Potato Response to Simulated Glyphosate Drift

Field studies were conducted in 2008 in Ontario, OR and Paterson, WA to determine the effect of simulated glyphosate drift on 'Ranger Russet' potato, including visual injury, shikimic acid accumulation, and tuber yield. Glyphosate was applied at 8.5, 54, 107, 215, and 423 g ae ha(-1); which corresponds to 0.01, 0.064, 0.126, 0.254, and 0.5 of the lowest recommended (846 g ha(-1)) single application dose for glyphosate-resistant corn and sugar beet. Glyphosate was applied when potato plants were at 10-cm height, stolon hooking, tuber initiation, or bulking stage. The greatest visual foliar injury was observed when glyphosate was applied at a dose of 54 g haT/ha or greater and potato plants were at the hooking stage. The lowest foliar injury was observed when glyphosate was applied to potato plants at the bulking stage. The I(50) glyphosate dose at 42 d after treatment (DAT) was estimated to be 167 g ha(-1) for potatoes sprayed at the hooking stage. The corresponding glyphosate dose to result in 50% injury, for potatoes sprayed at tuber initiation, 10-cm height, and bulking stages were 129%, 338%, and 438%, respectively, greater than hooking stage. The U.S. No.1 potato yield was inversely related to vine injury and shikimic acid accumulation. Shikimic acid accumulation increased when glyphosate was applied at 107 g ha(-1) or greater. U.S. No.1 potato yield was reduced by 46% and 84% relative to the untreated control (55 and 76 T/ha) when glyphosate was applied at 107 g ha(-1) to plants in the booking stage at Ontario and Paterson, respectively. Tuber yields at both sites were lowest when glyphosate was applied at hooking and tuber initiation stages

'White knuckle care work' : violence, gender and new public management in the voluntary sector

Drawing on comparative data from Canada and Scotland, this article explores reasons why violence is tolerated in non-profit care settings. This article will provide insights into how workers' orientations to work, the desire to care and the intrinsic rewards from working in a non-profit context interact with the organization of work and managerially constructed workplace norms and cultures (Burawoy, 1979) to offset the tensions in an environment characterized by scarce resources and poor working conditions. This article will also outline how the same environment of scarce resources causes strains in management's efforts to establish such cultures. Working with highly excluded service users with problems that do not respond to easy interventions, workers find themselves working at the edge of their endurance, hanging on by their fingernails, and beginning to participate in various forms of resistance; suggesting that even among the most highly committed, 'white knuckle care' may be unsustainable

Investigation into the benefits of reduced oil flows in internal combustion engines

The engine lubrication system is a vital element for engine health but causes a parasitic load on the engine which increases the fuel consumption: this load can be reduced by matching the oil flow to lubricating requirements using a variable displacement oil pump. In a first stage, two variable displacement oil pumps were installed on a 2.4-L diesel engine; experiments over the New European Drive cycle showed reductions in fuel consumption of up to 3.4% and up to 5.8% over the urban phase of the cycle. A variable displacement oil pump was subsequently installed on an instrumented engine capturing over 100 metal and fluid temperatures within the engine structure. This showed that reducing oil flows resulted in lower oil temperature by up to 4 °C during cold-start New European Drive cycle but hotter cylinder liner temperatures by up to 6 °C. The higher cylinder wall temperatures caused an increase of 3% in oxides of nitrogen emissions but a reduction of 3%−5% in carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions. Finally, an energy flow analysis showed that the variable displacement oil pump can reduce oil pump energy consumption by 160 kJ (32%) but that this led to a 400-kJ reduction in friction and accessory work. These findings highlight the need for a system-level rather than a component-level approach to engine lubrication design to capture key thermal interactions. </jats:p

An open-source deep learning algorithm for efficient and fully-automatic analysis of the choroid in optical coherence tomography

