The Role of Osteopontin (OPN/SPP1) Haplotypes in the Susceptibility to Crohn's Disease

Osteopontin represents a multifunctional molecule playing a pivotal role in chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Its expression is increased in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The aim of our study was to analyze the association of osteopontin (OPN/SPP1) gene variants in a large cohort of IBD patients. Genomic DNA from 2819 Caucasian individuals (n = 841 patients with Crohn's disease (CD), n = 473 patients with ulcerative colitis (UC), and n = 1505 healthy unrelated controls) was analyzed for nine OPN SNPs (rs2728127, rs2853744, rs11730582, rs11739060, rs28357094, rs4754 = p.Asp80Asp, rs1126616 = p.Ala236Ala, rs1126772 and rs9138). Considering the important role of osteopontin in Th17-mediated diseases, we performed analysis for epistasis with IBD-associated IL23R variants and analyzed serum levels of the Th17 cytokine IL-22. For four OPN SNPs (rs4754, rs1126616, rs1126772 and rs9138), we observed significantly different distributions between male and female CD patients. rs4754 was protective in male CD patients (p = 0.0004, OR = 0.69). None of the other investigated OPN SNPs was associated with CD or UC susceptibility. However, several OPN haplotypes showed significant associations with CD susceptibility. The strongest association was found for a haplotype consisting of the 8 OPN SNPs rs2728127-rs2853744-rs11730582-rs11439060-rs28357094-rs112661-rs1126772-rs9138 (omnibus p-value = 2.07×10⁻⁸). Overall, the mean IL-22 secretion in the combined group of OPN minor allele carriers with CD was significantly lower than that of CD patients with OPN wildtype alleles (p = 3.66×10⁻⁵). There was evidence for weak epistasis between the OPN SNP rs28357094 with the IL23R SNP rs10489629 (p = 4.18×10⁻²) and between OPN SNP rs1126616 and IL23R SNP rs2201841 (p = 4.18×10⁻²) but none of these associations remained significant after Bonferroni correction. Our study identified OPN haplotypes as modifiers of CD susceptibility, while the combined effects of certain OPN variants may modulate IL-22 secretion

Current and emerging developments in subseasonal to decadal prediction

Weather and climate variations of subseasonal to decadal timescales can have enormous social, economic and environmental impacts, making skillful predictions on these timescales a valuable tool for decision makers. As such, there is a growing interest in the scientific, operational and applications communities in developing forecasts to improve our foreknowledge of extreme events. On subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) timescales, these include high-impact meteorological events such as tropical cyclones, extratropical storms, floods, droughts, and heat and cold waves. On seasonal to decadal (S2D) timescales, while the focus remains broadly similar (e.g., on precipitation, surface and upper ocean temperatures and their effects on the probabilities of high-impact meteorological events), understanding the roles of internal and externally-forced variability such as anthropogenic warming in forecasts also becomes important. The S2S and S2D communities share common scientific and technical challenges. These include forecast initialization and ensemble generation; initialization shock and drift; understanding the onset of model systematic errors; bias correct, calibration and forecast quality assessment; model resolution; atmosphere-ocean coupling; sources and expectations for predictability; and linking research, operational forecasting, and end user needs. In September 2018 a coordinated pair of international conferences, framed by the above challenges, was organized jointly by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the World Weather Research Prograame (WWRP). These conferences surveyed the state of S2S and S2D prediction, ongoing research, and future needs, providing an ideal basis for synthesizing current and emerging developments in these areas that promise to enhance future operational services. This article provides such a synthesis

xoceanmodel/xroms: v0.5.1

What's Changed Bump actions/checkout from 3 to 4 by @dependabot in https://github.com/xoceanmodel/xroms/pull/55 changed references to divergence to convergence throughout by @kthyng in https://github.com/xoceanmodel/xroms/pull/57 Full Changelog: https://github.com/xoceanmodel/xroms/compare/v0.5.0...v0.5.

xoceanmodel/xroms: v0.5.0

What's Changed now MLD returns positive values by @kthyng in https://github.com/xoceanmodel/xroms/pull/56 Full Changelog: https://github.com/xoceanmodel/xroms/compare/v0.4.7...v0.5.

