786 research outputs found

    Putative Voltage Sensitive Enzymes in Prokaryotes

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    Test-retest reliability for common tasks in vision science

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    Historically, research in cognitive psychology has sought to evaluate cognitive mechanisms according to the average response to a manipulation. Differences between individuals have been dismissed as “noise” with an aim toward characterising an overall effect and how it can inform human cognition. More recently, research has shifted toward appreciating the value of individual differences between participants and the insight gained by exploring the impacts of between-subject variation on human cognition. However, recent research has suggested that many robust, well-established cognitive tasks suffer from surprisingly low levels of test-retest reliability (Hedge, Powell, & Sumner, 2018). While the tasks may produce reliable effects at the group level (i.e., they are replicable), they may not produce a reliable measurement of a given individual. If individual performance on a task is not consistent from one time point to another, the task is therefore unfit for the assessment of individual differences. To evaluate the reliability of commonly used tasks in vision science, we tested a large sample of undergraduate students in two sessions (separated by 1-3 weeks). Our battery included tasks that spanned the range of visual processing from basic sensitivity (motion coherence) to transient spatial attention (useful field of view) to sustained attention (multiple-object tracking) to visual working memory (change detection). Reliabilities (intraclass correlations) ranged from 0.4 to 0.7, suggesting that most of these measures suffer from lower reliability than would be desired for research in individual differences. These results do not detract from the value of the tasks in an experimental setting; however, higher levels of test-retest reliability would be required for a meaningful assessment of individual differences. Implications for using tools from vision science to understand processing in both healthy and neuropsychological populations are discussed

    Viability and Application of Mounting Personal PID VOC Sensors to Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

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    Using a UAS-mounted sensor to allow for a rapid response to areas that may be difficult to reach or potentially dangerous to human health can increase the situational awareness of first responders of an aircraft crash site through the remote detection, identification, and quantification of airborne hazardous materials. The primary purpose of this research was to evaluate the remote sensing viability and application of integrating existing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors with small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) technology to detect potentially hazardous airborne contaminants in emergency leak or spill response situations. By mounting the personal photoionization detector (PID) with volatile organic compound VOC sensor technology on UAS platforms, the needed information may be obtained at an optimum range and resolution without needlessly exposing a human to possible adverse conditions

    Dynamic alterations in decoy VEGF receptor-1 stability regulate angiogenesis

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    Blood vessel expansion is driven by sprouting angiogenesis of endothelial cells, and is essential for development, wound healing and disease. Membrane-localized vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-1 (mVEGFR1) is an endothelial cell-intrinsic decoy receptor that negatively modulates blood vessel morphogenesis. Here we show that dynamic regulation of mVEGFR1 stability and turnover in blood vessels impacts angiogenesis. mVEGFR1 is highly stable and constitutively internalizes from the plasma membrane. Post-translational palmitoylation of mVEGFR1 is a binary stabilization switch, and ligand engagement leads to depalmitoylation and lysosomal degradation. Trafficking of palmitoylation enzymes via Rab27a regulates mVEGFR1 stability, as reduced levels of Rab27a impaired palmitoylation of mVEGFR1, decreased its stability, and elevated blood vessel sprouting and in vivo angiogenesis. These findings identify a regulatory axis affecting blood vessel morphogenesis that highlights exquisite post-translational regulation of mVEGFR1 in its role as a molecular rheostat

    SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation

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    Reliable automatic evaluation of summarization systems is challenging due to the multifaceted and subjective nature of the task. This is especially the case for languages other than English, where human evaluations are scarce. In this work, we introduce SEAHORSE, a dataset for multilingual, multifaceted summarization evaluation. SEAHORSE consists of 96K summaries with human ratings along 6 dimensions of text quality: comprehensibility, repetition, grammar, attribution, main ideas, and conciseness, covering 6 languages, 9 systems and 4 datasets. As a result of its size and scope, SEAHORSE can serve both as a benchmark to evaluate learnt metrics, as well as a large-scale resource for training such metrics. We show that metrics trained with SEAHORSE achieve strong performance on the out-of-domain meta-evaluation benchmarks TRUE (Honovich et al., 2022) and mFACE (Aharoni et al., 2022). We make the SEAHORSE dataset and metrics publicly available for future research on multilingual and multifaceted summarization evaluation

