The Overlap of Diabetes and Osteoarthritis in American Populations.

Diabetes mellitus, a condition in which the body\u27s ability to produce insulin is impaired, and osteoarthritis (OA), a painful degeneration of joint cartilage, are both serious conditions that affect millions of people in the United States (U.S.). Osteoarthritis is a chronic degenerative condition of the joint cartilage, affecting mainly the older population. The purpose of this paper is to find a connection, if any, between diabetes and osteoarthritis and if either condition can predispose an individual to the other. Not only can this review help to explain the co-existence of these two diseases, but it can also be used to look into a cure for patients in the future. After preliminary searches were done on PubMed, results were narrowed using specific keywords and similar risk factors among the two diseases. It was found that these two conditions are actually interrelated due to oxidative stress and pro-inflammatory cytokines. Seeing the high risk of developing one of these conditions and that obesity, one of the biggest risk factors for both diabetes and osteoarthritis, is at an all-time high in this country, a possible connection between the two of these diseases is very prevalent to look into. This information can be used to help correlate not only a better-targeted treatment but also lead to future research into why obesity is one of the biggest risk factors for both conditions

Report of the panel on the land surface: Process of change, section 5

The panel defined three main areas of study that are central to the Solid Earth Science (SES) program: climate interactions with the Earth's surface, tectonism as it affects the Earth's surface and climate, and human activities that modify the Earth's surface. Four foci of research are envisioned: process studies with an emphasis on modern processes in transitional areas; integrated studies with an emphasis on long term continental climate change; climate-tectonic interactions; and studies of human activities that modify the Earth's surface, with an emphasis on soil degradation. The panel concluded that there is a clear requirement for global coverage by high resolution stereoscopic images and a pressing need for global topographic data in support of studies of the land surface

Repositioning of special schools within a specialist, personalised educational marketplace - the need for a representative principle

This paper considers how notions of inclusive education as defined in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Salamanca Agreement (1994) have become dissipated, and can be developed and reframed to encourage their progress. It analyses the discourse within a range of academic, legal and media texts, exploring how this dissipation has taken place within the UK. Using data from 78 specialist school websites it contextualises this change in the use of the terms and ideas of inclusion with the rise of two other constructs, the 'specialist school' and 'personalisation'. It identifies the need for a precisely defined representative principle to theorise the type of school which inclusion aims to achieve, which cannot be subsumed by segregated providers. It suggests that this principle should not focus on the individual, but draw upon a liberal/democratic view of social justice, underlining inclusive education's role in removing social barriers that prevent equity, access and participation for all

IVOA Recommendation: Sky Event Reporting Metadata Version 2.0

VOEvent defines the content and meaning of a standard information packet for representing, transmitting, publishing and archiving information about a transient celestial event, with the implication that timely follow-up is of interest. The objective is to motivate the observation of targets-of-opportunity, to drive robotic telescopes, to trigger archive searches, and to alert the community. VOEvent is focused on the reporting of photon events, but events mediated by disparate phenomena such as neutrinos, gravitational waves, and solar or atmospheric particle bursts may also be reported. Structured data is used, rather than natural language, so that automated systems can effectively interpret VOEvent packets. Each packet may contain zero or more of the "who, what, where, when & how" of a detected event, but in addition, may contain a hypothesis (a "why") regarding the nature of the underlying physical cause of the event. Citations to previous VOEvents may be used to place each event in its correct context. Proper curation is encouraged throughout each event's life cycle from discovery through successive follow-ups. VOEvent packets gain persistent identifiers and are typically stored in databases reached via registries. VOEvent packets may therefore reference other packets in various ways. Packets are encouraged to be small and to be processed quickly. This standard does not define a transport layer or the design of clients, repositories, publishers or brokers; it does not cover policy issues such as who can publish, who can build a registry of events, who can subscribe to a particular registry, nor the intellectual property issues

Pulse Width Evolution of Late Time X-rays Flares in GRBs: Evidence For Internal Shocks

We study the duration and variability of late time X-ray flares following gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) observed by the narrow field X-ray telescope (XRT) aboard the {\it Swift} spacecraft. These flares are thought to be indicative of late time activity by the central engine that powers the GRB and produced by means similar to those which produce the prompt emission. We use a non-parametric procedure to study the overall temporal properties of the flares and a structure function analysis to look for an evolution of the fundamental variability time-scale between the prompt and late time emission. We find a strong correlation in 28 individual x-ray flares in 18 separate GRBs between the flare duration and their time of peak flux since the GRB trigger. We also find a qualitative trend of decreasing variability as a function of time since trigger, with a characteristic minimum variability timescale $\Delta t/t=0.1$ for most flares. We interpret these results as evidence of internal shocks at collision radii that are larger than those that produced the prompt emission. Contemporaneous detections of high energy emission by GLAST could be a crucial test in determining if indeed these X-ray flares originate as internal shocks behind the afterglow, as any X-ray emission originating from behind the afterglow is expected to undergo inverse Compton scattering as it passes through the external shock.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Submitted to ApJ. This work expands upon and formalizes our previous report at the October 2006 AAS HEAD Meeting of the discovery of pulse width evolutio

Why high-error-rate random mutagenesis libraries are enriched in functional and improved proteins

Recently, several groups have used error-prone polymerase chain reactions to construct mutant libraries containing up to 27 nucleotide mutations per gene on average, and reported a striking observation: although retention of protein function initially declines exponentially with mutations as has previously been observed, orders of magnitude more proteins remain viable at the highest mutation rates than this trend would predict. Mutant proteins having improved or novel activity were isolated disproportionately from these heavily mutated libraries, leading to the suggestion that distant regions of sequence space are enriched in useful cooperative mutations and that optimal mutagenesis should target these regions. If true, these claims have profound implications for laboratory evolution and for evolutionary theory. Here, we demonstrate that properties of the polymerase chain reaction can explain these results and, consequently, that average protein viability indeed decreases exponentially with mutational distance at all error rates. We show that high-error-rate mutagenesis may be useful in certain cases, though for very different reasons than originally proposed, and that optimal mutation rates are inherently protocol-dependent. Our results allow optimal mutation rates to be found given mutagenesis conditions and a protein of known mutational robustness.Comment: Optimality results improved. 26 pages, 4 figures, 3 table