The Tax Treatment of Fringe Benefits

Woodbury and Huang use econometric models to investigate how changes in the tax treatment of fringe benefits can be expected to influence the level of benefits and compensation provided by employers, federal revenues, and income inequality.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1092/thumbnail.jp

Annotating Synapses in Large EM Datasets

Reconstructing neuronal circuits at the level of synapses is a central problem in neuroscience and becoming a focus of the emerging field of connectomics. To date, electron microscopy (EM) is the most proven technique for identifying and quantifying synaptic connections. As advances in EM make acquiring larger datasets possible, subsequent manual synapse identification ({\em i.e.}, proofreading) for deciphering a connectome becomes a major time bottleneck. Here we introduce a large-scale, high-throughput, and semi-automated methodology to efficiently identify synapses. We successfully applied our methodology to the Drosophila medulla optic lobe, annotating many more synapses than previous connectome efforts. Our approaches are extensible and will make the often complicated process of synapse identification accessible to a wider-community of potential proofreaders

Modeling impacts of farming management alternatives on CO2, CH4, and N2O emissions: A case study for water management of rice agriculture of China

Since the early 1980s, water management of rice paddies in China has changed substantially, with midseason drainage gradually replacing continuous flooding. This has provided an opportunity to estimate how a management alternative impacts greenhouse gas emissions at a large regional scale. We integrated a process-based model, DNDC, with a GIS database of paddy area, soil properties, and management factors. We simulated soil carbon sequestration (or net CO2 emission) and CH4 and N2O emissions from China\u27s rice paddies (30 million ha), based on 1990 climate and management conditions, with two water management scenarios: continuous flooding and midseason drainage. The results indicated that this change in water management has reduced aggregate CH4 emissions about 40%, or 5 Tg CH4 yr−1, roughly 5–10% of total global methane emissions from rice paddies. The mitigating effect of midseason drainage on CH4 flux was highly uneven across the country; the highest flux reductions (\u3e200 kg CH4-C ha−1 yr−1) were in Hainan, Sichuan, Hubei, and Guangdong provinces, with warmer weather and multiple-cropping rice systems. The smallest flux reductions (\u3c25 kg CH4-C ha−1 yr−1) occurred in Tianjin, Hebei, Ningxia, Liaoning, and Gansu Provinces, with relatively cool weather and single cropping systems. Shifting water management from continuous flooding to midseason drainage increased N2O emissions from Chinese rice paddies by 0.15 Tg N yr−1 (∼50% increase). This offset a large fraction of the greenhouse gas radiative forcing benefit gained by the decrease in CH4 emissions. Midseason drainage-induced N2O fluxes were high (\u3e8.0 kg N/ha) in Jilin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Xinjiang provinces, where the paddy soils contained relatively high organic matter. Shifting water management from continuous flooding to midseason drainage reduced total net CO2emissions by 0.65 Tg CO2-C yr−1, which made a relatively small contribution to the net climate impact due to the low radiative potential of CO2. The change in water management had very different effects on net greenhouse gas mitigation when implemented across climatic zones, soil types, or cropping systems. Maximum CH4 reductions and minimum N2O increases were obtained when the mid-season draining was applied to rice paddies with warm weather, high soil clay content, and low soil organic matter content, for example, Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces, which have 60% of China\u27s rice paddies and produce 65% of China\u27s rice harvest

Acid Stimulation (Sour Taste) Elicits GABA and Serotonin Release from Mouse Taste Cells

Several transmitter candidates including serotonin (5-HT), ATP, and norepinephrine (NE) have been identified in taste buds. Recently, γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) as well as the associated synthetic enzymes and receptors have also been identified in taste cells. GABA reduces taste-evoked ATP secretion from Receptor cells and is considered to be an inhibitory transmitter in taste buds. However, to date, the identity of GABAergic taste cells and the specific stimulus for GABA release are not well understood. In the present study, we used genetically-engineered Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells stably co-expressing GABAB receptors and Gαqo5 proteins to measure GABA release from isolated taste buds. We recorded robust responses from GABA biosensors when they were positioned against taste buds isolated from mouse circumvallate papillae and the buds were depolarized with KCl or a stimulated with an acid (sour) taste. In contrast, a mixture of sweet and bitter taste stimuli did not trigger GABA release. KCl- or acid-evoked GABA secretion from taste buds was Ca2+-dependent; removing Ca2+ from the bathing medium eliminated GABA secretion. Finally, we isolated individual taste cells to identify the origin of GABA secretion. GABA was released only from Presynaptic (Type III) cells and not from Receptor (Type II) cells. Previously, we reported that 5-HT released from Presynaptic cells inhibits taste-evoked ATP secretion. Combined with the recent findings that GABA depresses taste-evoked ATP secretion [1], the present results indicate that GABA and 5-HT are inhibitory transmitters in mouse taste buds and both likely play an important role in modulating taste responses

