Ethnographic context and spatial coherence of climate indicators for farming communities - a multi-regional comparative assessment

Accurate seasonal predictions of rainfall may reduce climatic risks that farmers are usually faced with across the tropical and subtropical zones. However, although regional-scale seasonal amounts have regularly been forecasted since 1997/98, the practical use of these seasonal predictions is still limited by myriad factors. This paper synthesizes the main resultsof a multi-disciplinary ethnographic and climatic project (PICREVAT). Its main objective was to seek the climatic information ? beyond the seasonal amounts ? critical for crops, both as an actual constraint to crop yields and as identified by the current and past practices and perceptions of farmers. A second goal was to confront the relevance and signifiCance of this climatic information with its spatial coherence, which gives an upper bound of its potential predictability. The ethnographic and climatic analyses were carried out on three very different fields: North Cameroon (mixed food crops associated with a cash crop ? cotton ? integrated into a national program); Eastern slopes of Mt Kenya (mixed food crops, with a recent development of maize at the expense of sorghum and pearl millet);and Central Argentina (mixed crops and livestock recently converting to monoculture of transgenic soybean, referred to as soybeanization).The ethnographic surveys, as well as yield?climate functions, emphasized the role played by various intra-seasonal characteristics of the rainy seasons beyond the seasonal rainfall amounts, in both actual yields and people?s representations and/or crop management strategies. For instance, the onset of the rainy season in East Africa and North Cameroon, the season duration in the driest district of the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya, or rains at the core (August) and at the end of the rainy season in North Cameroon have been high lighted. The dynamics of farming systems (i.e. soybeanization in Central Argentina, increas-ing popularity of maize in East Africa, recent decline of cotton in North Cameroon) were also emphasized as active drivers; these slow changes could increase climatic vulnerability (i.e. soybean is far more sensitive to rainfall variations than wheat, maize is less droughtresistant than sorghum or millet), at least for the least flexible actors (such as the non-capitalized farmers in Central Argentina). The cross between ethnographic surveys and climatic analyses enabled us to identify climate variables that are both useful to farmers and potentially predictable. These variables do not appear to be common across the surveyedfields. The best example is the rainy season onset date whose variations, depending on regions, crop species and farming practices may either have a major/minor role in crop performance and/or crop management, or may have a high/low potential predictability.Fil: Moron Vincent. Columbia University; Estados Unidos. Aix-Marseille University; FranciaFil: Boyard-Micheau Joseph. Universite de Bourgogne; FranciaFil: Camberlin Pierre. Universite de Bourgogne; FranciaFil: Hernandez, Valeria Alicia. Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales; Argentina. Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7; FranciaFil: Leclerc, Christian. No especifíca;Fil: Mwongera, Caroline. No especifíca;Fil: Philippon, Nathalie. Universite de Bourgogne; FranciaFil: Fossa Riglos, María Florencia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Martín; ArgentinaFil: Sultan, Benjamin. Sorbonne University; Franci

Diet-Related Metabolites Associated with Cognitive Decline Revealed by Untargeted Metabolomics in a Prospective Cohort

Scope: Untargeted metabolomics may reveal preventive targets in cognitive aging, including within the food metabolome. Methods and results: A case-control study nested in the prospective Three-City study includes participants aged &65 years and initially free of dementia. A total of 209 cases of cognitive decline and 209 controls (matched for age, gen- der, education) with slower cognitive decline over up to 12 years are contrasted. Using untargeted metabolomics and bootstrap-enhanced penalized regression, a baseline serum signature of 22 metabolites associated with subsequent cognitive decline is identified. The signature includes three coffee metabolites, a biomarker of citrus intake, a cocoa metabolite, two metabolites putatively derived from fish and wine, three medium-chain acylcarnitines, glycodeoxycholic acid, lysoPC(18:3), trimethyllysine, glucose, cortisol, creatinine, and arginine. Adding the 22 metabolites to a reference predictive model for cognitive decline (conditioned on age, gender, education and including ApoE-ε4, diabetes, BMI, and number of medications) substantially increases the predictive performance: cross-validated Area Under the Receiver Operating Curve = 75% [95% CI 70-80%] compared to 62% [95% CI 56-67%]. Conclusions: The untargeted metabolomics study supports a protective role of specific foods (e.g., coffee, cocoa, fish) and various alterations in the endogenous metabolism responsive to diet in cognitive aging

