ING Bank (Australia) Limited (trading as ING since 2017, and as ING DIRECT 1999–2017) is a direct bank operating in Australia. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational Dutch bank, ING Group. ING Australia holds an Australian banking licence as a foreign subsidiary company.ING operates through a number of controlled entities: trusts and the primary bank division, ING, which operates under the segments of Mortgages, Savings, Everyday Banking, Consumer Lending, Superannuation, Insurance, Wholesale Banking and Commercial Lending.Founded in 1999, ING Australia was Australia's first direct bank. It has since grown to become the largest mortgage lender outside of Australia's Big Four banks. ING scores favourably with customer satisfaction and has the highest net promoter score of any major financial institution in Australia.As of December 2016, the bank had 1.7 million customers and over 500,000 transaction accounts. In December 2015, ING had a mortgage portfolio valued at AU$38.6 billion and AU$1.6 billion super funds under management, with 34,000 active superannuation retirement accounts in 2014.As of December 2020, ING had a loan portfolio of $65.2b and deposits of $46.6b. Total customers had grown to 2.8m.
The semienclosed Bouraké lagoon in New Caledonia is a natural system that enables observation of evolution in action with respect to stress tolerance in marine organisms, a topic directly relevant to understanding the consequences of global climate change. Corals inhabiting the Bouraké lagoon endure extreme conditions of elevated temperature (> 33°C), acidification (7.2 pH units), and deoxygenation (2.28 mg O2 L-1), which fluctuate with the tide due to the lagoon's geomorphology. To investigate the underlying bases of the apparent stress tolerance of these corals, we combined whole genome resequencing of the coral host and ITS2 metabarcoding of the photosymbionts from 90 Acropora tenuis colonies from three localities along the steep environmental gradient from Bouraké to two nearby control reefs. Our results highlight the importance of coral flexibility to associate with different photosymbionts in facilitating stress tolerance of the holobiont; but, perhaps more significantly, strong selective effects were detected at specific loci in the host genome. Fifty-seven genes contained SNPs highly associated with the extreme environment of Bouraké and were enriched in functions related to sphingolipid metabolism. Within these genes, the conserved sensor of noxious stimuli TRPA1 and the ABCC4 transporter stood out due to the high number of environmentally selected SNPs that they contained. Protein 3D structure predictions suggest that a single-point mutation causes the rotation of the main regulatory domain of TRPA1, which may be behind this case of natural selection through environmental filtering. While the corals of the Bouraké lagoon provide a striking example of rapid adaptation to extreme conditions, overall, our results highlight the need to preserve the current standing genetic variation of coral populations to safeguard their adaptive potential to ongoing rapid environmental change.
Neuroinflammation underpins neurodegeneration and clinical progression in multiple sclerosis (MS), but knowledge of processes linking these disease mechanisms remains incomplete. Here we investigated somatic single-nucleotide variants (sSNVs) in the genomes of 106 single neurons from post-mortem brain tissue of ten MS cases and 16 controls to determine whether somatic mutagenesis is involved. We observed an increase of 43.9 sSNVs per year in neurons from chronic MS lesions, a 2.5 times faster rate than in neurons from normal-appearing MS and control tissues. This difference was equivalent to 1,291 excess sSNVs in lesion neurons at 70 years of age compared to controls. We performed mutational signature analysis to investigate mechanisms underlying neuronal sSNVs and identified a signature characteristic of lesions with a strong, age-associated contribution to sSNV counts. This research suggests that neuroinflammation is mutagenic in the MS brain, potentially contributing to disease progression.
BACKGROUND:Trends in news being increasingly accessed via social media warrants more attention to how mental illness and suicide news is being communicated on social platforms, which have the potential to amplify or mitigate stigma in wider audiences. AIMS:This study aimed to determine how mental illness and suicide are portrayed in Facebook posts by Australian news organisations, and examine engagement trends with these posts. METHOD:A systematic search of 22 Australian news Facebook pages was conducted on Meta's CrowdTangle database for posts about mental illness or suicide over a 1-year period. RESULTS:Of the 1343 Facebook news posts identified, over half (55%) comprised "helpful" content. News posts featuring people with lived experience were the most common topics with helpful content, however harmful content was still prominent. Problematic content in news posts often included sensationalist, trivialising, or "suffering" language, and stigmatising or sensationalist quotes. Public engagement with news posts did not differ based on alignment with media guidelines. CONCLUSIONS:There is substantial room for improvement in how mental illness and suicide-related news is communicated on social media. Ensuring this aligns with responsible media guidelines will reduce public exposure to content that can perpetuate stigma and increase harms.
Aims/Purpose: Improvements in technology for head mounted displays allow both a large increase in the quantity of visual information presented and capacity to control how it is displayed. The requirements of defence operators are unique, including making quick and efficient decisions, operating in varying light conditions and using night vision devices and laser eye protection. Scientifically‐informed symbology is required to ensure maximal operational capacity is obtained from available technology.Methods: Applied tasks have been used to investigate the addition of colour to visual symbology. The first used a flight simulator to examine the effect of adding colour to symbology requiring attention; both day and night backgrounds were investigated with the plane on autopilot. Participants were required to identify randomly appearing symbols presented either as monochrome green or with additional colour, in addition to other tasks. The second task manipulated symbology colour to improve performance when using laser eye protection. Participants undertook two simulated drives wearing laser eye protection while responding to both standard and optimised coloured symbols.Results: For the flight simulator experiment, the use of colour to draw attention to symbology resulted in faster response times (1.81s vs 2.57s, p < 0.001) and fewer missed events (0.91 vs 3.32/15 missed, p < 0.001). For the driving experiment, manipulating the colours did not statistically significantly affect reaction time but resulted in a statistically significant improvement in the accuracy of symbol detection and identification (standard 88.7%, optimised 94.5%, p < 0.001).Conclusion: The judicious use of colour informed by vision science in displays has demonstrated improvements in reaction time and accuracy which may be operationally significant for defence operators. Further work is required to refine other salient aspects of symbology which may attract attention including size, luminance and flicker.
