Retrospektive Bestimmung der elektromagnetischen Exposition durch analoge Rundfunksender im Rahmen von KiSS

Im Rahmen einer epidemiologischen Fall-Kontroll-Studie zur Untersuchung eines möglichen Zusammenhangs zwischen der Häufigkeit kindlicher Leukämien und elektromagnetischer Strahlung (,,KiSS" – <b>Ki</b>ndliche Leukämien und Expositionen in der Umgebung von hochfrequenten <b>S</b>ende<b>s</b>tationen) soll die Exposition durch leistungsstarke analoge Rundfunksender retrospektiv (Zeitraum 1982–2003) quantifiziert werden. Die zu betrachtenden Sendernetze für AM-Hörfunk, FM-Hörfunk und analoges Fernsehen unterscheiden sich nicht nur hinsichtlich der Modulationsart und der von den Einzelsendern abgestrahlten Leistung, sondern auch in der Netzkonfiguration und den je nach Wellenbereich verschiedenen Strahlungseigenschaften der Sendeantennen. Damit sind bei diesen drei Rundfunkdiensten sowohl die absolute Größe als auch die räumliche Struktur der hervorgerufenen Exposition verschieden. Es wird dargelegt, wie die für die Prognose der Rundfunkversorgung verwendeten Rechenverfahren zur Modellierung der Feldstärke für die Modellierung der Exposition herangezogen und durch Kontrollmessungen validiert werden und wie trotz Wahrung der Vertraulichkeit der dabei unabdingbar zu verwendenden Senderbetriebsdaten eine unerwünschte Beeinflussung der Studienergebnisse durch die Senderbetreiber ausgeschlossen wird

Upper limb amputees can be induced to experience a rubber hand as their own

We describe how upper limb amputees can be made to experience a rubber hand as part of their own body. This was accomplished by applying synchronous touches to the stump, which was out of view, and to the index finger of a rubber hand, placed in full view (26 cm medial to the stump). This elicited an illusion of sensing touch on the artificial hand, rather than on the stump and a feeling of ownership of the rubber hand developed. This effect was supported by quantitative subjective reports in the form of questionnaires, behavioural data in the form of misreaching in a pointing task when asked to localize the position of the touch, and physiological evidence obtained by skin conductance responses when threatening the hand prosthesis. Our findings outline a simple method for transferring tactile sensations from the stump to a prosthetic limb by tricking the brain, thereby making an important contribution to the field of neuroprosthetics where a major goal is to develop artificial limbs that feel like a real parts of the body

Development and Phenotype of Heart Failure in Long-Term Survivors of Childhood Cancer:The CVSS Study

BACKGROUND: The CVSS (Cardiac and Vascular Late Sequelae in Long-Term Survivors of Childhood Cancer) study aimed to investigate the prevalence of different stages of heart failure (HF) in childhood cancer survivors (CCSs) compared with the general population. METHODS AND RESULTS: A total of 1002 CCSs (age range, 23– 48 years) diagnosed with neoplasia before an age of 15 years underwent a comprehensive cardiovascular screening. An age-and sex-matched sample from the population-based GHS (Gutenberg Health Study) served as a comparison group. Although prevalence of HF was significantly higher in CCSs, prevalence of different HF stages varied strongly by specific tumor history. Compared with the population, the prevalence ratio was 2.6 (95% CI, 2.4– 2.8) for HF stage A and 4.6 (95% CI, 4.1– 5.1) for the composite of HF stage B to D in an age-and sex-adjusted Poisson regression model. Multivariable linear regression, adjusting for tumor entities, age, sex, and cardiovascular risk factors, revealed a lower left ventricular ejection fraction in patients with history of bone tumors (β, −4.30 [95% CI, −5.70 to −2.80]), soft tissue sarcoma (β, −1.60 [95% CI, −2.90 to −0.30]), and renal tumors (β, −1.60 [95% CI, −2.80 to −0.29]) compared with the population. The same model for the diastolic marker, ratio of the peak early diastolic filling velocity/lateral mitral annular early diastolic velocity, showed an association only with cardiovascular risk factors but not with tumor entities. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of HF stage A to D was significantly higher among long-term CCSs compared with the population and varied strongly by tumor entity. Systolic dysfunction was primarily associated with tumor entities, whereas diastolic dysfunction was associated with a higher burden of cardiovascular risk factors in CCSs.</p

