Space and biotechnology: An industry profile

The results of a study conducted by the Center for Space and Advanced Technology (CSAT) for NASA-JSC are presented. The objectives were to determine the interests and attitudes of the U.S. biotechnology industry toward space biotechnology and to prepare a concise review of the current activities of the biotechnology industry. In order to accomplish these objectives, two primary actions were taken. First, a questionnaire was designed, reviewed, and distributed to U.S. biotechnology companies. Second, reviews of the various biotechnology fields were prepared in several aspects of the industry. For each review, leading figures in the field were asked to prepare a brief review pointing out key trends and current industry technical problems. The result is a readable narrative of the biotechnology industry which will provide space scientists and engineers valuable clues as to where the space environment can be explored to advance the U.S. biotechnology industry

Functional imaging reveals working memory and attention interact to produce the attentional blink

Copyright @ 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology PressIf two centrally presented visual stimuli occur within approximately half a second of each other, the second target often fails to be reported correctly. This effect, called the attentional blink (AB; Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., & Arnell, K. M. Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: An attentional blink? Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and Performance, 18, 849-860, 1992], has been attributed to a resource "bottleneck," likely arising as a failure of attention during encoding into or retrieval from visual working memory (WM). Here we present participants with a hybrid WM-AB study while they undergo fMRI to provide insight into the neural underpinnings of this bottleneck. Consistent with a WM-based bottleneck account, fronto-parietal brain areas exhibited a WM load-dependent modulation of neural responses during the AB task. These results are consistent with the view that WM and attention share a capacity-limited resource and provide insight into the neural structures that underlie resource allocation in tasks requiring joint use of WM and attention.This research was supported by a project grant (071944) from the Wellcome Trust to Kimron Shapiro

More animals than markers: a study into the application of the single step T-BLUP model in large-scale multi-trait Australian Angus beef cattle genetic evaluation

International audienceAbstractMulti-trait single step genetic evaluation is increasingly facing the situation of having more individuals with genotypes than markers within each genotype. This creates a situation where the genomic relationship matrix (G\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\mathbf{G }$$\end{document}) is not of full rank and its inversion is algebraically impossible. Recently, the SS-T-BLUP method was proposed as a modified version of the single step equations, providing an elegant way to circumvent the inversion of the G\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\mathbf{G }$$\end{document} and therefore accommodate the situation described. SS-T-BLUP uses the Woodbury matrix identity, thus it requires an add-on matrix, which is usually the covariance matrix of the residual polygenic effet. In this paper, we examine the application of SS-T-BLUP to a large-scale multi-trait Australian Angus beef cattle dataset using the full BREEDPLAN single step genetic evaluation model and compare the results to the application of two different methods of using G\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\mathbf{G }$$\end{document} in a single step model. Results clearly show that SS-T-BLUP outperforms other single step formulations in terms of computational speed and avoids approximation of the inverse of G\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\mathbf{G }$$\end{document}

Establishing gold standard approaches to rapid tranquillisation: a review and discussion of the evidence on the safety and efficacy of medications currently used

Background: Rapid tranquillisation is used when control of agitation, aggression or excitement is required. Throughout the UK there is no consensus over the choice of drugs to be used as first line treatment. The NICE guideline on the management of violent behaviour involving psychiatric inpatients conducted a systematic examination of the literature relating to the effectiveness and safety of rapid tranquillisation (NICE, 2005). This paper presents the key findings from that review and key guideline recommendations generated, and discusses the implications for practice of more recent research and information. Aims: To examine the evidence on the efficacy and safety of medications used for rapid tranquillisation in inpatient psychiatric settings. Method: Systematic review of current guidelines and phase III randomised, controlled trials of medication used for rapid tranquillisation. Formal consensus methods were used to generate clinically relevant recommendations to support safe and effective prescribing of rapid tranquillisation in the development of a NICE guideline. Findings: There is a lack of high quality clinical trial evidence in the UK and therefore a ‘gold standard’ medication regime for rapid tranquillisation has not been established. Rapid tranquillisation and clinical practice: The NICE guideline produced 35 recommendations on rapid tranquillisation practice for the UK, with the primary aim of calming the service user to enable the use of psychosocial techniques. Conclusions and implications for clinical practice: Further UK specific research is urgently needed that provides the clinician with a hierarchy of options for the clinical practice of rapid tranquillisation

Magnetic susceptibility of a CuO2 plane in the La2CuO4 system: I. RPA treatment of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interactions

