Postprandial effects of resistant starch corn porridges on blood glucose and satiety responses in non-overweight and overweight adults

Background: Diabetes and obesity are major health concerns in the United States. There are several lifestyle factors that contribute to the development of these conditions and diet plays a large role in both etiology and treatment of these diseases. Poor carbohydrate quality and excess caloric intake can contribute to obesity and the development of insulin resistance, eventually progressing into Type 2 diabetes (DM2) and its associated co-morbidities. Resistant starch (RS), a type of dietary fiber, is thought to be a tool for prevention and treatment of obesity and DM2 due to its slow release of glucose post prandially, low energy density, and colonic health benefits from fermentation in the colon. Methods: Twenty healthy non-overweight/obese weight (n=10; BMI 18.5-24.9 kg/m2) and overweight/obese (n=10; BMI \u3e 25.0 kg/m2) consumed, in random order, 3 breakfast corn porridges providing 25 g starch derived from corn lines varying in levels of resistant starch. The porridges contained 3.1%, 8.4% and 28.9% RS of total starch. Post-prandial blood glucose was measured using a glucometer at baseline, 15, 30, 60 and 120 minutes. Postprandial satiety using a 100 mm Visual Analog Scales (VAS) was measured at baseline, 30, 60, 120, and 180 minutes. Subjects recorded 24 h food intake and gastrointestinal symptoms upon completion of each visit. Results: There were no differences in post-prandial blood glucose, satiety, or food intake responses between non-overweight/obese and overweight/obese participants with treatments. After data from the 2 weight groups were combined, mean plasma glucose at peak time-point 30 minutes was significantly lower in subjects consuming 28.9% RS treatment compared to the other treatments. Baseline-adjusted plasma glucose AUC was also significantly lower in subjects consuming the 28.9% RS porridge compared to the other porridges. There were no differences in subjective satiety or 24-hour food intake. Minimal gastrointestinal symptoms were experienced in the 24 hours following all 3 test meals. Conclusions: RS substitution improved acute and peak post-prandial glucose responses, but higher doses of RS (greater than approximately 30% or more of total starch, the maximum provided in our study) may be needed to increase satiety and decrease food-intake over 24 h after ingesting the RS

The use and re-use of unsustainable groundwater for irrigation: A global budget

Depletion of groundwater aquifers across the globe has become a significant concern, as groundwater is an important and often unsustainable source of irrigation water. Simultaneously, the field of water resource management has seen a lively debate over the concepts and metrics used to assess the downstream re-use of agricultural runoff, with most studies focusing on surface water balances. Here, we bring these two lines of research together, recognizing that depletion of aquifers leads to large amounts of groundwater entering surface water storages and flows by way of agricultural runoff. While it is clear that groundwater users will be impacted by reductions in groundwater availability, there is a major gap in our understanding of potential impacts downstream of groundwater pumping locations. We find that the volume of unsustainable groundwater that is re-used for irrigation following runoff from agricultural systems is nearly as large as the volume initially extracted from reservoirs for irrigation. Basins in which the volume of irrigation water re-used is equal to or greater than the volume of water initially used (which is possible due to multiple re-use of the same water) contain 33 million hectares of irrigated land and are home to 1.3 billion people. Some studies have called for increasing irrigation efficiency as a solution to water shortages. We find that with 100% irrigation efficiency, global demand for unsustainable groundwater is reduced by 52%, but not eliminated. In many basins, increased irrigation efficiency leads to significantly decreased river low flows; increasing irrigation efficiency to 70% globally decreases total surface water supplies by backsim600 km3 yr−1. These findings illustrate that estimates of aquifer depletion alone underestimate the importance of unsustainable groundwater to sustaining surface water systems and irrigated agriculture

A Survey of Data and Encodings in Word Clouds

Word clouds are an increasingly popular means of presenting statistical summaries of document collections, appearing frequently in digital humanities literature, newspaper articles, and social media. Despite their ubiquity and intuitive appeal, our ability to read such visualizations accurately is not yet fully understood. Past work has shown that readers perform poorly at certain tasks with word clouds, and that perceptual biases can affect their interpretation. To better understand the potential impacts of these biases, we present a survey of word cloud usage. Drawing from a corpus of literature from the fields of digital humanities, data visualization, and journalism, we record what data encodings are most commonly used (e.g., font size, position, etc.), what data is being presented, and what tasks are meant to be supported. We offer design recommendations given the most common tasks and biases, and point to future work to answer standing questions

Epidemiology and potential preventative measures for viral infections in children with malignancy and those undergoing hematopoietic cell transplantation.

