Prognos (R) in the diagnosis of amalgam hypersensitivity - A diagnostic case-control study

Objective: We aimed to investigate whether the Prognos (R) device might be a useful tool in the diagnosis of disorders suspected to be due to dental amalgam fillings. Participants and Methods: A diagnostic case-control study was performed in 27 patients who complained about health problems attributed to amalgam ( cases), 27 healthy volunteers with amalgam fillings ( controls I), and 27 healthy amalgam-free volunteers ( controls II). All participants were tested before and after application of 300 mg DMPS (2.3-dimercapto-1-propanesulfonic acid) with Prognos, a diagnostic device for the energetic measurement of Traditional Chinese Medicine meridians. In addition, mercury was measured in blood, urine, and saliva, and a lymphocyte transformation test (LTT) was performed. Results: Diagnoses derived from the first and second Prognos testing did not agree above chance (Cohen's Kappa = -0.11, 95% confidence interval -0.33 to 0.10; p = 0.30). Agreement for secondary outcome measures was poor, too. Prognos measurements did not differ between cases and controls. Correlations with measurements in urine, blood and saliva were low. Conclusion: In this study Prognos could not be shown to be a useful tool in the diagnosis of disorders suspected to be due to dental amalgam fillings

Long-term sublethal exposure to polyethylene and tire wear particles: Effects on risk-taking behaviour in invasive and native fish

Anthropogenic polymeric particles pollute even the most remote ecosystems and may compromise organisms' behaviour and movement skills. It is expected that invasive species cope better with pollutants than native species (i.e., pollution resistance hypothesis). In this study, invasive gibel carp (Carassius gibelio) and native crucian carp (Carassius carassius) were used as model organisms. Specimens were fed daily with food pellets (1 % body weight) added with 0.1 % polyethylene (PE), tire wear particles (TWPs) and control. Their behavioural parameters were compared before and after 14 and 60 days of exposure. Additionally, we evaluated burst swimming capacity after 60 days of exposure to the treatments. The fishes exposed to the PE and TWPs treatments showed significant trends toward increased boldness scores and, in the PE treatment, higher utilization of the open field, and both behavioural changes are associated with higher risk-taking. Invasive gibel carp had substantially better swimming performance than crucian carp, but the expected trend in relation to the treatments was not found. Fish exposed to sublethal doses of PE and TWPs showed signs of behavioural changes after two months of exposure that may affect risk-taking behaviour, which might impact species interactions with predators

Innovation Collaborations of Firms: the Case of Hungarian Multinational Companies

Multinational companies (MNCs) are geographically widespread production networks that can coordinate operations and activities in more than one country. MNCs transfer innovations, expertise, knowledge and advanced technologies to their host countries through their subsidiaries. Therefore, multinational companies are seen as transfer intermediaries distributing international technologies and innovations. MNCs help to bridge the existing technology gap between developed and developing countries. Due to the multilocation nature of MNCs, the study aims to examine the various drivers that influence Hungarian MNCs' R&D collaborations, making them choose to collaborate either with local partners or with partners in the countries of their headquarters. The paper reports on the preliminary findings of an on-going comparative research focused on understanding the key drivers of innovations and competitiveness in Hungary. For our empirical analysis, drawing on data from the Eurostat's harmonized Community Innovation Survey 2010-2012, we used the probit regression model. Since many studies have shown that innovation processes in companies are based on the same principles or similar framework, it is possible to generalize the results of the analysed data and successfully put the recommendations into practice. Our analysis provided mixed results; it has demonstrated that marketing orientations, expenditures devoted to research and development, absorptive capacity, firm size as well as funding support provided to Hungarian MNCs influenced their choice of collaborating partners. Hungarian MNCs were highly probable to collaborate with both local and foreign partners in the enterprise group, while preferring to cooperate with local universities rather than foreign ones. © Odei S. A., Prokop V., Stejskal J. Text. 2020.The article work has been prepared with the support of the grant No. 17-11795S provided by the scientific research project of the Czech Science Foundation

PAID TO PUMP: How a tax credit could discourage conservation of the High Plains Aquifer

