One-hundred years (and counting) of blast-associated traumatic brain injury

Blast-associated traumatic brain injury (TBI) has become one of the signature issues of modern warfare and is increasingly a concern in the civilian population due to a rise in terrorist attacks. Despite being a recognised feature of combat since the introduction of high explosives in conventional warfare over a century ago, only recently has there been interest in understanding the biology and pathology of blast TBI and the potential long-term consequences. Progress made has been slow and there remain remarkably few robust human neuropathology studies in this field. This article provides a broad overview of the history of blast TBI and reviews the pathology described in the limitedscientific studies found in the literature

Stimulus control : a coding of aversive stimuli and aggressive behavior

Treating aggressive behavior has been of interest to psychologists, sociologists, and law enforcement agencies for many years. Eron (1983) concluded that research should be directed towards understanding the early determinants of aggression before it escalates out of control. The purpose of the present study was to code aversive stimuli that precede aggressive behavior in boys. The following classes were used: Physically Aversive Stimuli, Verbally Aversive Stimuli, Socially Aversive Stimuli, Frustrating Stimuli, Neutral or No Stimuli, and Arguments. It was believed that particular stimuli would facilitate a greater frequency of aggressive behavior in the subjects. Observation revealed that physically aversive stimuli preceded twice the amount of aggression than all other stimuli. Verbally aversive stimuli preceded less aggression; however, the aggressive responses that did occur were more verbal than physical. Frustrating stimuli were not recorded during the study

THE ARCHITECTURE OF TELEPHONE EXCHANGE BUILDINGS

Technological advances are rapidly rendering telephone exchange equipment obsolete, along with the buildings designed to accommodate it Telephone exchange buildings are now leased or sold for change use or complete redevelopment at an increasing rate, with remarkably little attention paid to their architectural value. They are generally unobtrusive, everyday buildings easily overlooked or even forgotten. The standard types and modular construction may not have captured the general public's imagination, but these buildings have nonetheless played a significant part in shaping our modem way of life

Linking invisibility and vulnerability : strengthening refugee child protection capacity : the case of unaccompanied and separated refugee children from Bhutan living in Nepal

vii, 140 leaves : ill. (chiefly col.), col. map ; 29 cm.Includes abstract and appendix.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-134).The issues of invisibility and vulnerability are troubling phenomenon, particularly when children grow up parentless in protracted refugee camps. More disturbing is that many of these situations go largely unnoticed by the international community. The purpose of this thesis is threefold: (i) to discuss and review the policy protecting refugee children; (ii) to gain an understanding of the overall situation of unaccompanied and separated children (UASC) from Bhutan living in camps in Nepal and, (iii) to initiate discussion around developing strategies to improve the protection and overall services available to children who are separated from their parents or primary caregivers and residing in protracted refugee situations. Thus, the objective of this paper is to highlight the lack of policy concerning UASC residing in a protracted refugee context and, to demonstrate that policy alternatives must be developed to adequately care and protect these children. The data collected from this study will be able to influence policy as well as inform future research and protection strategies in the area of child refugee protection. Additionally, this information is critical to UASC residing in protracted refugee situations, as they remain invisible to policy makers which are why there are inadequacies in the policy addressing this vulnerable group of refugee children. This thesis further discusses whether policy alternatives can be devised to better protect this group of children who are at a heightened risk for abuse and exploitation because of the absence of their first line of protection, their parents or primary caregivers but more importantly, because many of these children continue to be invisible to the people who are responsible for them and in a position to protect them, ultimately, increasing their vulnerability. Therefore, there is a pressing need for more research on this issue, particularly to expose conditions that surround refugee children and other children in comparable situations. This Masters Dissertation does not represent the official views of UNHCR but is the product of my personal research

Fido, a Novel AMPylation Domain Common to Fic, Doc, and AvrB

BACKGROUND:The Vibrio parahaemolyticus type III secreted effector VopS contains a fic domain that covalently modifies Rho GTPase threonine with AMP to inhibit downstream signaling events in host cells. The VopS fic domain includes a conserved sequence motif (HPFx[D/E]GN[G/K]R) that contributes to AMPylation. Fic domains are found in a variety of species, including bacteria, a few archaea, and metazoan eukaryotes. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:We show that the AMPylation activity extends to a eukaryotic fic domain in Drosophila melanogaster CG9523, and use sequence and structure based computational methods to identify related domains in doc toxins and the type III effector AvrB. The conserved sequence motif that contributes to AMPylation unites fic with doc. Although AvrB lacks this motif, its structure reveals a similar topology to the fic and doc folds. AvrB binds to a peptide fragment of its host virulence target in a similar manner as fic binds peptide substrate. AvrB also orients a phosphate group from a bound ADP ligand near the peptide-binding site and in a similar position as a bound fic phosphate. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:The demonstrated eukaryotic fic domain AMPylation activity suggests that the VopS effector has exploited a novel host posttranslational modification. Fic domain-related structures give insight to the AMPylation active site and to the VopS fic domain interaction with its host GTPase target. These results suggest that fic, doc, and AvrB stem from a common ancestor that has evolved to AMPylate protein substrates

