Yucheng Pan

To address the public health crisis of overweight and obese preschool-age children, the Nutrition And Physical Activity Self Assessment for Child Care intervention was delivered by nurse child care health consultants with the objective of improving child care provider and parent nutrition and physical activity knowledge, center-level nutrition and physical activity policies and practices, and children's body mass index.A seven-month randomized control trial was conducted in 17 licensed child care centers serving predominantly low income families in California, Connecticut, and North Carolina, including 137 child care providers and 552 families with racially and ethnically diverse children three to five years old. The NAP SACC intervention included educational workshops for child care providers and parents on nutrition and physical activity and consultation visits provided by trained nurse child care health consultants. Demographic characteristics and pre - and post-workshop knowledge surveys were completed by providers and parents. Blinded research assistants reviewed each center's written health and safety policies, observed nutrition and physical activity practices, and measured randomly selected children's nutritional intake, physical activity, and height and weight pre- and post-intervention.Hierarchical linear models and multiple regression models assessed individual- and center-level changes in knowledge, policies, practices and age- and sex-specific standardized body mass index, controlling for state, parent education, and poverty level. Results showed significant increases in providers' and parents' knowledge of nutrition and physical activity, center-level improvements in policies, and child-level changes in children's zBMI based on 209 children in the intervention and control centers at both pre- and post-intervention time points.The NAP SACC intervention, as delivered by trained child health professionals such as child care health consultants, increases provider knowledge, improves center policies, and lowers BMI for children in child care centers. More health professionals specifically trained in a nutrition and physical activity intervention in child care are needed to help reverse the obesity epidemic.National Clinical Trials Number NCT01921842.

© 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.Metal-organic frameworks are crystalline porous materials with designable topology, porosity and functionality, having promising applications in gas storage and separation, ion conduction and catalysis. It is challenging to observe MOFs with transmission electron microscopy due to the extreme instability of MOFs upon electron beam irradiation. Here, we use a direct-detection electron-counting camera to acquire TEM images of the MOF ZIF-8 with an ultralow dose of 4.1 electrons per square ångström to retain the structural integrity. The obtained image involves structural information transferred up to 2.1 Å, allowing the resolution of individual atomic columns of Zn and organic linkers in the framework. Furthermore, TEM reveals important local structural features of ZIF-8 crystals that cannot be identified by diffraction techniques, including armchair-type surface terminations and coherent interfaces between assembled crystals. These observations allow us to understand how ZIF-8 crystals self-assemble and the subsequent influence of interfacial cavities on mass transport of guest molecules.

© 2015. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved. We have carried out an archaeomagnetic study on a late Neolithic locality in Sichuan, southwestern China. We pull together various dating techniques, including radiocarbon analysis, optically stimulated luminescence dating, stratigraphic information as well as archaeological and archaeomagnetic estimations, to constrain the age of the studied samples. Rock magnetic results indicate thermally stable fine-grained magnetite or titanomagnetite as the dominant magnetic carriers. More than half of the specimens in the paleointensity experiment pass the selection criteria and are considered to record robust intensity values. The virtual axial dipole moments range from approximately ×10 22 Am 2 with an average of 5.9×10 22 Am 2, indicating that the geomagnetic intensity around 3000 before the Common Era is overall lower than the present field intensity of this area. The new results from Liujiazhai are generally consistent with the published data of similar age but deviate from the only available model of CALS10k.1b at certain time periods, making them important for future improvements of the model. Those data are significant for constraining the variation of geomagnetic field intensity between ~3100 and 2600 B.C.E. and improving the regional model of eastern Asia.

In this study, we have carried out paleointensity experiments on 918 specimens spanning the last ~7 kyr, including pottery fragments, baked clay and slag, collected from Shandong, Liaoning, Zhejiang and Hebei Provinces in China. Approximately half of the specimens yielded results that passed strict data selection criteria and give high-fidelity paleointensities. The virtual axial dipole moments of our sites range from ~2×1022 to ~13×1022 Am2. At ~2250 BCE our results suggest a paleointensity low of ~2×1022 Am2, which increases to a high of ~13×1022 Am2 by ~1300 BCE. This rapid six-fold change in the paleointensity may have important implications for the dynamics of core flow at this time. Our data from the last ~3 kyr are generally in good agreement with the ARCH3k.1 model, but deviate significantly at certain time periods from the CALS3k.4 and CALS10k.1b model, which is likely due to differences in the data used to constrain these models. At ages older than ~3 ka, where only the CALS10k.1b model is available for comparison, our data deviate significantly from the model. Combining our new results with the published data from China and Japan, we provide greatly improved constraints for the regional model of Eastern Asia. When comparing the variations of geomagnetic field in three global representative areas of Eastern Asia, the Middle East and Southern Europe, a common general trend of sinusoidal variations since ~8 ka is shown, likely dominated by the dipole component. However, significant disparities are revealed as well, which we attribute to non-dipolar components caused by movement of magnetic flux patches at the core-mantle boundary. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.