Gut Microbial Metabolism and Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.

The gut microbiome, the multispecies community of microbes that exists in the gastrointestinal tract, encodes several orders of magnitude more functional genes than the human genome. It also plays a pivotal role in human health, in part due to metabolism of environmental, dietary, and host-derived substrates, which produce bioactive metabolites. Perturbations to the composition and associated metabolic output of the gut microbiome have been associated with a number of chronic liver diseases, including nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Here, we review the rapidly evolving suite of next-generation techniques used for studying gut microbiome composition, functional gene content, and bioactive products and discuss relationships with the pathogenesis of NAFLD

Quit playing games with my heart: Understanding online dating scams

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Online dating sites are experiencing a rise in popularity, with one in five relationships in the United States starting on one of these sites. Online dating sites provide a valuable platform not only for single people trying to meet a life partner, but also for cybercriminals, who see in people looking for love easy victims for scams. Such scams span from schemes similar to traditional advertisement of illicit services or goods (i.e., spam) to advanced schemes, in which the victim starts a long-distance relationship with the scammer and is eventually extorted money. In this paper we perform the first large-scale study of online dating scams. We analyze the scam accounts detected on a popular online dating site over a period of eleven months, and provide a taxonomy of the different types of scammers that are active in the online dating landscape. We show that different types of scammers target a different demographics on the site, and therefore set up accounts with different characteristics. Our results shed light on the threats associated to online dating scams, and can help researchers and practitioners in developing effective countermeasures to fight them

Auditory spatial processing in Alzheimer's disease.

: The location and motion of sounds in space are important cues for encoding the auditory world. Spatial processing is a core component of auditory scene analysis, a cognitively demanding function that is vulnerable in Alzheimer's disease. Here we designed a novel neuropsychological battery based on a virtual space paradigm to assess auditory spatial processing in patient cohorts with clinically typical Alzheimer's disease (n = 20) and its major variant syndrome, posterior cortical atrophy (n = 12) in relation to healthy older controls (n = 26). We assessed three dimensions of auditory spatial function: externalized versus non-externalized sound discrimination, moving versus stationary sound discrimination and stationary auditory spatial position discrimination, together with non-spatial auditory and visual spatial control tasks. Neuroanatomical correlates of auditory spatial processing were assessed using voxel-based morphometry. Relative to healthy older controls, both patient groups exhibited impairments in detection of auditory motion, and stationary sound position discrimination. The posterior cortical atrophy group showed greater impairment for auditory motion processing and the processing of a non-spatial control complex auditory property (timbre) than the typical Alzheimer's disease group. Voxel-based morphometry in the patient cohort revealed grey matter correlates of auditory motion detection and spatial position discrimination in right inferior parietal cortex and precuneus, respectively. These findings delineate auditory spatial processing deficits in typical and posterior Alzheimer's disease phenotypes that are related to posterior cortical regions involved in both syndromic variants and modulated by the syndromic profile of brain degeneration. Auditory spatial deficits contribute to impaired spatial awareness in Alzheimer's disease and may constitute a novel perceptual model for probing brain network disintegration across the Alzheimer's disease syndromic spectrum.<br/

A Kind of Affine Weighted Moment Invariants

A new kind of geometric invariants is proposed in this paper, which is called affine weighted moment invariant (AWMI). By combination of local affine differential invariants and a framework of global integral, they can more effectively extract features of images and help to increase the number of low-order invariants and to decrease the calculating cost. The experimental results show that AWMIs have good stability and distinguishability and achieve better results in image retrieval than traditional moment invariants. An extension to 3D is straightforward

Duplications of the critical Rubinstein-Taybi deletion region on chromosome 16p13.3 cause a novel recognisable syndrome

