University of Plymouth

Despite policy commitments to family-centred care, neonatal services often remain implicitly structured around maternal presence. Fathers, although increasingly acknowledged as vital to early child development, frequently experience feelings of exclusion throughout the neonatal journey, from antenatal care through to the neonatal intensive care unit. This review explores how fathers experience involvement and psychological wellbeing during their infant's admission to a neonatal intensive care unit. A narrative review of qualitative studies was conducted using the SPIDER framework to guide the search strategy. The nine included studies, which met the inclusion criteria were identified via searching the databases CINAHL, PubMed, and PsycINFO. Studies were appraised using the CASP (2018) checklist, and findings were synthesised thematically. Thematic synthesis identified four key themes: ‘Exclusion from the NICU Environment’; ‘ Emotional Suppression and Psychological Strain’; ‘Reclaiming Fatherhood Through Caregiving’ and ‘Coping and Support Mechanisms’. Findings highlight how fathers navigate a system not designed with their needs in mind, often suppressing their own emotions whilst seeking meaningful ways to engage. Fathers often remain peripheral within neonatal care, shaped not only by entrenched gender norms but also by structural barriers that limit their involvement and emotional expression. Without deliberate shifts in practice and policy, fathers risk continued exclusion, with implications for their wellbeing and the wider family dynamic. There is a pressing need for more inclusive and emotionally responsive care practices that recognise fathers as equal partners in neonatal care.

Rainfall is extremely important in Abeokuta as it supports agriculture, influences daily life, and the local economy. Abeokuta receives substantial seasonal precipitation; however, variability poses significant risks. This work focuses on Abeokuta and examines rainfall variability from 2001 to 2010. Using machine learning models is one way to extract information, patterns, and trends from historical data, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions. It is essential to measure the climatic variables that correlate with rainfall, as this will help identify ways to mitigate their effects in pursuit of a balanced nature. In this study, the Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA), Random Forest (RF), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) were used to examine seasonality and patterns in our dataset for predictive purposes. The results show that the ANN model's MSE (7767.4691) and MAE (64.7500) are the lowest among the models used in this work. This suggests that the ANN model's predictions are closer to the actual rainfall values than those of other models. Furthermore, a correlation analysis revealed that the ANN correlated with evaporation and relative humidity. This suggests that during wet seasons or prolonged rainy periods, when rainfall is high, evaporation is low, and less irrigation may be needed, but soils stay wet longer. This might result in flooding. In contrast, in dry seasons with little rain, evaporation is high, and soils dry out quickly, increasing irrigation demand.

Background Despite growing scientific evidence and health guidelines, the global health paradox persists, with rising lifestyle-related diseases and escalating healthcare costs exposing the inadequacy of current efforts. Objective Three multidisciplinary congresses were held to generate evidence-based conclusions aimed at addressing the global health paradox. Methods A total of 58 experts from 62 entities participated in the international research and knowledge-exchange panels. Experts reviewed the latest findings to develop practical strategies and identify key research and policy priorities, focusing on the Healthy Eating & Active Living (HEAL) approach. Results, conclusion, and relevance The expert consortium endorsed a 33 evidence-based consensual-statement policy roadmap for addressing global health challenges, emphasizing that the HEAL approach can significantly contribute to the “Prevention First” appeal and broad ethical, social, ecological, and economic advantages, and ultimately supporting policy change.

Abstract Pupils in England who, for some reason, are not able to attend school often find themselves in Alternative Provision (AP). These are special arrangements designed to address their specific needs and help them return to mainstream schooling. AP involves a financial agreement between the provider and the organisation that commissions the provision and thus operates as an explicit form of education market in which educational services are traded directly for financial recompense. We report on a case study of one AP provider in the South‐West of England undertaken over a one‐year period, which generated data through individual, semi‐structured interviews and observations. These are analysed using a Foucauldian framework to illuminate how truths are constructed, which then govern practices. We demonstrate how market arrangements affect the work of teachers and managers in the school, facing pressures which significantly distort the educational provision, but which satisfy the accountability that comes with the clear and specific market agreement about provision and its cost. We then use this instrumental account of one AP case to draw out more generally how markets operate through forms of accountability that change pedagogical and professional relationships. Specifically, these accountability pressures give teachers' work its moral and political form, signalling what the ‘right’ practices are for teachers to undertake and altering the epistemological shape of teaching and learning. We conclude by briefly considering some of the implications for teachers and students.