Hepatitis B Virus Alters the Antioxidant System in Transgenic Mice and Sensitizes Hepatocytes to Fas Signaling

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is a major etiological factor of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, the precise pathogenetic mechanisms linking HBV infection and HCC remain uncertain. It has been reported that decreased antioxidant enzyme activities are associated with severe liver injury and hepatocarcinogenesis in mouse models. It is unclear if HBV can interfere with the activities of antioxidant enzymes. We established a HBV transgenic mouse line, which spontaneously developed HCC at 2 years of age. We studied the activities of the antioxidant enzymes in the liver of the HBV transgenic mice. Our results showed that the antioxidant enzymes glutathione peroxidase and superoxide dismutase 2 were down-regulated in HBV transgenic mice and correlated with JNK activation. HBV enhanced the Fas-mediated activation of caspase 6, caspase 8 and JNK without enhancing the activation of caspase 3 and hepatocellular apoptosis. As a proper redox balance is important for maintaining cellular homeostasis, these effects of HBV on the host antioxidant system and Fas-signaling may play an important role in HBV-induced hepatocarcinogenesis

The SuperCam Instrument Suite on the Mars 2020 Rover: Science Objectives and Mast-Unit Description

On the NASA 2020 rover mission to Jezero crater, the remote determination of the texture, mineralogy and chemistry of rocks is essential to quickly and thoroughly characterize an area and to optimize the selection of samples for return to Earth. As part of the Perseverance payload, SuperCam is a suite of five techniques that provide critical and complementary observations via Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), Time-Resolved Raman and Luminescence (TRR/L), visible and near-infrared spectroscopy (VISIR), high-resolution color imaging (RMI), and acoustic recording (MIC). SuperCam operates at remote distances, primarily 2-7 m, while providing data at sub-mm to mm scales. We report on SuperCam's science objectives in the context of the Mars 2020 mission goals and ways the different techniques can address these questions. The instrument is made up of three separate subsystems: the Mast Unit is designed and built in France; the Body Unit is provided by the United States; the calibration target holder is contributed by Spain, and the targets themselves by the entire science team. This publication focuses on the design, development, and tests of the Mast Unit; companion papers describe the other units. The goal of this work is to provide an understanding of the technical choices made, the constraints that were imposed, and ultimately the validated performance of the flight model as it leaves Earth, and it will serve as the foundation for Mars operations and future processing of the data.In France was provided by the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES). Human resources were provided in part by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and universities. Funding was provided in the US by NASA's Mars Exploration Program. Some funding of data analyses at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was provided by laboratory-directed research and development funds

Molecular mechanisms of cell death: recommendations of the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death 2018.

Over the past decade, the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death (NCCD) has formulated guidelines for the definition and interpretation of cell death from morphological, biochemical, and functional perspectives. Since the field continues to expand and novel mechanisms that orchestrate multiple cell death pathways are unveiled, we propose an updated classification of cell death subroutines focusing on mechanistic and essential (as opposed to correlative and dispensable) aspects of the process. As we provide molecularly oriented definitions of terms including intrinsic apoptosis, extrinsic apoptosis, mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT)-driven necrosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, parthanatos, entotic cell death, NETotic cell death, lysosome-dependent cell death, autophagy-dependent cell death, immunogenic cell death, cellular senescence, and mitotic catastrophe, we discuss the utility of neologisms that refer to highly specialized instances of these processes. The mission of the NCCD is to provide a widely accepted nomenclature on cell death in support of the continued development of the field

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Harmonic acoustic pneumatic source (HAPS) as a narrow bandwidth acoustic loudspeaker

