Effect of Antimony and Cerium on the Formation of Chunky Graphite during Solidification of Heavy-Section Castings of Near-Eutectic Spheroidal Graphite Irons

Thermal analysis is applied to the study of the formation of chunky graphite (CHG) in heavysection castings of spheroidal graphite cast irons. To that aim, near-eutectic melts prepared in one single cast house were poured into molds containing up to four large cubic blocks 30 cm in size. Four melts have been prepared and cast that had a cerium content varying in relation with the spheroidizing alloy used. Postinoculation or addition of antimony was achieved by fixing appropriate amounts of materials in the gating system of each block. Cooling curves recorded in the center of the blocks show that solidification proceeds in three steps: a short primary deposition of graphite followed by an initial and then a bulk eutectic reaction. Formation of CHG could be unambiguously associated with increased recalescence during the bulk eutectic reaction. While antimony strongly decreases the amount of CHG, it appears that the ratio of the contents in antimony and cerium should be higher than 0.8 in order to avoid this graphite degeneracy

Refining Kidney Survival in 383 Genetically Characterized Patients With Nephronophthisis

Introduction: Nephronophthisis (NPH) comprises a group of rare disorders accounting for up to 10% of end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) in children. Prediction of kidney prognosis poses a major challenge. We assessed differences in kidney survival, impact of variant type, and the association of clinical characteristics with declining kidney function. Methods: Data was obtained from 3 independent sources, namely the network for early onset cystic kidney diseases clinical registry (n = 105), an online survey sent out to the European Reference Network for Rare Kidney Diseases (n = 60), and a literature search (n = 218). Results: A total of 383 individuals were available for analysis: 116 NPHP1, 101 NPHP3, 81 NPHP4 and 85 NPHP11/TMEM67 patients. Kidney survival differed between the 4 cohorts with a highly variable median age at onset of ESKD as follows: NPHP3, 4.0 years (interquartile range 0.3–12.0); NPHP1, 13.5 years (interquartile range 10.5–16.5); NPHP4, 16.0 years (interquartile range 11.0–25.0); and NPHP11/TMEM67, 19.0 years (interquartile range 8.7–28.0). Kidney survival was significantly associated with the underlying variant type for NPHP1, NPHP3, and NPHP4. Multivariate analysis for the NPHP1 cohort revealed growth retardation (hazard ratio 3.5) and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor (ACEI) treatment (hazard ratio 2.8) as 2 independent factors associated with an earlier onset of ESKD, whereas arterial hypertension was linked to an accelerated glomerular filtration rate (GFR) decline. Conclusion: The presented data will enable clinicians to better estimate kidney prognosis of distinct patients with NPH and thereby allow personalized counseling

Cross-national variations in reported discrimination among people treated for major depression worldwide: The ASPEN/INDIGO international study

Background: No study has so far explored differences in discrimination reported by people with major depressive disorder (MDD) across countries and cultures. Aims: To (a) compare reported discrimination across different countries, and (b) explore the relative weight of individual and contextual factors in explaining levels of reported discrimination in people with MDD. Method: Cross-sectional multisite international survey (34 countries worldwide) of 1082 people with MDD. Experienced and anticipated discrimination were assessed by the Discrimination and Stigma Scale (DISC). Countries were classified according to their rating on the Human Development Index (HDI). Multilevel negative binomial and Poisson models were used. Results: People living in 'very high HDI' countries reported higher discrimination than those in 'medium/low HDI' countries. Variation in reported discrimination across countries was only partially explained by individual-level variables. The contribution of country-level variables was significant for anticipated discrimination only. Conclusions: Contextual factors play an important role in anticipated discrimination. Country-specific interventions should be implemented to prevent discrimination towards people with MDD

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