Cardiovascular medicine: towards a molecular classification of pulmonary hypertension

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Recruitment behaviour in the ponerine ant, Plectroctena mandibularis F. Smith (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

Although workers of Plectroctena mandibularis laid trails with their stings while foraging, the trails appeared to be for individual orientation, because they never recruited nestmates to prey. However, both workers and queens laid trails when recruiting nestmates of either caste to new nest sites. During trail-laying, fluted hairs on the posterior edge of tergite VI were dragged along the ground, presumably applying a pheromone to the substrate. Anatomical and behavioural evidence suggests that pygidial gland secretions moved from the intersegmental pygidial gland between tergites VI and VII into a fingerprint-like, lamellar cuticular reservoir on the pygidium, and from there via the hairs to the substrate. These results suggest that recruitment may be crucial to moving nests but of value only to certain types of foraging, and that recruitment might even have originated in the Formicidae in the context of colony relocation, and then secondarily evolved to assist foraging

The effects of sitaxentan on sildenafil pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics in healthy subjects

WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN ABOUT THIS SUBJECT: * Endothelin-A receptor antagonists (ETRAs) and phosphodiesterase-type 5 inhibitors are approved monotherapies for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension; combining agents from these two drug classes could be beneficial. * There is a significant pharmacokinetic (PK) interaction between the ETRA bosentan and the phosphodiesterase-type 5 inhibitor sildenafil. * This study assessed whether the ETRA sitaxentan similarly impacts the PK of sildenafil. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS: * This study demonstrates that sitaxentan has little effect on sildenafil PK and pharmacodynamics and that no dose adjustment of either agent is required upon co-administration of sildenafil with sitaxentan. AIMS: This study evaluated the effects of sitaxentan on the pharmacodynamic [systemic blood pressure (BP)] and pharmacokinetic (PK) parameters of sildenafil in healthy volunteers. METHODS: Healthy subjects (18-60 years, n= 24) were randomized into two sequence groups. Group 1 received sitaxentan sodium 100 mg daily (7 days), followed by placebo (7 days). Group 2 received placebo (7 days), followed by sitaxentan sodium 100 mg (7 days). On day 7 of each treatment period, participants received sildenafil 100 mg. PK parameters and BP were analysed on day 7 in each treatment period. RESULTS: Sildenafil exposure was slightly higher [AUC(infinity) geometric mean ratio (GMR), 128%] when co-administered with sitaxentan 100 mg vs. placebo, demonstrating a weak, but statistically significant interaction (90% confidence interval 115.5%, 141.2%). The mean maximum positive (E(max)+) and maximum negative (E(max)-) changes from baseline in both systolic and diastolic BP were comparable for sitaxentan and placebo (range 4.8-7.3 mmHg) with three of four geometric mean ratios falling within the equivalence window, suggesting that the drug interaction was not clinically significant. Adverse events were similar between sitaxentan 100 mg (39%) and placebo (30%). No deaths or serious adverse events occurred during the study. CONCLUSION: The dose of sildenafil does not need to be adjusted when co-administered with sitaxentan

Connaissances et perceptions de la religion et du phénomène de la radicalisation chez les étudiant(e)s du collégial

Comprend des références bibliographiquesDiffusé avec l'aimable autorisation des auteurs. Le document original est également accessible en ligne : http://cefir.cegepmontpetit.ca/2018/05/16/connaissances-et-perceptions-de-la-religion-et-du-phenomene-de-la-radicalisation-chez-les-etudiantes-du-collegial-2018

Deep learning cardiac motion analysis for human survival prediction

Motion analysis is used in computer vision to understand the behaviour of moving objects in sequences of images. Optimising the interpretation of dynamic biological systems requires accurate and precise motion tracking as well as efficient representations of high-dimensional motion trajectories so that these can be used for prediction tasks. Here we use image sequences of the heart, acquired using cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, to create time-resolved three-dimensional segmentations using a fully convolutional network trained on anatomical shape priors. This dense motion model formed the input to a supervised denoising autoencoder (4Dsurvival), which is a hybrid network consisting of an autoencoder that learns a task-specific latent code representation trained on observed outcome data, yielding a latent representation optimised for survival prediction. To handle right-censored survival outcomes, our network used a Cox partial likelihood loss function. In a study of 302 patients the predictive accuracy (quantified by Harrell's C-index) was significantly higher (p < .0001) for our model C=0.73 (95$\%$ CI: 0.68 - 0.78) than the human benchmark of C=0.59 (95$\%$ CI: 0.53 - 0.65). This work demonstrates how a complex computer vision task using high-dimensional medical image data can efficiently predict human survival