Flood frequency and magnitude in the Himalaya are projected to increase over the next century due to accelerating glacier melt and more intense monsoons. Most research has focused on the upstream triggers of floods, such as glacial lake outbursts, avalanches, or intense rainfall. Entrainment of sediment stored within mountain valleys as they travel downstream can transform these floods into debris or hyperconcentrated flows, increasing both their travel distances and downstream impacts. This hazard cascade means the risk to downstream communities is conditioned not just by the trigger events but also the distribution of sediment fill along the flow path. However, controls on the spatial and temporal dynamics of sediment accumulation in mountain valleys are poorly constrained due to a lack of systematic, large-scale datasets that capture both channel sediment and landsliding in steep mountain catchments. Inventories of slow moving landslides, which can also supply sediment to channels, are even more scarce. Therefore, our understanding of how shallow and slow landslides contribute to stores of channel sediment in these catchments is limited.Here, we apply (semi-) automated approaches to generate inventories of channel and hillslope sediment stores for the Alaknanda Basin systematically through time, using a combination of deep learning and remote sensing data. Using these inventories, we develop a framework that explores connectivity between hillslope and channel sediment. We assess whether certain topographic and/or channel characteristics control the spatial and temporal dynamics of sediment supply and fill. We will use these findings to gain a better understanding of the role sediment stores in mountain landscapes that are highly susceptible to sediment-rich flood events.

Defining literacy is essential because it establishes a baseline for education, enables robust assessment and measurement of progress, supports policy and accountability, makes domain-specific differences explicit, and can improve equity by enabling better-designed interventions to promote learning. UNESCO notes that, beyond its conventional concept as a set of reading, writing and counting skills, literacy is now understood as a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world. Consequently, multiple domain literacies have emerged, including science, health, media, digital and financial literacy, and more recently AI literacy. While ocean literacy has gained significant traction in the last decade, for the coast an early coastal literacy framework was proposed in 2010 by CoastNet (UK charity that has since closed), but it was primarily oriented towards integrated coastal zone management. The objective of this work is thus to define coastal literacy and what it comprises.To develop a definition tailored to coastal contexts, related literacy constructs were reviewed, particularly ocean literacy, climate literacy and risk literacy. Across frameworks, literacy is commonly articulated through dimensions (for example, knowledge, awareness and attitudes) and, in some cases, through explicit principles. The Ocean Literacy Framework is a prominent example, currently comprising seven principles and 45 concepts, and defines ocean literacy as understanding the ocean’s influence on humanity and humanity’s influence on the ocean. Although coasts form part of the broader ocean system, coastal environments have distinct characteristics: they concentrate human activities, involve frequent and direct human–environment interactions, and are often exposed to hazards. Coasts also exist at the interface of multiple Earth system spheres, linking the ocean, land and atmosphere. The framework of coastal literacy was developed building on the literature review and on a two-day focus group using structured brainstorming methodologies. The proposed framework comprises seven principles: (P1) Each coast is unique and has value on its own; (P2) Coasts consist of many different and connected parts; (P3) Coasts are dynamic, changing from seconds to millennia; (P4) Human activities impact the coast, and coasts continually affect humans; (P5) Coasts are inherently hazardous environments that can place people and infrastructure at risk; (P6) Climate change is affecting coastal ecosystems and challenging future coastal use; and (P7) We share responsibility for looking after the coasts for present and future generations. A key contribution of these principles is how they frame human–coast relationships. They recognise the intrinsic coastal value independent of human use or resource exploitation (P1), position humans as part of coastal systems (P2, P4), explicitly foreground coastal risk (P5), and treat shared responsibility as a component of literacy (P7). They also embed sustainability by emphasising the need to safeguard future generations, including in the context of climate change (P6). Further work is needed to elaborate the concepts underpinning each principle and to refine the framework through additional validation; however, the principles presented here provide a structured foundation for defining and operationalising coastal literacy.

