Time mating guinea pigs by monitoring changes to the vaginal membrane throughout the estrus cycle and with ultrasound confirmation

One of the greatest challenges to the development and implementation of pregnancy therapeutics is the ability to rigorously test treatments in clinically relevant animal models. Guinea pigs offer a unique advantage in studying the placenta, fetal development, and reproductive health as they have similar developmental milestones to humans, both throughout gestation and following birth. Tracking the guinea pig estrus cycle is imperative to ensuring appropriately timed mating and can be performed by monitoring the guinea pig vaginal membrane. Here, we describe a methodology to efficiently and accurately time mate guinea pigs, and provide a picture representation of changes to the guinea pig vaginal membrane throughout the estrus cycle. Utilization of this monitoring enabled a 100% pregnancy success rate on the first mating attempt in a cohort of five guinea pigs. This approach, along with early pregnancy ultrasounds as a secondary method to confirm pregnancy, offers a reliable approach to timed mating in the guinea pig

The Grizzly, March 22, 1994

Public Not Pleased with Health Care Proposal • Tax-Exempt Status Challenged • J-Board Issues Punishment for Illegal Pledging Activity • U.S.G.A. Minutes • Letter to the Senior Class • Students Respond to Editor\u27s View on Pledging • Editor Clarifies Position • Awareness Needed • Investigative Team Responds • The Madness is Here: Update on the NCAA Tournament • Track & Field to Begin Seasonhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1333/thumbnail.jp

Networking - A Statistical Physics Perspective

Efficient networking has a substantial economic and societal impact in a broad range of areas including transportation systems, wired and wireless communications and a range of Internet applications. As transportation and communication networks become increasingly more complex, the ever increasing demand for congestion control, higher traffic capacity, quality of service, robustness and reduced energy consumption require new tools and methods to meet these conflicting requirements. The new methodology should serve for gaining better understanding of the properties of networking systems at the macroscopic level, as well as for the development of new principled optimization and management algorithms at the microscopic level. Methods of statistical physics seem best placed to provide new approaches as they have been developed specifically to deal with non-linear large scale systems. This paper aims at presenting an overview of tools and methods that have been developed within the statistical physics community and that can be readily applied to address the emerging problems in networking. These include diffusion processes, methods from disordered systems and polymer physics, probabilistic inference, which have direct relevance to network routing, file and frequency distribution, the exploration of network structures and vulnerability, and various other practical networking applications.Comment: (Review article) 71 pages, 14 figure

Association between 24-Hour Urinary Cadmium and Pulmonary Function among Community-Exposed Men: The VA Normative Aging Study

Background: High levels of cadmium exposure are known to cause emphysema in occupationally exposed workers, but little has been reported to date on the association between chronic environmental cadmium exposure and pulmonary function. Objective: In this study we examined the association between pulmonary function and cadmium body burden in a subcohort of the Normative Aging Study, a community-based study of aging. Methods: We examined 96 men who had cadmium measured in single 24-hr urinary specimens collected in 1994–1995 and who had one to three tests of pulmonary function between 1994 and 2002 (a total of 222 observations). We used mixed-effect models to predict pulmonary function based on individual 24-hr urinary cadmium output, adjusted for age, height, time elapsed from the baseline, and smoking status. We assessed effect modification by smoking status. Results: Among all subjects, a single log-unit increase in baseline urinary cadmium was inversely associated with forced expiratory volume in 1 sec (FEV1) percent predicted [β = −7.56%; 95% confidence interval (CI) −13.59% to −1.53%]; forced vital capacity (FVC) percent predicted (β = −2.70%; 95% CI −7.39% to 1.99%), and FEV1/FVC ratio (β = −4.13%; 95% CI −7.61% to −0.66%). In models including an interaction between urinary cadmium and smoking status, there was a graded, statistically significant reduction in FEV1/FVC ratio across smoking status in association with urinary cadmium. Conclusions: This study suggests that chronic cadmium exposure is associated with reduced pulmonary function, and cigarette smoking modifies this association. These results should be interpreted with caution because the sample size is small, and further studies are needed to confirm our findings