In pediatric patients with malignancy and those receiving hematopoietic stem cell transplants, bacterial and fungal infections have been the focus of fever and neutropenia episodes for decades. However, improved diagnostic capabilities have revealed viral pathogens as a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. Because of limited effective antiviral therapies, prevention of viral infections is paramount. Pre-exposure and post-exposure prophylaxis and antiviral suppressive therapeutic approaches are reviewed. Additionally, infection control practices specific to this patient population are discussed. A comprehensive approach utilizing each of these can be effective at reducing the negative impact of viral infections

Life-stage specific environments in a cichlid fish: implications for inducible maternal effects

Through environmentally induced maternal effects females may fine-tune their offspring's phenotype to the conditions offspring will encounter after birth. If juvenile and adult ecologies differ, the conditions mothers experienced as juveniles may better predict their offspring's environment than the adult females' conditions. Maternal effects induced by the environment experienced by females during their early ontogeny should evolve when three ecological conditions are met: (1) Adult ecology does not predict the postnatal environmental conditions of offspring; (2) Environmental conditions for juveniles are correlated across successive generations; and (3) Juveniles occasionally settle in conditions that differ from the juvenile habitat of their mothers. By combining size-structured population counts, ecological surveys and a genetic analysis of population structure we provide evidence that all three conditions hold for Simochromis pleurospilus, a cichlid fish in which mothers adjust offspring quality to their own juvenile ecology. In particular we show (1) that the spatial niches and the habitat quality differ between juveniles and adults, and we provide genetic evidence (2) that usually fish of successive generations grow up in similar habitats, and (3) that occasional dispersal in populations with a different habitat quality is likely to occur. As adults of many species cannot predict their offspring's environment from ambient cues, life-stage specific maternal effects are likely to be common in animals. It will therefore be necessary to incorporate parental ontogeny in the study of parental effects when juveniles and adults inhabit different environment

Enabling Hybrid Architectures and Mesh Network Topologies to Support the Global Multi-Domain Community

The turn of the new decade also represents the dawn of a new shift in domain operations. Concepts such as “Space Dial Tone,” reliable global access to internet, on-demand Earth observation, and remote sensing, while still not fully realized, are no longer purely imaginative. These concepts are in high demand and are coupled with the goals of Global Multi-Domain Operations (MDO). Small satellites (smallsats) have emerged as functionally reliable platforms, driving the development of next-generation satellite constellations. To achieve the potential of tomorrow’s technology, these constellations must embrace space mission architectures based on interoperable, open-system constructs such as hybrid architectures and mesh network topologies. This paper presents the full timeline for realization of multi-node, disparate (sovereign, coalition, commercial, etc.) multi-domain (Space, Air, Maritime, Land, and Cyber) systems to support future space mission architectures. It identifies and discusses the underlying technologies needed to bring new “system-of-systems” concepts to operational capability. Technologies to be discussed include: message-agnostic physical/protocol “Bridges”; Machine-to-Machine (M2M) data sharing enabled through Electronic Data Sheet (EDS) standards; and, new concepts related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled human decision making. Tying these technologies together effectively will positively impact the smallsat market and fundamentally change mission architectures in the near future

Achieving sustainable irrigation water withdrawals: global impacts on food security and land use

Unsustainable water use challenges the capacity of water resources to ensure food security and continued growth of the economy. Adaptation policies targeting future water security can easily overlook its interaction with other sustainability metrics and unanticipated local responses to the larger-scale policy interventions. Using a global partial equilibrium grid-resolving model SIMPLE-G, and coupling it with the global Water Balance Model, we simulate the consequences of reducing unsustainable irrigation for food security, land use change, and terrestrial carbon. A variety of future (2050) scenarios are considered that interact irrigation productivity with two policy interventions— inter-basin water transfers and international commodity market integration. We find that pursuing sustainable irrigation may erode other development and environmental goals due to higher food prices and cropland expansion. This results in over 800 000 more undernourished people and 0.87 GtC additional emissions. Faster total factor productivity growth in irrigated sectors will encourage more aggressive irrigation water use in the basins where irrigation vulnerability is expected to be reduced by inter-basin water transfer. By allowing for a systematic comparison of these alternative adaptations to future irrigation vulnerability, the global gridded modeling approach offers unique insights into the multiscale nature of the water scarcity challenge