Nutritional Quality of Leaves and Unripe Fruit Consumed as Famine Foods by the Flying Foxes of Samoa

Many tropical herbivores alter their diets throughout the year in response to different levels of food availability. Fruit bats, including Pteropus samoensis Peale and Pteropus tonganus Quoy & Gaimard, are phytophagous species that may increase their consumption of foods such as unripe fruit and leaves in periods of low fruit diversity and volume. These periods include the tropical dry season or following the frequent hurricanes that batter the Samoan Archipelago. We examined the nutritional composition of leaves and immature fruits and compared the levels of organic and mineral nutrients with those of ripe fruit. We used principal components analysis (PCA) to examine patterns of variation in nutrient components of leaves, unripe fruit, and ripe fruit, as well as to compare the mean levels of nutrients. Overall, unripe fruit provided levels of nutrients comparable with those of ripe fruit of the same species for many organic and mineral components. Unripe fruit were only half as rich in iron as ripe fruit, but unripe fruit had high levels of calcium compared with ripe fruit of the same species. Leaves are often cited as a rich source of protein for fruit bats, and our results were consistent with this suggestion. Leaves were also found to be rich in zinc, manganese, and calcium. Therefore, flying foxes and other herbivores probably do not avoid unripe fruits and leaves because of their low nutrient levels. It may be that these famine foods are not normally consumed because of the presence of secondary compounds, low concentrations of palatable sugars, or a distasteful and hard pericarp on unripe fruits

The Effects of Fire Fighting and On-Scene Rehabilitation on Hemostatis

Fire fighting is a dangerous occupation – in part because firefighters are called upon to perform strenuous physical activity in hot, hostile environments. Each year, approximately 100 firefighters lose their lives in the line of duty and tens of thousands are injured. Over the past 15 years, approximately 45% of line of duty deaths have been attributed to heart attacks and another 650-1,000 firefighters suffer non-fatal heart attacks in the line of duty each year. From 1990 to 2004, the total number of fireground injuries has declined, yet during this same period, the number of cases related to the leading cause of injury - overexertion/strain – remained relatively constant. It is well recognized that fire fighting leads to increased cardiovascular and thermal strain. However, the time course of recovery from fire fighting is not well documented, despite the fact that a large percentage of fire fighting fatalities occur after fire fighting activity. Furthermore, on scene rehabilitation (OSR) has been broadly recommended to mitigate the cardiovascular and thermal strain associated with performing strenuous fire fighting activity, yet the efficacy of different rehabilitation interventions has not been documented. Twenty-five firefighters were recruited to participate in a “within-subjects, repeated measures” study designed to describe the acute effects of fire fighting on a broad array of physiological and psychological measures and several key cardiovascular variables. This study provided the first detailed documentation of the time course of recovery during 2½ hours post-fire fighting. Additionally, we compared two OSR strategies (standard and enhanced) to determine their effectiveness.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe

Considerations for best practices in studies of fiber or other dietary components and the intestinal microbiome

Considerations for best practices in studies of fiber or other dietary components and the intestinal microbiome. Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab 315: E1087–E1097, 2018. First published August 21, 2018; doi:10.1152/ajpendo.00058.2018.—A 2-day workshop organized by the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Agriculture included 16 presentations focused on the role of diet in alterations of the gastrointestinal microbiome, primarily that of the colon. Although thousands of research projects have been funded by U.S. federal agencies to study the intestinal microbiome of humans and a variety of animal models, only a minority addresses dietary effects, and a small subset is described in sufficient detail to allow reproduction of a study. Whereas there are standards being developed for many aspects of microbiome studies, such as sample collection, nucleic acid extraction, data handling, etc., none has been proposed for the dietary component; thus this workshop focused on the latter specific point. It is important to foster rigor in design and reproducibility of published studies to maintain high quality and enable designs that can be compared in systematic reviews. Speakers addressed the influence of the structure of the fermentable carbohydrate on the microbiota and the variables to consider in design of studies using animals, in vitro models, and human subjects. For all types of studies, strengths and weaknesses of various designs were highlighted, and for human studies, comparisons between controlled feeding and observational designs were discussed. Because of the lack of published, best-diet formulations for specific research questions, the main recommendation is to describe dietary ingredients and treatments in as much detail as possible to allow reproduction by other scientists

