A DEVICE FOR MEASURING THE VELOCITY-TIME HISTORY OF ATHLETES

Measurements of the velocity-time histories of sprinters and jumpers are valuable to coaches of these events, but the devices which have been developed to make such measurements are too expensive for most athletics programs. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate the use of a relatively inexpensive device for measuring the velocity-time history of straight away sprinters, long jumpers, triple jumpers, and pole vaulter

EVOLUTION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERFORMANCE AND APPROACH RUN VELOCITY IN THE WOMEN'S POLE VAULT

The purpose of this study was to compare the relationship between approach run velocity and crossbar height for women pole vaulters from 1995 to 1997 and from 1997 to 2003. Videorecords of vaults were used to compute the average interval velocities from 9 to 4 m from the back of the vault box. The average 1997-2003 vault was 0.33 m/s or 4.5% faster and 51 cm or 14.1 % higher. Height was significantly correlated to approach run velocity. Linear regression equations predicting height from velocity were computed for each dataset. For a velocity of 8.25 m/s, the regression equations predicted a height 35 cm higher for the 1997-2003 vaults. Improvements in women's vaulting technique have been largely responsible for the increase in vault heights by women between 1995-1997 and 1997-2003

The Panarea natural CO2 seeps: fate and impact of the leaking gas (PaCO2) ; R/V URANIA, Cruise No. U10/2011, 27 July – 01 August 2011, Naples (Italy) – Naples (Italy)

Carbon capture and storage (CCS), both on- and offshore, is expected to be an important technique to mitigate anthropogenic effects on global climate by isolating man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) in deep geological formations. In marine environments, however, the potential impacts of CO2 leakage, appropriate detection methods, and risk and pathways of atmospheric emissions are poorly defined. The natural CO2 gas seeps that occur in the relatively shallow waters off the coast of Panarea Island (Aeolian Islands, Italy) can be studied as a large-scale, real-world analogue of what might occur at a leaking offshore CCS site and what tools can be used to study it. The oceanographic survey PaCO2 was performed aboard R/V Urania from 27 July – 01 August 2011 (Naples – Naples). The project’s ship-time was funded by Eurofleets, with work being performed as a sub-project of the Seventh Framework Programme projects “ECO2” and “RISCS”, which provided subsidiary funding. Large amounts of data and samples were collected during the cruise which will be interpreted in the coming months, with preliminary results detailed here. Of particular importance was the discovery of much larger areas showing gas seepage than previously reported. Interdisciplinary measurements were performed at the Panarea seepage site. The international team of scientists onboard R/V Urania performed complementary sampling and measurements for biological, chemical, and physical parameters throughout the area. Together with the dedication of R/V Urania’s Captain and crew, and the eagerness and cooperation of the scientific crew, we were able to obtain excellent scientific results during this six-day cruise

Developing a pressure ulcer risk factor minimum data set and risk assessment framework

AIM: To agree a draft pressure ulcer risk factor Minimum Data Set to underpin the development of a new evidenced-based Risk Assessment Framework.BACKGROUND: A recent systematic review identified the need for a pressure ulcer risk factor Minimum Data Set and development and validation of an evidenced-based pressure ulcer Risk Assessment Framework. This was undertaken through the Pressure UlceR Programme Of reSEarch (RP-PG-0407-10056), funded by the National Institute for Health Research and incorporates five phases. This article reports phase two, a consensus study.DESIGN: Consensus study.METHOD: A modified nominal group technique based on the Research and Development/University of California at Los Angeles appropriateness method. This incorporated an expert group, review of the evidence and the views of a Patient and Public Involvement service user group. Data were collected December 2010-December 2011.FINDINGS: The risk factors and assessment items of the Minimum Data Set (including immobility, pressure ulcer and skin status, perfusion, diabetes, skin moisture, sensory perception and nutrition) were agreed. In addition, a draft Risk Assessment Framework incorporating all Minimum Data Set items was developed, comprising a two stage assessment process (screening and detailed full assessment) and decision pathways.CONCLUSION: The draft Risk Assessment Framework will undergo further design and pre-testing with clinical nurses to assess and improve its usability. It will then be evaluated in clinical practice to assess its validity and reliability. The Minimum Data Set could be used in future for large scale risk factor studies informing refinement of the Risk Assessment Framework

Sequence alignment, mutual information, and dissimilarity measures for constructing phylogenies