LGBT Coverage in U.S. Dental Schools and Dental Hygiene Programs: Results of a National Survey

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153556/1/jddj0022033720168012tb06231x.pd

Photometric characterization of Lucideon and Avian Technologies color standards including application for calibration of the Mastcam-Z instrument on the Mars 2020 rover

Several commercially available color standards exist, generated by a variety of manufacturers including LabSphere, Lucideon, and Avian Technologies. Previous work has characterized the photometric properties of LabSphere Spectralon targets. Here, we measure the visible and shortwave infrared (VSWIR; 0.4 to 2.5  μm) reflectance at multiple angles and determine the photometric properties of materials manufactured by Lucideon and Avian Technologies for potential use as calibration target materials for the Mars 2020 Mastcam-Z instrument. The Lucideon black, gray 33, green, and cyan samples are found to be significantly forward scattering. The yellow, red, and gray 70 samples are found to be weakly forward scattering. The Avian Technologies AluWhite98 sample was found to be weakly backward scattering. We characterize the absorptions observable and note the occurrence of wavelength-dependent photometric properties. The reflectance and photometric data collected and released here enable the use of these color standards for calibration of data from Mastcam-Z and other Mars-2020 rover instruments as well as provide key information for many other imaging and spectroscopy applications that require the calibration of data from multiple lighting or viewing geometries

Dynamic interaction of PTP mu with multiple cadherins in vivo

There is a growing body of evidence to implicate reversible tyrosine phosphorylation as an important mechanism in the control of the adhesive function of cadherins. We previously demonstrated that the receptor protein tyrosine phosphatase PTP mu associates with the cadherin-catenin complex in various tissues and cells and, therefore, may be a component of such a regulatory mechanism (Brady-Kalnay, S.M., D.L. Rimm, and N.K. Tonks. 1995. J. Cell Biol. 130:977-986). In this study, we present further characterization of this interaction using a variety of systems. We observed that PTP mu interacted with N-cadherin, E-cadherin, and cadherin-4 (also called R-cadherin) in extracts of rat lung. We observed a direct interaction between PTP mu, and E-cadherin after coexpression in Sf9 cells. In WC5 cells, which express a temperature-sensitive mutant form of v-Src, the complex between PTP mu and E-cadherin was dynamic, and conditions that resulted in tyrosine phosphorylation of E-cadherin were associated with dissociation of PTP mu from the complex. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that the COOH-terminal 38 residues of the cytoplasmic segment of E-cadherin was required for association with PTP mu in WC5 cells. Zondag et al. (Zondag, G., W. Moolenaar, and M. Gebbink. 1996. J. Cell Biol. 134: 1513-1517) have asserted that the association we observed between PTP mu and the cadherin-catenin complex in immunoprecipitates of the phosphatase arises from nonspecific cross-reactivity between BK2, our antibody to PTP mu, and cadherins. In this study we have confirmed our initial observation and demonstrated the presence of cadherin in immunoprecipitates of PTP mu. obtained with three antibodies that recognize distinct epitopes in the phosphatase. In addition, we have demonstrated directly that the anti-PTP mu antibody BK2 that we used initially did not cross-react with cadherin. Our data reinforce the observation of an interaction between PTP mu, and E-cadherin in vitro and in vivo, further emphasizing the potential importance of reversible tyrosine phosphorylation in regulating cadherin function

Towards Reliable Automatic Protein Structure Alignment

A variety of methods have been proposed for structure similarity calculation, which are called structure alignment or superposition. One major shortcoming in current structure alignment algorithms is in their inherent design, which is based on local structure similarity. In this work, we propose a method to incorporate global information in obtaining optimal alignments and superpositions. Our method, when applied to optimizing the TM-score and the GDT score, produces significantly better results than current state-of-the-art protein structure alignment tools. Specifically, if the highest TM-score found by TMalign is lower than (0.6) and the highest TM-score found by one of the tested methods is higher than (0.5), there is a probability of (42%) that TMalign failed to find TM-scores higher than (0.5), while the same probability is reduced to (2%) if our method is used. This could significantly improve the accuracy of fold detection if the cutoff TM-score of (0.5) is used. In addition, existing structure alignment algorithms focus on structure similarity alone and simply ignore other important similarities, such as sequence similarity. Our approach has the capacity to incorporate multiple similarities into the scoring function. Results show that sequence similarity aids in finding high quality protein structure alignments that are more consistent with eye-examined alignments in HOMSTRAD. Even when structure similarity itself fails to find alignments with any consistency with eye-examined alignments, our method remains capable of finding alignments highly similar to, or even identical to, eye-examined alignments.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013