Introducing Eye Movement Modeling Examples for Programming Education and the Role of Teacher's Didactic Guidance

In this article, we introduce how eye-tracking technology might become a promising tool to teach programming skills, such as debugging with ĝ€-Eye Movement Modeling Examples' (EMME). EMME are tutorial videos that visualize an expert's (e.g., a programming teacher's) eye movements during task performance to guide students' attention, e.g., as a moving dot or circle. We first introduce the general idea behind the EMME method and present studies that showed first promising results regarding the benefits of EMME to support programming education. However, we argue that the instructional design of EMME varies notably across them, as evidence-based guidelines on how to create effective EMME are often lacking. As an example, we present our ongoing research on the effects of different ways to instruct the EMME model prior to video creation. Finally, we highlight open questions for future investigations that could help improving the design of EMME for (programming) education

The 1929 Grand Banks landslide of the Canadian Atlantic continental margin - Cruise No. MSM47 - September 30 - October 30, 2015 - St. John's (Canada) - Ponta Delgada, Azores (Portugal). Bathymetry and subsurface based on seismic, acoustic and core data

On November 18, 1929, a M7.2 earthquake occurred beneath the Laurentian Channel off the coast of Newfoundland. Nearly simultaneously, 12 undersea trans-Atlantic communication cables were severed and within two hours, a devastating tsunami struck the south coast of Newfoundland, claiming 28 lives. Only in 1952, it was understood that a slump-generated turbidity current caused the sequential severance of the cables and likely generated the tsunami. The 1929 Grand Banks events were pivotal, as they led to the first unequivocal recognition of a turbidity current and landslide-triggered tsunami. The landslide site was visited numerous times as underwater survey technologies evolved. No major head scarp related to the event is recognized. The landslide appears to have affected shallow sediments (top 5-100 m) and was laterally extensive. In order to test the hypothesis that a distributed, laterally extensive, shallow submarine mass failure event caused the tsunami, we collected ~ 1500 km of seismic lines in combination with a dense net of hydroacoustic data. A total of ~130 m of gravity cores were recovered at 30 stations. Giant box cores were taken at 15 stations. Three CPT (free-fall cone penetrating testing) transects were collected across landslide scarps. The data in the failure area show abundant small scarps and several young landslide deposits. The existing bathymetric data were slightly expanded to the shelf break but no obvious major scarp was discovered. The combined interpretation of existing and new data will allow estimating the volume of the failed material, which is an important input parameter for tsunami modelling. Another important aspect will be to assess the activity of listric faults in the failure area with special emphasis on their role for the failure dynamics and the triggering of the tsunami. The deposits of the related turbidity current were investigated in a complex channel area downslope of the failure area. Several coring transects will allow to reconstruct the flow lines of the 1929 turbidity current from bypass- dominated to depositional areas. Very coarse gravel was sampled up to 150 m above the canyon thalweg. First estimates suggest high concentrations of sediments in the flow, which was able to run out over 1000s of kilometers. The collected raw data of the surface and shallow subsurface is attached here. A detailed description of the dataset und utilised methods and the overview of track lines can be found in the official cruise report (Krastel et al. 2016, doi:10.2312/cr_msm47)

Sound velocity profiles recorded during Maria S. Merian cruise MSM47

.ASVP files represent the sound velocity profiles recorded during the survey

Swath sonar bathymetry during maria S. Merian cruise MSM47 with links to multibeam raw data files

.ALL files correspond to the mutlibeam echo sounder data collected with Merian's EM122 system. The nominal sonar frequency is 12 kHz with an angular coverage sector of up to 150° and 864 soundings per ping. The EM122 has a dual swath capacity, hence one ping consist of two swathes of up to 432 soundings each. The dual swath capacity increases the along track resolution of the multibeam data. The typical depths in our investigation area are between 500 and 5000 m water depth, allowing spacing bathymetry grid resolution of about 30 m to 200 m across and along, given survey velocities between 4.5 and 12 kn. The achievable swath width on a flat bottom will normally be up to six times the water depth. However, we limited the swath width to 15 km and 65° in order to guarantee good resolution in across track direction in deep water. Preliminary grids of the data (.grd) created during the research survey are made available for the bathymetry (MSM47finalgrid.grd, WGS84, Geographic) and backscatter data (MSM47finalgrdsss.grd, WGS84 Geographic)