The effect of sheltered load on reproduction in Solanum carolinense, a species with variable self-incompatibility

In previous studies, we have investigated the strength of self-incompatibility (SI) in Solanum carolinense, a highly successful weed with a fully functional SI system that inhabits early successional and other disturbed habitats. We have found that the SI response in S. carolinense is a plastic trait—its strength being affected by the age of the flowers, and the presence of developing fruits and that there are genetic differences among families in their self-fertility. However, in species with a fully functional SI response, selfing would not be that common. As a result, deleterious recessives scattered though the genome of horsenettle are only occasionally exposed to selection. It has been suggested that deleterious recessives accumulate near S-alleles in strong SI species because the S-locus is located in a non-recombining region of the genome and because strong S-alleles are never in the homozygous state, thus sheltering some of the genetic load near the S-locus from selection. We performed a series of laboratory and greenhouse experiments to determine the extent to which sheltered load adds to the overall magnitude of inbreeding depression in horsenettle. Specifically, we amplified and sequenced the S-alleles from 16 genets collected from a large population in Pennsylvania and performed a series of controlled self-pollinations. We then grew the selfed progeny in the greenhouse; recorded various measures of growth and reproductive output; and amplified and sequenced their S-allele(s). We found that the heterozygous progeny of self-pollinations produce more flowers and have a greater ability to set both self and cross seed than S-homozygous progeny. We also found evidence of variation in the magnitude of load among S-alleles. These results suggest that sheltered load might slow the fixation of weak (partially compatible) S-alleles in this population, thus adding to the maintenance of a mixed mating system rather than leading to the fixation of the selfing allele

El control interno en la adquisición de activos fijos en la modalidad de gobierno a gobierno

En la presente investigación, se estableció como objetivo determinar si las deficiencias de control interno originan el uso indebido de los recursos del estado en la adquisición de activos fijos. En este caso, vehículos patrulleros mediante la modalidad de gobierno a gobierno. El método utilizado fue de tipo correlacional, con un nivel descriptivo, que busca identificar la relación entre sus variables: el objeto de estudio, el control interno y la adquisición de activos fijos. El diseño fue no experimental y fue orientado para el período 2011-2016. Para llevar a cabo el objetivo de la investigación se hicieron precisiones teóricas y conceptuales del tema de investigación y los fines que buscaban responder a la pregunta de investigación y a los objetivos. En la presente investigación, se determinó si las deficiencias del control interno eran la causa del uso indebido de los recursos del estado en la adquisición de patrulleros inteligentes que no se realizaron adecuadamente por falta de precisiones en la Directiva N° 006-2014/IN “Procedimiento para la Contratación de Bienes y Servicios bajo la Modalidad de Gobierno a Gobierno”, en la que no se menciona el pago de honorarios de administración y gestión de proyectos para las compras de los 800 y 2,108 vehículos patrulleros inteligentes. Asimismo, la Oficina Comercial del Gobierno de Corea (KOTRA), es un organismo gubernamental sin fines de lucro.Tesi

The case of a pregnant woman with ARDS due to COVID-19 treated with Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin, and Remdesivir and delivery of a healthy baby during mechanical ventilation through cesarean section

We are in the midst of a pandemic due to SARS-CoV-2. Pregnancy was identified among the risk factors for worse clinical outcomes in multiple studies. The optimal therapy in this group of patients remains to be defined. Here we present the case of a 39 years old Caucasian pregnant female at 31 weeks of gestation who was treated successfully with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, remdesivir, prone therapy, and cesarean delivery of a healthy baby while on mechanical ventilation. The SARS-CoV-2 remained positive until the 39th day of hospitalization. We discussed the pathophysiology of the increase risk of infections during pregnancy and particularly the high risk of microthombosis and coagulopathy due to COVID-19. Ultimately the contribution of the medications used to the favorable outcomes remained unknown being more likely that the delivery helped resolve the infection

Excitation of Discrete and Continuous Spectrum in Subdiffraction Wire-Medium Type Lenses

Subwavelength imaging of the near field of a magnetic line-source excitation is studied for several wire-medium (WM) lens topologies using complex-plane analysis of the radiation integral. Nonlocal homogenization is used for the wire medium, resulting in an analytical expression for the transfer function of the lens. It is shown that by evaluating the Sommerfeld integral of the transmitted field in terms of the discrete and continuous spectra provides a general framework for better understanding of electromagnetic phenomena involved with subwavelength imaging. Results are obtained for a WM slab, and for a wire medium loaded with graphene monolayers and periodic arrays of graphene patches, demonstrating the interplay of the discrete and continuous spectral components in different operating regimes of the lenses. The imaging with a stack of silver slabs is also considered for comparison purposes.NASA NNX13AB31AMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2013-41913-PJunta de Andalucía P12-TIC-143

Automatic aggregation of subtask accesses for nested OpenMP-style tasks

Task-based programming is a high performance and productive model to express parallelism. Tasks encapsulate work to be executed across multiple cores or offloaded to GPUs, FPGAs, other accelerators or other nodes. In order to maintain parallelism and afford maximum freedom to the scheduler, the task dependency graph should be created in parallel and well in advance of task execution. A key limitation with OpenMP and OmpSs-2 tasking is that a task cannot be created until all its accesses and its descendents' accesses are known. Current approaches to work around this limitation either stop task creation and execution using a taskwait or they substitute “fake” accesses known as sentinels. This paper proposes the auto clause, which indicates that the task may create subtasks that access unspecified memory regions or it may allocate and return memory at addresses that are of course not yet known. Unlike approaches using taskwaits, there is no interruption to the concurrent creation and execution of tasks, maintaining parallelism and the scheduler's ability to optimize load balance and data locality. Unlike existing approaches using sentinels, all tasks can be given a precise specification of their own data accesses, so that a single mechanism is used to control task ordering, program data transfers on distributed memory and optimize data locality, e.g. on NUMA systems. The auto clause also provides an incremental path to develop programs with nested tasks, by removing the need for every parent task to have a complete specification of the accesses of its descendent tasks. This is redundant information that can be time consuming and error-prone to describe. We present a straightforward runtime implementation that achieves a 1.4 times speedup for n-body with OmpSs-2@Cluster task offloading to 32 nodes and <4% slowdown for three benchmarks with task offloading to 8 nodes. All code is open source.This research has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020/EuroHPC research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 955606 (DEEP- SEA) and 754337 (EuroEXA). It is supported by the Spanish State Research Agency - Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract PID2019-107255GB- C21/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and Ramon y Cajal fellowship RYC2018-025628-I/MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ESF Investing in your future”), as well as by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017-SGR-1414).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

El uso de Isertia laevis como percha por Centurio senex (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae) en el suroeste de Costa Rica

Several species of Phyllostomidae build tents by modifying large leaves of mainly Araceae, Arecaceae and Heliconiaceae (Rodríguez-Herrera et al. 2007). However, little is known about the resting sites of several phytostomids, which is perhaps the first step in understanding the family and social habits of the species.Varias especies de Phyllostomidae construyen tiendas mediante la modificación de hojas grandes de principalmente Araceae, Arecaceae y Heliconiaceae (Rodríguez-Herrera et al. 2007). No obstante, es poco lo que se conoce sobre los sitios de descanso de varios filostómidos, lo cual es quizá el primer paso para entender los hábitos familiares y sociales de las especies

