A Comparison of Producer Gas, Biochar, and Activated Carbon from Two Distributed Scale Thermochemical Conversion Systems used to Process Forest Biomass

Thermochemical biomass conversion systems have the potential to produce heat, power, fuels and other products from forest biomass at distributed scales that meet the needs of some forest industry facilities. However, many of these systems have not been deployed in this sector and the products they produce from forest biomass have not been adequately described or characterized with regards to chemical properties, possible uses, and markets. This paper characterizes the producer gas, biochar, and activated carbon of a 700 kg h−1 prototype gasification system and a 225 kg h−1 pyrolysis system used to process coniferous sawmill and forest residues. Producer gas from sawmill residues processed with the gasifier had higher energy content than gas from forest residues, with averages of 2.4 MJ m−3 and 9.8 MJ m−3, respectively. Gases from the pyrolysis system averaged 1.3 MJ m−3 for mill residues and 2.5 MJ m−3 for forest residues. Biochars produced have similar particle size distributions and bulk density, but vary in pH and carbon content. Biochars from both systems were successfully activated using steam activation, with resulting BET surface area in the range of commercial activated carbon. Results are discussed in the context of co-locating these systems with forest industry operations

Case Report: Deep brain stimulation improves tremor in FGF-14 associated spinocerebellar ataxia

ObjectivesSpinocerebellar ataxia 27 (SCA 27) is a rare heredodegenerative disorder caused by mutations in the fibroblast growth factor 14 (FGF14) and characterized by early-onset tremor and progressive ataxia later during the disease course. We investigated the effect of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventralis intermedius nucleus of the thalamus (VIM) and subthalamic projections on tremor and ataxia.MethodsAt baseline, we studied the effects of high-frequency VIM stimulation and low-frequency stimulation of subthalamic projections on tremor and ataxia. The patient then adopted the best individual high-frequency stimulation programme at daytime and either 30 Hz-stimulation of the subthalamic contacts or StimOFF at night during two separate 5-weeks follow-up intervals. Both patient and rater were blinded to the stimulation settings.ResultsHigh-frequency stimulation of the VIM effectively attenuated tremor. At follow-up, intermittent 30 Hz-stimulation at night resulted in a superior tremor response compared to StimOFF at night. Ataxia was not affected.DiscussionStimulation of the VIM and adjacent subthalamic projections effectively attenuated tremor in a patient with confirmed SCA 27. Cycling between daytime high-frequency and night-time low-frequency stimulation led to a more sustained tremor response. This suggests to study in future if low-frequency stimulation of the subthalamic projection fibers may help overcome tolerance of tremor that is observed as a long-term limitation of VIM-DBS

Deep learning trained on lymph node status predicts outcome from gastric cancer histopathology: a retrospective multicentric study

Aim Gastric cancer (GC) is a tumor entity with highly variant outcomes. Lymph node metastasis is a prognostically adverse biomarker. We hypothesized that GC primary tissue contains information that is predictive of lymph node status and patient prognosis and that this information can be extracted using Deep Learning (DL). Methods Using three patient cohorts comprising 1146 patients, we trained and validated a DL system to predict lymph node status directly from hematoxylin-and-eosin stained GC tissue sections. We investigated the concordance between the DL-based prediction from the primary tumor slides (aiN score) and the histopathological lymph node status (pN). Furthermore, we assessed the prognostic value of the aiN score alone and when combined with the pN status. Results The aiN score predicted the pN status reaching Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curves (AUROCs) of 0.71 in the training cohort and 0.69 and 0.65 in the two test cohorts. In a multivariate Cox analysis, the aiN score was an independent predictor of patient survival with Hazard Ratios (HR) of 1.5 in the training cohort and of 1.3 and 2.2 in the two test cohorts. A combination of the aiN score and the pN status prognostically stratified patients by survival with p-values <0.05 in log-rank tests. Conclusion GC primary tumor tissue contains additional prognostic information that is accessible using the aiN score. In combination with the pN status, this can be used for personalized management of gastric cancer patients after prospective validation

Pharmacokinetics and Dosing of Levofloxacin in Children Treated for Active or Latent Multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis, Federated States of Micronesia and Republic of the Marshall Islands

In the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and then the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), levofloxacin pharmacokinetics (PK) were studied in children receiving directly observed once-daily regimens (10 mg/kg, age >5 years; 15–20 mg/kg, age ≤5 years) for either multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) disease or latent infection after MDR TB exposure, to inform future dosing strategies

