No abstract

Crop adaptation to climate change requires accelerated crop variety introduction accompanied by recommendations to help farmers match the best variety with their field contexts. Existing approaches to generate these recommendations lack scalability and predictivity in marginal production environments. We tested if crowdsourced citizen science can address this challenge, producing empirical data across geographic space that, in aggregate, can characterize varietal climatic responses. We present the results of 12,409 farmer-managed experimental plots of common bean (Phaseolus vulgarisL.) in Nicaragua, durum wheat (Triticum durumDesf.) in Ethiopia, and bread wheat (Triticum aestivumL.) in India. Farmers collaborated as citizen scientists, each ranking the performance of three varieties randomly assigned from a larger set. We show that the approach can register known specific effects of climate variation on varietal performance. The prediction of variety performance from seasonal climatic variables was generalizable across growing seasons. We show that these analyses can improve variety recommendations in four aspects: reduction of climate bias, incorporation of seasonal climate forecasts, risk analysis, and geographic extrapolation. Variety recommendations derived from the citizen science trials led to important differences with previous recommendations.

Obesity, overweight and central obesity and sedentary behaviour coexist with undernutrition, and have become a public health problem in all the five cities of India. The prevalence of obesity and sedentary behaviour was significantly greater in Trivandrum, Calcutta and Bombay compared to Moradabad and Nagpur. Sedentary behaviour was significantly associated with obesity compared to non-obese subjects in both sexes, which may be due to greater economic development in metro cities.

This study indicates that circulatory diseases, injury and malignant diseases have become the major causes of death in India, after infections. Members of social classes 1-3 died more often due to circulatory diseases and members in lower social classes died more often due to infections. Urbanization with rapid changes in diet and lifestyle in various social classes, and possibly aging of the population seem to be responsible for the double burden of diseases, related to under- and over-nutrition, causing death in a developing economy. Monitoring of blood pressure and heart rate around the clock for 7 days, with data analysed chronobiologically can detect abnormal circadian patterns associated with a large increase in cardiovascular disease risk, greater than hypertension itself, allowing the institution of prophylactic treatment. Such prehabilitation may be particularly useful to curb the increasing burden of cardiovascular diseases in both developed and developing countries.

long-term residents of hospitals or residential care facilities. The sub-sample used in this analysis consisted of 38 151 respondents (52.4% male) between the ages of 20 and 64 y, excluding pregnant women. Health Utilities Index-Mark III (HUI3) scores were used to de®ne normal weight (body mass index (BMI) 19 ± 24.9 kgam 2 ), overweight (BMI 25 ± 29.9 kgam 2 ), obese (BMI 30 ± 34.9 kgam 2 ), and morbidly obese (BMI ! 35 kgam 2 ) individuals. HUI3 scores were age-and gender-standardized. RESULTS: The overall prevalence of obesity (BMI ! 30 kgam 2 ) in this Canadian population was 13.3%. The average difference in HUI3 scores between normal weight and morbidly obese respondents was 0.04 (P`0.001). Statistically signi®cant (P`0.05) differences across BMI categories were found in each of the eight component attributes of the HUI3. The attributes with the most substantial difference between normal and obese patients were cognition, mobility and pain. All demonstrated a ! 2-fold increase in the proportion of individuals in poorer classi®cations of health when normal weight respondents were compared with the morbidly obese. The magnitude of the decrement in utility ratings associated with obesity was comparable with other chronic non-cardiovascular conditions such as migraine or colitis. CONCLUSION:The results indicate that changes in self-rated health status appear to be due to signi®cant changes across several relevant domain attributes. Obesity has a signi®cant impact on both quality of life and health.