Measurement of the B0-anti-B0-Oscillation Frequency with Inclusive Dilepton Events

The $B^0$-$\bar B^0$ oscillation frequency has been measured with a sample of 23 million \B\bar B pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric B Factory at SLAC. In this sample, we select events in which both B mesons decay semileptonically and use the charge of the leptons to identify the flavor of each B meson. A simultaneous fit to the decay time difference distributions for opposite- and same-sign dilepton events gives $\Delta m_d = 0.493 \pm 0.012{(stat)}\pm 0.009{(syst)}$ ps$^{-1}$.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Physical Review Letter

Measurement of D-s(+) and D-s(*+) production in B meson decays and from continuum e(+)e(-) annihilation at √s=10.6 GeV

This is the pre-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the links below. Copyright @ 2002 APSNew measurements of Ds+ and Ds*+ meson production rates from B decays and from qq̅ continuum events near the Υ(4S) resonance are presented. Using 20.8 fb-1 of data on the Υ(4S) resonance and 2.6 fb-1 off-resonance, we find the inclusive branching fractions B(B⃗Ds+X)=(10.93±0.19±0.58±2.73)% and B(B⃗Ds*+X)=(7.9±0.8±0.7±2.0)%, where the first error is statistical, the second is systematic, and the third is due to the Ds+→φπ+ branching fraction uncertainty. The production cross sections σ(e+e-→Ds+X)×B(Ds+→φπ+)=7.55±0.20±0.34pb and σ(e+e-→Ds*±X)×B(Ds+→φπ+)=5.8±0.7±0.5pb are measured at center-of-mass energies about 40 MeV below the Υ(4S) mass. The branching fractions ΣB(B⃗Ds(*)+D(*))=(5.07±0.14±0.30±1.27)% and ΣB(B⃗Ds*+D(*))=(4.1±0.2±0.4±1.0)% are determined from the Ds(*)+ momentum spectra. The mass difference m(Ds+)-m(D+)=98.4±0.1±0.3MeV/c2 is also measured.This work was supported by DOE and NSF (USA), NSERC (Canada), IHEP (China), CEA and CNRS-IN2P3 (France), BMBF (Germany), INFN (Italy), NFR (Norway), MIST (Russia), and PPARC (United Kingdom). Individuals have received support from the Swiss NSF, A. P. Sloan Foundation, Research Corporation, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

An inherited duplication at the gene p21 protein-activated Kinase 7 (PAK7) is a risk factor for psychosis

FUNDING Funding for this study was provided by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium 2 project (085475/B/08/Z and 085475/Z/08/Z), the Wellcome Trust (072894/Z/03/Z, 090532/Z/09/Z and 075491/Z/04/B), NIMH grants (MH 41953 and MH083094) and Science Foundation Ireland (08/IN.1/B1916). We acknowledge use of the Trinity Biobank sample from the Irish Blood Transfusion Service; the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing; British 1958 Birth Cohort DNA collection funded by the Medical Research Council (G0000934) and the Wellcome Trust (068545/Z/02) and of the UK National Blood Service controls funded by the Wellcome Trust. Chris Spencer is supported by a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship (097364/Z/11/Z). Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by the Wellcome Trust. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors sincerely thank all patients who contributed to this study and all staff who facilitated their involvement. We thank W. Bodmer and B. Winney for use of the People of the British Isles DNA collection, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust. We thank Akira Sawa and Koko Ishzuki for advice on the PAK7–DISC1 interaction experiment and Jan Korbel for discussions on mechanism of structural variation.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Putting the Whole Grain Puzzle Together: Health Benefits Associated with Whole Grains—Summary of American Society for Nutrition 2010 Satellite Symposium123

The symposium “Putting the Whole Grain Puzzle Together: Health Benefits Associated with Whole Grains” sponsored by the ASN brought together researchers to review the evidence regarding the health benefits associated with whole grains. Current scientific evidence indicates that whole grains play an important role in lowering the risk of chronic diseases, such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, and also contribute to body weight management and gastrointestinal health. The essential macro- and micronutrients, along with the phytonutrients present in whole grains, synergistically contribute to their beneficial effects. Current evidence lends credence to the recommendations to incorporate whole grain foods into a healthy diet and lifestyle program. The symposium also highlighted the need for further research to examine the role of whole grain foods in disease prevention and management to gain a better understanding of their mechanisms of action