Development and Phenotype of Heart Failure in Long-Term Survivors of Childhood Cancer:The CVSS Study

BACKGROUND: The CVSS (Cardiac and Vascular Late Sequelae in Long-Term Survivors of Childhood Cancer) study aimed to investigate the prevalence of different stages of heart failure (HF) in childhood cancer survivors (CCSs) compared with the general population. METHODS AND RESULTS: A total of 1002 CCSs (age range, 23– 48 years) diagnosed with neoplasia before an age of 15 years underwent a comprehensive cardiovascular screening. An age-and sex-matched sample from the population-based GHS (Gutenberg Health Study) served as a comparison group. Although prevalence of HF was significantly higher in CCSs, prevalence of different HF stages varied strongly by specific tumor history. Compared with the population, the prevalence ratio was 2.6 (95% CI, 2.4– 2.8) for HF stage A and 4.6 (95% CI, 4.1– 5.1) for the composite of HF stage B to D in an age-and sex-adjusted Poisson regression model. Multivariable linear regression, adjusting for tumor entities, age, sex, and cardiovascular risk factors, revealed a lower left ventricular ejection fraction in patients with history of bone tumors (β, −4.30 [95% CI, −5.70 to −2.80]), soft tissue sarcoma (β, −1.60 [95% CI, −2.90 to −0.30]), and renal tumors (β, −1.60 [95% CI, −2.80 to −0.29]) compared with the population. The same model for the diastolic marker, ratio of the peak early diastolic filling velocity/lateral mitral annular early diastolic velocity, showed an association only with cardiovascular risk factors but not with tumor entities. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of HF stage A to D was significantly higher among long-term CCSs compared with the population and varied strongly by tumor entity. Systolic dysfunction was primarily associated with tumor entities, whereas diastolic dysfunction was associated with a higher burden of cardiovascular risk factors in CCSs.</p

Development and Phenotype of Heart Failure in Long-Term Survivors of Childhood Cancer:The CVSS Study

BACKGROUND: The CVSS (Cardiac and Vascular Late Sequelae in Long-Term Survivors of Childhood Cancer) study aimed to investigate the prevalence of different stages of heart failure (HF) in childhood cancer survivors (CCSs) compared with the general population. METHODS AND RESULTS: A total of 1002 CCSs (age range, 23– 48 years) diagnosed with neoplasia before an age of 15 years underwent a comprehensive cardiovascular screening. An age-and sex-matched sample from the population-based GHS (Gutenberg Health Study) served as a comparison group. Although prevalence of HF was significantly higher in CCSs, prevalence of different HF stages varied strongly by specific tumor history. Compared with the population, the prevalence ratio was 2.6 (95% CI, 2.4– 2.8) for HF stage A and 4.6 (95% CI, 4.1– 5.1) for the composite of HF stage B to D in an age-and sex-adjusted Poisson regression model. Multivariable linear regression, adjusting for tumor entities, age, sex, and cardiovascular risk factors, revealed a lower left ventricular ejection fraction in patients with history of bone tumors (β, −4.30 [95% CI, −5.70 to −2.80]), soft tissue sarcoma (β, −1.60 [95% CI, −2.90 to −0.30]), and renal tumors (β, −1.60 [95% CI, −2.80 to −0.29]) compared with the population. The same model for the diastolic marker, ratio of the peak early diastolic filling velocity/lateral mitral annular early diastolic velocity, showed an association only with cardiovascular risk factors but not with tumor entities. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of HF stage A to D was significantly higher among long-term CCSs compared with the population and varied strongly by tumor entity. Systolic dysfunction was primarily associated with tumor entities, whereas diastolic dysfunction was associated with a higher burden of cardiovascular risk factors in CCSs.</p

