Breakfast and exercise contingently affect postprandial metabolism and energy balance in physically active males

The present study examined the impact of breakfast and exercise on postprandial metabolism, appetite and macronutrient balance. A sample of twelve (blood variables n 11) physically active males completed four trials in a randomised, crossover design comprising a continued overnight fast followed by: (1) rest without breakfast (FR); (2) exercise without breakfast (FE); (3) breakfast consumption(1859 kJ) followed by rest (BR); (4) breakfast consumption followed by exercise (BE). Exercise was continuous, moderate-intensity running (expending approximately 2·9MJ of energy). The equivalent time was spent sitting during resting trials. A test drink (1500 kJ) was ingested on all trials followed 90 min later by an ad libitum lunch. The difference between the BR and FR trials in blood glucose time-averaged AUC following test drink consumption approached significance (BR: 4·33 (SEM 0·14) v. FR: 4·75 (SEM 0·16) mmol/l; P¼0·08); but it was not different between FR and FE (FE: 4·77 (SEM 0·14) mmol/l; P¼0·65); and was greater in BE (BE: 4·97 (SEM 0·13) mmol/l) v. BR(P¼0·012). Appetite following the test drink was reduced in BR v. FR (P¼0·006) and in BE v. FE (P¼0·029). Following lunch, the most positive energy balance was observed in BR and least positive in FE. Regardless of breakfast, acute exercise produced a less positive energy balance following ad libitum lunch consumption. Energy and fat balance is further reduced with breakfast omission. Breakfast improved the overall appetite responses to foods consumed later in the day, but abrogated the appetite suppressive effect of exercise

Seafloor ecological functioning over two decades of organic enrichment

Climate change and anthropogenic nutrient enrichment are driving rapid increases in ocean deoxygenation, these changes cause biodiversity loss and have severe consequences for marine ecosystem functioning and in turn the delivery of ecosystem services upon which humanity depends (e.g. fisheries). We seek to understand how such changes will impact seafloor functioning using biological traits analysis. Results from a sewage-sludge disposal site in the Firth of Clyde, UK spanning 26 years of monitoring showed that substantial changes in macrobenthic nutrient cycling and the provision of food for predators occurred, with elevated functioning on the margins 1–2 km from the centre of the disposal grounds. Changes in food-web dynamics are expected, that weaken benthic pelagic coupling and lower secondary production (such as fisheries). Generally, functioning was conserved, but declined below a ~6% total organic carbon threshold. Similar to other severely deoxygenated systems, the recovery was slow and hysteresis was apparent

Mechanical considerations in the design of surgical reconstructive procedures

Abstract Tendon transfers are used to restore arm and hand function after injury to the peripheral nerves or after spinal cord injury. Traditional guidelines to choose the length at which the transferred muscle should be attached have a poor scientific foundation. We postulate that passive tension only becomes significant at relatively long lengths and that passive tension as the major factor in intraoperative decision making may result in overstretch of the muscle-tendon unit (MTU) and accompanying low-active force generation. It appears unwise to rely on unknown factors, such as slippage or stress relaxation, to correct an overstretched transfer. Instead, we suggest the use of intra-operative sarcomere length measurements to predict and set the optimal MTU length during reconstructive upper limb surgery.

Explaining ecological shifts: the roles of temperature and primary production in the long-term dynamics of benthic faunal composition

Predicting the ecological consequences of environmental change requires that we can identify the drivers of long‐term ecological variation. Biological assemblages can exhibit abrupt deviations from temporal trends, potentially resulting in irreversible shifts in species composition over short periods of time. Such dynamics are hypothesised to occur as gradual forcing eventually causes biological thresholds to be crossed, but could also be explained by biota simply tracking abrupt changes to their environment. Here, we modelled temporal variation in a North Sea benthic faunal assemblage over a 40‐year period (1972–2012) to test for changes to temporal trends of biota and determine whether they could be explained by underlying patterns in sea temperature and primary production. These extrinsic factors were postulated to influence community dynamics through their roles in determining and sustaining the metabolic demands of organisms, respectively. A subset of mainly large and long‐lived taxa (those loaded on the first principal component of taxa densities) exhibited two significant changes to their temporal trends, which culminated in a shift in assemblage composition. These changes were explained by an increase in pelagic primary production, and hence detrital food input to the seabed, but were unrelated to variation in sea temperature. A second subset of mainly small and short‐lived taxa (those loaded on the second principal component) did not experience any significant changes to their temporal trends, as enhanced pelagic primary production appeared to mitigate the impact of warming on these organisms. Our results suggest that abrupt ecological shifts can occur as biota track underlying variation in extrinsic factors, in this case primary production. Changes to the structure of ecosystems may therefore be predictable based on environmental change projections.</jats:p

Linking marine ecosystems with the services they supply: what are the relevant service providing units?

Marine ecosystems support supply of ecosystem services (ESs) through processes and functions carried out by diverse biological elements. Managing sustainability of ES use requires linking services to the parts of ecosystems supplying them. We specified marine service providing units (SPUs) as plausible combinations of a biotic group (e.g., bacteria, seabirds) with an associated major habitat (e.g., sublittoral sediment). We developed a network model for large marine ecosystems, documenting 2,916 links between 153 SPUs with 31 services. Coastal habitats and their taxa accounted for 48% of links, but all habitats with their taxa contribute to at least 20 ESs. Through network analysis, we showed some services link to certain key habitats, while others are less clearly defined in space, being supported by a variety of habitats and their taxa. Analysis highlighted large‐scale flows across marine habitats that are essential in underpinning continued supply of certain ESs, for example, seed dispersal. If we only protect habitats where services are used, we will not fully protect the supply of services reliant on mobile taxa moving between habitats. This emerged because we considered habitats and their taxa together. We recommend using combinations of habitats and taxa as SPUs when informing marine ecosystem management and conservation

GAN-based multiple adjacent brain MRI slice reconstruction for unsupervised alzheimer’s disease diagnosis

Unsupervised learning can discover various unseen diseases, relying on large-scale unannotated medical images of healthy subjects. Towards this, unsupervised methods reconstruct a single medical image to detect outliers either in the learned feature space or from high reconstruction loss. However, without considering continuity between multiple adjacent slices, they cannot directly discriminate diseases composed of the accumulation of subtle anatomical anomalies, such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Moreover, no study has shown how unsupervised anomaly detection is associated with disease stages. Therefore, we propose a two-step method using Generative Adversarial Network-based multiple adjacent brain MRI slice reconstruction to detect AD at various stages: (Reconstruction) Wasserstein loss with Gradient Penalty + L1 loss---trained on 3 healthy slices to reconstruct the next 3 ones---reconstructs unseen healthy/AD cases; (Diagnosis) Average/Maximum loss (e.g., L2 loss) per scan discriminates them, comparing the reconstructed/ground truth images. The results show that we can reliably detect AD at a very early stage with Area Under the Curve (AUC) 0.780 while also detecting AD at a late stage much more accurately with AUC 0.917; since our method is fully unsupervised, it should also discover and alert any anomalies including rare disease.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, Accepted to Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI) as a volume in the Springer serie

Markbooks

A collection of carefully left traces — and their occasionally accompanying thoughts — Markbooks is the result of “an ongoing conversation about attention, its ecologies, its forms, and the markings of its passage.” “For many of the authors included here, the practice of making — and then reading — their little book located them in time… [T]here is paper, and there are pencils, and there are bodies to mark their own motion.