An evaluation of the relative efficacy of an open airway, an oxygen reservoir and continuous positive airway pressure 5 cmH2O on the non-ventilated lung

Publisher's copy made available with the permission of the publisher © Australian Society of AnaesthetistsThe aim of this study, during one-lung ventilation, was to evaluate if oxygenation could be improved by use of a simple oxygen reservoir or application of 5 cmH2O continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) to the non-ventilated lung compared with an open airway. Twenty-three patients with lung malignancy, undergoing thoracotomy requiring at least 60 minutes of one-lung ventilation before lung lobe excision, were studied. After routine induction and establishment of one-lung ventilation, the three treatments were applied in turn to the same patient in a sequence selected randomly. The first treatment was repeated as a fourth treatment and these results of the repeated treatment averaged to minimize the effect of slow changes. Arterial oxygenation was measured by an arterial blood gas 15 minutes after the application of each treatment. Twenty patients completed the study. Mean PaO2 (in mmHg) was 210.3 (SD 105.5) in the 'OPEN' treatment, 186.0 (SD 109.2) in the 'RESERVOIR' treatment, and 240.5 (SD 116.0) in the 'CPAP' treatment. This overall difference was not quite significant (P=0.058, paired ANOVA), but comparison of the pairs showed that there was a significant better oxygenation only with the CPAP compared to the reservoir treatments (t=2.52, P=0.021). While the effect on the surgical field was not apparent in most patients, in one patient surgery was impeded during CPAP. Our results show that the use of a reservoir does not give oxygenation better than an open tube, and is less effective than the use of CPAP 5 cmH2O on the non-ventilated lung during one-lung ventilation.J. Slimani, W. J. Russell, C. Jurisevichttp://www.aaic.net.au/Article.asp?D=200404

Visual symptom identification of grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3 in red berry cultivars supports virus management by roguing

Grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3 (GLRaV-3) is the most serious virus in New Zealand and South African vineyards. Its negative influence on berry development is reflected on wine quality, thus making GLRaV-3 control a priority. In red berry cultivars, changes in leaf colour could be useful for the visual identification of GLRaV-3-infected vines with a view to roguing (removing) such vines. We tested the efficacy of visual diagnosis as a potentially cost-effective alternative option to the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) that is usually used for this purpose. All the vines, or a subsection of vines, in multiple vineyards in New Zealand or South Africa where annual roguing was being performed, were evaluated with the two methods. Of the 114,782 vines assessed visually for symptoms and tested by ELISA, the two methods were in agreement for 114,701 (99.9%) vines, with only 81 vines showing differing results. In 11 of the 44 annual vineyard analyses, visual detection of symptoms was perfectly correlated with ELISA results (sensitivity 100%). The specificity of visual symptom identification compared with ELISA was higher than 99.7% in 43 of the 44 annual vineyard analyses. Symptoms as a predictor of negative ELISA proved to be above 97.5% in all 44 annual vineyard analyses but as a positive predictor, was 100% in 10 of 19 annual vineyard analyses where this could be determined. We conclude that for the red-berried cultivars in this study, visual assessment of foliar symptoms should be adopted as a costeffective alternative to ELISA during implementation of roguing for GLRaV-3 control.This work formed part of the New Zealand Grape and Wine Research programme.New Zealand Winegrowers, the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research Strategic Science Investment Fund and also Winetech and Vergelegen Wine Estate (South Africa).http://www.sipav.org/main/jpp/index.php/jpp2018-06-30am2017Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI)Microbiology and Plant Patholog

European Union enlargement, post-accession migration and imaginative geographies of the ‘New Europe’: media discourses in Romania and the United Kingdom.

This paper is concerned with re-imaginings of ‘Europe’ following the accession to the European Union (EU) of former ‘Eastern European’ countries. In particular it explores media representations of post-EU accession migration from Romania to the United Kingdom in the UK and Romanian newspaper press. Todorova’s (1997) notion of Balkanism is deployed as a theoretical construct to facilitate the analysis of these representations as first, the continuation of long-standing and deeply embedded imaginings of the ‘East’ of Europe and, second, as a means of contesting these discourses. The paper explores the way in which the UK press construct Balkanist discourses about Romania and Romanian migrants, and then analyses how the Romanian press has contested such discourses. The paper argues that the idea of the ‘East’ remains important in constructing notions of ‘Europe’ within popular media geographies

Search for the decay K+ to pi+ gamma gamma in the pi+ momentum region P>213 MeV/c

