The Demutualisation of the Australian Stock Exchange: Causes and Consequences

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Characterization, crystallization and preliminary X-ray investigation of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase from the hyperthermophilic archaeon Sulfolobus solfataricus.

Comparative StudyJournal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tRecombinant Sulfolobus solfataricus glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase has been purified and found to be a tetramer of 148 kDa. The enzyme shows dual cofactor specificity and uses NADP+ in preference to NAD+. The sequence has been compared with other GAPDH proteins including those from other archaeal sources. The purified protein has been crystallized from ammonium sulfate to produce crystals that diffract to 2.4 A with a space group of P43212 or P41212. A native data set has been collected to 2.4 A using synchrotron radiation and cryocooling.European UnionBBSR

Gas valves, forests and global change: a commentary on Jarvis (1976) 'The interpretation of the variations in leaf water potential and stomatal conductance found in canopies in the field'.

Microscopic turgor-operated gas valves on leaf surfaces-stomata-facilitate gas exchange between the plant and the atmosphere, and respond to multiple environmental and endogenous cues. Collectively, stomatal activities affect everything from the productivity of forests, grasslands and crops to biophysical feedbacks between land surface vegetation and climate. In 1976, plant physiologist Paul Jarvis reported an empirical model describing stomatal responses to key environmental and plant conditions that predicted the flux of water vapour from leaves into the surrounding atmosphere. Subsequent theoretical advances, building on this earlier approach, established the current paradigm for capturing the physiological behaviour of stomata that became incorporated into sophisticated models of land carbon cycling. However, these models struggle to accurately predict observed trends in the physiological responses of Northern Hemisphere forests to recent atmospheric CO2 increases, highlighting the need for improved representation of the role of stomata in regulating forest-climate interactions. Bridging this gap between observations and theory as atmospheric CO2 rises and climate change accelerates creates challenging opportunities for the next generation of physiologists to advance planetary ecology and climate science. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

The long-term impact of the MEMA kwa Vijana adolescent sexual and reproductive health intervention: effect of dose and time since intervention exposure.

BACKGROUND: Despite recent decreases in HIV incidence in many sub-Saharan African countries, there is little evidence that specific behavioural interventions have led to a reduction in HIV among young people. Further and wider-scale decreases in HIV require better understanding of when behaviour change occurs and why. The MEMA kwa Vijana adolescent sexual and reproductive health intervention has been implemented in rural Mwanza, Tanzania since 1999. A long-term evaluation in 2007/8 found that the intervention improved knowledge, attitudes to sex and some reported risk behaviours, but not HIV or HSV2 prevalence. The aim of this paper was to assess the differential impact of the intervention according to gender, age, marital status, number of years of exposure and time since last exposure to the intervention. METHODS: In 2007, a cross-sectional survey was conducted in the 20 trial communities among 13,814 young people (15-30 yrs) who had attended intervention or comparison schools between 1999 and 2002. Outcomes for which the intervention had an impact in 2001 or 2007 were included in this subgroup analysis. Data were analysed using cluster-level methods for stratified cluster-randomised trials, using interaction tests to determine if intervention impact differed by subgroup. RESULTS: Taking into account multiplicity of testing, concurrence with a priori hypotheses and consistency within the results no strong effect-modifiers emerged. Impact on pregnancy knowledge and reported attitudes to sex increased with years of exposure to high-quality intervention. CONCLUSIONS: The desirable long-term impact of the MEMA kwa Vijana intervention did not vary greatly according to the subgroups examined. This suggests that the intervention can have an impact on a broad cross-section of young people in rural Mwanza. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00248469

Boosting Long-term Memory via Wakeful Rest: Intentional Rehearsal is not Necessary, Automatic Consolidation is Sufficient.

<div><p>People perform better on tests of delayed free recall if learning is followed immediately by a short wakeful rest than by a short period of sensory stimulation. Animal and human work suggests that wakeful resting provides optimal conditions for the consolidation of recently acquired memories. However, an alternative account cannot be ruled out, namely that wakeful resting provides optimal conditions for intentional rehearsal of recently acquired memories, thus driving superior memory. Here we utilised non-recallable words to examine whether wakeful rest boosts long-term memory, even when new memories could not be rehearsed intentionally during the wakeful rest delay. The probing of non-recallable words requires a recognition paradigm. Therefore, we first established, via Experiment 1, that the rest-induced boost in memory observed via free recall can be replicated in a recognition paradigm, using concrete nouns. In Experiment 2, participants heard 30 non-recallable non-words, presented as ‘foreign names in a bridge club abroad’ and then either rested wakefully or played a visual spot-the-difference game for 10 minutes. Retention was probed via recognition at two time points, 15 minutes and 7 days after presentation. As in Experiment 1, wakeful rest boosted recognition significantly, and this boost was maintained for at least 7 days. Our results indicate that the enhancement of memory via wakeful rest is <i>not</i> dependent upon intentional rehearsal of learned material during the rest period. We thus conclude that consolidation is <i>sufficient</i> for this rest-induced memory boost to emerge. We propose that wakeful resting allows for superior memory consolidation, resulting in stronger and/or more veridical representations of experienced events which can be detected via tests of free recall and recognition.</p></div

