Slower Speed and Stronger Coupling: Adaptive Mechanisms of Self-Organized Chaos Synchronization

We show that two initially weakly coupled chaotic systems can achieve self-organized synchronization by adaptively reducing their speed and/or enhancing the coupling strength. Explicit adaptive algorithms for speed-reduction and coupling-enhancement are provided. We apply these algorithms to the self-organized synchronization of two coupled Lorenz systems. It is found that after a long-time self-organized process, the two coupled chaotic systems can achieve synchronization with almost minimum required coupling-speed ratio.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Oral Feeding Competences of Healthy Preterm Infants: A Review

Background. With increasing sophistication and technology, survival rates hugely improved among preterm infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit. Nutrition and feeding remain a challenge and preterm infants are at high risk of encountering oral feeding difficulties. Objective. To determine what facts may impact on oral feeding readiness and competence and which kind of interventions should enhance oral feeding performance in preterm infants. Search Strategy. MEDILINE database was explored and articles relevant to this topic were collected starting from 2009 up to 2011. Main Results. Increasingly robust alertness prior to and during feeding does positively impact the infant's feeding Skills. The review found that oral and non-oral sensorimotor interventions, provided singly or in combination, shortened the transition time to independent oral feeding in preterm infants and that preterm infants who received a combined oral and sensorimotor intervention demonstrated more advanced nutritive sucking, suck-swallow and swallow-respiration coordination than those who received an oral or sensorimotor intervention singly

Tibialis anterior muscle needle biopsy and sensitive biomolecular methods: A useful tool in myotonic dystrophy type 1

Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is a neuromuscular disorder caused by a CTG repeat expansion in 3\u2019UTR of DMPK gene. This mutation causes accumulation of toxic RNA in nuclear foci leading to splicing misregulation of specific genes. In view of future clinical trials with antisense oligonucleotides in DM1 patients, it is important to set up sensitive and minimally-invasive tools to monitor the efficacy of treatments on skeletal muscle. A tibialis anterior (TA) muscle sample of about 60 mg was obtained from 5 DM1 patients and 5 healthy subjects through a needle biopsy. A fragment of about 40 mg was used for histological examination and a fragment of about 20 mg was used for biomolecular analysis. The TA fragments obtained with the minimally-invasive needle biopsy technique is enough to perform all the histopathological and biomolecular evaluations useful to monitor a clinical trial on DM1 patients

Is it possible to make a diagnosis of raw, heated and baked egg allergy in children using cut-offs? A systematic review

The diagnosis of IgE-mediated egg allergy lies both on a compatible clinical history and on the results of skin prick tests (SPTs) and IgEs levels. Both tests have good sensitivity but low specificity. For this reason, oral food challenge (OFC) is the ultimate gold standard for the diagnosis. The aim of the present paper is to systematically review the literature in order to identify, analyze and synthesize the predictive value of SPT and specific IgEs both to egg white and main egg allergens and to review the cut-offs suggested in the literature

Nucleotide distance influences co-methylation between nearby CpG sites.

The tendency of individual CpG sites to be methylated is distinctive, non-random and well-regulated throughout the genome. We investigated the structural and spatial factors influencing CpGs methylation by performing an ultra-deep targeted methylation analysis on human, mouse and zebrafish genes. We found that methylation is not a random process and that closer neighboring CpG sites are more likely to share the same methylation status. Moreover, if the distance between CpGs increases, the degree of co-methylation decreases. We set up a simulation model to analyze the contribution of both the intrinsic susceptibility and the distance effect on the probability of a CpG to be methylated. Our finding suggests that the establishment of a specific methylation pattern follows a universal rule that must take into account of the synergistic and dynamic interplay of these two main factors: the intrinsic methylation susceptibility of specific CpG and the nucleotide distance between two CpG sites. © 2019 Elsevier Inc

ENIGMA-A centralised supervisory controller for enhanced onboard electrical energy management with model in the loop demonstration

A centralised smart supervisor (CSS) controller with enhanced electrical energy management (E2-EM) capability has been developed for an Iron Bird Electrical Power Generation and Distribution System (EPGDS) within the Clean Sky 2 ENhanced electrical energy MAnagement (ENIGMA) project. The E2-EM strategy considers the potential for eliminating the 5 min overload capability of the generators to achieve a substantial reduction in the mass of the EPGDS. It ensures optimal power and energy sharing within the EPGDS by interfacing the CSS with the smart grid network (SGN), the energy storage and regeneration system (ESRS), and the programmable load bank 1 secondary distribution board (PLB1 SDU) during power overloads and failure conditions. The CSS has been developed by formalizing E2-EM logic as an algorithm operating in real time and by following safety and reliability rules. The CSS undergoes initial verification using model-in-the-loop (MIL) testing. This paper describes the EPGDS simulated for the MIL testing and details the E2-EM strategy, the algorithms, and logic developed for the ENIGMA CSS design. The CSS was subjected to two test cases using MIL demonstration, and based on the test results, the performance of the ENIGMA CSS is verified and validated

Transcriptional Heterogeneity of Cryptococcus gattii VGII Compared with Non-VGII Lineages Underpins Key Pathogenicity Pathways

We thank Jose Munoz for his input on the analysis of the mouse RNA-seq enrichment. R.A.F. was supported by a Wellcome Trust-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Postdoctoral Fellowship. M.C.F. and J.R. were supported by Medical Research Council grant MR/K000373/1. R.C.M. is supported by a Wolfson Royal Society Research Merit Award and by funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP/2007-2013)/ERC (grant agreement no. 614562). This work was funded in part by NIAID grant U19AI110818 to the Broad Institute.Peer reviewedPublisher PD