Purpose: To develop an open-source, fully-automatic deep learning algorithm, DeepGPET, for choroid region segmentation in optical coherence tomography (OCT) data. Methods: We used a dataset of 715 OCT B-scans (82 subjects, 115 eyes) from 3 clinical studies related to systemic disease. Ground truth segmentations were generated using a clinically validated, semi-automatic choroid segmentation method, Gaussian Process Edge Tracing (GPET). We finetuned a UNet with MobileNetV3 backbone pre-trained on ImageNet. Standard segmentation agreement metrics, as well as derived measures of choroidal thickness and area, were used to evaluate DeepGPET, alongside qualitative evaluation from a clinical ophthalmologist. Results: DeepGPET achieves excellent agreement with GPET on data from 3 clinical studies (AUC=0.9994, Dice=0.9664; Pearson correlation of 0.8908 for choroidal thickness and 0.9082 for choroidal area), while reducing the mean processing time per image on a standard laptop CPU from 34.49s ($\pm$15.09) using GPET to 1.25s ($\pm$0.10) using DeepGPET. Both methods performed similarly according to a clinical ophthalmologist, who qualitatively judged a subset of segmentations by GPET and DeepGPET, based on smoothness and accuracy of segmentations. Conclusions :DeepGPET, a fully-automatic, open-source algorithm for choroidal segmentation, will enable researchers to efficiently extract choroidal measurements, even for large datasets. As no manual interventions are required, DeepGPET is less subjective than semi-automatic methods and could be deployed in clinical practice without necessitating a trained operator. DeepGPET addresses the lack of open-source, fully-automatic and clinically relevant choroid segmentation algorithms, and its subsequent public release will facilitate future choroidal research both in ophthalmology and wider systemic health.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. Currently in submission to ARVO TVST (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Translational Vision Science & Technology). GitHub link to codebase provided upon publicatio

Effect of a Web-Based Behavior Change Program on Weight Loss and Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Overweight and Obese Adults at High Risk of Developing Cardiovascular Disease: Randomized Controlled Trial.

Web-based programs are a potential medium for supporting weight loss because of their accessibility and wide reach. Research is warranted to determine the shorter- and longer-term effects of these programs in relation to weight loss and other health outcomes

Cardiac Angiogenic Imbalance Leads to Peripartum Cardiomyopathy

Peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) is an often fatal disease that affects pregnant women who are near delivery, and it occurs more frequently in women with pre-eclampsia and/or multiple gestation. The aetiology of PPCM, and why it is associated with pre-eclampsia, remain unknown. Here we show that PPCM is associated with a systemic angiogenic imbalance, accentuated by pre-eclampsia. Mice that lack cardiac PGC-$1\alpha$, a powerful regulator of angiogenesis, develop profound PPCM. Importantly, the PPCM is entirely rescued by pro-angiogenic therapies. In humans, the placenta in late gestation secretes VEGF inhibitors like soluble FLT1 (sFLT1), and this is accentuated by multiple gestation and pre-eclampsia. This anti-angiogenic environment is accompanied by subclinical cardiac dysfunction, the extent of which correlates with circulating levels of sFLT1. Exogenous sFLT1 alone caused diastolic dysfunction in wild-type mice, and profound systolic dysfunction in mice lacking cardiac PGC-$1\alpha$. Finally, plasma samples from women with PPCM contained abnormally high levels of sFLT1. These data indicate that PPCM is mainly a vascular disease, caused by excess anti-angiogenic signalling in the peripartum period. The data also explain how late pregnancy poses a threat to cardiac homeostasis, and why pre-eclampsia and multiple gestation are important risk factors for the development of PPCM

Genetic events in the progression of adenoid cystic carcinoma of the breast to high-grade triple-negative breast cancer

Adenoid cystic carcinoma of the breast is a rare histologic type of triple-negative breast cancer with an indolent clinical behavior, often driven by the MYB-NFIB fusion gene. Here we sought to define the repertoire of somatic genetic alterations in two adenoid cystic carcinomas associated with high-grade triple-negative breast cancer. The different components of each case were subjected to copy number profiling and massively parallel sequencing targeting all exons and selected regulatory and intronic regions of 488 genes. Reverse transcription PCR and fluorescence in situ hybridization were employed to investigate the presence of the MYB-NFIB translocation. The MYB-NFIB fusion gene was detected in both adenoid cystic carcinomas and their associated high-grade triple-negative breast cancer components. Whilst the distinct components of both cases displayed similar patterns of gene copy number alterations, massively parallel sequencing analysis revealed intra-tumor genetic heterogeneity. In case 1, progression from the trabecular adenoid cystic carcinoma to the high-grade triple-negative breast cancer was found to involve clonal shifts with enrichment of mutations affecting EP300, NOTCH1, ERBB2 and FGFR1 in the high-grade triple-negative breast cancer. In case 2, a clonal KMT2C mutation was present in the cribriform adenoid cystic carcinoma, solid adenoid cystic carcinoma and high-grade triple-negative breast cancer components, whereas a mutation affecting MYB was present only in the solid and high-grade triple-negative breast cancer areas and additional three mutations targeting STAG2, KDM6A and CDK12 were restricted to the high-grade triple-negative breast cancer. In conclusion, adenoid cystic carcinomas of the breast with high-grade transformation are underpinned by MYB-NFIB fusion gene, and, akin to other forms of cancer, may be constituted by a mosaic of cancer cell clones at diagnosis. The progression from adenoid cystic carcinoma to high-grade triple-negative breast cancer of no special type may involve the selection of neoplastic clones and/ or the acquisition of additional genetic alterations

