Country ownership as a guiding principle for IA2030: A case study of the measles and rubella elimination programs in Nepal and Nigeria.

Country-owned, as opposed to donor-driven, is a principle within the development sector that recognizes the centrality of countries' leadership, systems, and resources in executing programs and achieving sustainable development. In alignment with this notion, the Immunization Agenda 2030 was developed with country ownership as one of four core principles of the ambitious ten-year plan. This means that the success of immunization programs, including those with eradication and elimination goals such as polio, measles, and rubella, and those with broader equity goals to "leave no one behind" on immunization, would be largely driven by country systems. In this paper we deconstruct country ownership into five operational principles: commitment, coordination, capacity, community participation, and accountability. Through this lens, we illustrate how two countries, Nepal and Nigeria, have exemplified country ownership in their measles and rubella elimination programs and we infer the ways in which country ownership drives system performance and sustains program efforts.

Global silicate weathering flux overestimated because of sediment-water cation exchange.

Rivers carry the dissolved and solid products of silicate mineral weathering, a process that removes [Formula: see text] from the atmosphere and provides a key negative climate feedback over geological timescales. Here we show that, in some river systems, a reactive exchange pool on river suspended particulate matter, bonded weakly to mineral surfaces, increases the mobile cation flux by 50%. The chemistry of both river waters and the exchange pool demonstrates exchange equilibrium, confirmed by Sr isotopes. Global silicate weathering fluxes are calculated based on riverine dissolved sodium (Na+) from silicate minerals. The large exchange pool supplies Na+ of nonsilicate origin to the dissolved load, especially in catchments with widespread marine sediments, or where rocks have equilibrated with saline basement fluids. We quantify this by comparing the riverine sediment exchange pool and river water chemistry. In some basins, cation exchange could account for the majority of sodium in the river water, significantly reducing estimates of silicate weathering. At a global scale, we demonstrate that silicate weathering fluxes are overestimated by 12 to 28%. This overestimation is greatest in regions of high erosion and high sediment loads where the negative climate feedback has a maximum sensitivity to chemical weathering reactions. In the context of other recent findings that reduce the net [Formula: see text] consumption through chemical weathering, the magnitude of the continental silicate weathering fluxes and its implications for solid Earth [Formula: see text] degassing fluxes need to be further investigated.

A Novel cis Element Achieves the Same Solution as an Ancestral cis Element During Thiamine Starvation in Candida glabrata.

Regulatory networks often converge on very similar cis sequences to drive transcriptional programs due to constraints on what transcription factors are present. To determine the role of constraint loss on cis element evolution, we examined the recent appearance of a thiamine starvation regulated promoter in Candida glabrata This species lacks the ancestral transcription factor Thi2, but still has the transcription factor Pdc2, which regulates thiamine starvation genes, allowing us to determine the effect of constraint change on a new promoter. We identified two different cis elements in C. glabrata - one present in the evolutionarily recent gene called CgPMU3, and the other element present in the other thiamine (THI) regulated genes. Reciprocal swaps of the cis elements and incorporation of the S. cerevisiae Thi2 transcription factor-binding site into these promoters demonstrate that the two elements are functionally different from one another. Thus, this loss of an imposed constraint on promoter function has generated a novel cis sequence, suggesting that loss of trans constraints can generate a non-convergent pathway with the same output.

A simulator study of the effects of singing on driving performance.

This study aimed to investigate how singing while driving affects driver performance. Twenty-one participants completed three trials of a simulated drive concurrently while performing a peripheral detection task (PDT); each trial was conducted either without music, with participants listening to music, or with participants singing along to music. It was hypothesised that driving performance and PDT response times would be impaired, and that driver subjective workload ratings would be higher, when participants were singing to music compared to when there was no music or when participants were listening to music. As expected, singing while driving was rated as more mentally demanding, and resulted in slower and more variable speeds, than driving without music. Listening to music was associated with the slowest speeds overall, and fewer lane excursions than the no music condition. Interestingly, both music conditions were associated with slower speed-adjusted PDT response times and significantly less deviation within the lane than was driving without music. Collectively, results suggest that singing while driving alters driving performance and impairs hazard perception while at the same time increasing subjective mental workload. However, singing while driving does not appear to affect driving performance more than simply listening to music. Further, drivers' efforts to compensate for the increased mental workload associated with singing and listening to music by slowing down appear to be insufficient, as evidenced by relative increases in PDT response times in these two conditions compared to baseline.