is to provide an overview of how person-specific interactions between diet and the gut microbiota could play a role in affecting diet-induced weight loss responses. The highly person-specific gut microbiota, which is shaped by our diet, secretes digestive enzymes and molecules that affect digestion in the colon. Therefore, weight loss responses could in part depend on personal colonic fermentation responses, which affect energy extraction of food and production of microbial metabolites, such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which exert various effects on host metabolism. Colonic fermentation is the net result of the complex interplay between availability of dietary substrates, the functional capacity of the gut microbiome and environmental (abiotic) factors in the gut such as pH and transit time. While animal studies have demonstrated that the gut microbiota can causally affect obesity, causal and mechanistic evidence from human studies is still largely lacking. However, recent human studies have proposed that the baseline gut microbiota composition may predict diet-induced weight loss-responses. In particular, individuals characterised by high relative abundance of Prevotella have been found to lose more weight on diets rich in dietary fibre compared to individuals with low Prevotella abundance. Although harnessing of personal diet–microbiota interactions holds promise for more personalised nutrition and obesity management strategies to improve human health, there is currently insufficient evidence to unequivocally link the gut microbiota and weight loss in human subjects. To move the field forward, a greater understanding of the mechanistic underpinnings of personal diet–microbiota interactions is needed.

As individuals seek increasingly individualised nutrition and lifestyle guidance, numerous apps and nutrition programmes have emerged. However, complex individual variations in dietary behaviours, genotypes, gene expression and composition of the microbiome are increasingly recognised. Advances in digital tools and artificial intelligence can help individuals more easily track nutrient intakes and identify nutritional gaps. However, the influence of these nutrients on health outcomes can vary widely among individuals depending upon life stage, genetics and microbial composition. For example, folate may elicit favourable epigenetic effects on brain development during a critical developmental time window of pregnancy. Genes affecting vitamin B12 metabolism may lead to cardiometabolic traits that play an essential role in the context of obesity. Finally, an individual’s gut microbial composition can determine their response to dietary fibre interventions during weight loss. These recent advances in understanding can lead to a more complete and integrated approach to promoting optimal health through personalised nutrition, in clinical practice settings and for individuals in their daily lives. The purpose of this review is to summarise presentations made during the DSM Science and Technology Award Symposium at the 13th European Nutrition Conference, which focused on personalised nutrition and novel technologies for health in the modern world.

This study examines how characteristics of participatory processes affect citizens’ evaluations of such processes and thereby establish what kind of participatory process citizens demand. The literature on democratic innovations has proposed different criteria for evaluating participatory innovations. What remains unclear, however, is how citizens evaluate these participatory mechanisms. This is here examined in a conjoint analysis embedded in a representative survey of the Finnish population (n = 1050). The conjoint analysis examines the impact of inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgment, transparency, efficiency, and transferability on citizens’ evaluations of participatory processes. Furthermore, it is examined whether the evaluations differ by the policy issues and process preferences of the respondents. The results show that people want transparent participatory processes with face-to-face interaction among participants and expert advice to deal with complicated issues. The participatory processes should also be advisory and should not include too many meetings. These effects appear to be uniform across policy issues and do not depend on the process preferences of citizens.

We consider task planning for long-living intelligent agents situated in dynamic environments. Specifically, we address the problem of incomplete knowledge of the world due to the addition of new objects with unknown action models. We propose a multilayered agent architecture that uses meta-reasoning to control hierarchical task planning and situated learning, monitor expectations generated by a plan against world observations, forms goals and rewards for the situated reinforcement learner, and learns the missing planning knowledge relevant to the new objects. We use occupancy grids as a low-level representation for the high-level expectations to capture changes in the physical world due to the additional objects, and provide a similarity method for detecting discrepancies between the expectations and the observations at run-time; the meta-reasoner uses these discrepancies to formulate goals and rewards for the learner, and the learned policies are added to the hierarchical task network plan library for future re-use. We describe our experiments in the Minecraft and Gazebo microworlds to demonstrate the efficacy of the architecture and the technique for learning. We test our approach against an ablated reinforcement learning (RL) version, and our results indicate this form of expectation enhances the learning curve for RL while being more generic than propositional representations.

. Metallicity gradients are most frequently investigated directly from galaxies observed in emission. We have shown that galaxies detected via strong quasar absorption lines also exhibits a metallicity gradient in the outskirts and circumgalactic medium out to ~40 kpc distance. We infer a metallicity gradient of −0.022 dex kpc−1 for absorption-selected systems at redshifts 0.1 z3. Applying this metallicity gradient and a flattening of the gradient beyond 12 kpc, we demonstrate that absorption-selected galaxies obey the same mass-metallicity relation (MZR) as observed for luminosity-selected galaxies.

Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) is an inexpensive, quick and non-invasive method to determine body composition. Equations used in BIA are typically derived in healthy individuals of European descent. BIA is specific to health status and ethnicity and may therefore provide inaccurate results in populations of different ethnic origin and health status. The aim of the present study was to test the validity of BIA in Ethiopian antiretroviral-naive HIV patients.

BIA was validated against the 2H dilution technique by comparing fat-free mass (FFM) measured by the two methods using paired t tests and Bland–Altman plots. BIA was based on single frequency (50 kHz) whole-body measurements. Data were obtained at three health facilities in Jimma Zone, Oromia Region, South-West Ethiopia. Data from 281 HIV-infected participants were available. Two-thirds were female and the mean age was 32·7 (sd 8·6) years. Also, 46 % were underweight with a BMI below 18·5 kg/m2. There were no differences in FFM between the methods. Overall, BIA slightly underestimated FFM by 0·1 kg (−0·1, 95 % CI −0·3, 0·2 kg). The Bland–Altman plot indicated acceptable agreement with an upper limit of agreement of 4·5 kg and a lower limit of agreement of −4·6 kg, but with a small correlation between the mean difference and the average FFM. BIA slightly overestimated FFM at low values compared with the 2H dilution technique, while it slightly underestimated FFM at high values. In conclusion, BIA proved to be valid in this population and may therefore be useful for measuring body composition in routine practice in HIV-infected African individuals.

Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier is a >60 km long and 20 km wide floating outlet glacier located at 79°30’ N, 22° W, draining a large area of the northeast Greenland ice sheet. Climate, mass-balance and dynamics studies were carried out on the glacier in three field seasons in 1996, 1997 and 1998. As part of this work, tidal-movement observations were carried out by simultaneous differential global positioning system (GPS) measurements at several locations distributed on the glacier surface. The GPS observations were performed continuously over several tidal cycles. At the same time, tiltmeter measurements were carried out in the grounding zones along the glacier margins and upstream, where the glacier leaves the main ice sheet A tide gauge installed in the sea immediately in front of the glacier front recorded the tide in the open sea during the field seasons. The observations show that the main part of the glacier tongue responds as a freely floating plate to the phase and amplitude of the local tide in the sea. However, kilometre-wide flexure zones exist along the marginal and upstream grounding lines. Attempts to model the observed tidal deflection and tilt patterns in the flexure zone by elastic-beam theory are unsuccessful, in contrast to previous findings by other investigators. The strongest disagreement between our measurements and results derived from elastic-beam theory is a significant variation of the phase of the tidal records with distance from the grounding line (most clearly displayed by the tilt records). We suggest that the viscous properties of glacier ice must be taken into account, and consequently that a viscoelastic-beam model must be used to adequately describe tidal bending of floating glaciers.

We determined the incidence, type, and severity of complications after cardiac catheterisation in children with heart disease in Norway, and we present the results in terms of the International Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Code (IPCCC) nomenclature for complications. All paediatric cardiac catheterisations in Norway are performed in one clinical centre. All procedures performed during a 5-year period beginning in 2010 were prospectively registered, and medical records for cases with complications were reviewed to confirm the event and to re-classify the type, severity, and attributability of the complication according to the IPCCC nomenclature. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to identify possible risk predictors. A total of 1318 catheterisations performed on 941 patients were included in the present study, of which 68% were interventional. The complication and major complication rates were 5.5 and 1.4%, respectively. Trauma to the vessels or the myocardium, haemodynamic adverse events, and arrhythmias were the most common types of complications. In the multivariate model, weight <4 kg (odds ratios, 3.0; 95% confidence intervals: 1.6–5.8) and risk category 5 (odds ratios, 5.1; 95% confidence intervals: 2.1–12.3) were significant risk predictors for any complication. In spite of a high rate of interventions, the complication rates in this study were similar to older studies, but diverging methods and terminology limit the comparability. We strongly suggest general use of the proposed IPCCC classification system for registration and reports of complications for paediatric cardiac catheterisations.

Strong absorption lines in quasar spectra primarily probe low-mass galaxies and detecting these in emission has previously been difficult. Dedicated surveys for the host galaxies of damped Lyman-α (DLA) systems have often resulted in non-detections and upper limits. Targeting the most metal-rich absorbers has proven to be a viable method, because these galaxies are brighter. By combining DLA metallicities and deriving host galaxy stellar masses, we find that metal-rich DLAs (with >10% solar metallicity) and their host galaxies follow the same redshift-dependent scaling relation between stellar mass and metallicity as luminosity-selected galaxies. We derive a prediction for an absorber galaxy mass that depends on the DLA metallicity.

The interest in procedures for political decision-making has grown tremendously during recent decades. Given the intense scholarly debate and the implementation of greater opportunities for citizen participation in many democracies, there has been surprisingly little interest in citizens’ conceptions of democracy understood as their preferences concerning the processes by which the political system works. Some recent attempts do, however, suggest that it is important to expand the study of public opinion from policy output to decision-making processes, and that there are coherent patterns in citizens’ expectations of the way in which political decisions come about. What is not clear, though, is whether citizens’ different conceptions of democracy have repercussions for how they engage in politics. Using the Finnish National Election Study of 2011 (Borg and Grönlund 2011), this article explores the relationship between citizens’ conceptions of democracy and patterns of political participation. Results demonstrate a distinct association between citizens’ ideals and the actions they take.

Questionnaire-based zygosity assessment in twins has generally been found to be valid. In this report we evaluate sex- and age-differences in the validity of such questionnairebased classification when using the four questions that have been the basis of zygosity assessment in The Danish Twin Registry for half a century. Three hundred and forty-two male and 531 female twin pairs were zygosity diagnosed using genetic markers and the results compared with the original questionnaire based classification. We found significant differences in the accuracy of questionnaire based zygosity diagnosis when stratifying the data for sex as well as age: males and monozygotic having the highest misclassification. However, even in the group with the highest misclassification rate the frequency was less than 8%. The overall misclassification rate was only 4%, with a clear tendency towards a higher proportion of misclassified monozygotic than dizygotic twins. The results demonstrate that questionnaire based zygosity diagnosis can still be regarded as a valid and valuable classification method for most purposes.