Early cow's milk introduction is associated with failed personal-social milestones after 1 year of age

Both the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommend delaying the introduction of cow's milk until after 1 year of age due to its low absorbable iron content. We used a novel computerized decision support system to gather data from multiple general pediatrics offices. We asked families whether their child received cow's milk before 1 year of age, had a low-iron diet, or used low-iron formula. Then, at subsequent visits, we performed a modified developmental assessment using the Denver II. We assessed the effect of early cow's milk or a low-iron diet on the later failure of achieving developmental milestones. We controlled for covariates using logistic regression. Early cow's milk introduction (odds ratio (OR) 1.30, p = 0.012), as well as a low-iron diet or low-iron formula (OR 1.42, p < 0.001), was associated with increased rates of milestone failure. Only personal-social milestones (OR 1.44, p = 0.002) showed a significantly higher rate of milestone failure. Both personal-social (OR 1.42, p < 0.001) and language (OR 1.22, p = 0.009) showed higher rates of failure in children with a low-iron diet. CONCLUSIONS: There is an association between the introduction of cow's milk before 1 year of age and the rate of delayed developmental milestones after 1 year of age. This adds strength to the recommendations from the AAP and IOM to delay cow's milk introduction until after 1 year of age

A model for optimal fleet composition of vessels for offshore wind farm maintenance

We present a discrete optimisation model that chooses an optimal fleet of vessels to support maintenance operations at Offshore Wind Farms (OFWs). The model is presented as a bi-level problem. On the first (tactical) level, decisions are made on the fleet composition for a certain time horizon. On the second (operational) level, the fleet is used to optimise the schedule of operations needed at the OWF, given events of failures and weather conditions

Genome landscapes and bacteriophage codon usage

Across all kingdoms of biological life, protein-coding genes exhibit unequal usage of synonmous codons. Although alternative theories abound, translational selection has been accepted as an important mechanism that shapes the patterns of codon usage in prokaryotes and simple eukaryotes. Here we analyze patterns of codon usage across 74 diverse bacteriophages that infect E. coli, P. aeruginosa and L. lactis as their primary host. We introduce the concept of a `genome landscape,' which helps reveal non-trivial, long-range patterns in codon usage across a genome. We develop a series of randomization tests that allow us to interrogate the significance of one aspect of codon usage, such a GC content, while controlling for another aspect, such as adaptation to host-preferred codons. We find that 33 phage genomes exhibit highly non-random patterns in their GC3-content, use of host-preferred codons, or both. We show that the head and tail proteins of these phages exhibit significant bias towards host-preferred codons, relative to the non-structural phage proteins. Our results support the hypothesis of translational selection on viral genes for host-preferred codons, over a broad range of bacteriophages.Comment: 9 Color Figures, 5 Tables, 53 Reference

NASA Planetary Mission Concept Study: Assessing: Dwarf Planet Ceres' past and Present Habitability Potential

The Dawn mission revolutionized our understanding of Ceres during the same decade that has also witnessed the rise of ocean worlds as a research and exploration focus. We will report progress on the Planetary Mission Concept Study (PMCS) on the future exploration of Ceres under the New Frontiers or Flagship program that was selected for NASA funding in October 2019. At the time this writing, the study was just kicked off, hence this abstract reports the study plan as presented in the proposal

Environmental changes and violent conflict

This letter reviews the scientific literature on whether and how environmental changes affect the risk of violent conflict. The available evidence from qualitative case studies indicates that environmental stress can contribute to violent conflict in some specific cases. Results from quantitative large-N studies, however, strongly suggest that we should be careful in drawing general conclusions. Those large-N studies that we regard as the most sophisticated ones obtain results that are not robust to alternative model specifications and, thus, have been debated. This suggests that environmental changes may, under specific circumstances, increase the risk of violent conflict, but not necessarily in a systematic way and unconditionally. Hence there is, to date, no scientific consensus on the impact of environmental changes on violent conflict. This letter also highlights the most important challenges for further research on the subject. One of the key issues is that the effects of environmental changes on violent conflict are likely to be contingent on a set of economic and political conditions that determine adaptation capacity. In the authors' view, the most important indirect effects are likely to lead from environmental changes via economic performance and migration to violent conflict. © 2012 IOP Publishing Ltd