Existing sequence alignment algorithms use heuristic scoring schemes which cannot be used as objective distance metrics. Therefore one relies on measures like the p- or log-det distances, or makes explicit, and often simplistic, assumptions about sequence evolution. Information theory provides an alternative, in the form of mutual information (MI) which is, in principle, an objective and model independent similarity measure. MI can be estimated by concatenating and zipping sequences, yielding thereby the "normalized compression distance". So far this has produced promising results, but with uncontrolled errors. We describe a simple approach to get robust estimates of MI from global pairwise alignments. Using standard alignment algorithms, this gives for animal mitochondrial DNA estimates that are strikingly close to estimates obtained from the alignment free methods mentioned above. Our main result uses algorithmic (Kolmogorov) information theory, but we show that similar results can also be obtained from Shannon theory. Due to the fact that it is not additive, normalized compression distance is not an optimal metric for phylogenetics, but we propose a simple modification that overcomes the issue of additivity. We test several versions of our MI based distance measures on a large number of randomly chosen quartets and demonstrate that they all perform better than traditional measures like the Kimura or log-det (resp. paralinear) distances. Even a simplified version based on single letter Shannon entropies, which can be easily incorporated in existing software packages, gave superior results throughout the entire animal kingdom. But we see the main virtue of our approach in a more general way. For example, it can also help to judge the relative merits of different alignment algorithms, by estimating the significance of specific alignments.Comment: 19 pages + 16 pages of supplementary materia

Longitudinal trends in causes of death among adults with HIV on antiretroviral therapy in Europe and North America from 1996 to 2020: a collaboration of cohort studies

Background Mortality rates among people with HIV have fallen since 1996 following the widespread availability of effective antiretroviral therapy (ART). Patterns of cause-specific mortality are evolving as the population with HIV ages. We aimed to investigate longitudinal trends in cause-specific mortality among people with HIV starting ART in Europe and North America. Methods In this collaborative observational cohort study, we used data from 17 European and North American HIV cohorts contributing data to the Antiretroviral Therapy Cohort Collaboration. We included data for people with HIV who started ART between 1996 and 2020 at the age of 16 years or older. Causes of death were classified into a single cause by both a clinician and an algorithm if International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision or Tenth Revision data were available, or independently by two clinicians. Disagreements were resolved through panel discussion. We used Poisson models to compare cause-specific mortality rates during the calendar periods 1996-99, 2000-03, 2004-07, 2008-11, 2012-15, and 2016-20, adjusted for time-updated age, CD4 count, and whether the individual was ART -naive at the start of each period. Findings Among 189 301 people with HIV included in this study, 16 832 (8 center dot 9%) deaths were recorded during 1 519 200 person-years of follow-up. 13 180 (78 center dot 3%) deaths were classified by cause: the most common causes were AIDS (4203 deaths; 25 center dot 0%), non-AIDS non -hepatitis malignancy (2311; 13 center dot 7%), and cardiovascular or heart-related (1403; 8 center dot 3%) mortality. The proportion of deaths due to AIDS declined from 49% during 1996-99 to 16% during 2016-20. Rates of all-cause mortality per 1000 person-years decreased from 16 center dot 8 deaths (95% CI 15 center dot 4-18 center dot 4) during 1996-99 to 7 center dot 9 deaths (7 center dot 6-8 center dot 2) during 2016-20. Rates of all-cause mortality declined with time: the average adjusted mortality rate ratio per calendar period was 0 center dot 85 (95% CI 0 center dot 84-0 center dot 86). Rates of cause-specific mortality also declined: the most pronounced reduction was for AIDS-related mortality (0 center dot 81; 0 center dot 79-0 center dot 83). There were also reductions in rates of cardiovascular-related (0 center dot 83, 0 center dot 79-0 center dot 87), liver-related (0 center dot 88, 0 center dot 84-0 center dot 93), non-AIDS infectionrelated (0 center dot 91, 0 center dot 86-0 center dot 96), non-AIDS-non-hepatocellular carcinoma malignancy-related (0 center dot 94, 0 center dot 90-0 center dot 97), and suicide or accident-related mortality (0 center dot 89, 0 center dot 82-0 center dot 95). Mortality rates among people who acquired HIV through injecting drug use increased in women (1 center dot 07, 1 center dot 00-1 center dot 14) and decreased slightly in men (0 center dot 96, 0 center dot 93-0 center dot 99). Interpretation Reductions of most major causes of death, particularly AIDS-related deaths among people with HIV on ART, were not seen for all subgroups. Interventions targeted at high-risk groups, substance use, and comorbidities might further increase life expectancy in people with HIV towards that in the general population. Funding US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Copyright (c) 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license