Comparison of a New Length Measurement Technique for Inflatable Penile Prosthesis Implantation to Standard Techniques: Outcomes and Patient Satisfaction

Introduction.  Within a study evaluating the redesigned AMS 700MS inflatable penile prosthesis (IPP) (American Medical Systems, Minnetonka, MN, USA), one site used new length measurement technique (NLMT), a more aggressive dilation and measurement of the corpora cavernosa on a stretched penis, to address penile shortening. Aim.  To compare cylinder size and patient satisfaction, between a NLMT and traditional sizing for IPP implantation. Methods.  Fourteen men received IPPs using NLMT, and 55 with traditional sizing. Nationwide sales data from 2005 to 2008 for AMS 700 IPPs was obtained from AMS for comparison; additional surveys captured patient satisfaction. Main Outcome Measure.  Demographic data, cylinder sizes, and patient satisfaction were compared between the NLMT and standard techniques. Results.  The Fisher's exact test ( P  21 cm long and 28.6% (4) received cylinders <21 cm long, as compared with 12.7% (7) and 87.3% (48), respectively, for patients implanted by traditional techniques. There were ethnic differences between the samples: 42.9% (6) NLMT patients were of African‐American descent, as compared with 10.9% (6) in the standard technique group. However, longer cylinders were utilized more often, with 83.3% (5) of African‐Americans treated using the NLMT; as compared with 33.3% (2) of the standard technique group. Nationwide data reveal 12.3% of patients routinely receive 21 cm cylinders. At 6 months postimplantation, patient satisfaction with NLMT was no different than standard techniques. There were no distal erosions, complications, infections, or pain concerns reported through 24 months among the NLMT patients. Conclusions.  The NLMT resulted in a larger number of subjects implanted with larger cylinders. Satisfaction with performance and complication rates for NLMT patients was comparable to those implanted using standard techniques. Henry G, Houghton L, Culkin D, Otheguy J, Shabsigh R, and Ohl DA. Comparison of a new length measurement technique for inflatable penile prosthesis implantation to standard techniques: Outcomes and patient satisfaction. J Sex Med 2011;8:2640–2646.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86820/1/j.1743-6109.2011.02340.x.pd

Experimental investigation of woody and non-woody biomass combustion in a bubbling fluidised bed combustor focusing on gaseous emissions and temperature profiles

Air staging is a well-known effective method to control NOx emissions from solid fuel combustion boilers. However, further research is still needed to clarify the effect of air staging at different injection locations on the gaseous emissions of Fluidised Bed Combustion (FBC) boilers that fire 100% biomass fuels, particularly non-woody biomass fuels. The main objective of this work is to investigate the effect of the staging air injection location on the gaseous emissions (NOx and CO) and temperature profiles of a 20 kWth bubbling fluidised bed combustor firing three non-woody (straw, miscanthus and peanuts) and two woody biomass fuels. The experimental results showed that injecting the secondary air at the higher location could lead to a greater NOx reduction due to the fact that the biomass combustion reaction mainly took place in the splash zone and/or beginning of the freeboard. Up to 30% of NOx reduction, compared with no air staging, was achieved for the non-woody fuels when the staging air was injected at the higher position. Air staging also significantly reduced the CO emissions as a result of the higher temperatures in the freeboard and longer residence time in the primary combustion zone

Genome-wide meta-analysis of phytosterols reveals five novel loci and a detrimental effect on coronary atherosclerosis

Correction: Volume13, Issue1 Article Number1122 DOI 10.1038/s41467-022-28863-y Published FEB 25 2022Phytosterol serum concentrations are under tight genetic control. The relationship between phytosterols and coronary artery disease (CAD) is controversially discussed. We perform a genome-wide meta-analysis of 32 phytosterol traits reflecting resorption, cholesterol synthesis and esterification in six studies with up to 9758 subjects and detect ten independent genomewide significant SNPs at seven genomic loci. We confirm previously established associations at ABCG5/8 and ABO and demonstrate an extended locus heterogeneity at ABCG5/8 with different functional mechanisms. New loci comprise HMGCR, NPC1L1, PNLIPRP2, SCARB1 and APOE. Based on these results, we perform Mendelian Randomization analyses (MR) revealing a risk-increasing causal relationship of sitosterol serum concentrations and CAD, which is partly mediated by cholesterol. Here we report that phytosterols are polygenic traits. MR add evidence of both, direct and indirect causal effects of sitosterol on CAD.Peer reviewe

