Publications

Why would kidney disease affect the brain?

This special issue is a collaborative work which has been published in a high-impact journal Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation (NDT). In this issue, there are six reviews on current topics linking the brain and kidney.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a complex and potentially fatal illness affecting all organs and altering many fundamental physiological parameters and processes, such as plasma volume, electrolytes and acid-base balance, hormone and protein metabolism. Thirty to 60% of advanced CKD patients have been found to have impaired cognition. The most frequently diagnosed problem is Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), which is characterized by signs of neurological injury and cognitive dysfunction.

Although many theories have emerged as to why kidney disease affects the brain and causes cognitive impairment, the aetiology has not been fully explained. To study this brain-kidney relationship, we set up a multidisciplinary approach and the CONNECT network. CONNECT (Cognitive decline in Nephro-Neurology European Cooperative Target Action) was established and financed through the COST Action program. As described in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), CONNECT is comprised of 5 working groups and has the objective of filling the gap in our knowledge of brain-kidney interactions. It includes clinical nephrologists and neurologists, scientists with pre-clinical expertise in the field of nephrology and neuroscience, and scientists with knowledge and experience of clinical trials, epidemiology and data science. With the collaboration of the different expert working groups, we have already published on these topics in this special issue:

Present and future of CONNECT: a new and compelling project of modern medicine/ Acidosis, cognitive dysfunction and motor impairments in patients with kidney disease/ Neuropeptide Y as a risk factor for cardiorenal disease and cognitive dysfunction in chronic kidney disease: translational opportunities and challenges/ Cognitive disorders in patients with chronic kidney disease: specificities of clinical assessment/ Chronic kidney disease and neurological disorders: are uraemic toxins the missing piece of the puzzle?/ Brain dysfunction in tubular and tubulointerstitial kidney diseases/ Albuminuria as a risk factor for mild cognitive impairment and dementia—what is the evidence?

We highlight and emphasize that a healthy kidney is a healthy brain!

Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) is crucial for biodiversity conservation. Although it should be assessed by monitoring the diversity of multiple taxonomic groups, most current SFM criteria and indicators account only for trees or consider indirect biodiversity proxies. Several projects performed multi-taxon sampling to investigate the effects of forest management on biodiversity, but through heterogeneous sampling approaches that hamper the identification of general trends, and the broad-scale inference for designing SFM.

The COST Action BOTTOMS-UP (CA18207) established a network of researchers involved in 41 projects on European forest multi-taxon biodiversity across 13 European countries. 

The book includes an overview of the sampling approaches to multi-taxon biodiversity, standing trees and deadwood in the form of an operational handbook for nine different taxonomic groups and for the sampling of standing trees and lying deadwood. For each of these forest components, we provide two standards that differ in spatial scale and effort, and give specific instructions for the comparability across standards, taxonomic groups and studies. 

This handbook derives from an effort of networking and synthesis and represents a pragmatic synthesis and an important step forward to direct monitoring of forest biodiversity, in Europe and elsewhere.

This edited volume presents a compendium of emerging and innovative studies on the proliferation of new working spaces (NeWSps), both formal and informal (such as coworking spaces, maker spaces, fab labs, public libraries, and coffee shops), and their role during and following the COVID-19 pandemic in urban and regional development and planning.

This book presents an original, interdisciplinary approach to NeWSps through three features: (i) situating the debate in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has transformed NeWSp business models and the everyday work life of their owners and users; (ii) repositioning and rethinking the debate on NeWSps in the context of socioeconomics and planning and comparing conditions between before and during the COVID-19 pandemic; and (iii) providing new directions for urban and regional development and resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic, considering new ways of working and living.

The 17 chapters are co-authored by both leading international scholars who have studied the proliferation of NeWSps in the last decade and young, talented researchers, resulting in a total of 55 co-authors from different disciplines (48 of whom are currently involved in the COST Action CA18214 ‘The Geography of New Working Spaces and Impact on the Periphery’ 2019–2023: www.new-working-spaces.eu).

