Wavelength tunable spectral compression in a dispersion-increasing fiber

Adiabatic soliton spectral compression in a dispersion-increasing fiber is demonstrated both numerically and experimentally. We show a positively-chirped pulse provides better spectral compression in a dispersion-increasing fiber with large anomalous dispersion ramp. An experimental spectral compression ratio of 15.5 is obtained using 350 fs positively-chirped input pulse centered at 1.5 um. A 30 nm wavelength tuning ability is experimentally achieved.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures. Submitted 4/03/201

First report of NDM-1-producing acinetobacter baumannii in East Africa

Background: The emergence of carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (CRAB) was observed in a Kenyan hospital from 2009 to 2010. Further investigation of the dissemination of CRAB isolates and the molecular characterization of associated resistance determinants were therefore performed. Methods: Antibiotic susceptibilities were determined by broth microdilution and Etest. Metallo-blactamases were detected by Etest method. Clonal relationships were studied by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing (MLST). b-Lactam and aminoglycoside resistance determinants and the clonal relatedness to widespread European clones were studied by PCR and sequencing. Results: Sixteen CRAB isolates from 10 patients possessed six pulsotypes; half of the isolates belonged to the European clone II (ECII) lineage. ECII strains were typed as MLST sequence type 2 (ST2) and ST109, and non-ECII strains as ST25 and ST113. All isolates harbored ISAba1–blaOXA-23, blaOXA-51-like, blaADC, and class 1 integron, including one that also harbored blaNDM-1. ADC-57 and two integron cassettes (arr-2- cmlA5 and aadB-aadA2-cmlA6-aadA15) were newly-identified. Non-ECII isolates, designated non-ECII clone, carried armA and integron cassette arr-2-cmlA5. Conclusions: Two distinct clones of CRAB – ECII and non-ECII epidemic clones – were disseminated in Kenya. The concomitance of ISAba1–blaOXA-23 was the major mechanism contributing to CRAB. The first identification of ECII CRAB and New Delhi metallo-b-lactamase 1 (NDM-1) extensively drug-resistant A. baumannii in East Africa is of concern

STMT: A Spatial-Temporal Mesh Transformer for MoCap-Based Action Recognition

We study the problem of human action recognition using motion capture (MoCap) sequences. Unlike existing techniques that take multiple manual steps to derive standardized skeleton representations as model input, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Mesh Transformer (STMT) to directly model the mesh sequences. The model uses a hierarchical transformer with intra-frame off-set attention and inter-frame self-attention. The attention mechanism allows the model to freely attend between any two vertex patches to learn non-local relationships in the spatial-temporal domain. Masked vertex modeling and future frame prediction are used as two self-supervised tasks to fully activate the bi-directional and auto-regressive attention in our hierarchical transformer. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to skeleton-based and point-cloud-based models on common MoCap benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/zgzxy001/STMT.Comment: CVPR 202

Inhibition of Serine Protease Activity Protects Against High Fat Diet-Induced Inflammation and Insulin Resistance.

Recent evidence suggests that enhanced protease-mediated inflammation may promote insulin resistance and result in diabetes. This study tested the hypothesis that serine protease plays a pivotal role in type 2 diabetes, and inhibition of serine protease activity prevents hyperglycemia in diabetic animals by modulating insulin signaling pathway. We conducted a single-center, cross-sectional study with 30 healthy controls and 57 patients with type 2 diabetes to compare plasma protease activities and inflammation marker between groups. Correlations of plasma total and serine protease activities with variables were calculated. In an in-vivo study, LDLR-/- mice were divided into normal chow diet, high-fat diet (HFD), and HFD with selective serine protease inhibition groups to examine the differences of obesity, blood glucose level, insulin resistance and serine protease activity among groups. Compared with controls, diabetic patients had significantly increased plasma total protease, serine protease activities, and also elevated inflammatory cytokines. Plasma serine protease activity was positively correlated with body mass index, hemoglobin A1c, homeostasis model assessment-insulin resistance index (HOMA-IR), tumor necrosis factor-α, and negatively with adiponectin concentration. In the animal study, administration of HFD progressively increased body weight, fasting glucose level, HOMA-IR, and upregulated serine protease activity. Furthermore, in-vivo serine protease inhibition significantly suppressed systemic inflammation, reduced fasting glucose level, and improved insulin resistance, and these effects probably mediated by modulating insulin receptor and cytokine expression in visceral adipose tissue. Our findings support the serine protease may play an important role in type 2 diabetes and suggest a rationale for a therapeutic strategy targeting serine protease for clinical prevention of type 2 diabetes

