Reading Promotion Events Recommended for Elementary Students

One of the major professional goals of teacher librarians is to teach students a love of reading, so that they will independently choose to read throughout their lives

How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRR’s Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers

Over 50 million United States citizens (1 in 6 people in the US) have a developmental, acquired, or degenerative disability. The average US citizen can expect to live 20% of his or her life with a disability. Rehabilitation technologies play a major role in improving the quality of life for people with a disability, yet widespread and highly challenging needs remain. Within the US, a major effort aimed at the creation and evaluation of rehabilitation technology has been the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. As envisioned at their conception by a panel of the National Academy of Science in 1970, these centers were intended to take a “total approach to rehabilitation”, combining medicine, engineering, and related science, to improve the quality of life of individuals with a disability. Here, we review the scope, achievements, and ongoing projects of an unbiased sample of 19 currently active or recently terminated RERCs. Specifically, for each center, we briefly explain the needs it targets, summarize key historical advances, identify emerging innovations, and consider future directions. Our assessment from this review is that the RERC program indeed involves a multidisciplinary approach, with 36 professional fields involved, although 70% of research and development staff are in engineering fields, 23% in clinical fields, and only 7% in basic science fields; significantly, 11% of the professional staff have a disability related to their research. We observe that the RERC program has substantially diversified the scope of its work since the 1970’s, addressing more types of disabilities using more technologies, and, in particular, often now focusing on information technologies. RERC work also now often views users as integrated into an interdependent society through technologies that both people with and without disabilities co-use (such as the internet, wireless communication, and architecture). In addition, RERC research has evolved to view users as able at improving outcomes through learning, exercise, and plasticity (rather than being static), which can be optimally timed. We provide examples of rehabilitation technology innovation produced by the RERCs that illustrate this increasingly diversifying scope and evolving perspective. We conclude by discussing growth opportunities and possible future directions of the RERC program

Rarity of monodominance in hyperdiverse Amazonian forests.

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such "monodominant" forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network (ATDN). Utilizing a simple defining metric of at least half of the trees ≥ 10 cm diameter belonging to one species, we found only a few occurrences of monodominance in Amazonia, and the phenomenon was not significantly linked to previously hypothesized life history traits such wood density, seed mass, ectomycorrhizal associations, or Rhizobium nodulation. In our analysis, coppicing (the formation of sprouts at the base of the tree or on roots) was the only trait significantly linked to monodominance. While at specific locales coppicing or ectomycorrhizal associations may confer a considerable advantage to a tree species and lead to its monodominance, very few species have these traits. Mining of the ATDN dataset suggests that monodominance is quite rare in Amazonia, and may be linked primarily to edaphic factors

Maximising Synergy among Tropical Plant Systematists, Ecologists, and Evolutionary Biologists

Closer collaboration among ecologists, systematists, and evolutionary biologists working in tropical forests, centred on studies within long-term permanent plots, would be highly beneficial for their respective fields. With a key unifying theme of the importance of vouchered collection and precise identification of species, especially rare ones, we identify four priority areas where improving links between these communities could achieve significant progress in biodiversity and conservation science: (i) increasing the pace of species discovery; (ii) documenting species turnover across space and time; (iii) improving models of ecosystem change; and (iv) understanding the evolutionary assembly of communities and biomes

Different atrophy-hypertrophy transcription pathways in muscles affected by severe and mild spinal muscular atrophy

BACKGROUND: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a neurodegenerative disorder associated with mutations of the survival motor neuron gene SMN and is characterized by muscle weakness and atrophy caused by degeneration of spinal motor neurons. SMN has a role in neurons but its deficiency may have a direct effect on muscle tissue. METHODS: We applied microarray and quantitative real-time PCR to study at transcriptional level the effects of a defective SMN gene in skeletal muscles affected by the two forms of SMA: the most severe type I and the mild type III. RESULTS: The two forms of SMA generated distinct expression signatures: the SMA III muscle transcriptome is close to that found under normal conditions, whereas in SMA I there is strong alteration of gene expression. Genes implicated in signal transduction were up-regulated in SMA III whereas those of energy metabolism and muscle contraction were consistently down-regulated in SMA I. The expression pattern of gene networks involved in atrophy signaling was completed by qRT-PCR, showing that specific pathways are involved, namely IGF/PI3K/Akt, TNF-alpha/p38 MAPK and Ras/ERK pathways. CONCLUSION: Our study suggests a different picture of atrophy pathways in each of the two forms of SMA. In particular, p38 may be the regulator of protein synthesis in SMA I. The SMA III profile appears as the result of the concurrent presence of atrophic and hypertrophic fibers. This more favorable condition might be due to the over-expression of MTOR that, given its role in the activation of protein synthesis, could lead to compensatory hypertrophy in SMA III muscle fibers

Spatial Distribution of Dominant Arboreal Ants in a Malagasy Coastal Rainforest: Gaps and Presence of an Invasive Species

