Challenges in monitoring and managing engineered slopes in a changing climate

Geotechnical asset owners need to know which parts of their asset network are vulnerable to climate change induced failure in order to optimise future investment. Protecting these vulnerable slopes requires monitoring systems capable of identifying and alerting to asset operators changes in the internal conditions that precede failure. Current monitoring systems are heavily reliant on point sensors which can be difficult to interpret across slope scale. This paper presents challenges to producing such a system and research being carried out to address some of these using electrical resistance tomography (ERT). Experimental results show that whilst it is possible to measure soil water content indirectly via resistivity the relationship between resistivity and water content will change over time for a given slope. If geotechnical parameters such as pore water pressure are to be estimated using this method then ERT systems will require integrating with more conventional geotechnical instrumentation to ensure correct representative information is provided. The paper also presents examples of how such data can be processed and communicated to asset owners for the purposes of asset management

Systematic review of antiepileptic drugs’ safety and effectiveness in feline epilepsy

Understanding the efficacy and safety profile of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) in feline epilepsy is a crucial consideration for managing this important brain disease. However, there is a lack of information about the treatment of feline epilepsy and therefore a systematic review was constructed to assess current evidence for the AEDs’ efficacy and tolerability in cats. The methods and materials of our former systematic reviews in canine epilepsy were mostly mirrored for the current systematic review in cats. Databases of PubMed, CAB Direct and Google scholar were searched to detect peer-reviewed studies reporting efficacy and/or adverse effects of AEDs in cats. The studies were assessed with regards to their quality of evidence, i.e. study design, study population, diagnostic criteria and overall risk of bias and the outcome measures reported, i.e. prevalence and 95% confidence interval of the successful and affected population in each study and in total

Fine sediment reduces vertical migrations of Gammarus pulex (Crustacea: Amphipoda) in response to surface water loss

Surface and subsurface sediments in river ecosystems are recognized as refuges that may promote invertebrate survival during disturbances such as floods and streambed drying. Refuge use is spatiotemporally variable, with environmental factors including substrate composition, in particular the proportion of fine sediment (FS), affecting the ability of organisms to move through interstitial spaces. We conducted a laboratory experiment to examine the effects of FS on the movement of Gammarus pulex Linnaeus (Crustacea: Amphipoda) into subsurface sediments in response to surface water loss. We hypothesized that increasing volumes of FS would impede and ultimately prevent individuals from migrating into the sediments. To test this hypothesis, the proportion of FS (1–2 mm diameter) present within an open gravel matrix (4–16 mm diameter) was varied from 10 to 20% by volume in 2.5% increments. Under control conditions (0% FS), 93% of individuals moved into subsurface sediments as the water level was reduced. The proportion of individuals moving into the subsurface decreased to 74% at 10% FS, and at 20% FS no individuals entered the sediments, supporting our hypothesis. These results demonstrate the importance of reducing FS inputs into river ecosystems and restoring FS-clogged riverbeds, to promote refuge use during increasingly common instream disturbances

RSPCA and the criminology of social control

This paper contributes to a rethinking of animal abuse control and animal welfare protection in criminology, specifically, and in the social sciences more broadly. We do this, first, through a broad mapping of the institutional control complex around animal abuse in contemporary Britain. Second, we focus on the institutional strategies and practices, past and present, of the main agency of animal protection, and the policing thereof, in this society, namely the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). In looking back to this charity’s growth since the first decades of the nineteenth century at the time of the birth of modern industrial capitalism and also to its current rationale and practices as a late-modern, corporate organisation, we explore the seeming paradox of a private body taking a lead on the regulation and prosecution of illegalities associated with animal-human relationships. Finally, the ideology and strategy of the RSPCA are explored in the context of the often visceral and culturally influential ‘morality war’ associated with proponents, respectively, of animal rights (‘abolition’) and ‘anthropic’ welfare proponents (‘regulation’ and ‘protection’)

Identifying Cardiac Amyloid in Aortic Stenosis: ECV Quantification by CT in TAVR Patients

OBJECTIVES: To validate computed tomography measured ECV (ECVCT) as part of routine evaluation for the detection of cardiac amyloid in patients with aortic stenosis (AS)-amyloid. BACKGROUND: AS-amyloid affects 1 in 7 elderly patients referred for transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). Bone scintigraphy with exclusion of a plasma cell dyscrasia can diagnose transthyretin-related cardiac amyloid noninvasively, for which novel treatments are emerging. Amyloid interstitial expansion increases the myocardial extracellular volume (ECV). METHODS: Patients with severe AS underwent bone scintigraphy (Perugini grade 0, negative; Perugini grades 1 to 3, increasingly positive) and routine TAVR evaluation CT imaging with ECVCT using 3- and 5-min post-contrast acquisitions. Twenty non-AS control patients also had ECVCT performed using the 5-min post-contrast acquisition. RESULTS: A total of 109 patients (43% male; mean age 86 ± 5 years) with severe AS and 20 control subjects were recruited. Sixteen (15%) had AS-amyloid on bone scintigraphy (grade 1, n = 5; grade 2, n = 11). ECVCT was 32 ± 3%, 34 ± 4%, and 43 ± 6% in Perugini grades 0, 1, and 2, respectively (p < 0.001 for trend) with control subjects lower than lone AS (28 ± 2%; p < 0.001). ECVCT accuracy for AS-amyloid detection versus lone AS was 0.87 (0.95 for 99mTc-3,3-diphosphono-1,2-propanodicarboxylic acid Perugini grade 2 only), outperforming conventional electrocardiogram and echocardiography parameters. One composite parameter, the voltage/mass ratio, had utility (similar AUC of 0.87 for any cardiac amyloid detection), although in one-third of patients, this could not be calculated due to bundle branch block or ventricular paced rhythm. CONCLUSIONS: ECVCT during routine CT TAVR evaluation can reliably detect AS-amyloid, and the measured ECVCT tracks the degree of infiltration. Another measure of interstitial expansion, the voltage/mass ratio, also performed well