Variability in prey field structure drives inter-annual differences in prey encounter by a marine predator, the little penguin

This study was funded by Australian Research Council Linkage Grants (grant nos. LP110200603 and LP160100162), with contributions from the Taronga Conservation Society Australia.Understanding how marine predators encounter prey across patchy landscapes remains challenging due to difficulties in measuring the three-dimensional structure of pelagic prey fields at scales relevant to animal movement. We measured at-sea behaviour of a central-place forager, the little penguin (Eudyptula minor), over 5 years (2015–2019) using GPS and dive loggers. We made contemporaneous measurements of the prey field within the penguins' foraging range via boat-based acoustic surveys. We developed a prey encounter index by comparing estimates of acoustic prey density encountered along actual penguin tracks to those encountered along simulated penguin tracks with the same characteristics as real tracks but that moved randomly through the prey field. In most years, penguin tracks encountered prey better than simulated random movements greater than 99% of the time, and penguin dive depths matched peaks in the vertical distribution of prey. However, when prey was unusually sparse and/or deep, penguins had worse than random prey encounter indices, exhibited dives that mismatched depth of maximum prey density, and females had abnormally low body mass (5.3% lower than average). Reductions in prey encounters owing to decreases in the density or accessibility of prey may ultimately lead to reduced fitness and population declines in central-place foraging marine predators.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

(How) are decisions made in child and family social work supervisions?

Supervision is widely recognised as a core activity for social work. In this paper, we explore the nature of decision-making in supervision, using a collection of twelve audio-recordings from one child protection team in England. We apply Conversation Analysis to see how potential actions are put ‘on the table’, by whom, and the interactional work that occurs before any final decision is made. Within these data we find that supervision may not be an especially key site for decision-making. When actions are proposed, we identify three primary patterns: unilateral decision making, bilateral decision making and polar questions which instigate decision making sequences. In each, it is almost always the supervisor who proposes a possible future action, and the social worker who responds. If the social worker is agreeable, there is often little further discussion. When the social worker resists the proposal or there is further talk around the future action, the subsequent conversation was likely to focus on how it reflects on the worker’s professional competence, rather than the merits of the action and implications for the family. These findings raise the question of how (and where) casework decisions are made in this social work team, if not in supervision. They also suggest we need to pay more attention to issues of professional standing and creating opportunities for shared decision making when thinking about supervision. Our analysis furthers current knowledge of what happens in social work supervision by demonstrating how epistemic and deontic domains, as well professional competency, are interactionally relevant forces shaping the decision-making process

Athenaeus the Navigator

Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2008. Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher.This study concerns navigation in a geographical sense and in the sense of the reader finding a way through a complex text with the help of points of reference. Recent studies in Athenaeus have suggested that he was a more sophisticated writer than the second-hand compiler of Hellenistic comment on classical Greek authors, which has been a dominant view. Building on these studies, this article argues that Athenaeus' approach to his history of ancient dining draws on traditional poetic links between the symposium and the sea, and expands such metaphors with a major interest in place and provenance, which also belongs to the literature of the symposium. Provenance at the same time evokes a theme of imperial thought, that Rome can attract to herself all the good things of the earth that are now under her sway. Good things include foods and the literary heritage of Greece now housed in imperial libraries. Athenaeus deploys themes of navigation ambiguously, to celebrate diversity and to warn against the dangers of luxury. Notorious examples of luxury are presented – the Sybarites and Capuans, for example – but there seem to be oblique warnings to Rome as well. Much clearer censure is reserved for the gastronomic poem of Archestratus of Gela, which surveys the best cities in which to eat certain fish. The Deipnosophists deplore the immorality of the poet and his radical rewriting of their key authors Homer and Plato, while at the same time quoting him extensively for the range of his reference to geography and fish. This commentary on Archestratus is a good example of the Deipnosophists' guidance to the reader, Roman or otherwise, who wishes to ‘navigate’ the complicated history of the Greek deipnon and symposium