Estimation of Equivalent Axleloads: Computer Program Documentation

The estimation of equivalent axleloads (EAL) requires the correlation of several data bases. Described herein are three computer programs which summarize truckweight data and classification data, and combine the two data bases to estimate EAL\u27s for each site where classification counts are available in a given year. The programs also present the data in two matrices to characterize the effects that geographic area, federal-aid classification, coal-haul volume and total volume have on each of the traffic parameters necessary to compute EAL\u27s

Improved single-swab sample preparation for recovering bacterial and phage DNA from human skin and wound microbiomes.

BackgroundCharacterization of the skin and wound microbiome is of high biomedical interest, but is hampered by the low biomass of typical samples. While sample preparation from other microbiomes (e.g., gut) has been the subject of extensive optimization, procedures for skin and wound microbiomes have received relatively little attention. Here we describe an improved method for obtaining both phage and microbial DNA from a single skin or wound swab, characterize the yield of DNA in model samples, and demonstrate the utility of this approach with samples collected from a wound clinic.ResultsWe find a substantial improvement when processing wound samples in particular; while only one-quarter of wound samples processed by a traditional method yielded sufficient DNA for downstream analysis, all samples processed using the improved method yielded sufficient DNA. Moreover, for both skin and wound samples, community analysis and viral reads obtained through deep sequencing of clinical swab samples showed significant improvement with the use of the improved method.ConclusionUse of this method may increase the efficiency and data quality of microbiome studies from low-biomass samples

Microbial predictors of healing and short-term effect of debridement on the microbiome of chronic wounds.

Chronic wounds represent a large and growing disease burden. Infection and biofilm formation are two of the leading impediments of wound healing, suggesting an important role for the microbiome of these wounds. Debridement is a common and effective treatment for chronic wounds. We analyzed the bacterial content of the wound surface from 20 outpatients with chronic wounds before and immediately after debridement, as well as healthy skin. Given the large variation observed among different wounds, we introduce a Bayesian statistical method that models patient-to-patient variability and identify several genera that were significantly enriched in wounds vs. healthy skin. We found no difference between the microbiome of the original wound surface and that exposed by a single episode of sharp debridement, suggesting that this debridement did not directly alter the wound microbiome. However, we found that aerobes and especially facultative anaerobes were significantly associated with wounds that did not heal within 6 months. The facultative anaerobic genus Enterobacter was significantly associated with lack of healing. The results suggest that an abundance of facultative anaerobes is a negative prognostic factor in the chronic wound microbiome, possibly due to the increased robustness of such communities to different metabolic environments

Delayed Complications of Emergency Airway Management: A Study of 533 Emergency Department Intubations

OBJECTIVES: Airway management is a critical procedure performed frequently in emergency departments (EDs). Previous studies have evaluated the complications associated with this procedure but have focused only on the immediate complications. The purpose of this study is to determine the incidence and nature of delayed complications of tracheal intubation performed in the ED at an academic center where intubations are performed by emergency physicians (EPs).METHODS: All tracheal intubations performed in the ED over a one-year period were identified; 540 tracheal intubations were performed during the study period. Of these, 523 charts (96.9%) were available for review and were retrospectively examined. Using a structured datasheet, delayed complications occurring within seven days of intubation were abstracted from the medical record. Charts were scrutinized for the following complications: acute myocardial infarction (MI), stroke, airway trauma from the intubation, and new respiratory infections. An additional 30 consecutive intubations were examined for the same complications in a prospective arm over a 29-day period.RESULTS: The overall success rate for tracheal intubation in the entire study group was 99.3% (549/553). Three patients who could not be orally intubated underwent emergent cricothyrotomy. Thus, the airway was successfully secured in 99.8% (552/553) of the patients requiring intubation. One patient, a seven-month-old infant, had unanticipated subglottic stenosis and could not be intubated by the emergency medicine attending or the anesthesiology attending. The patient was mask ventilated and was transported to the operating room for an emergent tracheotomy. Thirty-four patients (6.2% [95% CI 4.3 - 8.5%]) developed a new respiratory infection within seven days of intubation. Only 18 patients (3.3% [95% CI 1.9 - 5.1%]) had evidence of a new respiratory infection within 48 hours, indicating possible aspiration pneumonia secondary to airway management. Three patients (0.5% [95% CI 0.1 - 1.6%]) suffered an acute MI, but none appeared to be related to the intubation. One patient was having an acute MI at the time of intubation and the other two patients had MIs more than 24 hours after the intubation. No patient suffered a stroke (0% [95% CI 0 - 0.6%]). No patients suffered any serious airway trauma such as a laryngeal or vocal cord injury.CONCLUSIONS: Emergency tracheal intubation in the ED is associated with an extremely high success rate and a very low rate of delayed complications. Complication rates identified in this study compare favorably to reports of emergency intubations in other hospital settings. Tracheal intubation can safely be performed by trained EPs

Evidence for the Magnetoionic Nature of Oblique VHF Reflections from Midlatitude Sporadic-E Layers

Mid-latitude sporadic-E (Es) is an intermittent phenomenon of the lower E region of the ionosphere. Es clouds are thin, transient, and patchy layers of intense ionization, with ionization densities which can be much higher than in the background ionosphere. Oblique reflection of radio signals in the very high frequency (VHF) range is regularly supported, but the mechanism for it has never been clearly established—specular reflection, scattering, and magnetoionic double refraction have all been suggested. This article proposes using the polarization behaviour of signals reflected from intense midlatitude sporadic-E clouds as an indicator of the true reflection mechanism. Results are presented from a measurement campaign in the summer of 2018, which gathered a large amount of data at a receiving station in the UK using 50 MHz amateur radio beacons as signal sources. In all cases the signals received were elliptically polarized, despite being transmitted with linear polarization; there were also indications that polarization behaviour varied systematically with the orientation of the path to the geomagnetic field. This represents, for all the examples recorded, clear evidence that signals were reflected from midlatitude Es by magnetoionic double refraction

