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New legislation (H.R. 485) that is currently being debated in the House Energy and Commerce Committee and a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee present a threat to Medicare's new and already limited ability to negotiate over some high-priced prescription drugs. The language…

AbstractContext grounds all aspects of indigenous evaluation. From an indigenous evaluation framework (IEF), programs are understood within their relationship to place, setting, and community, and evaluations are planned, undertaken, and validated in relation to cultural context. This chapter describes and explains fundamental elements of IEF epistemology and method and gives several examples of these elements from evaluations in American Indian communities. IEF underscores the importance of putting context ahead of method choice and suggests that context exerts an even greater impact than previously recognized. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

In this contribution we demonstrate structural control over a transport resonance in HS(CH2)n[1,4 −C6H4](CH2)nSH (n = 1, 3, 4, 6) metal-molecule-metal junctions, fabricated and tested using the scanning tunnelingmicroscopy-based I (z)method. The Breit-Wigner resonance originates from one of the arene π-bonding orbitals, which sharpens and moves closer to the contact Fermi energy as n increases. Varying the number of methylene groups thus leads to a very shallow decay of the conductance with the length of the molecule. We demonstrate that the electrical behavior observed here can be straightforwardly rationalized by analyzing the effects caused by the electrostatic balance created at the metal-molecule interface. Such resonances offer future prospects in molecular electronics in terms of controlling charge transport over longer distances, and also in single-molecule conductance switching if the resonances can be externally gated ; This research was supported by the EPSRC (Grant No. EP/H035184/1), by MINECO under Grant No. FIS2013-47328, by the European Union structural funds and the Comunidad de Madrid MAD2D-CM Program under Grant. P2013/MIT-2850, and by Generalitat Valenciana under Grant PROMETEO/2012/011.

As part of on-going efforts to optimize the electrical performance and stability of molecular electronic components, anchor groups that bind molecules to electrode surfaces via multiple points of connection (multipodal contacts) have begun to attract attention. Here an oligo(arylene)ethynylene (OAE) derivative with 'tripodal' 2,6-bis((methylthio)methyl)pyridine anchoring groups at both molecular termini has been prepared and used to form well-ordered monolayer Langmuir films at the air–water interface. These films were transferred onto solid supports (surface pressure of transference 8 mN m−1) to give homogeneous, densely packed, monolayer Langmuir–Blodgett (LB) films, which efficiently block a gold electrode surface. Within the surface-supported LB film, the molecules are oriented with a tilt angle of approximately 30° to the surface normal and contacted through both the 'buttressed' methylthioether groups and the pyridine nitrogen atom, as determined by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and shell-isolated nanoparticle-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SHINERS). Molecular junctions formed by contact of a single molecule within the film by the "STM touch-to-contact" method give a most probable molecular conductance of 4.4 × 10−5G0. This value compares well with the single molecule conductance of 1,4-bis(pyridin-4-ylethynyl)benzene determined by a variety of methods (3.2–5.4 × 10−5G0), indicating that the addition of the buttressing groups does not perturb the favourable electrical characteristics of the pyridyl contacting group. Consistent with these conductance data, a transition voltage (Vtrans = 0.48 V) was observed for this 'buttressed', pyridine-contacted OAE derivative, indicating relatively good alignment of the metal electrode Fermi level and the frontier molecular orbitals. ; E. E. gratefully acknowledges the award of a DGA fellowship from Government of Aragon. P. C. is grateful for financial assistance from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad from Spain and fondos FEDER in the framework of the project MAT2016-78257-R. S. M. and P. C. also acknowledge DGA/fondos FEDER (construyendo Europa desde Aragón) for funding the research group Platón (E31_17R). R. J. N. and D. C. M are grateful for financial assistance from the EPSRC (grants EP/M029522/1, EP/M005046/1 and EP/M014169/1). P. J. L. gratefully acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council (DP190100073 and DP190100074). S. B. thanks the University of Western Australia for the award of an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship. The authors also thank Dr G. Antorrena for technical support in XPS studies. H. M. O. is grateful for financial assistance from Escuela Politécnica Nacional in the framework of projects PII-DFIS-02-2018 and PIS-17-12. ; Peer reviewed

Policy makers and managers are increasingly called upon to assess the state of biodiversity, and make decisions regarding potential interventions. Genetic tools are well-recognised in the research community as a powerful approach to evaluate species and population status, reveal ecological and demographic processes, and inform nature conservation decisions. The wealth of genetic data and power of genetic methods are rapidly growing, but the consideration of genetic information and concerns in policy and management is limited by the currently low capacity of decision-makers to access and apply genetic resources. Here we describe a freely available, user-friendly online resource for decision-makers at local and national levels (http://congressgenetics.eu), which increases access to current knowledge, facilitates implementation of studies and interpretation of available data, and fosters collaboration between researchers and practitioners. This resource was created in partnership with conservation practitioners across the European Union, and includes a spectrum of taxa, ecosystems and conservation issues. Our goals here are to (1) introduce the rationale and context, (2) describe the specific tools (knowledge summaries, publications database, decision making tool, project planning tool, forum, community directory), and the challenges they help solve, and (3) summarise lessons learned. This article provides an outlook and model for similar efforts to build policy and management capacity ; Peer reviewed

A key goal in molecular electronics has been to find molecules that facilitate efficient charge transport over long distances. Normally, molecular wires become less conductive with increasing length. Here, we report a series of fused porphyrin oligomers for which the conductance increases substantially with length by > 10-fold at a bias of 0.7 V. This exceptional behavior can be attributed to the rapid decrease of the HOMO-LUMO gap with the length of fused porphyrins. In contrast, for butadiyne-linked porphyrin oligomers with moderate inter-ring coupling, a normal conductance decrease with length is found for all bias voltages explored (±1 V), although the attenuation factor (β) decreases from ca. 2 nm-1 at low bias to <1 nm-1 at 0.9 V, highlighting that β is not an intrinsic molecular property. Further theoretical analysis using density functional theory underlines the role of intersite coupling and indicates that this large increase in conductance with length at increasing voltages can be generalized to other molecular oligomers. ; R.J.N., S.H., E.L. and A.H. acknowledge the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the funding of this research under grant numbers EP/M014169/1, P/M029522/1 and EP/M005046/1. N.A., C.L., S.S. and I.G. acknowledge the European Commission (EC) FP7 ITN "MOLESCO" (project no. 606728) and the EPSRC (grant nos. EP/M014452/1 and EP/N017188/1). H.L.A. thanks the EPSRC (grants EP/N017188/1, EP/D076552/1 and EP/ M016110/1), UK National Mass Spectrometry Facility at Swansea University, for recording mass spectra. H.S. acknowledges the Leverhulme Trust for Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship no. ECF-2017-186. S.S. acknowledges the Leverhulme Trust for Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship no. ECF-2018-375. N.A. and G.R.B. acknowledge the Spanish MINECO (Grant MAT2014-57915-R, MAT2017-88693-R and MDM-2014-0377) and Comunidad de Madrid (Grant NANOFRONTMAG-CM, S2013/MIT-2850). N.A. and C.L. have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 767187. IMDEA Nanociencia acknowledges support from the 'Severo Ochoa' Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (MINECO, Grant SEV-2016-0686)