We have searched for the K+ to pi+ gamma gamma decay in the kinematic region with pi+ momentum close to the end point. No events were observed, and the 90% confidence-level upper limit on the partial branching ratio was obtained, B(K+ to pi+ gamma gamma, P>213 MeV/c) < 8.3 x 10-9 under the assumption of chiral perturbation theory including next-to-leading order ``unitarity'' corrections. The same data were used to determine an upper limit on the K+ to pi+ gamma branching ratio of 2.3 x 10-9 at the 90% confidence level.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; no change in the results, accepted for publication in Physics Letters

Lorentz breaking Effective Field Theory and observational tests

Analogue models of gravity have provided an experimentally realizable test field for our ideas on quantum field theory in curved spacetimes but they have also inspired the investigation of possible departures from exact Lorentz invariance at microscopic scales. In this role they have joined, and sometime anticipated, several quantum gravity models characterized by Lorentz breaking phenomenology. A crucial difference between these speculations and other ones associated to quantum gravity scenarios, is the possibility to carry out observational and experimental tests which have nowadays led to a broad range of constraints on departures from Lorentz invariance. We shall review here the effective field theory approach to Lorentz breaking in the matter sector, present the constraints provided by the available observations and finally discuss the implications of the persisting uncertainty on the composition of the ultra high energy cosmic rays for the constraints on the higher order, analogue gravity inspired, Lorentz violations.Comment: 47 pages, 4 figures. Lecture Notes for the IX SIGRAV School on "Analogue Gravity", Como (Italy), May 2011. V.3. Typo corrected, references adde

Postnatal Zika virus infection is associated with persistent abnormalities in brain structure, function, and behavior in infant macaques

The Zika virus (ZIKV) epidemic is associated with fetal brain lesions and other serious birth defects classified as congenital ZIKV syndrome. Postnatal ZIKV infection in infants and children has been reported; however, data on brain anatomy, function, and behavioral outcomes following infection are absent. We show that postnatal ZIKV infection of infant rhesus macaques (RMs) results in persistent structural and functional alterations of the central nervous system compared to age-matched controls. We demonstrate ZIKV lymphoid tropism and neurotropism in infant RMs and histopathologic abnormalities in the peripheral and central nervous systems including inflammatory infiltrates, astrogliosis, and Wallerian degeneration. Structural and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI/rs-fMRI) show persistent enlargement of lateral ventricles, maturational changes in specific brain regions, and altered functional connectivity (FC) between brain areas involved in emotional behavior and arousal functions, including weakened amygdala-hippocampal connectivity in two of two ZIKV-infected infant RMs several months after clearance of ZIKV RNA from peripheral blood. ZIKV infection also results in distinct alterations in the species-typical emotional reactivity to acute stress, which were predicted by the weak amygdala-hippocampal FC. We demonstrate that postnatal ZIKV infection of infants in this model affects neurodevelopment, suggesting that long-term clinical monitoring of pediatric cases is warranted

Dynamical mean-field approach to materials with strong electronic correlations

We review recent results on the properties of materials with correlated electrons obtained within the LDA+DMFT approach, a combination of a conventional band structure approach based on the local density approximation (LDA) and the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). The application to four outstanding problems in this field is discussed: (i) we compute the full valence band structure of the charge-transfer insulator NiO by explicitly including the p-d hybridization, (ii) we explain the origin for the simultaneously occuring metal-insulator transition and collapse of the magnetic moment in MnO and Fe2O3, (iii) we describe a novel GGA+DMFT scheme in terms of plane-wave pseudopotentials which allows us to compute the orbital order and cooperative Jahn-Teller distortion in KCuF3 and LaMnO3, and (iv) we provide a general explanation for the appearance of kinks in the effective dispersion of correlated electrons in systems with a pronounced three-peak spectral function without having to resort to the coupling of electrons to bosonic excitations. These results provide a considerable progress in the fully microscopic investigations of correlated electron materials.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures, final version, submitted to Eur. Phys. J. for publication in the Special Topics volume "Cooperative Phenomena in Solids: Metal-Insulator Transitions and Ordering of Microscopic Degrees of Freedom

Advances in ab-initio theory of Multiferroics. Materials and mechanisms: modelling and understanding

Within the broad class of multiferroics (compounds showing a coexistence of magnetism and ferroelectricity), we focus on the subclass of "improper electronic ferroelectrics", i.e. correlated materials where electronic degrees of freedom (such as spin, charge or orbital) drive ferroelectricity. In particular, in spin-induced ferroelectrics, there is not only a {\em coexistence} of the two intriguing magnetic and dipolar orders; rather, there is such an intimate link that one drives the other, suggesting a giant magnetoelectric coupling. Via first-principles approaches based on density functional theory, we review the microscopic mechanisms at the basis of multiferroicity in several compounds, ranging from transition metal oxides to organic multiferroics (MFs) to organic-inorganic hybrids (i.e. metal-organic frameworks, MOFs)Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure