Mapping Oil and Gas Development Potential in the US Intermountain West and Estimating Impacts to Species

Many studies have quantified the indirect effect of hydrocarbon-based economies on climate change and biodiversity, concluding that a significant proportion of species will be threatened with extinction. However, few studies have measured the direct effect of new energy production infrastructure on species persistence. in the western US and translate the build-out scenarios into estimated impacts on sage-grouse. We project that future oil and gas development will cause a 7–19 percent decline from 2007 sage-grouse lek population counts and impact 3.7 million ha of sagebrush shrublands and 1.1 million ha of grasslands in the study area.Maps of where oil and gas development is anticipated in the US Intermountain West can be used by decision-makers intent on minimizing impacts to sage-grouse. This analysis also provides a general framework for using predictive models and build-out scenarios to anticipate impacts to species. These predictive models and build-out scenarios allow tradeoffs to be considered between species conservation and energy development prior to implementation

A national clinical decision support infrastructure to enable the widespread and consistent practice of genomic and personalized medicine

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In recent years, the completion of the Human Genome Project and other rapid advances in genomics have led to increasing anticipation of an era of genomic and personalized medicine, in which an individual's health is optimized through the use of all available patient data, including data on the individual's genome and its downstream products. Genomic and personalized medicine could transform healthcare systems and catalyze significant reductions in morbidity, mortality, and overall healthcare costs.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>Critical to the achievement of more efficient and effective healthcare enabled by genomics is the establishment of a robust, nationwide clinical decision support infrastructure that assists clinicians in their use of genomic assays to guide disease prevention, diagnosis, and therapy. Requisite components of this infrastructure include the standardized representation of genomic and non-genomic patient data across health information systems; centrally managed repositories of computer-processable medical knowledge; and standardized approaches for applying these knowledge resources against patient data to generate and deliver patient-specific care recommendations. Here, we provide recommendations for establishing a national decision support infrastructure for genomic and personalized medicine that fulfills these needs, leverages existing resources, and is aligned with the <it>Roadmap for National Action on Clinical Decision Support </it>commissioned by the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Critical to the establishment of this infrastructure will be strong leadership and substantial funding from the federal government.</p> <p>Summary</p> <p>A national clinical decision support infrastructure will be required for reaping the full benefits of genomic and personalized medicine. Essential components of this infrastructure include standards for data representation; centrally managed knowledge repositories; and standardized approaches for leveraging these knowledge repositories to generate patient-specific care recommendations at the point of care.</p

An update on molecular cat allergens: Fel d 1 and what else? Chapter 1: Fel d 1, the major cat allergen

Background: Cats are the major source of indoor inhalant allergens after house dust mites. The global incidence of cat allergies is rising sharply, posing a major public health problem. Ten cat allergens have been identified. The major allergen responsible for symptoms is Fel d 1, a secretoglobin and not a lipocalin, making the cat a special case among mammals. Main body: Given its clinical predominance, it is essential to have a good knowledge of this allergenic fraction, including its basic structure, to understand the new exciting diagnostic and therapeutic applications currently in development. The recent arrival of the component-resolved diagnosis, which uses molecular allergens, represents a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of the disease. Recombinant Fel d 1 is now available for in vitro diagnosis by the anti-Fel d 1 specific IgE assay. The first part of the review will seek to describe the recent advances related to Fel d 1 in terms of positive diagnosis and assessment of disease severity. In daily practice, anti-Fel d 1 IgE tend to replace those directed against the overall extract but is this attitude justified? We will look at the most recent arguments to try to answer this question. In parallel, a second revolution is taking place thanks to molecular engineering, which has allowed the development of various forms of recombinant Fel d 1 and which seeks to modify the immunomodulatory properties of the molecule and thus the clinical history of the disease via various modalities of anti-Fel d 1-specific immunotherapy. We will endeavor to give a clear and practical overview of all these trends

Observation of B(s)0→J/ψpp¯ decays and precision measurements of the B(s)0 masses

The first observation of the decays B 0 ( s ) → J / ψ p ¯ p is reported, using proton-proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5.2     fb − 1 , collected with the LHCb detector. These decays are suppressed due to limited available phase space, as well as due to Okubo-Zweig-Iizuka or Cabibbo suppression. The measured branching fractions are B ( B 0 → J / ψ p ¯ p ) = [ 4.51 ± 0.40 ( stat ) ± 0.44 ( syst ) ] × 10 − 7 , B ( B 0 s → J / ψ p ¯ p ) = [ 3.58 ± 0.19 ( stat ) ± 0.39 ( syst ) ] × 10 − 6 . For the B 0 s meson, the result is much higher than the expected value of O ( 10 − 9 ) . The small available phase space in these decays also allows for the most precise single measurement of both the B 0 mass as 5279.74 ± 0.30 ( stat ) ± 0.10 ( syst )     MeV and the B 0 s mass as 5366.85 ± 0.19 ( stat ) ± 0.13 ( syst )     MeV

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Search for Lepton-Universality Violation in B^{+}→K^{+}ℓ^{+}ℓ^{-} Decays.

A measurement of the ratio of branching fractions of the decays B^{+}→K^{+}μ^{+}μ^{-} and B^{+}→K^{+}e^{+}e^{-} is presented. The proton-proton collision data used correspond to an integrated luminosity of 5.0  fb^{-1} recorded with the LHCb experiment at center-of-mass energies of 7, 8, and 13 TeV. For the dilepton mass-squared range 1.1<q^{2}<6.0  GeV^{2}/c^{4} the ratio of branching fractions is measured to be R_{K}=0.846_{-0.054}^{+0.060}_{-0.014}^{+0.016}, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. This is the most precise measurement of R_{K} to date and is compatible with the standard model at the level of 2.5 standard deviations

Amplitude analysis of the B0 (s)! K0K0 decays and measurement of the branching fraction of the B0! K0K0 decay

The $B^0 \to K^{*0} \overline{K}^{*0}$ and $B^0_s \to K^{*0} \overline{K}^{*0}$ decays are studied using proton-proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3fb$^{-1}$. An untagged and time-integrated amplitude analysis of $B^0_{(s)} \to (K^+\pi^-)(K^-\pi^+)$ decays in two-body invariant mass regions of 150 MeV$/c^2$ around the $K^{*0}$ mass is performed. A stronger longitudinal polarisation fraction in the ${B^0 \to K^{*0} \overline{K}^{*0}}$ decay, ${f_L = 0.724 \pm 0.051 \,({\rm stat}) \pm 0.016 \,({\rm syst})}$, is observed as compared to ${f_L = 0.240 \pm 0.031 \,({\rm stat}) \pm 0.025 \,({\rm syst})}$ in the ${B^0_s\to K^{*0} \overline{K}^{*0}}$ decay. The ratio of branching fractions of the two decays is measured and used to determine $\mathcal{B}(B^0 \to K^{*0} \overline{K}^{*0}) = (8.0 \pm 0.9 \,({\rm stat}) \pm 0.4 \,({\rm syst})) \times 10^{-7}$.Comment: All figures and tables, along with any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2019-004.html (LHCb public pages

Amplitude analysis of B-s(0) -> K-S(0) K-+/-pi(-/+) decays

The first untagged decay-time-integrated amplitude analysis of $B^{0}_{s} \rightarrow K^{0}_{\textrm{S}} K^{\pm}\pi^{\mp}$ decays is performed using a sample corresponding to $3.0\,$fb$^{-1}$ of $pp$ collision data recorded with the LHCb detector during 2011 and 2012. The data are described with an amplitude model that contains contributions from the intermediate resonances $K^{*}(892)^{0,+}$, $K^*_2(1430)^{0,+}$ and $K^*_0(1430)^{0,+}$, and their charge conjugates. Measurements of the branching fractions of the decay modes $B^{0}_{s} \rightarrow K^{*}(892)^{\pm}K^{\mp}$ and $B^{0}_{s} \rightarrow K^{*}(892)^{0}\kern 0.2em\overline{\kern -0.2em K}{}^{0}, \kern 0.2em\overline{\kern -0.2em K}{}^{*}(892)^{0}K^{0}$ are in agreement with, and more precise than, previous results. The decays $B^{0}_{s} \rightarrow K^*_0(1430)^{\pm} K^{\mp}$ and $B^{0}_{s} \rightarrow K^{*}_{0}(1430)^{0}\kern 0.2em\overline{\kern -0.2em K}{}^{0}, \kern 0.2em\overline{\kern -0.2em K}{}^{*}_{0}(1430)^{0}K^{0}$ are observed for the first time, each with significance over 10 standard deviations.Comment: 27 pages, 14 figures. All figures and tables, along with any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2018-045.htm