Frontostriatal Maturation Predicts Cognitive Control Failure to Appetitive Cues in Adolescents

Adolescent risk-taking is a public health issue that increases the odds of poor lifetime outcomes. One factor thought to influence adolescents' propensity for risk-taking is an enhanced sensitivity to appetitive cues, relative to an immature capacity to exert sufficient cognitive control. We tested this hypothesis by characterizing interactions among ventral striatal, dorsal striatal, and prefrontal cortical regions with varying appetitive load using fMRI scanning. Child, teen, and adult participants performed a go/no-go task with appetitive (happy faces) and neutral cues (calm faces). Impulse control to neutral cues showed linear improvement with age, whereas teens showed a nonlinear reduction in impulse control to appetitive cues. This performance decrement in teens was paralleled by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum. Prefrontal cortical recruitment correlated with overall accuracy and showed a linear response with age for no-go versus go trials. Connectivity analyses identified a ventral frontostriatal circuit including the inferior frontal gyrus and dorsal striatum during no-go versus go trials. Examining recruitment developmentally showed that teens had greater between-subject ventral-dorsal striatal coactivation relative to children and adults for happy no-go versus go trials. These findings implicate exaggerated ventral striatal representation of appetitive cues in adolescents relative to an intermediary cognitive control response. Connectivity and coactivity data suggest these systems communicate at the level of the dorsal striatum differentially across development. Biased responding in this system is one possible mechanism underlying heightened risk-taking during adolescence

Correlation between Subjective Nasal Patency and Intranasal Airflow Distribution

Objectives (1) Analyze the relationship between intranasal airflow distribution and subjective nasal patency in healthy and nasal airway obstruction (NAO) cohorts using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). (2) Determine whether intranasal airflow distribution is an important objective measure of airflow sensation that should be considered in future NAO virtual surgery planning. Study Design Cross-sectional. Setting Academic tertiary medical center and academic dental clinic. Subjects and Methods Three-dimensional models of nasal anatomy were created based on computed tomography scans of 15 patients with NAO and 15 healthy subjects and used to run CFD simulations of nasal airflow and mucosal cooling. Subjective nasal patency was quantified with a visual analog scale (VAS) and the Nasal Obstruction Symptom Evaluation (NOSE). Regional distribution of nasal airflow (inferior, middle, and superior) was quantified in coronal cross sections in the narrowest nasal cavity. The Pearson correlation coefficient was used to quantify the correlation between subjective scores and regional airflows. Results Healthy subjects had significantly higher middle airflow than patients with NAO. Subjective nasal patency had no correlation with inferior and superior airflows but a high correlation with middle airflow (|r| = 0.64 and |r| = 0.76 for VAS and NOSE, respectively). Anterior septal deviations tended to shift airflow inferiorly, reducing middle airflow and reducing mucosal cooling in some patients with NAO. Conclusion Reduced middle airflow correlates with the sensation of nasal obstruction, possibly due to a reduction in mucosal cooling in this region. Further research is needed to elucidate the role of intranasal airflow distribution in the sensation of nasal airflow

A Dual Read-Out Assay to Evaluate the Potency of Compounds Active against Mycobacterium tuberculosis

PMCID: PMC3617142This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

The Indian family on UK reality television: Convivial culture in salient contexts

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below, copyright 2012 @ the author.This article demonstrates how The Family (2009), a fly-on-the wall UK reality series about a British Indian family, facilitates both current public service broadcasting requirements and mass audience appeal. From a critical cultural studies perspective, the author examines the journalistic and viewer responses to the series where authenticity, universality, and comedy emerge as major themes. Textual analysis of the racialized screen representations also helps locate the series within the contexts of contested multiculturalism, genre developments in reality television and public service broadcasting. Paul Gilroy’s concept of convivial culture is used as a frame in understanding how meanings of the series are produced within a South Asian popular representational space. The author suggests that the social comedy taxonomy is a prerequisite for the making of this particular observational documentary. Further, the popular (comedic) mode of conviviality on which the series depends is both expedient and necessary within the various sociopolitical contexts outlined

Correlating the Energetics and Atomic Motions of the Metal-Insulator Transition of M1 Vanadium Dioxide