Flexible attention allocation to visual and auditory working memory tasks: manipulating reward induces a trade-off

Prominent roles for general attention resources are posited in many models of working memory, but the manner in which these can be allocated differs between models or is not sufficiently specified. We varied the payoffs for correct responses in two temporally-overlapping recognition tasks, a visual array comparison task and a tone sequence comparison task. In the critical conditions, an increase in reward for one task corresponded to a decrease in reward for the concurrent task, but memory load remained constant. Our results show patterns of interference consistent with a trade-off between the tasks, suggesting that a shared resource can be flexibly divided, rather than only fully allotted to either of the tasks. Our findings support a role for a domain-general resource in models of working memory, and furthermore suggest that this resource is flexibly divisible

Orthogonal decomposition of left ventricular remodeling in myocardial infarction

Left ventricular size and shape are important for quantifying cardiac remodeling in response to cardiovascular disease. Geometric remodeling indices have been shown to have prognostic value in predicting adverse events in the clinical literature, but these often describe interrelated shape changes. We developed a novel method for deriving orthogonal remodeling components directly from any (moderately independent) set of clinical remodeling indices. Results: Six clinical remodeling indices (end-diastolic volume index, sphericity, relative wall thickness, ejection fraction, apical conicity, and longitudinal shortening) were evaluated using cardiac magnetic resonance images of 300 patients with myocardial infarction, and 1991 asymptomatic subjects, obtained from the Cardiac Atlas Project. Partial least squares (PLS) regression of left ventricular shape models resulted in remodeling components that were optimally associated with each remodeling index. A Gram–Schmidt orthogonalization process, by which remodeling components were successively removed from the shape space in the order of shape variance explained, resulted in a set of orthonormal remodeling components. Remodeling scores could then be calculated that quantify the amount of each remodeling component present in each case. A one-factor PLS regression led to more decoupling between scores from the different remodeling components across the entire cohort, and zero correlation between clinical indices and subsequent scores. Conclusions: The PLS orthogonal remodeling components had similar power to describe differences between myocardial infarction patients and asymptomatic subjects as principal component analysis, but were better associated with well-understood clinical indices of cardiac remodeling. The data and analyses are available from www.cardiacatlas.org

Effective connectivity reveals strategy differences in an expert calculator

Mathematical reasoning is a core component of cognition and the study of experts defines the upper limits of human cognitive abilities, which is why we are fascinated by peak performers, such as chess masters and mental calculators. Here, we investigated the neural bases of calendrical skills, i.e. the ability to rapidly identify the weekday of a particular date, in a gifted mental calculator who does not fall in the autistic spectrum, using functional MRI. Graph-based mapping of effective connectivity, but not univariate analysis, revealed distinct anatomical location of “cortical hubs” supporting the processing of well-practiced close dates and less-practiced remote dates: the former engaged predominantly occipital and medial temporal areas, whereas the latter were associated mainly with prefrontal, orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate connectivity. These results point to the effect of extensive practice on the development of expertise and long term working memory, and demonstrate the role of frontal networks in supporting performance on less practiced calculations, which incur additional processing demands. Through the example of calendrical skills, our results demonstrate that the ability to perform complex calculations is initially supported by extensive attentional and strategic resources, which, as expertise develops, are gradually replaced by access to long term working memory for familiar material

An investigation into electron scattering from pyrazine at intermediate and high energies

Total electron scattering cross sections for pyrazine in the energy range 10-500 eV have been measured with a new magnetically confined electron transmission-beam apparatus. Theoretical differential and integral elastic, as well as integral inelastic, cross sections have been calculated by means of a screening-corrected form of the independent-atom representation (IAM-SCAR) from 10 to 1000 eV incident electron energies. The present experimental and theoretical total cross sections show a good level of agreement, to within 10%, in the overlapping energy range. Consistency of these results with previous calculations (i.e., the R-matrix and Schwinger Multichannel methods) and elastic scattering measurements at lower energies, below 10 eV, is also discussed