Highlights from day three of the EuroSciCon 2015 Sports Science Summit.

This EuroSciCon Sports Science Summit represented a significant gathering of leading professionals in the field of sports science. The conference was held on 13-15 January 2015 at the O2 arena, London, UK. The chairman on the third day was Mr Greg Robertson, a specialist trainee Orthopedic surgeon from Edinburgh. The conference attracted over 80 attendants from all over the world, with 32 presentations from invited speakers and peer-reviewed submissions. This meeting report provides a summary of the best abstracts from the conference

Will This Paper Increase Your h-index? Scientific Impact Prediction

Scientific impact plays a central role in the evaluation of the output of scholars, departments, and institutions. A widely used measure of scientific impact is citations, with a growing body of literature focused on predicting the number of citations obtained by any given publication. The effectiveness of such predictions, however, is fundamentally limited by the power-law distribution of citations, whereby publications with few citations are extremely common and publications with many citations are relatively rare. Given this limitation, in this work we instead address a related question asked by many academic researchers in the course of writing a paper, namely: "Will this paper increase my h-index?" Using a real academic dataset with over 1.7 million authors, 2 million papers, and 8 million citation relationships from the premier online academic service ArnetMiner, we formalize a novel scientific impact prediction problem to examine several factors that can drive a paper to increase the primary author's h-index. We find that the researcher's authority on the publication topic and the venue in which the paper is published are crucial factors to the increase of the primary author's h-index, while the topic popularity and the co-authors' h-indices are of surprisingly little relevance. By leveraging relevant factors, we find a greater than 87.5% potential predictability for whether a paper will contribute to an author's h-index within five years. As a further experiment, we generate a self-prediction for this paper, estimating that there is a 76% probability that it will contribute to the h-index of the co-author with the highest current h-index in five years. We conclude that our findings on the quantification of scientific impact can help researchers to expand their influence and more effectively leverage their position of "standing on the shoulders of giants."Comment: Proc. of the 8th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'15

Synthesis and evaluation of sulphonamide clubbed thiophenes as dihydrogen pteroate synthase inhibitors

Background. Derivatives of thiophene and sulphonamide showed various pharmacological activities including antimicrobial and dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) inhibition activity. Dihydrofolate reductase and dihydropteroate synthetase enzymes are responsible for bacterial growth and cell proliferation of cancer cells. Method: In the first step, thiophene was synthesized from cyclohexanone, sulphur and ethyl cyanoacetate by Gewald reaction. Second step involved cyclization of ethyl 2-aminothiophene-3-carboxylate conducted using formamide. In the third step, the carbonyl group was replaced by chlorine in the presence of POCl3. Then the chlorine group was removed by substituted sulphonamide. A series of derivatives were synthesized and evaluated for antimicrobial, anti-oxidant and DHFR inhibition activity. Newly synthesized derivatives of sulphonamide clubbed thiophene showed moderate to excellent antimicrobial and DHFR inhibition activity. Results. A series of thiophene clubbed sulphonamide conjugates were designed, synthesized and their structures were characterized using 1H NMR, 13C NMR, IR and HR-MS spectral analysis. The antioxidant activity was performed by DPPH and hydrogen peroxide method. Among these derivatives, the compounds a and b showed comparable anti-oxidant activity 76.29% and 73.25% respectively against DPPH as compared to standard drug ascorbic acid (82.68%). Remaining conjugates displayed significant anti-oxidant activity. The docking study was performed using Molegro virtual docker (MVD) molecular docking suggested a remarkable binding pose for all the thiophene linked sulphonamide derivatives. Conclusion. Compounds with electron donating groups showed potential activity. The binding affinity of these derivatives against dihydropteroate synthetase (DHTS) and dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) enzymes were confirmed by molecular docking studies. The ADME and toxicity profile was studied. The compounds can serve as potential DHFR and DHTS inhibitors

Effect of viscosity on wave propagation in anisotropic thermoelastic medium with three-phase-lag model

The aim of the present paper is to study the wave propagation in anisotropic viscoelastic medium in the context of the theory threephase- lag model of thermoelasticity. It is found that there exist two quasi-longitudinal waves (qP1, qP2) and two transverse waves (qS1, qS2). The governing equations for homogeneous transversely isotropic thermoviscoelastic are reduced as a special case from the considered model. Different characteristics of waves like phase velocity, attenuation coefficient, specific loss and penetration depth are computed from the obtained results. Viscous effect is shown graphically on different resulting quantities for two-phase-lag model and three-phase-lag model of thermoelasticity. Some particular cases of interest are also deduced from the present investigation

In vivo Neutralization of Pro-inflammatory Cytokines During Secondary Streptococcus pneumoniae Infection Post Influenza A Virus Infection

An overt pro-inflammatory immune response is a key factor contributing to lethal pneumococcal infection in an influenza pre-infected host and represents a potential target for therapeutic intervention. However, there is a paucity of knowledge about the level of contribution of individual cytokines. Based on the predictions of our previous mathematical modeling approach, the potential benefit of IFN-γ- and/or IL-6-specific antibody-mediated cytokine neutralization was explored in C57BL/6 mice infected with the influenza A/PR/8/34 strain, which were subsequently infected with the Streptococcus pneumoniae strain TIGR4 on day 7 post influenza. While single IL-6 neutralization had no effect on respiratory bacterial clearance, single IFN-γ neutralization enhanced local bacterial clearance in the lungs. Concomitant neutralization of IFN-γ and IL-6 significantly reduced the degree of pneumonia as well as bacteremia compared to the control group, indicating a positive effect for the host during secondary bacterial infection. The results of our model-driven experimental study reveal that the predicted therapeutic value of IFN-γ and IL-6 neutralization in secondary pneumococcal infection following influenza infection is tightly dependent on the experimental protocol while at the same time paving the way toward the development of effective immune therapies

Intravenous albumin infusion is an effective therapy for hyponatremia in patient with malignant ascites

There are few reports about the treatment of moderate to severe hyponatremia associated with malignant liver metastasis. Here, we report using intravenous salt poor albumin infusion to treat hypervolemic cirrhosis related hyponatremia. A 58-year-old female with ascites secondary to metastatic breast cancer was referred to our department with symptomatic hyponatremia (serum sodium concentration of 121 mEq/L). The serum sodium level was corrected slowly over 2 days with intravenous albumin infusion and the patient\u27s symptoms - fatigue, nausea, dizziness and headache improved