At plate boundaries where continents collide, felsic continental crust can be buried to depths of > 100 km resulting in the formation of ultra-high pressure (UHP) minerals such as coesite, a high-pressure polymorph of SiO2. While the burial and subsequent exhumation of buoyant continental crust poses interesting questions for large-scale tectonics, the identification of such UHP terranes is difficult as few petrological barometers are suitable for dominantly felsic lithologies. In such cases, burial to extreme depths is commonly identified through the preservation of coesite or from parallel or radiating columnar grains of quartz assumed to have formed as quartz transforms from coesite—a microstructure termed 'palisades'. However, coesite readily transforms to quartz upon exhumation, while palisade microstructures can easily be modified by annealing during exhumation, meaning that UHP metamorphism of felsic lithologies may often be overlooked. Recent studies proposed that the former presence of coesite could be identified through an orientation signature inherited by quartz, providing a crucial and relatively simple test of deep subduction. However, debate exists within the literature as to whether the quartz↔coesite transformations involve specific crystallographic relationships. Before using crystallography to identify UHP terranes in nature, a better understanding of the coesite-to-quartz crystallographic signature and the conditions under which it forms is required. We collected crystallographic data using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) on quartz in rocks from the Tso Morari Complex (NW Himalaya) and the Dora Maira Massif (Western Alps), two areas known to reach UHP conditions. We demonstrate that neighbouring domains of quartz commonly feature an 84 ± 4° rotation of [c] axes around the pole of a common {m} plane, matching the rotation axis and angle of a Japan Twin. This orientation relationship is a product of epitaxy, whereby the Japan twin plane in quartz nucleates on the (b) plane in coesite. In supercell simulations, the nucleation of Japan twins can be explained by the energetically favourable alignment of quartz tetrahedra on parental coesite tetrahedra. Through subsequent high-pressure, high-temperature experiments, we demonstrate that this microstructural signature emerges over a broad range of conditions, regardless of the availability of nucleation sites (e.g., grain boundaries) or the density of crystal lattice defects (e.g., dislocations). In addition, Japan twins are present in all experimental specimens that traversed the quartz↔coesite phase boundary, whereas palisade microstructures are largely absent. Our crystallographic method of identifying UHP terranes is therefore more robust, and remains applicable even in the absence of palisade quartz. Overall, this work provides a new tool to quantitatively and unambiguously identify UHP terranes, even when all coesite has transformed to quartz.

Access to National Health Service (NHS) dental care in the UK, particularly in rural and coastal regions such as the South West, remains a significant concern. Increasing socio-economic diversity in the dental workforce has previously been reported to improve access to care in underserved areas. Widening Participation (WP) initiatives aim to address this by encouraging applications from underrepresented groups. This study analysed admissions data from the University of Plymouth's Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) programme for cohorts between 2014 and 2021. Metrics included entry qualifications, age, gender, ethnicity, disability and socio-economic markers. Statistical analyses included chi-squared tests and ANOVA to identify demographic shifts over time. Data from 512 students revealed significant changes in entry profile (p < 0.001), gender distribution (p = 0.003), school type (p = 0.003) and age at entry (p < 0.001). The proportion of students applying with predicted grades increased, while graduate applicants declined. Socio-economic diversity remained limited, with most students from areas of high participation in higher education and low deprivation. Over the study period, the demographic profile of dental students remained largely unchanged, even though this period coincided with enhancements to widening participation initiatives. Without greater representation from diverse backgrounds, the dental workforce may struggle to meet the needs of underserved communities.