Summer Activity Patterns of Three Rodents in the Southwestern Yukon

The small mammal communities of boreal forest in the SW Yukon are diverse and little is known about the underlying reasons for this species richness. Niche differentiation through staggered periods of activity is one way in which similar species may avoid potential interference competition. In this study we describe the activity pattern of three rodents (the deer mouse, the northern red-backed vole, and the singing vole) from the summer solstice to the autumnal equinox. Activity was measured on two white spruce plots by checking live-traps at 2 h intervals over a 24 h period. We did this at monthly intervals between June and September 1984. The deer mouse was strongly nocturnal throughout the summer, while the northern red-backed vole and the singing vole were active both day and night. During the nocturnal period of deer mouse activity, approximately 80% of the red-backed vole population was active, and we conclude that there is no evidence of temporal niche differentiation between these two species. Only deer mice showed a seasonal change in activity pattern. As the days became shorter, deer mice became active earlier, so that by September they were active 4 h earlier than they were in June.Key words: deer mice, Peromyscus maniculatus, northern red-backed vole, Clethrionomys rutilus, singing vole, Microtus miurus, activity time, Yukon, competitionMots clés: souris sylvestre, Peromyscus maniculatus, campagnol à dos roux boréal, Clethrionomys rutilus, campagnol chanteur, Microtus miurus, période d'activité, Yukon, compétitio

Combined resection and multi-agent adjuvant chemotherapy for intra-abdominal desmoplastic small round cell tumour: case report and review of the literature

Desmoplastic small round cell tumor (DSRCT) is a rare, highly aggressive malignancy with distinctive histological and immunohistochemical features occurring in young population with male predominance. We report a case of DRSCT occurred in a 17 years old patient which presented with a large upper left quadrant abdominal mass that was treated with a very aggressive surgical approach and multi-agent chemotherapy. At a 12 months follow-up he is free of recurrence. This kind of tumour has a very poor prognosis. No standard treatment protocol has been established. Aggressive surgery combined with postoperative multi-agent adjuvant chemotherapy is justified not only to relieve symptoms but also to try to improve the outcome

SPARC is a new myeloid-derived suppressor cell marker licensing suppressive activities

Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) are well-known key negative regulators of the immune response during tumor growth, however scattered is the knowledge of their capacity to influence and adapt to the different tumor microenvironments and of the markers that identify those capacities. Here we show that the secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine (SPARC) identifies in both human and mouse MDSC with immune suppressive capacity and pro-tumoral activities including the induction of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and angiogenesis. In mice the genetic deletion of SPARC reduced MDSC immune suppression and reverted EMT. Sparc−/− MDSC were less suppressive overall and the granulocytic fraction was more prone to extrude neutrophil extracellular traps (NET). Surprisingly, arginase-I and NOS2, whose expression can be controlled by STAT3, were not down-regulated in Sparc−/− MDSC, although less suppressive than wild type (WT) counterpart. Flow cytometry analysis showed equal phosphorylation of STAT3 but reduced ROS production that was associated with reduced nuclear translocation of the NF-kB p50 subunit in Sparc−/− than WT MDSC. The limited p50 in nuclei reduce the formation of the immunosuppressive p50:p50 homodimers in favor of the p65:p50 inflammatory heterodimers. Supporting this hypothesis, the production of TNF by Sparc−/− MDSC was significantly higher than by WT MDSC. Although associated with tumor-induced chronic inflammation, TNF, if produced at high doses, becomes a key factor in mediating tumor rejection. Therefore, it is foreseeable that an unbalance in TNF production could skew MDSC toward an inflammatory, anti-tumor phenotype. Notably, TNF is also required for inflammation-driven NETosis. The high level of TNF in Sparc−/− MDSC might explain their increased spontaneous NET formation as that we detected both in vitro and in vivo, in association with signs of endothelial damage. We propose SPARC as a new potential marker of MDSC, in both human and mouse, with the additional feature of controlling MDSC suppressive activity while preventing an excessive inflammatory state through the control of NF-kB signaling pathway

