Mingling Echoes

Mingling Echoes is an exhibition comprised of written word, alchemic reactions, found and repurposed objects, as well as sculptural forms of my own creation. All are abstractions from my subconscious, and they are blended with influential objects from my past in an intuitive manner. The following abstract gives a glimpse into my inspirations and personal experiences that have led to how I perceive memories are connected, intertwined, and ultimately, triggered. Additionally, I included two contemporary artists in whose work I find correlations with my own. The found and repurposed objects come from my personal collection that I have amassed over the past three decades from myriad places including my grand-parents’ property, gifts, flea markets, junk yards, antique/vintage shops, and roadsides

Intrinsic high aerobic capacity protects against lipid induced hepatic insulin resistance [abstract]

Hepatic steatosis is commonly linked to hepatic insulin resistance. However, recent studies have found that increased hepatic triacylglycerol (TAG) accumulation is not always associated with impaired hepatic insulin signaling, leading to a hypothesis that partitioning of lipids into TAG in the liver matched with high rates of fatty acid oxidation (FAO) under high lipid exposure conditions may protect against hepatic insulin resistance. We examined this hypothesis in the livers of high and low capacity running (HCR/LCR) rats which were created by artificial selection based on differences in intrinsic aerobic capacity

Increased aerobic capacity reduces susceptibility to acute high‐fat diet‐induced weight gain

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134165/1/oby21564.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134165/2/oby21564_am.pd

Rats selectively bred for low aerobic capacity have reduced hepatic mitochondrial oxidative capacity and susceptibility to hepatic steatosis and injury

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65411/1/jphysiol.2009.169060.pd

The genetic architecture of the human cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex underlies our complex cognitive capabilities, yet little is known about the specific genetic loci that influence human cortical structure. To identify genetic variants that affect cortical structure, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 51,665 individuals. We analyzed the surface area and average thickness of the whole cortex and 34 regions with known functional specializations. We identified 199 significant loci and found significant enrichment for loci influencing total surface area within regulatory elements that are active during prenatal cortical development, supporting the radial unit hypothesis. Loci that affect regional surface area cluster near genes in Wnt signaling pathways, which influence progenitor expansion and areal identity. Variation in cortical structure is genetically correlated with cognitive function, Parkinson's disease, insomnia, depression, neuroticism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

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

High Intrinsic Aerobic Capacity Protects against Ethanol-Induced Hepatic Injury and Metabolic Dysfunction: Study Using High Capacity Runner Rat Model

Rats artificially selected over several generations for high intrinsic endurance/aerobic capacity resulting in high capacity runners (HCR) has been developed to study the links between high aerobic fitness and protection from metabolic diseases (Wisloff et al., Science, 2005). We have previously shown that the HCR strain have elevated hepatic mitochondrial content and oxidative capacity. In this study, we tested if the elevated hepatic mitochondrial content in the HCR rat would provide “metabolic protection” from chronic ethanol-induced hepatic steatosis and injury. The Leiber-Decarli liquid diet with ethanol (7% v/v; HCR-E) and without (HCR-C) was given to HCR rats (n = 8 per group) from 14 to 20 weeks of age that were weight matched and pair-fed to assure isocaloric intake. Hepatic triglyceride (TG) content and macro- and microvesicular steatosis were significantly greater in HCR-E compared with HCR-C (p < 0.05). In addition, hepatic superoxide dismutase activity and glutathione levels were significantly (p < 0.05) reduced in the HCR-E rats. This hepatic phenotype also was associated with reduced total hepatic fatty acid oxidation (p = 0.03) and ß-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase activity (p = 0.01), and reductions in microsomal triglyceride transfer protein and apoB-100 protein content (p = 0.01) in HCR-E animals. However, despite these documented hepatic alterations, ethanol ingestion failed to induce significant hepatic liver injury, including no changes in hepatic inflammation, or serum alanine amino transferase (ALTs), free fatty acids (FFAs), triglycerides (TGs), insulin, or glucose. High intrinsic aerobic fitness did not reduce ethanol-induced hepatic steatosis, but protected against ethanol-induced hepatic injury and systemic metabolic dysfunction in a high aerobic capacity rat model

Deficiency in the Heat Stress Response Could Underlie Susceptibility to Metabolic Disease

A fines de 1886, se registraron brotes de cólera en Santa Fe y las provincias vecinas. Los gobiernos del Norte del país intentaron entonces levantar barreras sanitarias para impedir el paso de la peste. Pero su intento fue inútil, porque desde el Gobierno central, ignorando los problemas regionales y locales, se autorizó el viaje de Rosario a Tucumán de una formación del Central Argentino llena de soldados, con destino al Chaco salteño. Aquel tren, se supo después, llevó el cólera a Tucumán. Para fines de 1887, el Jardín de la República ya había perdido, a causa de la epidemia, un tercio de su población. Un joven médico socialista –Juan B. Justo- observaba horrorizado las hogueras con madera de pino alquitranado que los vecinos de San Miguel (la capital) prendían en las esquinas, pretendiendo evitar el contagio. “Los niños en las calles –escribió JBJ-alegres e inconscientes, danzaban en torno a esas extrañas piras”. Las familias tucumanas pudientes, propietarias de tierras, plantaciones e ingenios, se trasladaron a sus lejanas residencias de verano y/o invierno, a la espera de que la peste terminara la faena.Facultad de Periodismo y Comunicación Socia