Motivated by recent experiments on undoped La2CuO4, which found pronounced temperature-dependent anisotropies in the low-field magnetic susceptibility, we have investigated a two-dimensional square lattice of S=1/2 spins that interact via Heisenberg exchange plus the symmetric and anti-symmetric Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya anisotropies. We describe the transition to a state with long-ranged order, and find the spin-wave excitations, with a mean-field theory, linear spin-wave analysis, and using Tyablikov's RPA decoupling scheme. We find the different components of the susceptibility within all of these approximations, both below and above the N'eel temperature, and obtain evidence of strong quantum fluctuations and spin-wave interactions in a broad temperature region near the transition.Comment: 20 pages, 2 column format, 22 figure

In search of Britain’s Muslim ghettoes

The local media have recently carried a number of stories suggesting that Muslim ghettoes are developing in British cities – a claim also made about European cities more generally. Analysis of data from the 2001 and 2011 Censuses of England and Wales suggests that these representations are journalistic hyperbole: most British Muslims live in small city blocks where they form only a minority of the local population. </jats:p

Uncovering interactions in multivariate contingency tables:a multi-level modelling exploratory approach

Much quantitative behavioural social science – a great deal of it exploratory in nature – involves the analysis of multivariate contingency tables, usually deploying logistic binomial and multinomial regression models with no exploration of interaction effects, despite arguments that this should be a crucial element of the analysis. This article builds on suggestions that the search for interaction effects should employ multi-level modelling strategies and outlines a procedure for modelling patterns in data sets with small numbers of observations in many, if not all, of their multivariate contingency table cells; all expected cells must be non-zero. The procedure produces precision-weighted estimates of the observed:expected rates for each and every cell, together with associated Bayesian credible intervals, and is illustrated using a large survey data set relating voting (and abstaining) at the 2015 UK general election to age, sex and educational qualifications. Crucially, while fine detail can be explored in the analysis, unreliable rates for particular subgroups are automatically down-weighted to what is happening generally. The identification of reliable differential rates then allows a simpler hybrid model that captures the main trends to be fitted and interpreted. </jats:p

Proportion of physicians who treat patients with greater social and clinical risk and physician inclusion in Medicare Advantage networks

IMPORTANCE: Medicare Advantage (MA) plans are expanding rapidly, now serving 50% of all Medicare enrollees. Little is known about how inclusion rates of physicians in MA plan networks vary by the social and clinical risks of their patients. OBJECTIVE: To examine the association of physicians caring for patients with higher levels of social and clinical risk in traditional Medicare (TM) with the likelihood of inclusion in MA plan networks. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This cross-sectional study evaluated the number of patients of physicians participating in TM Part B in 2019. The data analysis was conducted between June 2022 and March 2023. EXPOSURES: Quintiles of the proportion of patients who were dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid and average beneficiary hierarchical condition category (HCC) score (a measure of a patient\u27s chronic disease burden that is used in risk adjustment and MA plan payment, where higher scores indicate higher risk) in the Part B TM program. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The main outcomes were the proportion of MA plans and enrollees for which physicians were in network. RESULTS: The analysis sample included 259 932 physicians billing Medicare Part B in 2019. After adjusting for physician, patient, and county characteristics, physicians with the highest quintile of patients with dual eligibility were associated with a lower likelihood of being included in MA plans and being in network with MA enrollees than the lowest quintile physicians (MA inclusion rate, -3.0% [95% CI, -3.2% to -2.8%]; P \u3c .001; in-network enrollee proportion, -6.5% [95% CI, -7.0% to -6.0%]; P \u3c .001). Similarly, physicians with the highest quintile HCC score were associated with a lower likelihood of being included in MA plans and being in network with MA enrollees than the lowest quintile physicians (MA inclusion rate, -7.5% [95% CI, -7.9% to -7.2%]; P \u3c .001; in-network enrollee proportion, -18.7% [95% CI, -19.5% to -18.1%]; P \u3c .001). Physicians in medical specialties in the highest clinical risk group (highest quintile HCC score) were associated with a significantly lower likelihood of being in network with MA enrollees than those in the lowest clinical risk group (in-network enrollee proportion, -20.4% [95% CI, -21.1% to -19.8%]; P \u3c .001). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: This cross-sectional study of physicians participating in TM Part B in 2019 found that physicians with higher numbers of patients with social and medical risks in TM were significantly less likely to be associated with MA plans

ZNF804A genotype modulates neural activity during working memory for faces

Copyright © 2013 S. Karger AG, Basel.Peer reviewedPublisher PD