Engineering egress data considering pedestrians with reduced mobility

To quantify the evacuation process, evacuation practitioners use engineering egress data describing the occupant movement characteristics. These data are typically based to young and fit populations. However, the movement abilities of occupants who might be involved in evacuations are becoming more variable—with the building populations of today typically including increasing numbers of individuals: with impairments or who are otherwise elderly or generally less mobile. Thus, there will be an increasing proportion of building occupants with reduced ability to egress. For safe evacuation, there is therefore a need to provide valid engineering egress data considering pedestrians with disabilities. Gwynne and Boyce recently compiled a series of data sets related to the evacuation process to support practitioner activities in the chapter Engineering Data in the SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering. This paper supplements these data sets by providing information on and presenting data obtained from additional research related to the premovement and horizontal movement of participants with physical‐, cognitive‐, or age‐related disabilities. The aim is to provide an overview of currently available data sets related to, and key factors affecting the egress performance of, mixed ability populations which could be used to guide fire safety engineering decisions in the context of building design.     

Regulatory RNAs: A Universal Language for Inter-Domain Communication

In eukaryotes, microRNAs (miRNAs) have roles in development, homeostasis, disease and the immune response. Recent work has shown that plant and mammalian miRNAs also mediate cross-kingdom and cross-domain communications. However, these studies remain controversial and are lacking critical mechanistic explanations. Bacteria do not produce miRNAs themselves, and therefore it is unclear how these eukaryotic RNA molecules could function in the bacterial recipient. In this review, we compare and contrast the biogenesis and functions of regulatory RNAs in eukaryotes and bacteria. As a result, we discovered several conserved features and homologous components in these distinct pathways. These findings enabled us to propose novel mechanisms to explain how eukaryotic miRNAs could function in bacteria. Further understanding in this area is necessary to validate the findings of existing studies and could facilitate the use of miRNAs as novel tools for the directed remodelling of the human microbiota.