Analysis of Risk Factors Associated with Maskne in the Era of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The necessity to always use a mask in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a new term called maskne. Maskne is the appearance of acne that is triggered by wearing a mask. It usually occurs specifically in the area covered by the mask, focused on the cheeks, chin, and nose. This study aims to determine the risk factors associated with the occurrence of maskne. A cross-sectional study was conducted on the Faculty of Medicine students, Universitas Sumatera Utara class 2018. This study uses primary data from questionnaires and observation of respondents' face photos. Based on statistical analysis, 99 out of 221 respondents (44.8%) experienced maskne. Bivariate analysis shows p-values <0.05  for gender, duration of mask use, and previous acne history. On the other hand, it was obtained p-value >0.05 for the type of mask and mask changing habit. Based on multivariate analysis, the p-value <0.05 for gender indicates that gender is the most dominant risk factor in the incidence of maskne. Furthermore, there is a significant association between gender and the occurrence of maskne. Females are twice as likely to experience maskne

Nutriepigenetics and cardiovascular disease

Purpose of review: We present a current perspective of epigenetic alterations that can lead to cardiovascular disease (CVD) and the potential of dietary factors to counteract their actions. In addition, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of dietary treatments as epigenetic modifiers for disease prevention and therapy. Recent findings: Recent epigenome-wide association studies along with candidate gene approaches and functional studies in cell culture and animal models have delineated mechanisms through which nutrients, food compounds and dietary patterns may affect the epigenome. Several risk factors for CVD, including adiposity, inflammation and oxidative stress, have been associated with changes in histone acetylation, lower global DNA methylation levels and shorter telomere length. A surplus of macronutrients such as in a high-fat diet or deficiencies of specific nutrients such as folate and other B-vitamins can affect the activity of DNA methyltransferases and histone-modifying enzymes, affecting foetal growth, glucose/lipid metabolism, oxidative stress, inflammation and atherosclerosis. Bioactive compounds such as polyphenols (resveratrol, curcumin) or epigallocatechin may activate deacetylases Sirtuins (SIRTs), histone deacetylases or acetyltransferases and in turn the response of inflammatory mediators. Adherence to cardioprotective dietary patterns, such as the Mediterranean diet (MedDiet), has been associated with altered methylation and expression of genes related to inflammation and immuno-competence. Summary: The mechanisms through which nutrients and dietary patterns may alter the cardiovascular epigenome remain elusive. The research challenge is to determine which of these nutriepigenetic effects are rev

Fast Locality-Sensitive Hashing Frameworks for Approximate Near Neighbor Search

The Indyk-Motwani Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) framework (STOC 1998) is a general technique for constructing a data structure to answer approximate near neighbor queries by using a distribution $\mathcal{H}$ over locality-sensitive hash functions that partition space. For a collection of $n$ points, after preprocessing, the query time is dominated by $O(n^{\rho} \log n)$ evaluations of hash functions from $\mathcal{H}$ and $O(n^{\rho})$ hash table lookups and distance computations where $\rho \in (0,1)$ is determined by the locality-sensitivity properties of $\mathcal{H}$. It follows from a recent result by Dahlgaard et al. (FOCS 2017) that the number of locality-sensitive hash functions can be reduced to $O(\log^2 n)$, leaving the query time to be dominated by $O(n^{\rho})$ distance computations and $O(n^{\rho} \log n)$ additional word-RAM operations. We state this result as a general framework and provide a simpler analysis showing that the number of lookups and distance computations closely match the Indyk-Motwani framework, making it a viable replacement in practice. Using ideas from another locality-sensitive hashing framework by Andoni and Indyk (SODA 2006) we are able to reduce the number of additional word-RAM operations to $O(n^\rho)$.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Vocational perspectives after spinal cord injury

Objective: To give insight into the vocational situation several years after a traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) and describe the personal experiences and unmet needs; to give an overview of health and functional status per type of SCI and their relationship with employment status. Design: Descriptive analysis of data from a questionnaire. Setting: Dutch rehabilitation centre with special department for patients with spinal cord injuries. Subjects: Fifty-seven patients with a traumatic SCI, aged 18-60 years, admitted to the rehabilitation centre from 1990 to 1998. Main measures: Questionnaire with items related to vocational outcome, job experiences, health and functional status. Results: Of 49 patients who were working at the moment of SCI 60% currently had a paid job. Vocational outcome was related to a higher educational level. A significant relation between the SCI-specific health and functional status and employment was not found. The respondents who changed to a new employer needed more time to resume work, but seemed more satisfied with the job and lost fewer working hours than those who resumed work with the same employer. In spite of reasonable to good satisfaction with the current work situation, several negative experiences and unmet needs were reported. Conclusions: Despite a high participation in paid work following SCI, the effort of the disabled worker to have and keep a job should not be underestimated

How and why DNA barcodes underestimate the diversity of microbial eukaryotes

Background: Because many picoplanktonic eukaryotic species cannot currently be maintained in culture, direct sequencing of PCR-amplified 18S ribosomal gene DNA fragments from filtered sea-water has been successfully used to investigate the astounding diversity of these organisms. The recognition of many novel planktonic organisms is thus based solely on their 18S rDNA sequence. However, a species delimited by its 18S rDNA sequence might contain many cryptic species, which are highly differentiated in their protein coding sequences. Principal Findings: Here, we investigate the issue of species identification from one gene to the whole genome sequence. Using 52 whole genome DNA sequences, we estimated the global genetic divergence in protein coding genes between organisms from different lineages and compared this to their ribosomal gene sequence divergences. We show that this relationship between proteome divergence and 18S divergence is lineage dependant. Unicellular lineages have especially low 18S divergences relative to their protein sequence divergences, suggesting that 18S ribosomal genes are too conservative to assess planktonic eukaryotic diversity. We provide an explanation for this lineage dependency, which suggests that most species with large effective population sizes will show far less divergence in 18S than protein coding sequences. Conclusions: There is therefore a trade-off between using genes that are easy to amplify in all species, but which by their nature are highly conserved and underestimate the true number of species, and using genes that give a better description of the number of species, but which are more difficult to amplify. We have shown that this trade-off differs between unicellular and multicellular organisms as a likely consequence of differences in effective population sizes. We anticipate that biodiversity of microbial eukaryotic species is underestimated and that numerous ''cryptic species'' will become discernable with the future acquisition of genomic and metagenomic sequences