Determination of Soil Contaminant Transport Parameters Using Time Domain Reflectometry

Proceedings of the 1993 Georgia Water Resources Conference, April 20-21, 1993, Athens, Georgia.A recent study of rural shallow drinking wells found that 4.6% of the wells in the Piedmont region of Georgia had nitrate levels above the EPA recommended level of 10 ppm nitrate nitrogen (Tyson and Issac, 1991). The most likely sources of this nitrate are septic systems, fertilizers, and manures. Nitrate transport models such as LEACHN (Wagenet and Hutson, 1989) can be used to investigate the contributions of these sources to groundwater contamination, but the models require soil transport parameters that are difficult to measure. Another problem is that we are interested in predicting nitrate transport at the field scale, but transport parameters are usually measured on a much smaller soil volume.Sponsored and Organized by: U.S. Geological Survey, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, The University of Georgia, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of TechnologyThis book was published by the Institute of Natural Resources, The University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602 with partial funding provided by the U.S. Department of Interior, Geological Survey, through the Georgia Water Research Institute as authorized by the Water Resources Research Act of 1984 (P.L. 98-242). The views and statements advanced in this publication are solely those of the authors and do not represent official views or policies of the University of Georgia or the U.S. Geological Survey or the conference sponsors

Measuring cognition and function in the preclinical stage of Alzheimer\u27s disease

© 2018 The Authors The Alzheimer\u27s Association\u27s Research Roundtable met in November 2016 to explore how best to measure changes in cognition and function in the preclinical stage of Alzheimer\u27s disease. This review will cover the tools and instruments currently available to identify populations for prevention trials, and measure subtle disease progression in the earliest stages of Alzheimer\u27s disease, and will include discussions of suitable cognitive, behavioral, functional, composite, and biological endpoints for prevention trials. Current prevention trials are reviewed including TOMMOROW, Alzheimer\u27s Prevention Initiative Autosomal Dominant Alzheimer\u27s Disease Trial, the Alzheimer\u27s Prevention Initiative Generation Study, and the Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer\u27s to compare current approaches and tools that are being developed

On parallel Branch and Bound frameworks for Global Optimization

Branch and Bound (B&B) algorithms are known to exhibit an irregularity of the search tree. Therefore, developing a parallel approach for this kind of algorithms is a challenge. The efficiency of a B&B algorithm depends on the chosen Branching, Bounding, Selection, Rejection, and Termination rules. The question we investigate is how the chosen platform consisting of programming language, used libraries, or skeletons influences programming effort and algorithm performance. Selection rule and data management structures are usually hidden to programmers for frameworks with a high level of abstraction, as well as the load balancing strategy, when the algorithm is run in parallel. We investigate the question by implementing a multidimensional Global Optimization B&B algorithm with the help of three frameworks with a different level of abstraction (from more to less): Bobpp, Threading Building Blocks (TBB), and a customized Pthread implementation. The following has been found. The Bobpp implementation is easy to code, but exhibits the poorest scalability. On the contrast, the TBB and Pthread implementations scale almost linearly on the used platform. The TBB approach shows a slightly better productivity

Biophysical and electrochemical studies of protein-nucleic acid interactions

This review is devoted to biophysical and electrochemical methods used for studying protein-nucleic acid (NA) interactions. The importance of NA structure and protein-NA recognition for essential cellular processes, such as replication or transcription, is discussed to provide background for description of a range of biophysical chemistry methods that are applied to study a wide scope of protein-DNA and protein-RNA complexes. These techniques employ different detection principles with specific advantages and limitations and are often combined as mutually complementary approaches to provide a complete description of the interactions. Electrochemical methods have proven to be of great utility in such studies because they provide sensitive measurements and can be combined with other approaches that facilitate the protein-NA interactions. Recent applications of electrochemical methods in studies of protein-NA interactions are discussed in detail