Status febrilis mit Bewusstlosigkeit

Zusammenfassung: Eine zerebrale Beteiligung bei Malaria mit Plasmodium vivax ist ungewöhnlich. Diese schwere Form der Malaria ist üblicherweise durch Plasmodium falciparum bedingt. Wir berichten über eine 18-jährige Patientin aus Pakistan mit langjähriger intermittierender Fieberanamnese, welche 4Monate nach Einreise in die Schweiz erstmals an einer zerebralen Vivax-Malaria erkrankt. Die eindrückliche neurologische Symptomatik mit Amaurosis und Bewusstseinsstörung bildete sich in diesem Fall unter Therapie in wenigen Tagen zurück. Jedoch sind Todesfälle bei zerebraler Malaria durch Plasmodium vivax beschriebe

Interdisciplinary research in Rajasthan, India: exploring the role of culture and art to support rural development and water management

This paper examines the role of art and culture in supporting rural development in the context of critical water challenges. It focuses on an interdisciplinary network and research programme conducted in 2018 with the village of Jhakhoda, in Rajasthan, India. The village has experienced years of declining water quality and has recently turned to rainwater harvesting and other conservation measures as a means to address water challenges. The research team sought to support local NGO and village efforts through creative, regionally specific forms of cultural activity. Through our project, we found that arts approaches can contribute to changes in the way people understand water and environmental challenges and can play a significant role in working towards sustainable water futures

Competitiveness, gender and handedness

We conduct an intercultural experiment in three locations on three different continents to elicit competitiveness and study whether individual differences in competitiveness are related to handedness. Being a “lefty” (i.e., having either a dominant left hand or a dominant left foot) is associated with neurological differences which are determined prenatally, and can therefore be seen as a proxy for innate differences. In large-scale data with incentivized choices from 3664 participants from India, Norway and Tanzania, we find a significant gender gap in competitiveness in all cultures. However, we find inconsistent results when comparing the competitiveness of lefties and righties. In north-east India we find that lefties of both genders are significantly more competitive than righties. In Norway we find that lefty men are more competitive than any other group, but women's competitiveness is not related to handedness. In Tanzania, we find no relationship between handedness and the competitiveness of either gender. The merged data show weak evidence of a positive correlation between being a lefty and competitiveness for men, but no such evidence for women. Thus, our data provide suggestive but not robust evidence that individual and gender differences in competitiveness are partially determined by innate factors, where innate factors are proxied by the complex, prenatally shaped trait of handedness.</p

Uncertainty-principle noise in vacuum-tunneling transducers

The fundamental sources of noise in a vacuum-tunneling probe used as an electromechanical transducer to monitor the location of a test mass are examined using a first-quantization formalism. We show that a tunneling transducer enforces the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for the position and momentum of a test mass monitored by the transducer through the presence of two sources of noise: the shot noise of the tunneling current and the momentum fluctuations transferred by the tunneling electrons to the test mass. We analyze a number of cases including symmetric and asymmetric rectangular potential barriers and a barrier in which there is a constant electric field. Practical configurations for reaching the quantum limit in measurements of the position of macroscopic bodies with such a class of transducers are studied

All-Sky spectrally matched UBVRI-ZY and u'g'r'i'z' magnitudes for stars in the Tycho2 catalog

We present fitted UBVRI-ZY and u'g'r'i'z' magnitudes, spectral types and distances for 2.4M stars, derived from synthetic photometry of a library spectrum that best matches the Tycho2 BtVt, NOMAD Rn and 2MASS JHK_{2/S} catalog magnitudes. We present similarly synthesized multi-filter magnitudes, types and distances for 4.8M stars with 2MASS and SDSS photometry to g<16 within the Sloan survey region, for Landolt and Sloan primary standards, and for Sloan Northern (PT) and Southern secondary standards. The synthetic magnitude zeropoints for BtVt, UBVRI, ZvYv, JHK_{2/S}, JHK_{MKO}, Stromgren uvby, Sloan u'g'r'i'z' and ugriz are calibrated on 20 calspec spectrophotometric standards. The UBVRI and ugriz zeropoints have dispersions of 1--3%, for standards covering a range of color from -0.3 < V-I < 4.6; those for other filters are in the range 2--5%. The spectrally matched fits to Tycho2 stars provide estimated 1-sigma errors per star of ~0.2, 0.15, 0.12, 0.10 and 0.08 mags respectively in either UBVRI or u'g'r'i'z'; those for at least 70% of the SDSS survey region to g<16 have estimated 1-sigma errors per star of ~0.2, 0.06, 0.04, 0.04, 0.05 in u'g'r'i'z' or UBVRI. The density of Tycho2 stars, averaging about 60 stars per square degree, provides sufficient stars to enable automatic flux calibrations for most digital images with fields of view of 0.5 degree or more. Using several such standards per field, automatic flux calibration can be achieved to a few percent in any filter, at any airmass, in most workable observing conditions, to facilitate inter-comparison of data from different sites, telescopes and instruments.Comment: 36 pages, 30 figures, 3 printed tables, several electronic tables, accepted PASP Dec 201

Breast cancer: Pretreatment drug resistance parameters (GSH-system, ATase, P-glycoprotein) in tumor tissue and their correlation with clinical and prognostic characteristics

Background: The identification of new factors predicting relapse, outcome and response to systemic therapy in breast cancer is warranted. The measurement of biological markers such as drug resistance parameters (DRPs), which are part of the phenotype of malignant cells and contribute to resistance to anti-cancer drugs may be a possibility, which may ultimately lead to improvement of therapeutic results. Patients and methods: The level of glutathione (GSH), activities of glutathione-S-transferase (GST), glutathione-peroxidase (GPx), 06-alkylguanine-DNA-alkyltransferase (ATase), and P-glycoprotein (PGP) were measured in tumor and adjacent tumor free tissue samples from 89 consecutive, untreated females with breast cancer and correlated with clinical and prognostic factors. Early breast cancer (EBC) was diagnosed in 56 patients, 22 patients had locally advanced (LABC) and 11 patients metastatic breast cancer. Results: All DRPs showed significantly higher expression in tumor than in tumor free tissues. GPx was positively correlated with GST (r = 0.3, P = 0.0048) and with GSH (r = 0.5, P = 0.0001) in tumor as well as in normal tissue. GST activity was significantly higher in EBC than in LABC or metastatic breast cancer (P = 0.02). GSH level was significantly higher in grade I than in grade 2 or grade 3 tumors (P = 0.01). When clinical characteristics were related to the level of DRP, ‘high' GSH was associated with age >60 years (P = 0.01) in EBC, and with grade 1-2 tumors (P = 0.05) in LABC. No differences in OS were apparent between groups of ‘high' and ‘low' DRP-expression. However, the four-year estimated disease-free survival of EBC tended to be higher in patients with ‘high' GST (P = 0.10) and of LABC in patients with ‘high' GPx levels (P = 0.06). Conclusion: We conclude that ‘high' levels of DRP in tumor tissue of breast cancer patients are part of the initial phenotype of the malignant cells. Due to its high prevalence (83% in EBC, 100% in primarily metastatic breast cancer), PGP did not add to prognostic information. High levels of GSH, GST and and GPx were associated with favorable clinical characteristics and good prognosis, whereas low levels of GSH and GST activity were associated with more aggressive or more advanced diseas

The age of the oldest globular clusters

The age of three of the oldest clusters -- M15, M68, M92 -- has been redetermined. We use the latest EOS and opacity data available for calculating both isochrones and zero age horizontal branches and employ the brightness difference between turn-off and horizontal branch to determine the cluster age. Our best ages for all three clusters are about 13 Gyr, and even smaller ages are possible. Our results help to reconcile cluster ages with recent results on the age of the universe determined from the Hubble constant.Comment: submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letter

Stellar pollution and [Fe/H] in the Hyades

The Hyades open cluster presents a unique laboratory for planet formation and stellar pollution studies because all of the stars have essentially the same age and were born from the same cloud of gas. Furthermore, with an age of roughly 650 Myr most of the intermediate and low mass stars are on the main sequence. Given these assumptions, the accretion of metal rich material onto the surface of a star during and shortly after the formation of planetary systems should be evident via the enhanced metallicity of the star. Building on previous work, stellar evolution models which include the effects of stellar pollution are applied to the Hyades. The results of several Monte Carlo simulations, in which the amount of accreted material is drawn at random from a Gaussian distribution with standard deviation equal to half the mean, are presented. An effective temperature-[Fe/H] relation is produced and compared to recent observations. The theoretical predictions presented in this letter will be useful in future searches for evidence of stellar pollution due to planet formation. It is concluded that stellar pollution effects at the mean level of >=2 Earth masses of iron are ruled out by current observational data.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, AASTeX, accepted to the ApJ

Different effects of sevoflurane, desflurane, and isoflurane on early and late left ventricular diastolic function in young healthy adults†

Background Knowledge on the effects of volatile anaesthetics on left ventricular (LV) diastolic function in humans in vivo is limited. We tested the hypothesis that sevoflurane, desflurane, and isoflurane do not impair LV diastolic function in young healthy humans. Methods Sixty otherwise healthy subjects (aged 18-48 yr) undergoing minor procedures under general anaesthesia were studied. After randomization for the anaesthetic, transthoracic echocardiographic examinations were performed at baseline and under anaesthesia with 1 minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) of the volatile anaesthetics during spontaneous breathing and intermittent positive pressure ventilation (IPPV). Peak early (E′) and late (A′) diastolic velocities of the mitral annulus were studied as the main echocardiographic indicators of diastolic function. Results During anaesthesia with 1 MAC under spontaneous breathing, E′ increased with desflurane (P<0.001), was not significantly different with isoflurane (P=0.030), and decreased with sevoflurane (P=0.006). During IPPV, E′ was similar to baseline with desflurane (P=0.550), insignificantly decreased with isoflurane (P=0.029), and decreased with the sevoflurane group (P<0.001). In contrast, A′ was similarly reduced in all groups during spontaneous breathing without further changes during IPPV. Haemodynamic changes were comparable in all study groups. Conclusions The findings of this in vivo study indicate that desflurane and isoflurane, and most likely sevoflurane, have no relevant direct negative effect on early diastolic relaxation in young healthy humans. In contrast, all three volatile anaesthetics appear to impair late diastolic LV filling during atrial contraction. Trial Registration #: NCT002445

Disentangling the Galaxy at low Galactic latitudes

We have used the field stars from the open cluster survey BOCCE, to study three low-latitude fields imaged with the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT), with the aim of better understanding the Galactic structure in those directions. Due to the deep and accurate photometry in these fields, they provide a powerful discriminant among Galactic structure models. In the present paper we discuss if a canonical star count model, expressed in terms of thin and thick disc radial scales, thick disc normalization and reddening distribution, can explain the observed CMDs. Disc and thick disc are described with double exponentials, the spheroid is represented with a De Vaucouleurs density law. In order to assess the fit quality of a particular set of parameters, the colour distribution and luminosity function of synthetic photometry is compared to that of target stars selected from the blue sequence of the observed colour-magnitude diagrams. Through a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test we find that the classical decomposition halo-thin/thick disc is sufficient to reproduce the observations--no additional population is strictly necessary. In terms of solutions common to all three fields, we have found a thick disc scale length that is equal to (or slightly longer than) the thin disc scale.Comment: Accepted for publication on MNRA