Benchmarking weakly-supervised deep learning pipelines for whole slide classification in computational pathology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can extract visual information from histopathological slides and yield biological insight and clinical biomarkers. Whole slide images are cut into thousands of tiles and classification problems are often weakly-supervised: the ground truth is only known for the slide, not for every single tile. In classical weakly-supervised analysis pipelines, all tiles inherit the slide label while in multiple-instance learning (MIL), only bags of tiles inherit the label. However, it is still unclear how these widely used but markedly different approaches perform relative to each other. We implemented and systematically compared six methods in six clinically relevant end-to-end prediction tasks using data from N=2980 patients for training with rigorous external validation. We tested three classical weakly-supervised approaches with convolutional neural networks and vision transformers (ViT) and three MIL-based approaches with and without an additional attention module. Our results empirically demonstrate that histological tumor subtyping of renal cell carcinoma is an easy task in which all approaches achieve an area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC) of above 0.9. In contrast, we report significant performance differences for clinically relevant tasks of mutation prediction in colorectal, gastric, and bladder cancer. In these mutation prediction tasks, classical weakly-supervised workflows outperformed MIL-based weakly-supervised methods for mutation prediction, which is surprising given their simplicity. This shows that new end-to-end image analysis pipelines in computational pathology should be compared to classical weakly-supervised methods. Also, these findings motivate the development of new methods which combine the elegant assumptions of MIL with the empirically observed higher performance of classical weakly-supervised approaches. We make all source codes publicly available at https://github.com/KatherLab/HIA, allowing easy application of all methods to any similar task

The Origin of Phenotypic Heterogeneity in a Clonal Cell Population In Vitro

BACKGROUND: The spontaneous emergence of phenotypic heterogeneity in clonal populations of mammalian cells in vitro is a rule rather than an exception. We consider two simple, mutually non-exclusive models that explain the generation of diverse cell types in a homogeneous population. In the first model, the phenotypic switch is the consequence of extrinsic factors. Initially identical cells may become different because they encounter different local environments that induce adaptive responses. According to the second model, the phenotypic switch is intrinsic to the cells that may occur even in homogeneous environments. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We have investigated the “extrinsic” and the “intrinsic” mechanisms using computer simulations and experimentation. First, we simulated in silico the emergence of two cell types in a clonal cell population using a multiagent model. Both mechanisms produced stable phenotypic heterogeneity, but the distribution of the cell types was different. The “intrinsic” model predicted an even distribution of the rare phenotype cells, while in the “extrinsic” model these cells formed small clusters. The key predictions of the two models were confronted with the results obtained experimentally using a myogenic cell line. CONCLUSIONS: The observations emphasize the importance of the “ecological” context and suggest that, consistently with the “extrinsic” model, local stochastic interactions between phenotypically identical cells play a key role in the initiation of phenotypic switch. Nevertheless, the “intrinsic” model also shows some other aspects of reality: The phenotypic switch is not triggered exclusively by the local environmental variations, but also depends to some extent on the phenotypic intrinsic robustness of the cells

Identification of LukPQ, a novel, equid-adapted leukocidin of Staphylococcus aureus.

Bicomponent pore-forming leukocidins are a family of potent toxins secreted by Staphylococcus aureus, which target white blood cells preferentially and consist of an S- and an F-component. The S-component recognizes a receptor on the host cell, enabling high-affinity binding to the cell surface, after which the toxins form a pore that penetrates the cell lipid bilayer. Until now, six different leukocidins have been described, some of which are host and cell specific. Here, we identify and characterise a novel S. aureus leukocidin; LukPQ. LukPQ is encoded on a 45 kb prophage (ΦSaeq1) found in six different clonal lineages, almost exclusively in strains cultured from equids. We show that LukPQ is a potent and specific killer of equine neutrophils and identify equine-CXCRA and CXCR2 as its target receptors. Although the S-component (LukP) is highly similar to the S-component of LukED, the species specificity of LukPQ and LukED differs. By forming non-canonical toxin pairs, we identify that the F-component contributes to the observed host tropism of LukPQ, thereby challenging the current paradigm that leukocidin specificity is driven solely by the S-component