Assessing direct contributions of morphological awareness and prosodic sensitivity to children’s word reading and reading comprehension

We examined the independent contributions of prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness to word reading, text reading accuracy, and reading comprehension. We did so in a longitudinal study of English-speaking children (N = 70). At 5 to 7 years of age, children completed the metalinguistic measures along with control measures of phonological awareness and vocabulary. Children completed the reading measures two years later. Morphological awareness, but not prosodic sensitivity made a significant independent contribution to word reading, text reading accuracy and reading comprehension. The effects of morphological awareness on reading comprehension remained after controls for word reading. These results suggest that morphological awareness needs to be considered seriously in models of reading development and that prosodic sensitivity might have primarily indirect relations to reading outcomes. Keywords: Morphological Awareness; Prosody; Word Reading; Reading Comprehension

The JCSG high-throughput structural biology pipeline

The Joint Center for Structural Genomics high-throughput structural biology pipeline has delivered more than 1000 structures to the community over the past ten years and has made a significant contribution to the overall goal of the NIH Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) of expanding structural coverage of the protein universe

Prospecting in ultracool dwarfs : Measuring the metallicities of mid- and late-m dwarfs

© 2014. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.Metallicity is a fundamental parameter that contributes to the physical characteristics of a star. The low temperatures and complex molecules present in M dwarf atmospheres make it difficult to measure their metallicities using techniques that have been commonly used for Sun-like stars. Although there has been significant progress in developing empirical methods to measure M dwarf metallicities over the last few years, these techniques have been developed primarily for early- to mid-M dwarfs. We present a method to measure the metallicity of mid- to late-M dwarfs from moderate resolution (R ∼ 2000) K-band (≃ 2.2 μm) spectra. We calibrate our formula using 44 wide binaries containing an F, G, K, or early-M primary of known metallicity and a mid- to late-M dwarf companion. We show that similar features and techniques used for early-M dwarfs are still effective for late-M dwarfs. Our revised calibration is accurate to ∼0.07 dex for M4.5-M9.5 dwarfs with -0.58 <[Fe/H] <+0.56 and shows no systematic trends with spectral type, metallicity, or the method used to determine the primary star metallicity. We show that our method gives consistent metallicities for the components of M+M wide binaries. We verify that our new formula works for unresolved binaries by combining spectra of single stars. Lastly, we show that our calibration gives consistent metallicities with the Mann et al. study for overlapping (M4-M5) stars, establishing that the two calibrations can be used in combination to determine metallicities across the entire M dwarf sequence.Peer reviewe

Weather on the Nearest Brown Dwarfs: Resolved Simultaneous Multi-Wavelength Variability Monitoring of WISE J104915.57-531906.1AB

We present two epochs of MPG/ESO 2.2m GROND simultaneous 6-band ($r'i'z'JHK$) photometric monitoring of the closest known L/T transition brown dwarf binary WISE J104915.57-531906.1AB. We report here the first resolved variability monitoring of both the T0.5 and L7.5 components. We obtained 4 hours of focused observations on the night of UT 2013-04-22, as well as 4 hours of defocused (unresolved) observations on the night of UT 2013-04-16. We note a number of robust trends in our light curves. The $r'$ and $i'$ light curves appear to be anticorrelated with $z'$ and $H$ for the T0.5 component and in the unresolved lightcurve. In the defocused dataset, $J$ appears correlated with $z'$ and $H$ and anticorrelated with $r'$ and $i'$, while in the focused dataset we measure no variability for $J$ at the level of our photometric precision, likely due to evolving weather phenomena. In our focused T0.5 component lightcurve, the $K$ band lightcurve displays a significant phase offset relative to both $H$ and $z'$. We argue that the measured phase offsets are correlated with atmospheric pressure probed at each band, as estimated from 1D atmospheric models. We also report low-amplitude variability in $i'$ and $z'$ intrinsic to the L7.5 component.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted to ApJ Letter

Mutation in Mouse Hei10, an E3 Ubiquitin Ligase, Disrupts Meiotic Crossing Over

Crossing over during meiotic prophase I is required for sexual reproduction in mice and contributes to genome-wide genetic diversity. Here we report on the characterization of an N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea-induced, recessive allele called mei4, which causes sterility in both sexes owing to meiotic defects. In mutant spermatocytes, chromosomes fail to congress properly at the metaphase plate, leading to arrest and apoptosis before the first meiotic division. Mutant oocytes have a similar chromosomal phenotype but in vitro can undergo meiotic divisions and fertilization before arresting. During late meiotic prophase in mei4 mutant males, absence of cyclin dependent kinase 2 and mismatch repair protein association from chromosome cores is correlated with the premature separation of bivalents at diplonema owing to lack of chiasmata. We have identified the causative mutation, a transversion in the 5′ splice donor site of exon 1 in the mouse ortholog of Human Enhancer of Invasion 10 (Hei10; also known as Gm288 in mouse and CCNB1IP1 in human), a putative B-type cyclin E3 ubiquitin ligase. Importantly, orthologs of Hei10 are found exclusively in deuterostomes and not in more ancestral protostomes such as yeast, worms, or flies. The cloning and characterization of the mei4 allele of Hei10 demonstrates a novel link between cell cycle regulation and mismatch repair during prophase I