Combining Plant Pathogenic Fungi and the Leaf-Mining Fly, Hydrellia pakistanae, Increases Damage to Hydrilla

Four fungal species, F71PJ Acremonium sp., F531 Cylindrocarpon sp., F542, Botrytis sp., and F964 Fusarium culmorum [Wm. G. Sm.] Sacc. were recovered from hydrilla [ Hydrilla verticillata (L. f.) Royle] shoots or from soil and water surrounding hydrilla growing in ponds and lakes in Florida and shown to be capable of killing hydrilla in a bioassay. The isolates were tested singly and in combination with the leaf-mining fly, Hydrellia pakistanae (Diptera: Ephydridae), for their capability to kill or severely damage hydrilla in a bioassay

The Slender Mr. Cogito.” Rev. of Collected Poems, 1956-1998, Zbigniew Herbert.

"Fatten your animal for sacrifice" Apollo warned the ancient Greek poet Callimachus, whom opponents criticized for avoiding civic verse, "but keep your muse slender." The implication of this directive--that poetry's aesthetic value depends upon its refusal to engage in contemporary politics--has never been less true than in the case of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), whose slender Muse magically digests even the most ungainly of fares

The Turbulent Lives of Yeats's Painted Horses.

HAD THINGS GONE the way he hoped, Yeats would have been in Japan by 1921, combing the museums and mountains for ancient paintings and statuary, or perhaps wandering through `some forgotten city, where the streets are full of grass' and `where there is no sound but that of some temple bell'.1 Instead, on 27 June he was still in Oxford writing wistfully to his friend Yone Noguchi, the poet who had visited him and Ezra Pound at Stone Cottage in 1913, spent time with him in New York in 1919, and returned to Keio University in Japan to arrange an invitation for him to lecture there for two years: `I wish I had found my way to your country a year or so ago', Yeats admits regretfully, `and were still there'.2 He had received the invitation two years before, on 9 July 1919, had written about it with growing excitement in the following months, but in November his eminently frugal `Instructors' (with no little assistance from his wife) firmly directed him to decline the offer.3 By the time he wrote to Noguchi in 1921, he had reluctantly resigned himself to poring over books of paintings by Japanese artists, to settling for an ancient Japan of the imagination, composed mainly of `the lives E...1 of these painters'. `[T]heir talks, their loves, their religion, their friends', he implores Noguchi, `I would like to know these things minutely'.4 Perhaps it was this sense of disappointment and the subsequent renewal of interest in Japanese painting that provoked a boyhood memory only a few months before, when he was preparing Four Years: 1887-1891 for its upcoming serial publication in the London Mercury and the Dial.

“What Matters Most.” Rev. of Selected Poems, 1931-2005, Czeslaw Milosz.

Czeslaw Milosz took a long, thoughtful pause midway through a reading he gave in December 1975 at the Guggenheim. The audience rustled their programs and shifted in their seats. Perhaps it was the prodding irony of a line from the poem he had just read that prompted him to stop for a moment. "People therefore preserve silent integrity," he recited from "Ars Poetica?," "thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors." Or perhaps he was simply gathering his thoughts to announce the end of a long and, certainly in his eyes, far from respectful silence

Competition among native and invasive Phragmites australis populations: An experimental test of the effects of invasion status, genome size, and ploidy level

Among the traits whose relevance for plant invasions has recently been suggested are genome size (the amount of nuclear DNA) and ploidy level. So far, research on the role of genome size in invasiveness has been mostly based on indirect evidence by comparing species with different genome sizes, but how karyological traits influence competition at the intraspecific level remains unknown. We addressed these questions in a common-garden experiment evaluating the outcome of direct intraspecific competition among 20 populations of Phragmites australis, represented by clones collected in North America and Europe, and differing in their status (native and invasive), genome size (small and large), and ploidy levels (tetraploid, hexaploid, or octoploid). Each clone was planted in competition with one of the others in all possible combinations with three replicates in 45-L pots. Upon harvest, the identity of 21 shoots sampled per pot was revealed by flow cytometry and DNA analysis. Differences in performance were examined using relative proportions of shoots of each clone, ratios of their aboveground biomass, and relative yield total (RYT). The performance of the clones in competition primarily depended on the clone status (native vs. invasive). Measured in terms of shoot number or aboveground biomass, the strongest signal observed was that North American native clones always lost in competition to the other two groups. In addition, North American native clones were suppressed by European natives to a similar degree as by North American invasives. North American invasive clones had the largest average shoot biomass, but only by a limited, nonsignificant difference due to genome size. There was no effect of ploidy on competition. Since the North American invaders of European origin are able to outcompete the native North American clones, we suggest that their high competitiveness acts as an important driver in the early stages of their invasion

Healthy aging in elderly cochlear implant recipients: a multinational observational study

Background: Given an increase in the aging population and its impact on healthcare systems, policy makers for provision of health and social services are aiming to keep older adults in good health for longer, in other words towards ‘healthy aging’. Our study objective is to show that rehabilitation with cochlear implant treatment in the elderly with hearing impairment improves the overall health-related quality of life and general well-being that translate into healthy aging. Methods: The multicentre, prospective, repeated measures, single-subject, clinical observational study will accrue 100 elderly, first-time, unilateral CI recipients (≥ 60 years) and analyze changes on specific measurement tools over ca. 20 months from preimplant to postimplant. Evaluations will consist of details collected through case history and interview questionnaires by clinicians, data logging, self-report questionnaires completed by the recipients and a series of commonly used audiometric measures and geriatric assessment tools. The primary indicator of changes in overall quality of life will be the HUI-3. Discussion: The protocol is designed to make use of measurement tools that have already been applied to the hearing-impaired population in order to compare effects of CI rehabilitation in adults immediately before their implantation, (pre-implant) and after gaining 1–1.5 years of experience (post-implant). The broad approach will lead to a greater understanding of how useful hearing impacts the quality of life in elderly individuals, and thus improves potentials for healthy aging. Outcomes will be described and analyzed in detail. Trial registration: This research has been registered in ClinicalTrials.gov (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/), 7 March 2017 under the n° NCT03072862

Parallel mutual information estimation for inferring gene regulatory networks on GPUs

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Mutual information is a measure of similarity between two variables. It has been widely used in various application domains including computational biology, machine learning, statistics, image processing, and financial computing. Previously used simple histogram based mutual information estimators lack the precision in quality compared to kernel based methods. The recently introduced B-spline function based mutual information estimation method is competitive to the kernel based methods in terms of quality but at a lower computational complexity.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present a new approach to accelerate the B-spline function based mutual information estimation algorithm with commodity graphics hardware. To derive an efficient mapping onto this type of architecture, we have used the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming model to design and implement a new parallel algorithm. Our implementation, called CUDA-MI, can achieve speedups of up to 82 using double precision on a single GPU compared to a multi-threaded implementation on a quad-core CPU for large microarray datasets. We have used the results obtained by CUDA-MI to infer gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from microarray data. The comparisons to existing methods including ARACNE and TINGe show that CUDA-MI produces GRNs of higher quality in less time.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>CUDA-MI is publicly available open-source software, written in CUDA and C++ programming languages. It obtains significant speedup over sequential multi-threaded implementation by fully exploiting the compute capability of commonly used CUDA-enabled low-cost GPUs.</p