Rumors Are Flying

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Wheel of Fortune

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When the Lights Go on Again

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A Girl! A Girl! (Zoom Ba Di Alli Nella)

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These Things I Offer You

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Large reorganizations in butterfly communities during an extreme weather event

Drought events are projected to increase in frequency and magnitude, which may alter the composition of ecological communities. Using a functional community metric that describes abundance, life history traits and conservation status, based upon Grime’s CSR (Competitive-Stress tolerant-Ruderal)¬ scheme, we investigated how British butterfly communities changed during an extreme drought in 1995. Throughout Britain, the total abundance of these insects had a significant tendency to increase, accompanied by substantial changes in community composition, particularly in more northerly, wetter sites. Communities tended to shift away from specialist, vulnerable species, and towards generalist, widespread species and, in the year following, communities had yet to return to equilibrium. Importantly, heterogeneity in surrounding landscapes mediated community responses to the drought event. Contrary to expectation, however, community shifts were more extreme in areas of greater topographic diversity, whilst land-cover diversity buffered community changes and limited declines in vulnerable specialist butterflies

Relationship between sedentary behavior and depression: a mediation analysis of influential factors across the lifespan among 42,469 people in low- and middle-income countries

Background: Sedentary behavior (SB) is associated with diabetes, cardiovascular disease and low mood. There is a paucity of multi-national research investigating SB and depression, particularly among low- and middle-income countries. This study investigated the association between SB and depression, and factors which influence this. Methods: Cross-sectional data were analyzed from the World Health Organization's Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health. Depression was based on the Composite International Diagnostic Interview. The association between depression and SB (self-report) was estimated by multivariable linear and logistic regression analyses. Mediation analysis was used to identify influential factors. Results: A total of 42,469 individuals (50.1% female, mean 43.8 years) were included. People with depression spent 25.6 (95%CI8.5-42.7) more daily minutes in SB than non-depressed participants. This discrepancy was most notable in adults aged ≥65 y (35.6 minutes in those with depression). Overall, adjusting for socio-demographics and country, depression was associated with a 1.94 (95%CI1.31-2.85) times higher odds for high SB (i.e., ≥8 h/day). The largest proportion of the SB-depression relationship was explained by mobility limitations (49.9%), followed by impairments in sleep/energy (43.4%), pain/discomfort (31.1%), anxiety (30.0%), disability (25.6%), cognition (16.1%), and problems with vision (11.0%). Other health behaviors (physical activity, alcohol consumption, smoking), body mass index, and social cohesion did not influence the SB-depression relationship. Conclusion: People with depression are at increased risk of engaging in high levels of SB. This first multi-national study offers potentially valuable insight for a number of hypotheses which may influence this relationship, although testing with longitudinal studies is needed

Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

How important can it be?

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