In 1965’s United States v. Shurbet case, an irrigator from Texas asserted his claim for a depletion tax deduction for groundwater pumped from the High Plains Aquifer. He argued that the unique conditions of the southern High Plains region - a plateau where the shallow aquifer is recharged only through precipitation at a slow rate - meant the groundwater resource would be depleted in time. The state argued that groundwater was not fundamentally an exhaustible natural deposit, but the Supreme Court concluded the tax deduction was appropriate given the “peculiar” conditions in the area. It was stated the decision was not meant to establish a precedent regarding cost depletion of groundwater. The findings of the Shurbet case were intended to be limited to the southern High Plains region. However, in a 1980 lawsuit against the IRS, the Gigot brothers of Kansas sought to expand the deduction to allow depletion of the aquifer beneath their 30,000 acre farm in Kansas. The case was settled in the district court with a ruling allowing the brothers’ deductions to continue, thereby extending the Shurbet decision to include all landowners extracting from the approximately 174,000 square miles of land overlying the High Plains Aquifer. Currently, the estimated value of the credit is highest in parts of northern Texas, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, and south central Nebraska

Properties of small molecular drug loading and diffusion in a fluorinated PEG hydrogel studied by ^1H molecular diffusion NMR and ^(19)F spin diffusion NMR

R_f-PEG (fluoroalkyl double-ended poly(ethylene glycol)) hydrogel is potentially useful as a drug delivery depot due to its advanced properties of sol–gel two-phase coexistence and low surface erosion. In this study, ^1H molecular diffusion nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and ^(19)F spin diffusion NMR were used to probe the drug loading and diffusion properties of the R_f-PEG hydrogel for small anticancer drugs, 5-fluorouracil (FU) and its hydrophobic analog, 1,3-dimethyl-5-fluorouracil (DMFU). It was found that FU has a larger apparent diffusion coefficient than that of DMFU, and the diffusion of the latter was more hindered. The result of ^(19)F spin diffusion NMR for the corresponding freeze-dried samples indicates that a larger portion of DMFU resided in the R_f core/IPDU intermediate-layer region (where IPDU refers to isophorone diurethane, as a linker to interconnect the R_f group and the PEG chain) than that of FU while the opposite is true in the PEG–water phase. To understand the experimental data, a diffusion model was proposed to include: (1) hindered diffusion of the drug molecules in the R_f core/IPDU-intermediate-layer region; (2) relatively free diffusion of the drug molecules in the PEG-water phase (or region); and (3) diffusive exchange of the probe molecules between the above two regions. This study also shows that molecular diffusion NMR combined with spin diffusion NMR is useful in studying the drug loading and diffusion properties in hydrogels for the purpose of drug delivery applications

Finsler geometry on higher order tensor fields and applications to high angular resolution diffusion imaging.

We study 3D-multidirectional images, using Finsler geometry. The application considered here is in medical image analysis, specifically in High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) (Tuch et al. in Magn. Reson. Med. 48(6):1358–1372, 2004) of the brain. The goal is to reveal the architecture of the neural fibers in brain white matter. To the variety of existing techniques, we wish to add novel approaches that exploit differential geometry and tensor calculus. In Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), the diffusion of water is modeled by a symmetric positive definite second order tensor, leading naturally to a Riemannian geometric framework. A limitation is that it is based on the assumption that there exists a single dominant direction of fibers restricting the thermal motion of water molecules. Using HARDI data and higher order tensor models, we can extract multiple relevant directions, and Finsler geometry provides the natural geometric generalization appropriate for multi-fiber analysis. In this paper we provide an exact criterion to determine whether a spherical function satisfies the strong convexity criterion essential for a Finsler norm. We also show a novel fiber tracking method in Finsler setting. Our model incorporates a scale parameter, which can be beneficial in view of the noisy nature of the data. We demonstrate our methods on analytic as well as simulated and real HARDI data

Classical Limit of Demagnetization in a Field Gradient

We calculate the rate of decrease of the expectation value of the transverse component of spin for spin-1/2 particles in a magnetic field with a spatial gradient, to determine the conditions under which a previous classical description is valid. A density matrix treatment is required for two reasons. The first arises because the particles initially are not in a pure state due to thermal motion. The second reason is that each particle interacts with the magnetic field and the other particles, with the latter taken to be via a 2-body central force. The equations for the 1-body Wigner distribution functions are written in a general manner, and the places where quantum mechanical effects can play a role are identified. One that may not have been considered previously concerns the momentum associated with the magnetic field gradient, which is proportional to the time integral of the gradient. Its relative magnitude compared with the important momenta in the problem is a significant parameter, and if their ratio is not small some non-classical effects contribute to the solution. Assuming the field gradient is sufficiently small, and a number of other inequalities are satisfied involving the mean wavelength, range of the force, and the mean separation between particles, we solve the integro- partial differential equations for the Wigner functions to second order in the strength of the gradient. When the same reasoning is applied to a different problem with no field gradient, but having instead a gradient to the z-component of polarization, the connection with the diffusion coefficient is established, and we find agreement with the classical result for the rate of decrease of the transverse component of magnetization.Comment: 22 pages, no figure