First-Year Spectroscopy for the SDSS-II Supernova Survey

This paper presents spectroscopy of supernovae discovered in the first season of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey. This program searches for and measures multi-band light curves of supernovae in the redshift range z = 0.05 - 0.4, complementing existing surveys at lower and higher redshifts. Our goal is to better characterize the supernova population, with a particular focus on SNe Ia, improving their utility as cosmological distance indicators and as probes of dark energy. Our supernova spectroscopy program features rapid-response observations using telescopes of a range of apertures, and provides confirmation of the supernova and host-galaxy types as well as precise redshifts. We describe here the target identification and prioritization, data reduction, redshift measurement, and classification of 129 SNe Ia, 16 spectroscopically probable SNe Ia, 7 SNe Ib/c, and 11 SNe II from the first season. We also describe our efforts to measure and remove the substantial host galaxy contamination existing in the majority of our SN spectra.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal(47pages, 9 figures

Stratification strength and light climate explain variation in chlorophyll a at the continental scale in a European multilake survey in a heatwave summer

To determine the drivers of phytoplankton biomass, we collected standardized morphometric, physical, and biological data in 230 lakes across the Mediterranean, Continental, and Boreal climatic zones of the European continent. Multilinear regression models tested on this snapshot of mostly eutrophic lakes (median total phosphorus [TP] = 0.06 and total nitrogen [TN] = 0.7 mg L−1), and its subsets (2 depth types and 3 climatic zones), show that light climate and stratification strength were the most significant explanatory variables for chlorophyll a (Chl a) variance. TN was a significant predictor for phytoplankton biomass for shallow and continental lakes, while TP never appeared as an explanatory variable, suggesting that under high TP, light, which partially controls stratification strength, becomes limiting for phytoplankton development. Mediterranean lakes were the warmest yet most weakly stratified and had significantly less Chl a than Boreal lakes, where the temperature anomaly from the long-term average, during a summer heatwave was the highest (+4°C) and showed a significant, exponential relationship with stratification strength. This European survey represents a summer snapshot of phytoplankton biomass and its drivers, and lends support that light and stratification metrics, which are both affected by climate change, are better predictors for phytoplankton biomass in nutrient-rich lakes than nutrient concentrations and surface temperature.Additional co-authors: Jolanda Verspagen, Maria van Herk, Maria G. Antoniou, Nikoletta Tsiarta, Valerie McCarthy, Victor C. Perello, Danielle Machado-Vieira, Alinne Gurjao de Oliveira, Dubravka Špoljaric Maronic, Filip Stevic, Tanja Žuna Pfeiffer, Itana Bokan Vucelic, Petar Žutinic, Marija Gligora Udovic, Anđelka Plenkovic-Moraj, Ludek Blaha, Rodan Geriš, Markéta Frankova, Kirsten Seestern Christoffersen, Trine Perlt Warming, Tõnu Feldmann, Alo Laas, Kristel Panksep, Lea Tuvikene, Kersti Kangro, Judita Koreiviene, Jurate Karosiene, Jurate Kasperoviciene, Ksenija Savadova-Ratkus, Irma Vitonyte, Kerstin Häggqvist, Pauliina Salmi, Lauri Arvola, Karl Rothhaupt, Christos Avagianos, Triantafyllos Kaloudis, Spyros Gkelis, Manthos Panou, Theodoros Triantis, Sevasti-Kiriaki Zervou, Anastasia Hiskia, Ulrike Obertegger, Adriano Boscaini, Giovanna Flaim, Nico Salmaso, Leonardo Cerasino, Sigrid Haande, Birger Skjelbred, Magdalena Grabowska, Maciej Karpowicz, Damian Chmura, Lidia Nawrocka, Justyna Kobos, Hanna Mazur-Marzec, Pablo Alcaraz-Parraga, Elżbieta Wilk-Wozniak, Wojciech Krzton, Edward Walusiak, Ilona