Sentiment Classification of Customer Reviews about Automobiles in Roman Urdu

Text mining is a broad field having sentiment mining as its important constituent in which we try to deduce the behavior of people towards a specific item, merchandise, politics, sports, social media comments, review sites etc. Out of many issues in sentiment mining, analysis and classification, one major issue is that the reviews and comments can be in different languages like English, Arabic, Urdu etc. Handling each language according to its rules is a difficult task. A lot of research work has been done in English Language for sentiment analysis and classification but limited sentiment analysis work is being carried out on other regional languages like Arabic, Urdu and Hindi. In this paper, Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) is used as a platform to execute different classification models for text classification of Roman Urdu text. Reviews dataset has been scrapped from different automobiles sites. These extracted Roman Urdu reviews, containing 1000 positive and 1000 negative reviews, are then saved in WEKA attribute-relation file format (arff) as labeled examples. Training is done on 80% of this data and rest of it is used for testing purpose which is done using different models and results are analyzed in each case. The results show that Multinomial Naive Bayes outperformed Bagging, Deep Neural Network, Decision Tree, Random Forest, AdaBoost, k-NN and SVM Classifiers in terms of more accuracy, precision, recall and F-measure.Comment: This is a pre-print of a contribution published in Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (editors: Kohei Arai, Supriya Kapoor and Rahul Bhatia) published by Springer, Cham. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03405-4_4

Type-1 Interferon Responses Underlie Tumor-Selective Replication of Oncolytic Measles Virus

The mechanism of tumor selective replication of oncolytic measles virus (MV) is poorly understood. Using a step-wise model of cellular transformation, in which oncogenic hits were additively expressed in human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stromal cells, we show that MV-induced oncolysis increased progressively with transformation. Type-1 interferon response to MV infection was significantly reduced and delayed, in accordance with the level of transformation. Consistently, we observed delayed and reduced STAT1 phosphorylation in the fully transformed cells. Pre-treatment with IFNβ restored resistance to MV-mediated oncolysis. Gene expression profiling to identify the genetic correlates of susceptibility to MV oncolysis revealed a dampened basal level of immune-related genes in the fully transformed cells compared to their normal counterparts. Interferon-induced transmembrane protein 1 (IFITM1) was the foremost basally downregulated immune gene. Stable IFITM1 overexpression in MV-susceptible cells resulted in a 50% increase in cell viability and a significant reduction in viral replication at 24 hours post MV infection. Overall, our data indicate that the basal reduction in functions of the type 1 IFN pathway is a major contributor to the oncolytic selectivity of MV. In particular, we have identified IFITM1 as a restriction factor for oncolytic MV, acting at early stages of infection

LE DAMIER COLONIAL DE BISKRA OU L’HISTOIRE DE LA MARGINALISATION D’UN CENTRE VILLE

L'apparition des espaces marginalisés au niveau de la ville ne se limite pas à certaines zones géographiquementdéfavorisées et/ou de création relativement récente (les grands ensembles, la banlieue, les nouveaux quartiers…), mais elle concerne aussi des espaces historiquement prestigieux : les centres historiques. Ces derniers dontla centralité est souvent multiples: urbaine, historique, sociale, culturelle, identitaire et économique, sont parfoisaussi des territoires urbains qui ont subi, à travers leur évolution, des changements sociaux et économiques telsqu’ils ne sont plus aptes à subvenir aux besoins nouveaux. Notre intervention s'intéresse à ces territoires souventlaissés pour compte et tente de reconnaître les différentes formes de leur marginalité. Il s'agira, notamment,d’identifier les causes qui ont été à la source du déclin de ses entités urbaines et qui ont engendré une situationambiguë, quant à leur appropriation par leurs utilisateurs, se manifestant par des phénomènes socioculturelsgraves (paupérisation, insécurité, qualité de la vie en deçà des ambitions des populations, exclusion, perted’identité…).Notre intervention se basera sur une étude de cas : le damier colonial de Biskra. Cet intérêt pour le centrecolonial répond aux objectifs d'un projet de recherche en cours qui tente de définir les outils permettant de sauverce qui reste de cette ville coloniale en la considérant comme patrimoine locale. la situation de ce centrehistorique est, en effet, assez problématique: territoire exclu des circuits principaux des échanges et des activités,soumis parfois à la destruction de son patrimoine, défiguré et bazardisé, souffrant cruellement d'un manqued'animation, subissant un dépeuplement massif. Ce sont là des constatations générales, mais néanmoins réellesqui attestent d'une marginalisation assez avancée de cette entité urbaine et que l'on se propose de présenter etd'analyser dans le cadre de ce travail

Strain-engineering in Germanium membranes towards light sources on Silicon

Bi-axially strained Germanium (Ge) is an ideal material for Silicon (Si) compatible light sources, offering exciting applications in optical interconnect technology. By employing a novel suspended architecture with an optimum design on the curvature, we applied a biaxial tensile strain as large as 0.85% to the central region of the membrane