MAN v FAT Soccer: Feasibility Study and Preliminary Efficacy of a Sport-Based Weight-Loss Intervention for Overweight and Obese Men in Australia.

MAN v FAT Soccer is a sport-based weight-loss program for overweight and obese men that originated in the United Kingdom (i.e., as MAN v FAT Football) and appears to successfully engage men with weight loss. We sought to explore whether the program would work in an Australian context by (a) establishing a foundation for the implementation of the program on a larger scale and (b) determining how large-scale implementation is most feasible. We conducted a nonrandomized, single intervention group feasibility trial of MAN v FAT Soccer in Australia with 418 male participants with a body mass index greater than 27.50 kg/m2. Results indicate that the program is acceptable, with participants reporting positive perceptions of the various components of the program and a high proportion reporting intentions to recommend the program to others (95.9%). Furthermore, preliminary effectiveness results indicate positive changes in weight (4.6% reduction) and physical activity (88.5% increase) and improvements in psychological outcomes such as depression (17.6% decrease), stress (19.0% decrease), and body appreciation (19.1% increase). Our findings provide general support for the feasibility of MAN v FAT Soccer and the notion that leveraging competition and masculinity may help drive men's health behavior change.

A roadmap for cost-of-goods planning to guide economic production of cell therapy products.

Cell therapy products are frequently developed and produced without incorporating cost considerations into process development, contributing to prohibitively costly products. Herein we contextualize individual process development decisions within a broad framework for cost-efficient therapeutic manufacturing. This roadmap guides the analysis of cost of goods (COG) arising from tissue procurement, material acquisition, facility operation, production, and storage. We present the specific COG considerations related to each of these elements as identified through a 2013 International Society for Cellular Therapy COG survey, highlighting the differences between autologous and allogeneic products. Planning and accounting for COG at each step in the production process could reduce costs, allowing for more affordable market pricing to improve the long-term viability of the cell therapy product and facilitate broader patient access to novel and transformative cell therapies.

Domain-general inhibition areas of the brain are involved in language switching: fMRI evidence from trilingual speakers.

The prevailing theory of language switching states that unbalanced bilingual speakers use inhibition to switch between their languages (Inhibitory Control or IC model; Green, 1998). Using fMRI, we examined the brain mechanisms underlying language switching and investigated the role of domain-general inhibition areas such as the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) and the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). Dutch-English-German trilinguals performed a picture naming task in the MRI scanner in both a blocked-language and a mixed-language context. The rIFG and pre-SMA showed more activation for switches to the second and third language (L2 and L3) compared to non-switch trials and blocked trials. No such difference was found for switches to the first language (L1). Our results indicate that language switching recruits brain areas related to domain-general inhibition. In this way, our study supports the claim that multilinguals use inhibition to switch between their languages.

Alpha-band suppression in the visual word form area as a functional bottleneck to consciousness.

The current state of empirical investigations refers to consciousness as an all-or-none phenomenon. However, a recent theoretical account opens up this perspective by proposing a partial level (between nil and full) of conscious perception. In the well-studied case of single-word reading, short-lived exposure can trigger incomplete word-form recognition wherein letters fall short of forming a whole word in one's conscious perception thereby hindering word-meaning access and report. Hence, the processing from incomplete to complete word-form recognition straightforwardly mirrors a transition from partial to full-blown consciousness. We therefore hypothesized that this putative functional bottleneck to consciousness (i.e. the perceptual boundary between partial and full conscious perception) would emerge at a major key hub region for word-form recognition during reading, namely the left occipito-temporal junction. We applied a real-time staircase procedure and titrated subjective reports at the threshold between partial (letters) and full (whole word) conscious perception. This experimental approach allowed us to collect trials with identical physical stimulation, yet reflecting distinct perceptual experience levels. Oscillatory brain activity was monitored with magnetoencephalography and revealed that the transition from partial-to-full word-form perception was accompanied by alpha-band (7-11 Hz) power suppression in the posterior left occipito-temporal cortex. This modulation of rhythmic activity extended anteriorly towards the visual word form area (VWFA), a region whose selectivity for word-forms in perception is highly debated. The current findings provide electrophysiological evidence for a functional bottleneck to consciousness thereby empirically instantiating a recently proposed partial perspective on consciousness. Moreover, the findings provide an entirely new outlook on the functioning of the VWFA as a late bottleneck to full-blown conscious word-form perception.

Structured exercise programs for higher education students experiencing mental health challenges: background, significance, and implementation.

The incidence of mental illness is greatest among young adults, and those enrolled in higher education may be particularly vulnerable compared to the general young adult population. Many higher education institutions employ student support staff tasked with implementing strategies to improve student wellbeing and mental illness. However, these strategies tend to be focused on clinical therapies and pharmacological interventions with limited lifestyle approaches. Exercise is an effective method for addressing mental illness and promoting wellbeing, yet widespread provision of structured exercise services to support treatment options for students with mental health challenges has not been fully realized. In an effort to guide exercise strategies for student mental health, we synthesize considerations for developing and delivering exercise programs in higher education settings. We draw directly from the evidence base on existing exercise programs in higher education; and the broader behavior change, exercise adherence, health psychology, implementation science, and exercise prescription literatures. Our broad considerations cover issues regarding program engagement and behavior change, exercise 'dose' and prescription, integration with other on-campus services, and robust research and evaluation. These considerations may provide impetus for widespread program development and implementation, as well as informing research focused on protecting and improving student mental health.

Governing the soil: natural farming and bionationalism in India.

This article examines India's response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country's Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world's largest alternative agriculture movements: natural farming. This puts farmer expertise at the centre of soil fertility and attends to the wider ecological health of soils. Despite emerging as a mode of resistance to dominant agricultural systems, natural farming is now being delivered in increasingly bureaucratic ways by India's state governments. This article offers Himachal Pradesh as a case study in how the soil is governed, drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with scientists, agricultural officers, non-governmental organisation leaders, and activists. Rather than assess approaches to soil health according to their ecological bottom line, we examine the differing forms of knowledge, expertise and 'truth' in the SHC and Natural Farming approaches. Our analysis reveals discontinuities in how farmers are imagined, as well as continuities in how quasi-spiritual language combines in a bionationalist project, positing assumptions about the correct arrangement of life in nationalist terms. We point to a shift toward hybrid and pick-and-mix approaches to soil health, as farmers and their organisers are increasingly invested with the capacities to combine multiple options. We see a fracturing of expertise and the opening up of epistemic pluralism in responses to the soil fertility crisis.

Lexical competition in nonnative speech comprehension.

Electrophysiological studies consistently find N400 effects of semantic incongruity in nonnative (L2) language comprehension. These N400 effects are often delayed compared with native (L1) comprehension, suggesting that semantic integration in one's second language occurs later than in one's first language. In this study, we investigated whether such a delay could be attributed to (1) intralingual lexical competition and/or (2) interlingual lexical competition. We recorded EEG from Dutch-English bilinguals who listened to English (L2) sentences in which the sentence-final word was (a) semantically fitting and (b) semantically incongruent or semantically incongruent but initially congruent due to sharing initial phonemes with (c) the most probable sentence completion within the L2 or (d) the L1 translation equivalent of the most probable sentence completion. We found an N400 effect in each of the semantically incongruent conditions. This N400 effect was significantly delayed to L2 words but not to L1 translation equivalents that were initially congruent with the sentence context. Taken together, these findings firstly demonstrate that semantic integration in nonnative listening can start based on word initial phonemes (i.e., before a single lexical candidate could have been selected based on the input) and secondly suggest that spuriously elicited L1 lexical candidates are not available for semantic integration in L2 speech comprehension.

The time course of colour congruency effects in picture naming.

In our interactions with people and objects in the world around us, as well as in communicating our thoughts, we rely on the use of conceptual knowledge stored in long-term memory. From a frame-theoretic point of view, a concept is represented by a central node and recursive attribute-value structures further specifying the concept. The present study explores whether and how the activation of an attribute within a frame might influence access to the concept's name in language production, focussing on the colour attribute. Colour has been shown to contribute to object recognition, naming, and memory retrieval, and there is evidence that colour plays a different role in naming objects that have a typical colour (high colour-diagnostic objects such as tomatoes) than in naming objects without a typical colour (low colour-diagnostic objects such as bicycles). We report two behavioural experiments designed to reveal potential effects of the activation of an object's typical colour on naming the object in a picture-word interference paradigm. This paradigm was used to investigate whether naming is facilitated when typical colours are presented alongside the to-be-named picture (e.g., the word "red" superimposed on the picture of a tomato), compared to atypical colours (such as "brown"), unrelated adjectives (such as "fast"), or random letter strings. To further explore the time course of these potential effects, the words were presented at different time points relative to the to-be-named picture (Exp. 1: -400 ms, Exp. 2: -200 ms, 0 ms, and + 200 ms). By including both high and low colour-diagnostic objects, it was possible to explore whether the activation of a colour differentially affects naming of objects that have a strong association with a typical colour. The results showed that (pre-)activation of the appropriate colour attribute facilitated naming compared to an inappropriate colour. This was only the case for objects closely connected with a typical colour. Consequences of these findings for frame-theoretic accounts of conceptual representation are discussed.

Automated Counterflow Centrifugal System for Small-Scale Cell Processing.

Successful commercialization of gene and cell-based therapies requires manufacturing processes that are cost-effective and scalable. Buffer exchange and product concentration are essential components for most manufacturing processes. However, at the early stages of product development, these steps are often performed manually. Manual dead-end centrifugation for buffer exchange is labor-intensive, costly, and not scalable. A closed automated system can effectively eliminate this laborious step, but implementation can be challenging. Here, we describe a newly developed cell processing device that is suitable for small- to medium-scale cell processing and aims to bridge the gap between manual processing and large-scale automation. This protocol can be easily applied to various cell types and processes by modifying the flow rate and centrifugation speed. Our protocol demonstrated high cell recovery with shorter processing times in comparison to the manual process. Cells recovered from the automated process also maintained their proliferation rates. The device can be applied as a modular component in a closed manufacturing process to accommodate steps such as buffer exchange, cell formulation, and cryopreservation.