Updated fracture incidence rates for the US version of FRAX®

# The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Summary On the basis of updated fracture and mortality data, we recommend that the base population values used in the US version of FRAX ® be revised. The impact of suggested changes is likely to be a lowering of 10-year fracture probabilities. Introduction Evaluation of results produced by the US version of FRAX ® indicates that this tool overestimates the likelihood of major osteoporotic fracture. In an attempt to correct this, we updated underlying fracture and mortality rates for the model. Methods We used US hospital discharge data from 2006 t

Melanoma cells break down LPA to establish local gradients that drive chemotactic dispersal.

The high mortality of melanoma is caused by rapid spread of cancer cells, which occurs unusually early in tumour evolution. Unlike most solid tumours, thickness rather than cytological markers or differentiation is the best guide to metastatic potential. Multiple stimuli that drive melanoma cell migration have been described, but it is not clear which are responsible for invasion, nor if chemotactic gradients exist in real tumours. In a chamber-based assay for melanoma dispersal, we find that cells migrate efficiently away from one another, even in initially homogeneous medium. This dispersal is driven by positive chemotaxis rather than chemorepulsion or contact inhibition. The principal chemoattractant, unexpectedly active across all tumour stages, is the lipid agonist lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) acting through the LPA receptor LPAR1. LPA induces chemotaxis of remarkable accuracy, and is both necessary and sufficient for chemotaxis and invasion in 2-D and 3-D assays. Growth factors, often described as tumour attractants, cause negligible chemotaxis themselves, but potentiate chemotaxis to LPA. Cells rapidly break down LPA present at substantial levels in culture medium and normal skin to generate outward-facing gradients. We measure LPA gradients across the margins of melanomas in vivo, confirming the physiological importance of our results. We conclude that LPA chemotaxis provides a strong drive for melanoma cells to invade outwards. Cells create their own gradients by acting as a sink, breaking down locally present LPA, and thus forming a gradient that is low in the tumour and high in the surrounding areas. The key step is not acquisition of sensitivity to the chemoattractant, but rather the tumour growing to break down enough LPA to form a gradient. Thus the stimulus that drives cell dispersal is not the presence of LPA itself, but the self-generated, outward-directed gradient

Incorporating functional inter-relationships into protein function prediction algorithms

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Functional classification schemes (e.g. the Gene Ontology) that serve as the basis for annotation efforts in several organisms are often the source of gold standard information for computational efforts at supervised protein function prediction. While successful function prediction algorithms have been developed, few previous efforts have utilized more than the protein-to-functional class label information provided by such knowledge bases. For instance, the Gene Ontology not only captures protein annotations to a set of functional classes, but it also arranges these classes in a DAG-based hierarchy that captures rich inter-relationships between different classes. These inter-relationships present both opportunities, such as the potential for additional training examples for small classes from larger related classes, and challenges, such as a harder to learn distinction between similar GO terms, for standard classification-based approaches.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We propose a method to enhance the performance of classification-based protein function prediction algorithms by addressing the issue of using these interrelationships between functional classes constituting functional classification schemes. Using a standard measure for evaluating the semantic similarity between nodes in an ontology, we quantify and incorporate these inter-relationships into the <it>k</it>-nearest neighbor classifier. We present experiments on several large genomic data sets, each of which is used for the modeling and prediction of over hundred classes from the GO Biological Process ontology. The results show that this incorporation produces more accurate predictions for a large number of the functional classes considered, and also that the classes benefitted most by this approach are those containing the fewest members. In addition, we show how our proposed framework can be used for integrating information from the entire GO hierarchy for improving the accuracy of predictions made over a set of base classes. Finally, we provide qualitative and quantitative evidence that this incorporation of functional inter-relationships enables the discovery of interesting biology in the form of novel functional annotations for several yeast proteins, such as Sna4, Rtn1 and Lin1.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We implemented and evaluated a methodology for incorporating interrelationships between functional classes into a standard classification-based protein function prediction algorithm. Our results show that this incorporation can help improve the accuracy of such algorithms, and help uncover novel biology in the form of previously unknown functional annotations. The complete source code, a sample data set and the additional files for this paper are available free of charge for non-commercial use at <url>http://www.cs.umn.edu/vk/gaurav/functionalsimilarity/</url>.</p

Quantum dynamics in strong fluctuating fields

A large number of multifaceted quantum transport processes in molecular systems and physical nanosystems can be treated in terms of quantum relaxation processes which couple to one or several fluctuating environments. A thermal equilibrium environment can conveniently be modelled by a thermal bath of harmonic oscillators. An archetype situation provides a two-state dissipative quantum dynamics, commonly known under the label of a spin-boson dynamics. An interesting and nontrivial physical situation emerges, however, when the quantum dynamics evolves far away from thermal equilibrium. This occurs, for example, when a charge transferring medium possesses nonequilibrium degrees of freedom, or when a strong time-dependent control field is applied externally. Accordingly, certain parameters of underlying quantum subsystem acquire stochastic character. Herein, we review the general theoretical framework which is based on the method of projector operators, yielding the quantum master equations for systems that are exposed to strong external fields. This allows one to investigate on a common basis the influence of nonequilibrium fluctuations and periodic electrical fields on quantum transport processes. Most importantly, such strong fluctuating fields induce a whole variety of nonlinear and nonequilibrium phenomena. A characteristic feature of such dynamics is the absence of thermal (quantum) detailed balance.Comment: review article, Advances in Physics (2005), in pres