Reduced methane emissions from large-scale changes in water management of China’s rice paddies during 1980-2000

Decreased methane emissions from paddy rice may have contributed to the decline in the rate of increase of global atmospheric methane (CH4) concentration over the last 20 years. In China, midseason paddy drainage, which reduces growing season CH4 fluxes, was first implemented in the early 1980s, and has gradually replaced continuous flooding in much of the paddy area. We constructed a regional prediction for China\u27s rice paddy methane emissions using the DNDC biogeochemical model. Results of continuous flooding and midseason drainage simulations for all paddy fields in China were combined with regional scenarios for the timing of the transition from continuous flooding to predominantly mid-season drainage to generate estimates of total methane flux for 1980–2000. CH4 emissions from China\u27s paddy fields were reduced over that period by ∼5 Tg CH4 yr−1

The mPEG-PCL Copolymer for Selective Fermentation of Staphylococcus lugdunensis Against Candida parapsilosis in the Human Microbiome.

Many human skin diseases, such as seborrheic dermatitis, potentially occur due to the over-growth of fungi. It remains a challenge to develop fungicides with a lower risk of generating resistant fungi and non-specifically killing commensal microbes. Our probiotic approaches using a selective fermentation initiator of skin commensal bacteria, fermentation metabolites or their derivatives provide novel therapeutics to rein in the over-growth of fungi. Staphylococcus lugdunensis (S. lugdunensis) bacteria and Candida parapsilosis (C. parapsilosis) fungi coexist in the scalp microbiome. S. lugdunensis interfered with the growth of C. parapsilosis via fermentation. A methoxy poly(ethylene glycol)-b-poly(ε-caprolactone) (mPEG-PCL) copolymer functioned as a selective fermentation initiator of S. lugdunensis, selectively triggering the S. lugdunensis fermentation to produce acetic and isovaleric acids. The acetic acid and its pro-drug diethyleneglycol diacetate (Ac-DEG-Ac) effectively suppressed the growth of C. parapsilosis in vitro and impeded the fungal expansion in the human dandruff. We demonstrate for the first time that S. lugdunensis is a skin probiotic bacterium that can exploit mPEG-PCL to yield fungicidal short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). The concept of bacterial fermentation as a part of skin immunity to re-balance the dysbiotic microbiome warrants a novel avenue for studying the probiotic function of the skin microbiome in promoting health

Chronic exposure to neonicotinoids increases neuronal vulnerability to mitochondrial dysfunction in the bumblebee (Bombus terrestris)

This work was funded jointly by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Natural Environment Research Council, the Scottish Government, and The Wellcome Trust, under the Insect Pollinators Initiative (United Kingdom) Grant BB/ 1000313/1 (to C.N.C.).The global decline in the abundance and diversity of insect pollinators could result from habitat loss, disease, and pesticide exposure. The contribution of the neonicotinoid insecticides (e.g., clothianidin and imidacloprid) to this decline is controversial, and key to understanding their risk is whether the astonishingly low levels found in the nectar and pollen of plants is sufficient to deliver neuroactive levels to their site of action: the bee brain. Here we show that bumblebees (Bombusterrestris audax) fed field levels [10 nM, 2.1 ppb (w/w)] of neonicotinoid accumulate between 4 and 10 nM in their brains within 3 days. Acute (minutes) exposure of cultured neurons to 10 nM clothianidin, but not imidacloprid, causes a nicotinic acetylcholine receptor-dependent rapid mitochondrial depolarization. However, a chronic (2 days) exposure to 1 nM imidacloprid leads to a receptor-dependent increased sensitivity to a normally innocuous level of acetylcholine, which now also causes rapid mitochondrial depolarization in neurons. Finally, colonies exposed to this level of imidacloprid show deficits in colony growth and nest condition compared with untreated colonies. These findings provide a mechanistic explanation for the poor navigation and foraging observed in neonicotinoid treated bumblebee colonies.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

An Implementation of a Renesas H8/300 Microprocessor with a Cycle-Level Timing Extension

We describe an implementation of the Renesas H8/300 16-bit processor in VHDL suitable for synthesis on an FPGA. We extended the ISA slightly to accomodate cycle-accurate timers accessible from the instruction set, designed to provide more precise real-time control. We describe the architecture of our implementation in detail, describe our testing strategy, and finally show how to built a cross compilation toolchain under Linux