Head start for target language in bilingual listening.

In this study we investigated the availability of non-target language semantic features in bilingual speech processing. We recorded EEG from Dutch-English bilinguals who listened to spoken sentences in their L2 (English) or L1 (Dutch). In Experiments 1 and 3 the sentences contained an interlingual homophone. The sentence context was either biased towards the target language meaning of the homophone (target biased), the non-target language meaning (non-target biased), or neither meaning of the homophone (fully incongruent). These conditions were each compared to a semantically congruent control condition. In L2 sentences we observed an N400 in the non-target biased condition that had an earlier offset than the N400 to fully incongruent homophones. In the target biased condition, a negativity emerged that was later than the N400 to fully incongruent homophones. In L1 contexts, neither target biased nor non-target biased homophones yielded significant N400 effects (compared to the control condition). In Experiments 2 and 4 the sentences contained a language switch to a non-target language word that could be semantically congruent or incongruent. Semantically incongruent words (switched, and non-switched) elicited an N400 effect. The N400 to semantically congruent language-switched words had an earlier offset than the N400 to incongruent words. Both congruent and incongruent language switches elicited a Late Positive Component (LPC). These findings show that bilinguals activate both meanings of interlingual homophones irrespective of their contextual fit. In L2 contexts, the target-language meaning of the homophone has a head start over the non-target language meaning. The target-language head start is also evident for language switches from both L2-to-L1 and L1-to-L2.

The use of conceptual components in language production: an ERP study.

According to frame-theory, concepts can be represented as structured frames that contain conceptual attributes (e.g., "color") and their values (e.g., "red"). A particular color value can be seen as a core conceptual component for (high color-diagnostic; HCD) objects (e.g., bananas) which are strongly associated with a typical color, but less so for (low color-diagnostic; LCD) objects (e.g., bicycles) that exist in many different colors. To investigate whether the availability of a core conceptual component (color) affects lexical access in language production, we conducted two experiments on the naming of visually presented HCD and LCD objects. Experiment 1 showed that, when naming latencies were matched for colored HCD and LCD objects, achromatic HCD objects were named more slowly than achromatic LCD objects. In Experiment 2 we recorded ERPs while participants performed a picture-naming task, in which achromatic target pictures were either preceded by an appropriately colored box (primed condition) or a black and white checkerboard (unprimed condition). We focused on the P2 component, which has been shown to reflect difficulty of lexical access in language production. Results showed that HCD resulted in slower object-naming and a more pronounced P2. Priming also yielded a more positive P2 but did not result in an RT difference. ERP waveforms on the P1, P2 and N300 components showed a priming by color-diagnosticity interaction, the effect of color priming being stronger for HCD objects than for LCD objects. The effect of color-diagnosticity on the P2 component suggests that the slower naming of achromatic HCD objects is (at least in part) due to more difficult lexical retrieval. Hence, the color attribute seems to affect lexical retrieval in HCD words. The interaction between priming and color-diagnosticity indicates that priming with a feature hinders lexical access, especially if the feature is a core feature of the target object.

The temporal dynamics of first versus second language production.

In this study we explored the temporal origin of processing differences between first and second language production. Forty highly proficient bilinguals named objects of high and low lexical frequency aloud for both L1 and L2 separately while event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The first electrophysiological differences elicited by response language occurred at the same early P2 peak (∼140-220 ms) where we observed the onset of the lexical frequency effect, but only for those bilinguals who started naming in an L1 context and afterwards switched to an L2 naming context. The bilinguals who named objects in the reverse direction did not display a language effect in the ERPs. Taken together, the data show that the L2 naming disadvantage originates during the onset of lexical access and seems to be driven by both representational strength, which is lower for L2 words, and language control demands, which are higher for L2 words.

The effect of rainfall during gestation and early childhood on adult height in a foraging and horticultural society of the Bolivian Amazon.

Recent research documents the effects of adverse conditions during gestation and early childhood on growth responses and health throughout life. Most research linking adverse conditions in early life with adult health comes from industrial nations. We know little about the plasticity of growth responses to environmental perturbations early in life among foragers and horticulturalists. Using 2005 data from 211 women and 215 men 20+ years of age from a foraging-horticultural society of native Amazonians in Bolivia (Tsimane'), we estimate the association between (a) adult height and (b) rainfall amount and variability during three stages in the life cycle: gestation (year 0), birth year (year 1), and years 2-5. We control for confounders such as height of the same-sex parent. Rainfall amount and variability during gestation and birth year bore weak associations with adult height, probably from the protective role of placental physiology and breastfeeding. However, rainfall variability during years 2-5 of life bore a negative association with adult female height. Among women, a 10% increase in the coefficient of variation of rainfall during years 2-5 was associated with 0.7-1.2% lower adult height (1.08-1.93 cm). Environmental perturbations that take place after the cessation of weaning seem to leave the strongest effect on adult height. We advance possible explanations for the absence of effects among males.