The production and consumption activities relating to the celebrity artist

This paper considers the impact of the celebrity artist on the associated production and consumption activities. It also considers the role which entrepreneurial marketing plays in helping to create the celebrity artist aura. The artist Thomas Kinkade is used to illustrate how this occurs in practice. Here, authenticity and nostalgia dimensions are also influential factors. Underpinning these relationships are the roles played out by the media, including communication of celebrity artist identity, and the catalysing of its commodification within the celebrity artist brandscape. An enduring celebrity brand results due to the market creation activities of the celebrity artist. A conceptual model is developed which synthesises the factors behind the production and consumption of the celebrity artist which can stimulate further research. This paper provides innovative insight into the world of the celebrity artist by interrogating the market making and shaping devices behind successful production and consumption practices

Learning to Make Sense: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Sensory Education and Embodied Enculturation

In this introductory essay we examine through a ‘temporally inflected lens’ some of the complex entanglements of learning, senses, and sense making; body-sensory experience and practice; and culture and society. We thereby aim to bring into dialogue inter-/multisensorial approaches to education as a project and praxis and processes of ‘enculturation’, which have always, in one way or the other, involved ‘embodied’ learning (and imaginaries thereof), rather than mere ‘mental processing’. We first situate the ‘turn’ to the senses, across a range of disciplinary fields, brought on by a growing interest in ‘modes of meaning-making’, including the visual, aural, audio-visual, material, bodily, and spatial. Secondly, we investigate the explanatory potential of enculturation and embodiment as seemingly entangled notions. From this, we derive the concept of ‘embodied enculturation’ for the study of situated, historical entanglements of sensory learning and education. We link this proposed research paradigm to incisive scholarship on ‘cultural learning’ through sensorial lenses, after which we tease out six key questions or concerns emerging from a review of relevant, recent research. These key concerns help to contextualize state-of-the-art ‘sensuous education scholarship’ introduced in the final section of the article and elaborated further in the ensuing contributions to this special issue

PIK3CA-associated developmental disorders exhibit distinct classes of mutations with variable expression and tissue distribution

Mosaicism is increasingly recognized as a cause of developmental disorders with the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS). Mosaic mutations of PIK3CA have been associated with the widest spectrum of phenotypes associated with overgrowth and vascular malformations. We performed targeted NGS using 2 independent deep-coverage methods that utilize molecular inversion probes and amplicon sequencing in a cohort of 241 samples from 181 individuals with brain and/or body overgrowth. We identified PIK3CA mutations in 60 individuals. Several other individuals (n = 12) were identified separately to have mutations in PIK3CA by clinical targetedpanel testing (n = 6), whole-exome sequencing (n = 5), or Sanger sequencing (n = 1). Based on the clinical and molecular features, this cohort segregated into three distinct groups: (a) severe focal overgrowth due to low-level but highly activating (hotspot) mutations, (b) predominantly brain overgrowth and less severe somatic overgrowth due to less-activating mutations, and (c) intermediate phenotypes (capillary malformations with overgrowth) with intermediately activating mutations. Sixteen of 29 PIK3CA mutations were novel. We also identified constitutional PIK3CA mutations in 10 patients. Our molecular data, combined with review of the literature, show that PIK3CA-related overgrowth disorders comprise a discontinuous spectrum of disorders that correlate with the severity and distribution of mutations