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Background: The Canadian Assessment of Physical Literacy (CAPL) assesses the capacity of children to lead a physically active lifestyle. It is comprised of a battery of standardized assessment protocols that reflect the Canadian consensus definition of physical literacy. The Royal Bank of Canada Learn to Play - Canadian Assessment of Physical Literacy s

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850-2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high- and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850-2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high- and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.

Microbeam radiation therapy (MRT) has the potential to treat infantile brain tumours when other kinds of radiotherapy would be excessively toxic to the developing normal brain. MRT uses extraordinarily high doses of x-rays but provides unusual resistance to radioneurotoxicity, presumably from the migration of endothelial cells from 'valleys' into 'peaks', i.e., into directly irradiated microslices of tissues. We present a novel irradiation geometry which results in a tolerable valley dose for the normal tissue and a decreased peak-to-valley dose ratio (PVDR) in the tumour area by applying an innovative cross-firing technique. We propose an MRT technique to orthogonally crossfire two arrays of parallel, nonintersecting, mutually interspersed microbeams that produces tumouricidal doses with small PVDRs where the arrays meet and tolerable radiation doses to normal tissues between the microbeams proximal and distal to the tumour in the paths of the arrays.

Microbeam Radiation Therapy (MRT) has the potential to treat infantile brain tumors when other kinds of radiotherapy would be excessively toxic to the developing normal brain. MRT uses extraordinarily high doses of X-rays but provides unusual resistance to radioneurotoxicity, presumably from the rapid migration of regenerative endothelial cells from dose "valleys" into dose "peaks", i.e., into directly irradiated micro-slices of tissues. We will present a novel irradiation geometry which results in a tolerable valley dose for the normal tissue and a decreased peak-to-valley dose ratio (PVDR) in the tumor area by applying an innovative cross-firing technique. We propose an MRT technique to orthogonally crossfire two arrays of parallel, nonintersecting, mutually interspersed microbeams that produces tumoricidal doses with small PVDRs where the arrays meet and tolerable radiation doses to normal tissues between the microbeams proximal and distal to the tumor in the paths of the arrays.

The evolution of industrial-era warming across the continents and oceans provides a context for future climate change and is important for determining climate sensitivity and the processes that control regional warming. Here we use post-ad 1500 palaeoclimate records to show that sustained industrial-era warming of the tropical oceans first developed during the mid-nineteenth century and was nearly synchronous with Northern Hemisphere continental warming. The early onset of sustained, significant warming in palaeoclimate records and model simulations suggests that greenhouse forcing of industrial-era warming commenced as early as the mid-nineteenth century and included an enhanced equatorial ocean response mechanism. The development of Southern Hemisphere warming is delayed in reconstructions, but this apparent delay is not reproduced in climate simulations. Our findings imply that instrumental records are too short to comprehensively assess anthropogenic climate change and that, in some regions, about 180 years of industrial-era warming has already caused surface temperatures to emerge above pre-industrial values, even when taking natural variability into account.

The Blue Nile is the major contributor of freshwater and sediments to the modern-day main Nile River and exerts a key control on seasonal flooding in the Nile valley. Recent studies have postulated that the relative contribution from the Blue Nile to the main Nile runoff might have been reduced during the mid-Holocene, at a time when higher boreal summer insolation stimulated enhanced precipitation in North Africa. Whether the decrease in the relative contribution from the Blue Nile resulted from a decrease in precipitation over the catchment, from an increase in White Nile runoff or from a combination of both is still a matter of debate. By comparing regional proxy-records with the output from a global atmospheric model zoomed on Africa, we propose that the reduced contribution from the Blue Nile at 6 ka originated from both a higher White Nile runoff and a lower Blue Nile runoff. Enhanced African and Indian monsoons at 6 ka induced a northern shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and an eastward shift of the Congo Air Boundary. Such an atmospheric configuration led to a negative anomaly of summer precipitation over the Blue Nile catchment that likely resulted in a reduction in the Blue Nile runoff. By contrast, a sustained positive anomaly of precipitation over the White Nile catchment during both summer and autumn most likely induced a higher main Nile runoff during the mid-Holocene. Using the model output, we propose a first synoptic view on regional rainfall dynamics that permits to reconcile contrasting proxy records.

In an attempt to assess trends of Holocene sea-surface temperature (SST), two proxies have been compiled and analyzed in light of model simulations. The data reveal contrasting SST trends, depending upon the proxy used to derive Holocene SST history. To reconcile these mismatches between proxies in the estimated Holocene SST trends, it has been proposed that the Holocene evolution of orbitally-driven seasonality of the incoming radiation is the first-order driving mechanism of the observed SST trends. Such hypothesis has been further tested in numerical models of the Earth system with important implications for SST signals ultimately recorded by marine sediment cores. The analysis of model results and alkenone proxy data for the Holocene indicate a similar pattern in temperature change, but the simulated SST trends underestimate the proxy-based SST trends by a factor of two to five. SST trends based on Mg/Ca show no correspondence with model results. We explore whether the consideration of different growing seasons and depth habitats of the planktonic organisms used for temperature reconstruction could lead to a better agreement of model results with alkenone data on a regional scale. We found that invoking shifts in the living season and habitat depth can remove some of the model–data discrepancies in SST trends. Our results indicate that modeled and reconstructed temperature trends are to a large degree only qualitatively comparable, thus providing at present a challenge for the interpretation of proxy data as well as the model sensitivity to orbital forcing.

The Blue Nile is the major contributor of freshwater and sediments to the modern-day main Nile River and exerts a key control on seasonal flooding in the Nile valley. Recent studies have postulated that the relative contribution from the Blue Nile to the main Nile runoff might have been reduced during the mid-Holocene, at a time when higher boreal summer insolation stimulated enhanced precipitation in North Africa. Whether the decrease in the relative contribution from the Blue Nile resulted from a decrease in precipitation over the catchment, from an increase in White Nile runoff or from a combination of both is still a matter of debate. By comparing regional proxy-records with the output from a global atmospheric model zoomed on Africa, we propose that the reduced contribution from the Blue Nile at 6 ka originated from both a higher White Nile runoff and a lower Blue Nile runoff. Enhanced African and Indian monsoons at 6 ka induced a northern shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and an eastward shift of the Congo Air Boundary. Such an atmospheric configuration led to a negative anomaly of summer precipitation over the Blue Nile catchment that likely resulted in a reduction in the Blue Nile runoff. By contrast, a sustained positive anomaly of precipitation over the White Nile catchment during both summer and autumn most likely induced a higher main Nile runoff during the mid-Holocene. Using the model output, we propose a first synoptic view on regional rainfall dynamics that permits to reconcile contrasting proxy records.