    Study Protocol for a Stepped-Wedge Randomized Cookstove Intervention in Rural Honduras: Household Air Pollution and Cardiometabolic Health

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    Growing evidence links household air pollution exposure from biomass-burning cookstoves to cardiometabolic disease risk. Few randomized controlled interventions of cookstoves (biomass or otherwise) have quantitatively characterized changes in exposure and indicators of cardiometabolic health, a growing and understudied burden in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Ideally, the solution is to transition households to clean cooking, such as with electric or liquefied petroleum gas stoves; however, those unable to afford or to access these options will continue to burn biomass for the foreseeable future. Wood-burning cookstove designs such as the Justa (incorporating an engineered combustion zone and chimney) have the potential to substantially reduce air pollution exposures. Previous cookstove intervention studies have been limited by stove types that did not substantially reduce exposures and/or by low cookstove adoption and sustained use, and few studies have incorporated community-engaged approaches to enhance the intervention

    A Framework for the Cross-Sectoral Integration of Multi-Model Impact Projections: Land Use Decisions Under Climate Impacts Uncertainties

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    Climate change and its impacts already pose considerable challenges for societies that will further increase with global warming (IPCC, 2014a, b). Uncertainties of the climatic response to greenhouse gas emissions include the potential passing of large-scale tipping points (e.g. Lenton et al., 2008; Levermann et al., 2012; Schellnhuber, 2010) and changes in extreme meteorological events (Field et al., 2012) with complex impacts on societies (Hallegatte et al., 2013). Thus climate change mitigation is considered a necessary societal response for avoiding uncontrollable impacts (Conference of the Parties, 2010). On the other hand, large-scale climate change mitigation itself implies fundamental changes in, for example, the global energy system. The associated challenges come on top of others that derive from equally important ethical imperatives like the fulfilment of increasing food demand that may draw on the same resources. For example, ensuring food security for a growing population may require an expansion of cropland, thereby reducing natural carbon sinks or the area available for bio-energy production. So far, available studies addressing this problem have relied on individual impact models, ignoring uncertainty in crop model and biome model projections. Here, we propose a probabilistic decision framework that allows for an evaluation of agricultural management and mitigation options in a multi-impactmodel setting. Based on simulations generated within the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP), we outline how cross-sectorally consistent multi-model impact simulations could be used to generate the information required for robust decision making. Using an illustrative future land use pattern, we discuss the trade-off between potential gains in crop production and associated losses in natural carbon sinks in the new multiple crop- and biome-model setting. In addition, crop and water model simulations are combined to explore irrigation increases as one possible measure of agricultural intensification that could limit the expansion of cropland required in response to climate change and growing food demand. This example shows that current impact model uncertainties pose an important challenge to long-term mitigation planning and must not be ignored in long-term strategic decision makin

    Mitotic stress is an integral part of the oncogene-induced senescence program that promotes multinucleation and cell cycle arrest

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    Oncogene-induced senescence (OIS) is a tumor suppression mechanism that blocks cell proliferation in response to oncogenic signaling. OIS is frequently accompanied by multinucleation; however, the origin of this is unknown. Here, we show that multinucleate OIS cells originate mostly from failed mitosis. Prior to senescence, mutant H-RasV12 activation in primary human fibroblasts compromised mitosis, concordant with abnormal expression of mitotic genes functionally linked to the observed mitotic spindle and chromatin defects. Simultaneously, H-RasV12 activation enhanced survival of cells with damaged mitoses, culminating in extended mitotic arrest and aberrant exit from mitosis via mitotic slippage. ERK-dependent transcriptional upregulation of Mcl1 was, at least in part, responsible for enhanced survival and slippage of cells with mitotic defects. Importantly, mitotic slippage and oncogene signaling cooperatively induced senescence and key senescence effectors p21 and p16. In summary, activated Ras coordinately triggers mitotic disruption and enhanced cell survival to promote formation of multinucleate senescent cells
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