A Record of Antarctic Climate and Ice Sheet History Recovered

Antarctica’s late Cenozoic (the past ~15 million years) climate history is poorly known from direct evidence, owing to its remoteness, an extensive sea ice apron, and an ice sheet cover over the region for the past 34 million years. Consequently, knowledge about the role of Antarctica’s ice sheets in global sea level and climate has relied heavily upon interpretations of oxygen isotope records from deep-sea cores. Whereas these isotopic records have revolutionized our understanding of climate-ice-ocean interactions, questions still remain about the specific role of Antarctic ice sheets in global climate. Such questions can be addressed from geological records at the marine margin of the ice sheets, recovered by drilling from floating ice platforms [e.g., Davey et al., 2001; Harwood et al., 2006; Barrett, 2007]. During the austral summer of 2006–2007, a new Antarctic geological drilling program (ANDRILL) successfully recovered a 1285- meter-long record of climate and ice sheet variability spanning the past 13 million years from beneath the McMurdo Ice Shelf (Figure 1). The cores contain sedimentary rocks deposited by the ice sheets grounded in the sea, and they provide the best direct evidence to date of past Antarctic ice sheet and climate fluctuations for this period of Earth’s history. The new geological evidence is being used to provide direct physical calibrationfor deep-sea isotope records, low-latitude continental margin sea level records, and numerical climate and ice sheet models, especially for times of past global warmth. Such analogs are becoming increasingly important because of the difficulties in predicting the dynamic response of ice sheets to global warming [Vaughan and Athern, 2007]. In this article we summarize the initial results of the ANDRILL program’s first drilling project from the McMurdo Ice Shelf (MIS) site [Naish et al., 2007a, 2007b], with an emphasis on the potential of the record for improving our knowledge of Antarctica’s influence on, and response to, global climate change

A Modulator-less Beam Steering Transmitter based on a revised DDS-PLL Phase Shifter Architecture

This paper details the design and implementation of a modulator-less beam steering transmitter based on a revised DDS-PLL phase shifter architecture. The proposed topology targets low data rate communications for Internet-of-Things systems, and has been demonstrated using an FPGA evaluation board and a custom PCB with four PLLs centered at 2.453-GHz. Measured system performance for an experimental 32-kbps data rate achieved through a 16-PSK modulation scheme are discussed. The proposed architecture is frequency independent, can be used in multi-band devices and has the potential for being integrated as an RF System-on-Chip

EXSCALATE: An Extreme-Scale Virtual Screening Platform for Drug Discovery Targeting Polypharmacology to Fight SARS-CoV-2

The social and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic demands a reduction of the time required to find a therapeutic cure. In this paper, we describe the EXSCALATE molecular docking platform capable to scale on an entire modern supercomputer for supporting extreme-scale virtual screening campaigns. Such virtual experiments can provide in short time information on which molecules to consider in the next stages of the drug discovery pipeline, and it is a key asset in case of a pandemic. The EXSCALATE platform has been designed to benefit from heterogeneous computation nodes and to reduce scaling issues. In particular, we maximized the accelerators’ usage, minimized the communications between nodes, and aggregated the I/O requests to serve them more efficiently. Moreover, we balanced the computation across the nodes by designing an ad-hoc workflow based on the execution time prediction of each molecule. We deployed the platform on two HPC supercomputers, with a combined computational power of 81 PFLOPS, to evaluate the interaction between 70 billion of small molecules and 15 binding-sites of 12 viral proteins of SARS-CoV-2. The experiment lasted 60 hours and it performed more than one trillion ligand-pocket evaluations, setting a new record on the virtual screening scale

Petrology and Geochemistry of the AND-1B Core, ANDRILL McMurdo Ice Shelf Project, Antarctica

This section reports preliminary data and results on petrology and geochemistry of AND-1B corePublishedin press2.3. TTC - Laboratori di chimica e fisica delle rocceN/A or not JCRreserve

Petrology and Geochemistry of the AND-1B Core, ANDRILL McMurdo Ice Shelf Project, Antarctica

This section reports preliminary data and results on petrology and geochemistry of AND-1B core

Petrology and Geochemistry of the AND-1B Core, ANDRILL McMurdo Ice Shelf Project, Antarctica

This section reports preliminary data and results on petrology and geochemistry of AND-1B core