Abstract: During takeoff, the harmonic noise of the turbofan is the main acoustic nuisance for people near airports. Much research has been done to achieve active noise control of turbofans with loudspeakers or piezo actuators as noise suppression sources. However, the required fragility, and weight and volume penalty make them unsuitable for engine nacelle applications. On the other hand, electro-pneumatic sound sources (sirens or air modulators) are good candidates for generating the required high noise control sound pressure level, but they are not designed for active noise control applications. Therefore, an alternative solution, called the Harmonic Acoustic Pneumatic Source (HAPS), has been designed to generate a high harmonic noise level controllable in amplitude, phase and frequency. The specificity of the HAPS is to use a flow chopper to generate a pulsed jet at a given frequency and a servo-valve to control its amplitude. This study presents the HAPS composed of a high-pressure pneumatic air source, a flow chopper using a rotating perforated cage and a dedicated exhaust. The fundamental equation of the pneumatic speaker is used to define the time-varying orifice as the generator of a periodic pressure source with a built-in internal impedance. To implement phase control of the generated sound, a phase-locked loop (PLL) controls the instantaneous angle of the rotating cage. Thus, control of the HAPS requires 2 slow-time signals: one for amplitude (position of the servo-valve) and the second for phase (via the PLL). However, for active noise control, the HAPS control is presented as a mechanical modulator driven by two slowly varying signals (the real and imaginary parts of the complex value envelope of the command). The mechanical time responses of the servo valve and the rotating cage motor imply a narrow bandwidth centered on the modulation frequency. The experimental results presented are obtained on a dedicated test bench for different frequencies. Finally, the narrow bandwidth of the HAPS is discussed with a view to its use as a controllable tonal sound source for active noise control, or other applications. This work is supported by Association Nationale Recherche Technologie (ANRT, France) and Safran Nacelles (Le Havre, France). We thank Marc Versaevel of Safran Nacelles for his collaboration.""Résumé de la communication présentée lors du congrès international tenu conjointement par Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) et Computational Fluid Dynamics Society of Canada (CFD Canada), à l’Université de Sherbrooke (Québec), du 28 au 31 mai 2023

Etude de l'implication de la voie des MARK/ERK dans la consolidation du conditionnement de peur (dépendance à la nature de la représentaion mnésique)

Le but de ce travail était de déterminer si la nature de la représentation mnésique influe sur la dynamique des processus de consolidation. Nous avons utilisé deux procédures comportementales de conditionnement de peur qui ne diffèrent que par la nature de l'association à établir : une procédure d'appariement dans laquelle l'association son-choc est prévalente et une procédure de non-appariement dans laquelle l'association contexte-choc est priviligiée. Nous avons montré que la transmission cholinergique speto-hippocampique permet la sélection de l'association pertinente en configurant les processus de plasticité neuronale (voie des ERK) au sein du réseau hippocampo-amygdalien et que la consolidation de chaque type de conditionnement s'appuie sur une dynamique spécifique des processus de plasticité au sein de ce réseau : la consolidation de l'association élémentaire requiert une phase précoce et transitoire d'activation des ERK, tandis que la consolidation de l'association contextuelle s'appuie sur deux phases d'activation. La mise en évidence du pattern biphasique nous a amené à nous interroger sur l'implication du contrôle transcriptionnel des ERK lors de chaque phase et ainsi de tenter de cibler spécifiquement leur action nucléaire. Dans un modèle in vitro, nous avons mis en évidence que le transport des ERK au noyau sous stimulation au glutamate requiert leur interaction avec des vésicules d'endocytose et que perturber l'endocytose permet de ségréger les ERK activés au cytoplasme en bloquant leurs actions nucléaires.BORDEAUX1-BU Sciences-Talence (335222101) / SudocSudocFranceF

Création d'alphabets sur Macintosh

Micheau Françoise, Molénat Jean-Pierre. Création d'alphabets sur Macintosh . In: Le médiéviste et l'ordinateur, N°16, automne 1986. L’édition électronique. pp. 13-18