Transparent load balancing of MPI programs using OmpSs-2@Cluster and DLB

Load imbalance is a long-standing source of inefficiency in high performance computing. The situation has only got worse as applications and systems increase in complexity, e.g., adaptive mesh refinement, DVFS, memory hierarchies, power and thermal management, and manufacturing processes. Load balancing is often implemented in the application, but it obscures application logic and may need extensive code refactoring. This paper presents an automated and transparent dynamic load balancing approach for MPI applications with OmpSs-2 tasks, which relieves applications from this burden. Only local and trivial changes are required to the application. Our approach exploits the ability of OmpSs-2@Cluster to offload tasks for execution on other nodes, and it reallocates compute resources among ranks using the Dynamic Load Balancing~(DLB) library. It employs LeWI to react to fine-grained load imbalances and DROM to address coarse-grained load imbalances by reserving cores on other nodes that can be reclaimed on demand. We use an expander graph to limit the amount of point-to-point communication and state. The results show 46% reduction in time-to-solution for micro-scale solid mechanics on 32 nodes and a 20% reduction beyond DLB for $n$-body on 16 nodes, when one node is running slow. A synthetic benchmark shows that performance is within 10% of optimal for an imbalance of up to 2.0 on 8 nodes. All software is released open source.This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020/EuroHPC research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 955606 (DEEP-SEA) and 754337 (EuroEXA). It is supported by the Spanish State Research Agency - Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract PID2019-107255GB and Ramon y Cajal fellowship RYC2018-025628-I) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017-SGR-1414).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Pair production of the heavy leptons in future high energy linear e^{+}e^{-} colliders

The littlest Higgs model with T-parity predicts the existence of the T-odd particles, which can only be produced in pair. We consider pair production of the T-odd leptons in future high energy linear $e^{+}e^{-}$ collider ($ILC$). Our numerical results show that, as long as the T-odd leptons are not too heavy, they can be copiously produced and their possible signals might be detected via the processes $e^{+}e^{-}\to \bar{L}_{i}L_{j}$ in future $ILC$ experiments.Comment: Discussions added, typos and references correcte

Are (poly)phenols contained in 100% fruit juices mediating their effects on cardiometabolic risk factors? A meta-regression analysis

BackgroundThe consumption of 100% fruit juices has not been associated with substantial detrimental outcomes in population studies and may even contribute to improving the cardiometabolic profile if included in a healthy balanced diet. The main contributors to such potential beneficial effects include vitamins, minerals, and likely the (poly)phenol content. This study aimed to investigate whether the (poly)phenols contained in 100% fruit juices may mediate their effects on cardiometabolic risk factors based on published randomized controlled trials (RCT).MethodsA systematic search in PubMed/MEDLINE and Embase, updated till the end of October 2022, was carried out to identify RCT providing quantitative data on (poly)phenol content in 100% fruit juices and used as an intervention to improve cardiometabolic parameters such as blood lipids, glucose, and blood pressure. Meta-regression analysis was performed to calculate the effect of the intervention [expressed as standardized mean difference and 95% confidence intervals (CI)] using the (poly)phenol content as moderator.ResultsA total of 39 articles on RCT investigating the effects of 100% fruit juices on cardiometabolic risk factors reporting data on total (poly)phenol and anthocyanin content were included in the analysis. Total (poly)phenol content was substantially unrelated to any outcome investigated. In contrast, each 100 mg per day increase in anthocyanins was related to 1.53 mg/dL decrease in total cholesterol (95% CI, −2.83, −0.22, p = 0.022) and 1.94 mg/dL decrease in LDL cholesterol (95% CI, −3.46, −0.42, p = 0.012). No other potential mediating effects of anthocyanins on blood triglycerides, glucose, systolic and diastolic pressure were found, while a lowering effect on HDL cholesterol after excluding one outlier study was observed.DiscussionIn conclusion, the present study showed that anthocyanins may mediate the potential beneficial effects of some 100% fruit juices on some blood lipids. Increasing the content of anthocyanins through specific fruit varieties or plant breeding could enhance the health benefits of 100% fruit juices

Persistent Spin Currents in Helimagnets

We demonstrate that weak external magnetic fields generate dissipationless spin currents in the ground state of systems with spiral magnetic order. Our conclusions are based on phenomenological considerations and on microscopic mean-field theory calculations for an illustrative toy model. We speculate on possible applications of this effect in spintronic devices.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, updated version as published, Journal referenc