First report of NDM-1-producing acinetobacter baumannii in East Africa

Background: The emergence of carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (CRAB) was observed in a Kenyan hospital from 2009 to 2010. Further investigation of the dissemination of CRAB isolates and the molecular characterization of associated resistance determinants were therefore performed. Methods: Antibiotic susceptibilities were determined by broth microdilution and Etest. Metallo-blactamases were detected by Etest method. Clonal relationships were studied by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing (MLST). b-Lactam and aminoglycoside resistance determinants and the clonal relatedness to widespread European clones were studied by PCR and sequencing. Results: Sixteen CRAB isolates from 10 patients possessed six pulsotypes; half of the isolates belonged to the European clone II (ECII) lineage. ECII strains were typed as MLST sequence type 2 (ST2) and ST109, and non-ECII strains as ST25 and ST113. All isolates harbored ISAba1–blaOXA-23, blaOXA-51-like, blaADC, and class 1 integron, including one that also harbored blaNDM-1. ADC-57 and two integron cassettes (arr-2- cmlA5 and aadB-aadA2-cmlA6-aadA15) were newly-identified. Non-ECII isolates, designated non-ECII clone, carried armA and integron cassette arr-2-cmlA5. Conclusions: Two distinct clones of CRAB – ECII and non-ECII epidemic clones – were disseminated in Kenya. The concomitance of ISAba1–blaOXA-23 was the major mechanism contributing to CRAB. The first identification of ECII CRAB and New Delhi metallo-b-lactamase 1 (NDM-1) extensively drug-resistant A. baumannii in East Africa is of concern

Effectiveness of influenza vaccination in patients with end-stage renal disease receiving hemodialysis: a population-based study.

BackgroundLittle is known on the effectiveness of influenza vaccine in ESRD patients. This study compared the incidence of hospitalization, morbidity, and mortality in end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients undergoing hemodialysis (HD) between cohorts with and without influenza vaccination.MethodsWe used the insurance claims data from 1998 to 2009 in Taiwan to determine the incidence of these events within one year after influenza vaccination in the vaccine (N = 831) and the non-vaccine (N = 3187) cohorts. The vaccine cohort to the non-vaccine cohort incidence rate ratio and hazard ratio (HR) of morbidities and mortality were measured.ResultsThe age-specific analysis showed that the elderly in the vaccine cohort had lower hospitalization rate (100.8 vs. 133.9 per 100 person-years), contributing to an overall HR of 0.81 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.72-0.90). The vaccine cohort also had an adjusted HR of 0.85 [95% CI 0.75-0.96] for heart disease. The corresponding incidence of pneumonia and influenza was 22.4 versus 17.2 per 100 person-years, but with an adjusted HR of 0.80 (95% CI 0.64-1.02). The vaccine cohort had lowered risks than the non-vaccine cohort for intensive care unit (ICU) admission (adjusted HR 0.20, 95% CI 0.12-0.33) and mortality (adjusted HR 0.50, 95% CI 0.41-0.60). The time-dependent Cox model revealed an overall adjusted HR for mortality of 0.30 (95% CI 0.26-0.35) after counting vaccination for multi-years.ConclusionsESRD patients with HD receiving the influenza vaccination could have reduced risks of pneumonia/influenza and other morbidities, ICU stay, hospitalization and death, particularly for the elderly

DNA Binding and Degradation by the HNH Protein ColE7

The bacterial toxin ColE7 bears an HNH motif which has been identified in hundreds of prokaryotic and eukaryotic endonucleases, involved in DNA homing, restriction, repair, or chromosome degradation. The crystal structure of the nuclease domain of ColE7 in complex with a duplex DNA has been determined at 2.5 Å resolution. The HNH motif is bound at the minor groove primarily to DNA phosphate groups at and beyond the 3′ side of the scissile phosphate, with little interaction with ribose groups and bases. This result provides a structural basis for sugar- and sequence-independent DNA recognition and the inhibition mechanism by inhibitor Im7, which blocks the substrate binding site but not the active site. Structural comparison shows that two families of endonucleases bind and bend DNA in a similar way to that of the HNH ColE7, indicating that endonucleases containing a “ββα-metal” fold of active site possess a universal mode for protein-DNA interactions