Metabolic analysis of the interaction between plants and herbivores

Insect herbivores by necessity have to deal with a large arsenal of plant defence metabolites. The levels of defence compounds may be increased by insect damage. These induced plant responses may also affect the metabolism and performance of successive insect herbivores. As the chemical nature of induced responses is largely unknown, global metabolomic analyses are a valuable tool to gain more insight into the metabolites possibly involved in such interactions. This study analyzed the interaction between feral cabbage (Brassica oleracea) and small cabbage white caterpillars (Pieris rapae) and how previous attacks to the plant affect the caterpillar metabolism. Because plants may be induced by shoot and root herbivory, we compared shoot and root induction by treating the plants on either plant part with jasmonic acid. Extracts of the plants and the caterpillars were chemically analysed using Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography/Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry (UPLCT/MS). The study revealed that the levels of three structurally related coumaroylquinic acids were elevated in plants treated on the shoot. The levels of these compounds in plants and caterpillars were highly correlated: these compounds were defined as the ‘metabolic interface’. The role of these metabolites could only be discovered using simultaneous analysis of the plant and caterpillar metabolomes. We conclude that a metabolomics approach is useful in discovering unexpected bioactive compounds involved in ecological interactions between plants and their herbivores and higher trophic levels.

Does training with amplitude modulated tones affect tone-vocoded speech perception?

Temporal-envelope cues are essential for successful speech perception. We asked here whether training on stimuli containing temporal-envelope cues without speech content can improve the perception of spectrally-degraded (vocoded) speech in which the temporal-envelope (but not the temporal fine structure) is mainly preserved. Two groups of listeners were trained on different amplitude-modulation (AM) based tasks, either AM detection or AM-rate discrimination (21 blocks of 60 trials during two days, 1260 trials; frequency range: 4Hz, 8Hz, and 16Hz), while an additional control group did not undertake any training. Consonant identification in vocoded vowel-consonant-vowel stimuli was tested before and after training on the AM tasks (or at an equivalent time interval for the control group). Following training, only the trained groups showed a significant improvement in the perception of vocoded speech, but the improvement did not significantly differ from that observed for controls. Thus, we do not find convincing evidence that this amount of training with temporal-envelope cues without speech content provide significant benefit for vocoded speech intelligibility. Alternative training regimens using vocoded speech along the linguistic hierarchy should be explored

A weakness measure for GR(1) formulae

In spite of the theoretical and algorithmic developments for system synthesis in recent years, little effort has been dedicated to quantifying the quality of the specifications used for synthesis. When dealing with unrealizable specifications, finding the weakest environment assumptions that would ensure realizability is typically a desirable property; in such context the weakness of the assumptions is a major quality parameter. The question of whether one assumption is weaker than another is commonly interpreted using implication or, equivalently, language inclusion. However, this interpretation does not provide any further insight into the weakness of assumptions when implication does not hold. To our knowledge, the only measure that is capable of comparing two formulae in this case is entropy, but even it fails to provide a sufficiently refined notion of weakness in case of GR(1) formulae, a subset of linear temporal logic formulae which is of particular interest in controller synthesis. In this paper we propose a more refined measure of weakness based on the Hausdorff dimension, a concept that captures the notion of size of the omega-language satisfying a linear temporal logic formula. We identify the conditions under which this measure is guaranteed to distinguish between weaker and stronger GR(1) formulae. We evaluate our proposed weakness measure in the context of computing GR(1) assumptions refinements

Axonal Dynamics of Excitatory and Inhibitory Neurons in Somatosensory Cortex

Electrophysiology-delivery of fluorescent viral vectors-and two-photon microscopy were used to demonstrate the rapidity of axonal restructuring of both excitatory and inhibitory neurons in rodent cortical layer II/III following alterations in sensory experience

Effects of Aging on Paired-Pulse Behavior of Rat Somatosensory Cortical Neurons

Aging affects all levels of neural processing including changes of intracortical inhibition and cortical excitability. The paired-pulse stimulation protocol, the application of 2 stimuli in close succession, is used to investigate cortical excitability. The paired-pulse behavior is characterized by the fact that the second response is significantly suppressed at short interstimulus intervals (ISIs) but approaches the first response with increasing ISIs. However, there are controversial reports about the influence of age on paired-pulse behavior. We therefore used pairs of tactile stimuli (ISIs from tens to hundreds of milliseconds) to record extracellular responses of somatosensory cortical neurons of young and aged rats. Paired-pulse behavior was quantified as the ratio of the amplitude of the second response divided by the first. For all ISIs, we found significantly higher ratios in the old animals indicating reduced paired-pulse suppression (PPS). Evaluation of the single response components revealed a significant reduction of the response to the first stimulus for old animals but no age-dependent decrement to the second. Changes in PPS are usually mediated by modulating the second response characteristics. Thus, our data demonstrate reduced PPS due to an overall reduction of the first response as a form of modified PPS developing at old age