Selected comparative studies among several European countries (Western and Eastern Europe) and from the US and Lebanon are presented. The book contributes to the understanding of multi-disciplinary theoretical and practical implications of NeWSps for our society, economy, and urban/regional planning in conditions following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Pandemic of Argumentation is a the first collective volume on virality of argumentation in pandemic times. It offers state-of-the art accounts of the challenges of public communication and public deliberation during crisis. It is published by COST Action CA17132 – European network for Argumentation and Public PoLicY analysis (APPLY) and thanks to the golden Open Access fees covered by the Action, this book is available Open Access.

The construction and maintenance of a high quality and interoperable knowledge commons that covers the area of gene regulation information involves key players in the field of bio-curation, database management and computational biology who collaborated with knowledge commons users under aegis of the GREEKC COST Action. This special issue of BBA-Gene Regulatory Mechanisms reports on progress in the following areas; ontologies and controlled vocabularies, the development of curation guidelines and standards, identify literature content by text mining and storing and sharing of the gene expression regulation knowledge commons.

This book collects the lectures presented in the first COST TUMIEE Training School held in Greece in 2019, supplemented with specific applications that illustrate how the multi-scale approach is implemented in specific cases of interest. The book is intended both as a reference in the field and as a textbook for people becoming interested or entering the field. The first part focuses on experimental methods, the second on theoretical approaches, and the third on cases of interest.

While several researchers have suggested that evolution should be explored from the initial years of schooling, little information is available on effective resources to enhance elementary school students’ level of understanding of evolution by natural selection (LUENS). For the present study, we designed, implemented, and evaluated an educational activity planned for fourth graders (9 to 10 years old) to explore concepts and conceptual fields that were historically important for the discovery of natural selection. Observation field notes and students’ productions were used to analyze how the students explored the proposed activity. Additionally, an evaluation framework consisting of a test, the evaluation criteria, and the scoring process was applied in two fourth-grade classes (N = 44) to estimate elementary school students’ LUENS before and after engaging in the activity. Our results show that our activity allowed students to link the key concepts, resulting in a significant increase of their understanding of natural selection. They also reveal that additional activities and minor fine-tuning of the present activity are required to further support students’ learning about the concept of differential reproduction.

Evolution is a key concept of biology, fundamental to understand the world and address important societal problems, but research studies show that it is still not widely understood and accepted. Several factors are known to influence evolution acceptance and understanding, but little information is available regarding the impacts of the curriculum on these aspects. Very few curricula have been examined to assess the coverage of biological evolution. The available studies do not allow comparative analyses, due to the different methodologies employed by the authors. However, such an analysis would be useful for research purposes and for the development of appropriate educational policies to address the problem of a lack of evolution acceptance in some countries. In this paper we describe the steps through which we developed a valid and reliable instrument for curricula analysis known as FACE: “Framework to Assess the Coverage of biological Evolution by school curricula.” This framework was developed based on the “Understanding Evolution Conceptual Framework” (UECF). After an initial pilot study, our framework was reformulated based on identified issues and experts’ opinions. To generate validity and reliability evidence in support of the framework, it was applied to four European countries’ curricula. For each country, a team of a minimum of two national and two foreign coders worked independently to assess the curriculum using this framework for content analysis. Reliability evidence was estimated using Krippendorf’s alpha and resulted in appropriate values for coding the examined curricula. Some issues that coders faced during the analysis were discussed and, to ensure better reliability for future researchers, additional guidelines and one extra category were included in the framework. The final version of the framework includes six categories and 34 subcategories. FACE is a useful tool for the analysis and the comparison of curricula and school textbooks regarding the coverage of evolution, and such results can guide curricula development.

The lack of standardised assessment of evolutionary knowledge and acceptance of evolution across Europe makes comparisons between studies difficult. The Evolution Education Questionnaire on Acceptance and Knowledge (EEQ) was constructed to measure attitudes and understanding across Europe and beyond. We aimed to compile a brief instrument to allow for easy application in school and university. The target group of the EEQ was freshman university students who had just finished their secondary education. However, several components of the questionnaire were developed and validated for additional target groups. Therefore, this questionnaire may, in addition, be suitable for students in secondary school, in-service teachers as well as the general public.

This method report describes the contents and application of the EEQ and provides information on survey conduction, data preparation, analyses and interpretation of results to serve as a standardised and ready-to-use protocol to measure the acceptance of and knowledge about evolution in a local, national or international context. To allow for sampling in different European countries, we present

the EEQ in 23 European languages.