Developing and using a school menu healthiness assessment tool to analyse school food provision in Wales.

Objectives: To design and develop a new, innovative and valid School Menu Healthiness Assessment Tool that is suitable for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of school food and drink provision. Secondly, to analyse primary and secondary school menus and price lists pan-Wales to ascertain their healthiness and whether free school meal eligible pupils can afford to access healthy, nutritious food across the school day.

Design: Codable items and categories of school food and drink provision were operationalised before the tool underwent iterative development and testing.

Direct covalent attachment of fluorescent molecules on plasma polymerized nanoparticles: a simplified approach for biomedical applications.

Polymeric nanoparticles surface functionalised with fluorescent molecules hold significant potential for advancing diagnostics and therapeutic delivery. Despite their promise, challenges persist in achieving robust attachment of fluorescent molecules for real-time tracking. Weak physical adsorption, pH-dependent electrostatic capture, and hydrophobic interactions often fail to achieve stable attachment of fluorescent markers.

Noisy Robots? Comparison of Occupational Noise Levels Between Robotic-Assisted and Conventional Total Knee Arthroplasty.

Background: Noise exposure during surgery is a known occupational hazard, impacting staff hearing and surgical outcomes. Despite guidelines such as the Australian Work Health and Safety Act, noise safety remains largely neglected in orthopaedic surgery. Anecdotally, the introduction of robotic-assisted arthroplasty has contributed to increased noise production.

The practical and ethical challenges of identifying, accessing and obtaining school canteen transactional data for public health research.

Objective: The purpose of the study was to investigate the feasibility of using existing data to better understand what pupils purchase during the school day and its nutritional quality. This report highlights the ethical challenges experienced in attempting to obtain anonymised school canteen transaction data for public health research.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted before a variety of approaches were tried to recruit secondary schools for the study via purposive sampling.

A modular toolkit for environmental , , and enables complex metabolic manipulation.

Soil-dwelling Actinomycetes are a diverse and ubiquitous component of the global microbiome but largely lack genetic tools comparable to those available in model species such as or , posing a fundamental barrier to their characterization and utilization as hosts for biotechnology. To address this, we have developed a modular plasmid assembly framework, along with a series of genetic control elements for the previously genetically intractable Gram-positive environmental isolate C208, and demonstrate conserved functionality in 11 additional environmental isolates of , , and . This toolkit encompasses five Mycobacteriale origins of replication, five broad-host-range antibiotic resistance markers, transcriptional and translational control elements, fluorescent reporters, a tetracycline-inducible system, and a counter-selectable marker.