Climate change is conventionally recognised as a large-scale issue resolved through regional or national policy initiatives. However, little research has been done to directly evaluate local climate change action plans. This study examines 40 recently adopted local climate change action plans in the US and analyses how well they recognise the concepts of climate change and prepare for climate change mitigation and adaptation. The results indicate that local climate change action plans have a high level of 'awareness', moderate 'analysis capabilities' for climate change, and relatively limited 'action approaches' for climate change mitigation. The study also identifies specific factors influencing the quality of these local jurisdictional plans. Finally, it provides policy recommendations to improve planning for climate change at the local level.climate change, local jurisdiction, action plan, quality,

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Although higher education understands the need to develop critical thinkers, it has not lived up to the task consistently. Students are graduating deficient in these skills, unprepared to think critically once in the workforce. Limited development of cognitive processing skills leads to less effective leaders. Various definitions of critical thinking are examined to develop a general construct to guide the discussion as critical thinking is linked to constructivism, leadership, and education. Most pedagogy is content‐based built on deep knowledge. Successful critical thinking pedagogy is moving away from this paradigm, teaching students to think complexly. Some of the challenges faced by higher education moving to a critical thinking curricula are discussed, and recommendations are offered for improving outcomes.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) transports substantial amounts of heat into the North Atlantic sector, and hence is of very high importance in regional climate projections. The AMOC has been observed to show multi-stability across a range of models of different complexity. The simplest models find a bifurcation associated with the AMOC "on" state losing stability that is a saddle node. Here we study a physically derived global oceanic model of Wood et al with five boxes, that is calibrated to runs of the FAMOUS coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model. We find the loss of stability of the "on" state is due to a subcritical Hopf for parameters from both pre-industrial and doubled CO 2 atmospheres. This loss of stability via subcritical Hopf bifurcation has important consequences for the behaviour of the basin of attraction close to bifurcation. We consider various time-dependent profiles of freshwater forcing to the system, and find that rate-induced thresholds for tipping can appear, even for perturbations that do not cross the bifurcation. Understanding how such state transitions occur is important in determining allowable safe climate change mitigation pathways to avoid collapse of the AMOC.

Background -Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been used for thousands of years to treat or prevent diseases, including cancer. Good manufacturing practices (GMP) and sophisticated product analysis (PhytomicsQC) to ensure consistency are now available allowing the assessment of its utility. Polychemical Medicines, like TCM, include chemicals with distinct tissue-dependent pharmacodynamic properties that result in tissue-specific bioactivity. Determining the mode of action of these mixtures was previously unsatisfactory; however, information rich RNA microarray technologies now allow for thorough mechanistic studies of the effects complex mixtures. PHY906 is a long used four herb TCM formula employed as an adjuvant to relieve the side effects associated with chemotherapy. Animal studies documented a decrease in global toxicity and an increase in therapeutic effectiveness of chemotherapy when combined with PHY906.Methods -Using a systems biology approach, we studied tumor tissue to identify reasons for the enhancement of the antitumor effect of CPT-11 (CPT-11) by PHY906 in a well-characterized pre-clinical model; the administration of PHY906 and CPT-11 to female BDF-1 mice bearing subcutaneous Colon 38 tumors.Results -We observed that 1) individually PHY906 and CPT-11 induce distinct alterations in tumor, liver and spleen; 2) PHY906 alone predominantly induces repression of transcription and immune-suppression in tumors; 3) these effects are reverted in the presence of CPT-11, with prevalent induction of pro-apoptotic and pro-inflammatory pathways that may favor tumor rejection.Conclusions -PHY906 together with CPT-11 triggers unique changes not activated by each one alone suggesting that the combination creates a unique tissue-specific response.

This study demonstrates that NIFTP cases have distinguishing cytomorphologic characteristics in comparison with invasive FVPTC cases. Therefore, a preoperative cytologic evaluation provides clues that can aid in the distinction between NIFTP and its invasive counterparts. Cancer Cytopathol 2017;125:865-75. © 2017 American Cancer Society.

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The Mid-Pleistocene Transition, the shift from 41 kyr to 100 kyr glacialinterglacial cycles that occurred roughly 1 Myr ago, is often considered as a change in internal climate dynamics. Here we revisit the model of Quaternary climate dynamics that was proposed by Saltzman and Maasch ('Carbon cycle instability as a cause of the late Pleistocene ice age oscillations: modelling the asymmetric response'. Glob Biogeochem Cycle 1988; 2: 177-185-from this point, referred to as SM88). We show that it is quantitatively similar to a scalar equation for the ice dynamics only when combining the remaining components into a single delayed feedback term. The delay is the sum of the internal time scales of ocean transport and ice sheet dynamics, which is on the order of 10 kyr.We find that, in the absence of astronomical forcing, the delayed feedback leads to bistable behaviour, where stable large-amplitude oscillations of ice volume and an equilibrium coexist over a large range of values for the delay. We then apply astronomical forcing using the forcing data for integrated summer insolation at 65 degrees North from Huybers and Eisenman (Integrated Summer Insolation Calculations. NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program Data Contribution # 2006Contribution # -079, 2006. Since the precise scaling of the forcing amplitude is not known, we perform a systematic study to show how the system response depends on the forcing amplitude. We find that over a wide range of forcing amplitudes the forcing leads to a switch from smallscale oscillations of 41 kyr to large-amplitude oscillations of roughly 100 kyr without any change of other parameters. The transition in the forced model consistently occurs at about the same time as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (between 1200 and 800 kyr BP) as observed in the data records from Lisiecki and Raymo ('A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic δ 18 O records'. Paleoceanography 2005; 20:1-17).. This provides evidence that the MPT could have been primarily forcing-invoked. Small additional random disturbances make the forcing-induced transition near 800 kyr BP even more robust.We also find that the forced system forgets its initial history during the small-scale oscillations, in particular, nearby initial conditions converge prior to transitioning. In contrast to this, in the regime of large-amplitude oscillations, the oscillation phase is very sensitive to random perturbations, which has a strong effect on the timing of the deglaciation events. a) c.quinn2@exeter.ac.uk arXiv:1712.07614v3 [physics.ao-ph]