Background The introduction of molecular karyotyping technologies facilitated the identification of specific genetic disorders associated with imbalances of certain genomic regions. A detailed phenotypic delineation of interstitial 16p13.3 duplications is hampered by the scarcity of such patients. Objectives To delineate the phenotypic spectrum associated with interstitial 16p13.3 duplications, and perform a genotype-phenotype analysis. Results The present report describes the genotypic and phenotypic delineation of nine submicroscopic interstitial 16p13.3 duplications. The critically duplicated region encompasses a single gene, CREBBP, which is mutated or deleted in Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome. In 10 out of the 12 hitherto described probands, the duplication arose de novo. Conclusions Interstitial 16p13.3 duplications have a recognizable phenotype, characterized by normal to moderately retarded mental development, normal growth, mild arthrogryposis, frequently small and proximally implanted thumbs and characteristic facial features. Occasionally, developmental defects of the heart, genitalia, palate or the eyes are observed. The frequent de novo occurrence of 16p13.3 duplications demonstrates the reduced reproductive fitness associated with this genotype. Inheritance of the duplication from a clinically normal parent in two cases indicates that the associated phenotype is incompletely penetrant

A note on the boundary contribution with bad deformation in gauge theory

Motivated by recently progresses in the study of BCFW recursion relation with nonzero boundary contributions for theories with scalars and fermions\cite{Bofeng}, in this short note we continue the study of boundary contributions of gauge theory with the bad deformation. Unlike cases with scalars or fermions, it is hard to use Feynman diagrams directly to obtain boundary contributions, thus we propose another method based on the ${\cal N}=4$ SYM theory. Using this method, we are able to write down a useful on-shell recursion relation to calculate boundary contributions from related theories. Our result shows the cut-constructibility of gauge theory even with the bad deformation in some generalized sense.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

New insights into atypical Alzheimer's disease in the era of biomarkers

Most patients with Alzheimer's disease present with amnestic problems; however, a substantial proportion, over-represented in young-onset cases, have atypical phenotypes including predominant visual, language, executive, behavioural, or motor dysfunction. In the past, these individuals often received a late diagnosis; however, availability of CSF and PET biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease pathologies and incorporation of atypical forms of Alzheimer's disease into new diagnostic criteria increasingly allows them to be more confidently diagnosed early in their illness. This early diagnosis in turn allows patients to be offered tailored information, appropriate care and support, and individualised treatment plans. These advances will provide improved access to clinical trials, which often exclude atypical phenotypes. Research into atypical Alzheimer's disease has revealed previously unrecognised neuropathological heterogeneity across the Alzheimer's disease spectrum. Neuroimaging, genetic, biomarker, and basic science studies are providing key insights into the factors that might drive selective vulnerability of differing brain networks, with potential mechanistic implications for understanding typical late-onset Alzheimer's disease

Tuneable Singlet Exciton Fission and Triplet-Triplet Annihilation in an Orthogonal Pentacene Dimer

We report fast and highly efficient intramolecular singlet exciton fission in a pentacene dimer, consisting of two covalently attached, nearly orthogonal pentacene units. Fission to triplet excitons from this ground state geometry occurs within 1 ps in isolated molecules in solution and dispersed solid matrices. The process exhibits a sensitivity to environmental polarity and competes with geometric relaxation in the singlet state, while subsequent triplet decay is strongly dependent on conformational freedom. The near orthogonal arrangement of the pentacene units is unlike any structure currently proposed for efficient singlet exciton fission and may lead to new molecular design rules.JW acknowledges financial support from Singapore MOE Tier 3 grant (MOE2014-T3-1-004). SL thanks AGS Scholarship support from the A*STAR Singapore. The work was supported by the EPSRC (grant number EP/G060738/1). We acknowledge the use of the Darwin Supercomputer of the University of Cambridge High 18 Performance Computing Service (http://www.hpc.cam.ac.uk/) and the EPSRC UK National Service for Computational Chemistry Software (NSCCS) at Imperial College London in carrying out this work.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adfm.20150153

“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hypercompetition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship