Measuring the intermittent synchronicity of macroeconomic growth in Europe. ACES Cases No. 2010.1

Synchronization of growth rates are an important feature of international business cycles, particularly in relation to regional integration projects such as the single currency in Europe. Synchronization of growth rates clearly enhances the effectiveness of European Central Bank monetary policy, ensuring that policy changes are attuned to the dynamics of growth and business cycles in the majority of member states. In this paper a dissimilarity metric is constructed by measuring the topological differences between the GDP growth patterns in recurrence plots for individual countries. The results show that synchronization of growth rates were higher among the Euro area member states during the second half of the 1980s and from 1997 to roughly 2002. Apart from these two time periods, Euro area member states do not appear to be more synchronized than a group of major international countries, signifying that globalization was the major cause of international business cycle synchronization

Different partial volume correction methods lead to different conclusions: An 18F-FDG-PET study of aging.

A cross-sectional group study of the effects of aging on brain metabolism as measured with 18F-FDG-PET was performed using several different partial volume correction (PVC) methods: no correction (NoPVC), Meltzer (MZ), Müller-Gärtner (MG), and the symmetric geometric transfer matrix (SGTM) using 99 subjects aged 65-87years from the Harvard Aging Brain study. Sensitivity to parameter selection was tested for MZ and MG. The various methods and parameter settings resulted in an extremely wide range of conclusions as to the effects of age on metabolism, from almost no changes to virtually all of cortical regions showing a decrease with age. Simulations showed that NoPVC had significant bias that made the age effect on metabolism appear to be much larger and more significant than it is. MZ was found to be the same as NoPVC for liberal brain masks; for conservative brain masks, MZ showed few areas correlated with age. MG and SGTM were found to be similar; however, MG was sensitive to a thresholding parameter that can result in data loss. CSF uptake was surprisingly high at about 15% of that in gray matter. The exclusion of CSF from SGTM and MG models, which is almost universally done, caused a substantial loss in the power to detect age-related changes. This diversity of results reflects the literature on the metabolism of aging and suggests that extreme care should be taken when applying PVC or interpreting results that have been corrected for partial volume effects. Using the SGTM, significant age-related changes of about 7% per decade were found in frontal and cingulate cortices as well as primary visual and insular cortices

Beliefs about the Minds of Others Influence How We Process Sensory Information

Attending where others gaze is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social cognition. The present study is the first to examine the impact of the attribution of mind to others on gaze-guided attentional orienting and its ERP correlates. Using a paradigm in which attention was guided to a location by the gaze of a centrally presented face, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the gazer: gaze behavior was believed to result either from operations of a mind or from a machine. In Experiment 1, beliefs were manipulated by cue identity (human or robot), while in Experiment 2, cue identity (robot) remained identical across conditions and beliefs were manipulated solely via instruction, which was irrelevant to the task. ERP results and behavior showed that participants' attention was guided by gaze only when gaze was believed to be controlled by a human. Specifically, the P1 was more enhanced for validly, relative to invalidly, cued targets only when participants believed the gaze behavior was the result of a mind, rather than of a machine. This shows that sensory gain control can be influenced by higher-order (task-irrelevant) beliefs about the observed scene. We propose a new interdisciplinary model of social attention, which integrates ideas from cognitive and social neuroscience, as well as philosophy in order to provide a framework for understanding a crucial aspect of how humans' beliefs about the observed scene influence sensory processing

Resistance to autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease in an APOE3 Christchurch homozygote: a case report.

We identified a PSEN1 (presenilin 1) mutation carrier from the world's largest autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease kindred, who did not develop mild cognitive impairment until her seventies, three decades after the expected age of clinical onset. The individual had two copies of the APOE3 Christchurch (R136S) mutation, unusually high brain amyloid levels and limited tau and neurodegenerative measurements. Our findings have implications for the role of APOE in the pathogenesis, treatment and prevention of Alzheimer's disease

Is Task-Irrelevant Learning Really Task-Irrelevant?

In the present study we address the question of whether the learning of task-irrelevant stimuli found in the paradigm of task-irrelevant learning (TIPL) [1]–[9] is truly task irrelevant. To test the hypothesis that associations that are beneficial to task-performance may develop between the task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli, or the task-responses and the task-irrelevant stimuli, we designed a new procedure in which correlations between the presentation of task-irrelevant motion stimuli and the identity of task-targets or task-responses were manipulated. We found no evidence for associations developing between the learned (task-irrelevant) motion stimuli and the targets or responses to the letter identification task used during training. Furthermore, the conditions that had the greatest correlations between stimulus and response showed the least amount of TIPL. On the other hand, TIPL was found in conditions of greatest response uncertainty and with the greatest processing requirements for the task-relevant stimuli. This is in line with our previously published model that suggests that task-irrelevant stimuli benefit from the spill-over of learning signals that are released due to processing of task-relevant stimuli

Is Task-Irrelevant Learning Really Task-Irrelevant?

In the present study we address the question of whether the learning of task-irrelevant stimuli found in the paradigm of task-irrelevant learning (TIPL) [1]–[9] is truly task irrelevant. To test the hypothesis that associations that are beneficial to task-performance may develop between the task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli, or the task-responses and the task-irrelevant stimuli, we designed a new procedure in which correlations between the presentation of task-irrelevant motion stimuli and the identity of task-targets or task-responses were manipulated. We found no evidence for associations developing between the learned (task-irrelevant) motion stimuli and the targets or responses to the letter identification task used during training. Furthermore, the conditions that had the greatest correlations between stimulus and response showed the least amount of TIPL. On the other hand, TIPL was found in conditions of greatest response uncertainty and with the greatest processing requirements for the task-relevant stimuli. This is in line with our previously published model that suggests that task-irrelevant stimuli benefit from the spill-over of learning signals that are released due to processing of task-relevant stimuli

Measurement of the production of a W boson in association with a charm quark in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

The production of a W boson in association with a single charm quark is studied using 4.6 fb−1 of pp collision data at s√ = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. In events in which a W boson decays to an electron or muon, the charm quark is tagged either by its semileptonic decay to a muon or by the presence of a charmed meson. The integrated and differential cross sections as a function of the pseudorapidity of the lepton from the W-boson decay are measured. Results are compared to the predictions of next-to-leading-order QCD calculations obtained from various parton distribution function parameterisations. The ratio of the strange-to-down sea-quark distributions is determined to be 0.96+0.26−0.30 at Q 2 = 1.9 GeV2, which supports the hypothesis of an SU(3)-symmetric composition of the light-quark sea. Additionally, the cross-section ratio σ(W + +c¯¯)/σ(W − + c) is compared to the predictions obtained using parton distribution function parameterisations with different assumptions about the s−s¯¯¯ quark asymmetry

Global Analysis of Proline-Rich Tandem Repeat Proteins Reveals Broad Phylogenetic Diversity in Plant Secretomes

Cell walls, constructed by precisely choreographed changes in the plant secretome, play critical roles in plant cell physiology and development. Along with structural polysaccharides, secreted proline-rich Tandem Repeat Proteins (TRPs) are important for cell wall function, yet the evolutionary diversity of these structural TRPs remains virtually unexplored. Using a systems-level computational approach to analyze taxonomically diverse plant sequence data, we identified 31 distinct Pro-rich TRP classes targeted for secretion. This analysis expands upon the known phylogenetic diversity of extensins, the most widely studied class of wall structural proteins, and demonstrates that extensins evolved before plant vascularization. Our results also show that most Pro-rich TRP classes have unexpectedly restricted evolutionary distributions, revealing considerable differences in plant secretome signatures that define unexplored diversity

Dopamine neurons modulate neural encoding and expression of depression-related behaviour

Major depression is characterized by diverse debilitating symptoms that include hopelessness and anhedonia1. Dopamine neurons involved in reward and motivation are among many neural populations that have been hypothesized to be relevant, and certain antidepressant treatments, including medications and brain stimulation therapies, can influence the complex dopamine system. Until now it has not been possible to test this hypothesis directly, even in animal models, as existing therapeutic interventions are unable to specifically target dopamine neurons. Here we investigated directly the causal contributions of defined dopamine neurons to multidimensional depression-like phenotypes induced by chronic mild stress, by integrating behavioural, pharmacological, optogenetic and electrophysiological methods in freely moving rodents. We found that bidirectional control (inhibition or excitation) of specified midbrain dopamine neurons immediately and bidirectionally modulates (induces or relieves) multiple independent depression symptoms caused by chronic stress. By probing the circuit implementation of these effects, we observed that optogenetic recruitment of these dopamine neurons potently alters the neural encoding of depression-related behaviours in the downstream nucleus accumbens of freely moving rodents, suggesting that processes affecting depression symptoms may involve alterations in the neural encoding of action in limbic circuitry

Neuronal dysfunction and disconnection of cortical hubs in non-demented subjects with elevated amyloid burden

Disruption of functional connectivity between brain regions may represent an early functional consequence of β-amyloid pathology prior to clinical Alzheimer's disease. We aimed to investigate if non-demented older individuals with increased amyloid burden demonstrate disruptions of functional whole-brain connectivity in cortical hubs (brain regions typically highly connected to multiple other brain areas) and if these disruptions are associated with neuronal dysfunction as measured with fluorodeoxyglucose-positron emission tomography. In healthy subjects without cognitive symptoms and patients with mild cognitive impairment, we used positron emission tomography to assess amyloid burden and cerebral glucose metabolism, structural magnetic resonance imaging to quantify atrophy and novel resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging processing methods to calculate whole-brain connectivity. Significant disruptions of whole-brain connectivity were found in amyloid-positive patients with mild cognitive impairment in typical cortical hubs (posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus), strongly overlapping with regional hypometabolism. Subtle connectivity disruptions and hypometabolism were already present in amyloid-positive asymptomatic subjects. Voxel-based morphometry measures indicate that these findings were not solely a consequence of regional atrophy. Whole-brain connectivity values and metabolism showed a positive correlation with each other and a negative correlation with amyloid burden. These results indicate that disruption of functional connectivity and hypometabolism may represent early functional consequences of emerging molecular Alzheimer's disease pathology, evolving prior to clinical onset of dementia. The spatial overlap between hypometabolism and disruption of connectivity in cortical hubs points to a particular susceptibility of these regions to early Alzheimer's-type neurodegeneration and may reflect a link between synaptic dysfunction and functional disconnection