Gagala-Borowska, Joana Mankiewicz-Boczek, Magdalena Toporowska, Barbara Pawlik-Skowronska, Michał Niedzwiecki, Wojciech Pęczuła, Agnieszka Napiorkowska-Krzebietke, Julita Dunalska, Justyna Sienska, Daniel Szymanski, Marek Kruk, Agnieszka Budzynska, Ryszard Goldyn, Anna Kozak, Joanna Rosinska, Elżbieta Szeląg-Wasielewska, Piotr Domek, Natalia Jakubowska-Krepska, Kinga Kwasizur, Beata Messyasz, Aleksandra Pełechata, Mariusz Pełechaty, Mikolaj Kokocinski, Beata Madrecka-Witkowska, Iwona Kostrzewska-Szlakowska, Magdalena Frąk, Agnieszka Bankowska-Sobczak, Michał Wasilewicz, Agnieszka Ochocka, Agnieszka Pasztaleniec, Iwona Jasser, Ana M. Antao-Geraldes, Manel Leira, Vitor Vasconcelos, Joao Morais, Micaela Vale, Pedro M. Raposeiro, Vítor Gonçalves, Boris Aleksovski, Svetislav Krstic, Hana Nemova, Iveta Drastichova, Lucia Chomova, Spela Remec-Rekar, Tina Elersek, Lars-Anders Hansson, Pablo Urrutia-Cordero, Andrea G. Bravo, Moritz Buck, William Colom-Montero, Kristiina Mustonen, Don Pierson, Yang Yang, Christine Edwards, Hannah Cromie, Jordi Delgado-Martín, David García, Jose Luís Cereijo, Joan Gomà, Mari Carmen Trapote, Teresa Vegas-Vilarrúbia, Biel Obrador, Ana García-Murcia, Monserrat Real, Elvira Romans, Jordi Noguero-Ribes, David Parreño Duque, Elísabeth Fernandez-Moran, Barbara Úbeda, José Angel Galvez, Núria Catalan, Carmen Pérez-Martínez, Eloísa Ramos-Rodríguez, Carmen Cillero-Castro, Enrique Moreno-Ostos, José María Blanco, Valeriano Rodríguez, Jorge Juan Montes-Pérez, Roberto L. Palomino, Estela Rodríguez-Pérez, Armand Hernandez, Rafael Carballeira, Antonio Camacho, Antonio Picazo, Carlos Rochera, Anna C. Santamans, Carmen Ferriol, Susana Romo, Juan Miguel Soria, Arda Özen, Tünay Karan, Nilsun Demir, Meryem Beklioglu, Nur Filiz, Eti Levi, Ugur Iskin, Gizem Bezirci, Ülkü Nihan Tavsanoglu, Kemal Çelik, Koray Ozhan, Nusret Karakaya, Mehmet Ali Turan Koçer, Mete Yilmaz, Faruk Maras¸lıoglu, Özden Fakioglu, Elif Neyran Soylu, Meral Apaydın Yagcı, Sakir Çınar, Kadir Çapkın, Abdulkadir Yagcı, Mehmet Cesur, Fuat Bilgin, Cafer Bulut, Rahmi Uysal, Köker Latife, Reyhan Akçaalan, Meriç Albay, Mehmet Tahir Alp, Korhan Özkan, Tugba Ongun Sevindik, Hatice Tunca, Burçin Önem, Hans Paerl, Cayelan C. Carey, Bastiaan W. Ibeling

SynBlast: Assisting the analysis of conserved synteny information

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Motivation</p> <p>In the last years more than 20 vertebrate genomes have been sequenced, and the rate at which genomic DNA information becomes available is rapidly accelerating. Gene duplication and gene loss events inherently limit the accuracy of orthology detection based on sequence similarity alone. Fully automated methods for orthology annotation do exist but often fail to identify individual members in cases of large gene families, or to distinguish missing data from traceable gene losses. This situation can be improved in many cases by including conserved synteny information.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we present the <monospace>SynBlast</monospace> pipeline that is designed to construct and evaluate local synteny information. <monospace>SynBlast</monospace> uses the genomic region around a focal reference gene to retrieve candidates for homologous regions from a collection of target genomes and ranks them in accord with the available evidence for homology. The pipeline is intended as a tool to aid high quality manual annotation in particular in those cases where automatic procedures fail. We demonstrate how <monospace>SynBlast</monospace> is applied to retrieving orthologous and paralogous clusters using the vertebrate <it>Hox </it>and <it>ParaHox </it>clusters as examples.</p> <p>Software</p> <p>The <monospace>SynBlast</monospace> package written in <monospace>Perl</monospace> is available under the GNU General Public License at <url>http://www.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de/Software/SynBlast/</url>.</p