Materials that undergo reversible metal-insulator transitions are obvious candidates for new generations of devices. For such potential to be realised, the underlying microscopic mechanisms of such transitions must be fully determined. In this work we probe the correlation between the energy landscape and electronic structure of the metal-insulator transition of vanadium dioxide and the atomic motions occurring using first principles calculations and high resolution X-ray diffraction. Calculations find an energy barrier between the high and low temperature phases corresponding to contraction followed by expansion of the distances between vanadium atoms on neighbouring sub-lattices. X-ray diffraction reveals anisotropic strain broadening in the low temperature structure's crystal planes, however only for those with spacings affected by this compression/expansion. GW calculations reveal that traversing this barrier destabilises the bonding/anti-bonding splitting of the low temperature phase. This precise atomic description of the origin of the energy barrier separating the two structures will facilitate more precise control over the transition characteristics for new applications and devices.Comment: 11 Pages, 8 Figure

The Internal Ultraviolet-to-Optical Color Dispersion: Quantifying the Morphological K-Correction

We present a quantitative measure of the internal color dispersion within galaxies, which quantifies differences in morphology as a function of wavelength. We apply this statistic to a local galaxy sample with archival images at 1500 and 2500 Angstroms from the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, and ground-based B-band observations to investigate how the color dispersion relates to global galaxy properties. The intenal color dispersion generally correlates with transformations in galaxy morphology as a function of wavelength, i.e., it quantifies the morphological K-correction. Mid-type spiral galaxies exhibit the highest dispersion in their internal colors, which stems from differences in the bulge, disk, and spiral-arm components. Irregulars and late-type spirals show moderate internal color dispersion, which implies that young stars generally dominate the colors. Ellipticals, lenticulars, and early-type spirals generally have low or negligible internal color dispersion, which indicates that the stars contributing to the UV-to-optical emission have a very homogeneous distribution. We discuss the application of the internal color dispersion to high-redshift galaxies in deep, Hubble Space Telescope images. By simulating local galaxies at cosmological distances, many of the galaxies have luminosities that are sufficiently bright at rest--frame optical wavelengths to be detected within the limits of the currently deepest near-infrared surveys even with no evolution. Under assumptions that the luminosity and color evolution of the local galaxies conform with the measured values of high-redshift objects, we show that galaxies' intrinsic internal color dispersion remains measurable out to z ~ 3.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. 41 pages, 13 figures (3 color). Full resolution version (~8 Mb) available at http://mips.as.arizona.edu/~papovich/papovich_astroph.p

Academic performance & student engagement in level 1 physics undergraduates

At the beginning of academic year 2007-08, staff in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Glasgow started to implement a number of substantial changes to the administration of the level 1 physics undergraduate class. The main aims were to improve the academic performance and progression statistics. With this in mind, a comprehensive system of learning support was introduced, the main remit being the provision of an improved personal contact and academic monitoring and support strategy for all students at level 1. The effects of low engagement with compulsory continuous assessment components had already been observed to have a significant effect for students sitting in the middle of the grade curve. Analysis of data from the 2007-08 class showed that even some nominally high-achieving students achieved lowered grades due to the effects of low engagement. Nonetheless, academic and other support measures put in place during 2007-08 played a part in raising the passrate for the level 1 physics class by approximately 8% as well as raising the progression rate by approximately 10%.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Deep proteogenomics; high throughput gene validation by multidimensional liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry of proteins from the fungal wheat pathogen Stagonospora nodorum

BACKGROUND: Stagonospora nodorum, a fungal ascomycete in the class dothideomycetes, is a damaging pathogen of wheat. It is a model for necrotrophic fungi that cause necrotic symptoms via the interaction of multiple effector proteins with cultivar-specific receptors. A draft genome sequence and annotation was published in 2007. A second-pass gene prediction using a training set of 795 fully EST-supported genes predicted a total of 10762 version 2 nuclear-encoded genes, with an additional 5354 less reliable version 1 genes also retained. RESULTS: In this study, we subjected soluble mycelial proteins to proteolysis followed by 2D LC MALDI-MS/MS. Comparison of the detected peptides with the gene models validated 2134 genes. 62% of these genes (1324) were not supported by prior EST evidence. Of the 2134 validated genes, all but 188 were version 2 annotations. Statistical analysis of the validated gene models revealed a preponderance of cytoplasmic and nuclear localised proteins, and proteins with intracellularassociated GO terms. These statistical associations are consistent with the source of the peptides used in the study. Comparison with a 6-frame translation of the S. nodorum genome assembly confirmed 905 existing gene annotations (including 119 not previously confirmed) and provided evidence supporting 144 genes with coding exon frameshift modifications, 604 genes with extensions of coding exons into annotated introns or untranslated regions (UTRs), 3 new gene annotations which were supported by tblastn to NR, and 44 potential new genes residing within un-assembled regions of the genome. CONCLUSION: We conclude that 2D LC MALDI-MS/MS is a powerful, rapid and economical tool to aid in the annotation of fungal genomic assemblies