We conducted a survey along three belt transects located at increasing distances from the coast to determine whether a non-random arboreal ant assemblage, such as an ant mosaic, exists in the rainforest on the Masoala Peninsula, Madagascar. In most tropical rainforests, very populous colonies of territorially dominant arboreal ant species defend absolute territories distributed in a mosaic pattern. Among the 29 ant species recorded, only nine had colonies large enough to be considered potentially territorially dominant; the remaining species had smaller colonies and were considered non-dominant. Nevertheless, the null-model analyses used to examine the spatial structure of their assemblages did not reveal the existence of an ant mosaic. Inland, up to 44% of the trees were devoid of dominant arboreal ants, something not reported in other studies. While two Crematogaster species were not associated with one another, Brachymyrmex cordemoyi was positively associated with Technomyrmex albipes, which is considered an invasive species—a non-indigenous species that has an adverse ecological effect on the habitats it invades. The latter two species and Crematogaster ranavalonae were mutually exclusive. On the other hand, all of the trees in the coastal transect and at least 4 km of coast were occupied by T. albipes, and were interconnected by columns of workers. Technomyrmex albipes workers collected from different trees did not attack each other during confrontation tests, indicating that this species has formed a supercolony along the coast. Yet interspecific aggressiveness did occur between T. albipes and Crematogaster ranavalonae, a native species which is likely territorially dominant based on our intraspecific confrontation tests. These results suggest that the Masoala rainforest is threatened by a potential invasion by T. albipes, and that the penetration of this species further inland might be facilitated by the low density of native, territorially dominant arboreal ants normally able to limit its progression

Impaired access of lymphocytes to neoplastic prostate tissue is associated with neoangiogenesis in the tumour site

Recent reports demonstrated that neovasculature of certain murine tumours inhibits migration of lymphocytes to malignant tissues. We examined the possible existence of this phenomenon in human prostate adenocarcinoma by relating extent, patterns and composition of leucocyte infiltrates in adenocarinoma specimens (N=28) to microvessel density and percentages of these vessels expressing adhesion molecules CD54, CD106 and CD62E. Specimens of nodular hyperplasia (N=30) were used as a control for nonmalignant prostate. Increased microvessel density was detected in foci of adenocarcinoma, as compared with adjacent benign areas (P=0.004) or hyperplastic specimens (P=0.001). Only CD54 was detected on prostate vasculature; percentages of CD54-expressing vessels in adenocarcinoma lesions and adjacent areas were higher than in hyperplasia (P=0.041 and P=0.014, respectively). Infiltrating leucocytes were either scattered diffusely in tissue or organised into clusters mainly composed of CD4-positive lymphocytes; smaller percentage of tissue was occupied by clustered infiltrates in adenocarcinoma foci (mean=0.7; median=0; range=0–5) than in adjacent tissue (mean=2.5; median=1; range=0–15; P=.021) and hyperplasia (mean=1.9; median=2; range=0–5; P=.006). In adenocarcinoma foci, microvessel density tended to negatively correlate with percentage of tissue occupied by an overall leucocyte infiltrate (mean=8.6; median=7.5; range=30) and negatively correlated with percentage of tissue occupied by clustered infiltrate (P=0.045). Percentage of CD54-expressing vessels positively correlated with percentage of tissue occupied by an overall (mean=12; median=10; range=30; P=0.01) and clustered (P=0.023) infiltrate in hyperplasia, whereas in carcinoma-adjacent benign areas, correlation was detected only for clustered infiltrates (P=0.02). The results indicate that impaired access of lymphocytes to malignant lesions is associated with increased numbers of newly formed blood vessels, whereas vascular CD54 likely contributes to extravasation of lymphocytes only in benign prostate tissue

Macrophages promote angiogenesis in human breast tumour spheroids in vivo

An in vivo model has been established to study the role of macrophages in the initiation of angiogenesis by human breast tumour spheroids in vivo. The extent of the angiogenic response induced by T47D spheroids implanted into the dorsal skinfold chamber in nude mice was measured in vivo and compared to that induced by spheroids infiltrated with human macrophages prior to implantation. Our results indicate that the presence of macrophages in spheroids resulted in at least a three-fold upregulation in the release of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in vitro when compared with spheroids composed only of tumour cells. The angiogenic response measured around the spheroids, 3 days after in vivo implantation, was significantly greater in the spheroids infiltrated with macrophages. The number of vessels increased (macrophages vs no macrophages 34±1.9 vs 26±2.5, P<0.01), were shorter in length (macrophages vs no macrophages 116±4.92 vs 136±6.52, P<0.008) with an increased number of junctions (macrophages vs no macrophages 14±0.93 vs 11±1.25, P<0.025) all parameters indicative of new vessel formation. This is the first study to demonstrate a role for macrophages in the initiation of tumour angiogenesis in vivo