Strategies to Increase Willingness to Receive a COVID-19 Vaccine among Nursing Home Staff.

Background: Nursing home (NH) staff and residents have been prioritized to receive COVID-19 vaccinations. However, NH staff have been hesitant. This study explored what strategies were used to overcome this hesitancy and which of these were found to be important by NH staff to increase their willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine.

Distancing Measures and Challenges Discussed by COVID-19 Outbreak Teams of Dutch Nursing Homes: The COVID-19 MINUTES Study.

The most severe COVID-19 infections and highest mortality rates are seen among long-term care residents. To reduce the risk of infection, physical distancing is important. This study investigates what physical distancing measures were discussed by COVID-19 outbreak teams of Dutch long-term care organizations and what challenges they encountered.

Where to do number two: Lizards prefer to defecate on the largest rock in the territory.

Many animals use their excrements to communicate with others. In order to increase signal efficacy, animals often behaviourally select for specific defecation sites that maximize the detectability of their faecal deposits, such as the tip of rocks by some lizard species. However, the field conditions in which these observations are made make it difficult to reject alternative explanations of defecation site preference; rock tips may also provide better opportunities for thermoregulation, foraging, or escaping predators, and not solely for increasing the detectability of excrements.

Warm water vapour in the sooty outflow from a luminous carbon star.

The detection of circumstellar water vapour around the ageing carbon star IRC +10216 challenged the current understanding of chemistry in old stars, because water was predicted to be almost absent in carbon-rich stars. Several explanations for the water were postulated, including the vaporization of icy bodies (comets or dwarf planets) in orbit around the star, grain surface reactions, and photochemistry in the outer circumstellar envelope. With a single water line detected so far from this one carbon-rich evolved star, it is difficult to discriminate between the different mechanisms proposed.