Do therapist behaviors differ with Hispanic youth? A brief look at within-session therapist behaviors and youth treatment response.

Brief addiction treatments, including motivational interviewing (MI), have shown promise with youth. One underexamined factor in this equation is the role of therapist behaviors. We therefore sought to assess whether and how therapist behaviors differ for Hispanic versus non-Hispanic youth and how that may be related to treatment outcome. With 80 substance-using adolescents (M age = 16 years; 65% male; 59% Hispanic; 41% non-Hispanic), we examined the relationship between youth ethnicity and therapist behaviors across two brief treatments (MI and alcohol/marijuana education [AME]). We then explored relationships to youth 3-month treatment response across four target outcomes: binge drinking days, alcohol-related problems, marijuana use days, and marijuana-related problems. In this study, therapists showed significantly more MI skills within the MI condition and more didactic skills in the AME condition. With respect to youth ethnicity, across both conditions (MI and AME), therapists used less MI skills with Hispanic youth. Contrary to expectations, therapists' use of MI skills was not connected to poorer outcomes for Hispanic youth across the board (e.g., for binge drinking days, marijuana use days, or marijuana-related problems). Rather, for Hispanic youth, therapists' use of lower MI skills was related only to poorer treatment outcomes in the context of alcohol-related problems. The observed relationships highlight the importance of investigating salient treatment interactions between therapist factors and youth ethnicity to guide improvements in youth treatment response

Life after charge noise: recent results with transmon qubits

We review the main theoretical and experimental results for the transmon, a superconducting charge qubit derived from the Cooper pair box. The increased ratio of the Josephson to charging energy results in an exponential suppression of the transmon's sensitivity to 1/f charge noise. This has been observed experimentally and yields homogeneous broadening, negligible pure dephasing, and long coherence times of up to 3 microseconds. Anharmonicity of the energy spectrum is required for qubit operation, and has been proven to be sufficient in transmon devices. Transmons have been implemented in a wide array of experiments, demonstrating consistent and reproducible results in very good agreement with theory.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Review article, accepted for publication in Quantum Inf. Pro

Electromagnetic-field quantization and spontaneous decay in left-handed media

We present a quantization scheme for the electromagnetic field interacting with atomic systems in the presence of dispersing and absorbing magnetodielectric media, including left-handed material having negative real part of the refractive index. The theory is applied to the spontaneous decay of a two-level atom at the center of a spherical free-space cavity surrounded by magnetodielectric matter of overlapping band-gap zones. Results for both big and small cavities are presented, and the problem of local-field corrections within the real-cavity model is addressed.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, RevTe

Functional diversity of chemokines and chemokine receptors in response to viral infection of the central nervous system.

Encounters with neurotropic viruses result in varied outcomes ranging from encephalitis, paralytic poliomyelitis or other serious consequences to relatively benign infection. One of the principal factors that control the outcome of infection is the localized tissue response and subsequent immune response directed against the invading toxic agent. It is the role of the immune system to contain and control the spread of virus infection in the central nervous system (CNS), and paradoxically, this response may also be pathologic. Chemokines are potent proinflammatory molecules whose expression within virally infected tissues is often associated with protection and/or pathology which correlates with migration and accumulation of immune cells. Indeed, studies with a neurotropic murine coronavirus, mouse hepatitis virus (MHV), have provided important insight into the functional roles of chemokines and chemokine receptors in participating in various aspects of host defense as well as disease development within the CNS. This chapter will highlight recent discoveries that have provided insight into the diverse biologic roles of chemokines and their receptors in coordinating immune responses following viral infection of the CNS

An Integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource to Drive High-Quality Survival Outcome Analytics

For a decade, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program collected clinicopathologic annotation data along with multi-platform molecular profiles of more than 11,000 human tumors across 33 different cancer types. TCGA clinical data contain key features representing the democratized nature of the data collection process. To ensure proper use of this large clinical dataset associated with genomic features, we developed a standardized dataset named the TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource (TCGA-CDR), which includes four major clinical outcome endpoints. In addition to detailing major challenges and statistical limitations encountered during the effort of integrating the acquired clinical data, we present a summary that includes endpoint usage recommendations for each cancer type. These TCGA-CDR findings appear to be consistent with cancer genomics studies independent of the TCGA effort and provide opportunities for investigating cancer biology using clinical correlates at an unprecedented scale. Analysis of clinicopathologic annotations for over 11,000 cancer patients in the TCGA program leads to the generation of TCGA Clinical Data Resource, which provides recommendations of clinical outcome endpoint usage for 33 cancer types

Supernova Interaction with a Circumstellar Medium

The explosion of a core collapse supernova drives a powerful shock front into the wind from the progenitor star. A layer of shocked circumstellar gas and ejecta develops that is subject to hydrodynamic instabilities. The hot gas can be observed directly by its X-ray emission, some of which is absorbed and re-radiated at lower frequencies by the ejecta and the circumstellar gas. Synchrotron radiation from relativistic electrons accelerated at the shock fronts provides information on the mass loss density if free-free absorption dominates at early times or the size of the emitting region if synchrotron self-absorption dominates. Analysis of the interaction leads to information on the density and structure of the ejecta and the circumstellar medium, and the abundances in these media. The emphasis here is on the physical processes related to the interaction.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, to appear as a Chapter in "Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts," edited by K. W. Weiler (Springer-Verlag

Driver Fusions and Their Implications in the Development and Treatment of Human Cancers.

Gene fusions represent an important class of somatic alterations in cancer. We systematically investigated fusions in 9,624 tumors across 33 cancer types using multiple fusion calling tools. We identified a total of 25,664 fusions, with a 63% validation rate. Integration of gene expression, copy number, and fusion annotation data revealed that fusions involving oncogenes tend to exhibit increased expression, whereas fusions involving tumor suppressors have the opposite effect. For fusions involving kinases, we found 1,275 with an intact kinase domain, the proportion of which varied significantly across cancer types. Our study suggests that fusions drive the development of 16.5% of cancer cases and function as the sole driver in more than 1% of them. Finally, we identified druggable fusions involving genes such as TMPRSS2, RET, FGFR3, ALK, and ESR1 in 6.0% of cases, and we predicted immunogenic peptides, suggesting that fusions may provide leads for targeted drug and immune therapy

Perspective on Oncogenic Processes at the End of the Beginning of Cancer Genomics

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) has catalyzed systematic characterization of diverse genomic alterations underlying human cancers. At this historic junction marking the completion of genomic characterization of over 11,000 tumors from 33 cancer types, we present our current understanding of the molecular processes governing oncogenesis. We illustrate our insights into cancer through synthesis of the findings of the TCGA PanCancer Atlas project on three facets of oncogenesis: (1) somatic driver mutations, germline pathogenic variants, and their interactions in the tumor; (2) the influence of the tumor genome and epigenome on transcriptome and proteome; and (3) the relationship between tumor and the microenvironment, including implications for drugs targeting driver events and immunotherapies. These results will anchor future characterization of rare and common tumor types, primary and relapsed tumors, and cancers across ancestry groups and will guide the deployment of clinical genomic sequencing