What Determines the Adoption of Conservation Agriculture? Evidence from Quebec.

Conservation agriculture (CA) is promoted by various organisations and scholars as alternative to conventional agriculture to meet growing food demand with minimal damage on environment; but its factors of adoption have not been well identified. The study uses the recent composite index of adoption of CA developed by Takam Fongang et al. (2023) to analyse the factors of adoption of conservation agriculture among maize and soybean farmers in Quebec. Using data from 93 maize and soybean producers and a Fractional logit model, the study shows that adoption of CA increases with farmer's favourable perceptions of yield and easiness of implementing CA, off-farm employment and higher education. The study therefore indicates that higher education, technical assistance and popularisation of performance of CA can play a significant role in boosting adoption of CA in Quebec.

Perceived Community Age-friendliness is Associated With Quality of Life Among Older Adults.

We examined the positive association between perceived community age-friendliness and self-reported quality of life for older adults. A total of 171 participants, aged 77-96 years, completed a mail-in questionnaire package that included measures of health (SF-36 Physical), social participation (Social Participation Scale), community age-friendliness (Age-Friendly Survey [AFS]), and quality of life (WHO Quality of Life). Hierarchical regression models including age, gender, driving status, finances, health, social participation, and AFS scores explained 8 to 21 per cent of the variance in quality of life scores. Community age-friendliness was a statistically significant variable in all models, accounting for three to six and a half per cent of additional variance in quality of life scores. Although the proportion of variance explained by age-friendliness was small, our findings suggest that it is worthwhile to further investigate whether focused, age-friendly policies, interventions, and communities could play a role towards successful and healthy aging.

Social scientists' testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset.

Congressional hearings are a venue in which social scientists present their views and analyses before lawmakers in the United States, however quantitative data on their representation has been lacking. We present new, publicly available, data on the rates at which anthropologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists appeared before United States congressional hearings from 1946 through 2016. We show that social scientists were present at some 10,347 hearings and testified 15,506 times. Economists testify before the US Congress far more often than other social scientists, and constitute a larger proportion of the social scientists testifying in industry and government positions. We find that social scientists' testimony is increasingly on behalf of think tanks; political scientists, in particular, have gained much more representation through think tanks. Sociology, and psychology's representation before Congress has declined considerably beginning in the 1980s. Anthropologists were the least represented. These findings show that academics are representing a more diverse set of organizations, but economists continue to be far more represented than other disciplines before the US Congress.

Group Threat and Policy Change: The Spatial Dynamics of Prohibition Politics, 1890-1919.

The authors argue that group threat is a key driver of the adoption of new and controversial policies. Conceptualizing threat in spatial terms, they argue that group threat is activated through the joint occurrence of (1) proximity to threatening groups and (2) the population density of threatened groups. By analyzing the adoption of county and state "dry laws" banning alcohol from 1890 to 1919, they first show that prohibition victories were driven by the relative strength of supportive constituencies such as native whites and rural residents, vis-à-vis opponents such as Irish, Italian, or German immigrants or Catholics. Second, they show that threat contributed to prohibition victories: counties bordering large immigrant or urban populations, which did not themselves contain similar populations, were more likely to adopt dry laws. Threat arises primarily from interactions between spatially proximate units at the local level, and therefore higher-level policy change is not reducible to the variables driving local policy.

Intracellular expression of a single domain antibody reduces cytotoxicity of 15-acetyldeoxynivalenol in yeast.

15-Acetyldeoxynivalenol (15-AcDON) is a low molecular weight sesquiterpenoid trichothecene mycotoxin associated with Fusarium ear rot of maize and Fusarium head blight of small grain cereals. The accumulation of mycotoxins such as deoxynivalenol (DON) and 15-AcDON within harvested grain is subject to stringent regulation as both toxins pose dietary health risks to humans and animals. These toxins inhibit peptidyltransferase activity, which in turn limits eukaryotic protein synthesis. To assess the ability of intracellular antibodies (intrabodies) to modulate mycotoxin-specific cytotoxocity, a gene encoding a camelid single domain antibody fragment (V(H)H) with specificity and affinity for 15-AcDON was expressed in the methylotropic yeast Pichia pastoris. Cytotoxicity and V(H)H immunomodulation were assessed by continuous measurement of cellular growth. At equivalent doses, 15-AcDON was significantly more toxic to wild-type P. pastoris than was DON. In turn, DON was orders of magnitude more toxic than 3-acetyldeoxynivalenol. Intracellular expression of a mycotoxin-specific V(H)H within P. pastoris conveyed significant (p = 0.01) resistance to 15-AcDON cytotoxicity at doses ranging from 20 to 100 mug.ml(-1). We also documented a biochemical transformation of DON to 15-AcDON to account for the attenuation of DON cytotoxicity at 100 and 200 mug.ml(-1). The proof of concept established within this eukaryotic system suggests that in planta V(H)H expression may lead to enhanced tolerance to mycotoxins and thereby limit Fusarium infection of commercial agricultural crops.