Long COVID following mild SARS-CoV-2 infection: characteristic T cell alterations and response to antihistamines

Long COVID is characterized by the emergence of multiple debilitating symptoms following SARS-CoV-2 infection. Its etiology is unclear and it often follows a mild acute illness. Anecdotal reports of gradual clinical responses to histamine receptor antagonists (HRAs) suggest a histamine-dependent mechanism that is distinct from anaphylaxis, possibly mediated by T cells, which are also regulated by histamine. T cell perturbations have been previously reported in post-viral syndromes, but the T cell landscape in patients who have recovered from mild COVID-19 and its relationship to both long COVID symptoms and any symptomatic response to HRA remain underexplored. We addressed these questions in an observational study of 65 individuals who had recovered from mild COVID-19. Participants were surveyed between 87 and 408 days after the onset of acute symptoms; none had required hospitalization, 16 had recovered uneventfully, and 49 had developed long COVID. Symptoms were quantified using a structured questionnaire and T cell subsets enumerated in a standard diagnostic assay. Patients with long-COVID had reduced CD4+ and CD8+ effector memory (EM) cell numbers and increased PD-1 (programmed cell death protein 1) expression on central memory (CM) cells, whereas the asymptomatic participants had reduced CD8+ EM cells only and increased CD28 expression on CM cells. 72% of patients with long COVID who received HRA reported clinical improvement, although T cell profiling did not clearly distinguish those who responded to HRA. This study demonstrates that T cell perturbations persist for several months after mild COVID-19 and are associated with long COVID symptoms

Overheating mitigation in buildings: a computational exploration of the potential of phase change materials

Phase change materials (PCMs) can store and release thermal energy. The energy is stored when the material goes through a solid-toliquid phase change, and released in the reverse process. Such materials can contribute to the mitigation of overheating in buildings, if their melting and solidification temperatures are in a suitable range. The present contribution entails a computational examination of this potential as relevant to overheating mitigation in typical residential units in the Central European context of Vienna, Austria. Thereby, multiple variations of PCM application (size, thickness, location, and application thickness) under different contextual settings (fenestration and insulation, boundary conditions in terms of weather) were simulated and comparatively evaluated. Results indicate that certain PCM application configurations can significantly influence indoor thermal condition. For instance, PCM elements with larger surface areas displayed a more pronounced effect as compared to bulkier elements with smaller surface areas. Likewise, ceilingintegrated PCM application was found to be more effective that those involving other room surfaces. The results also highlight the importance of rooms ventilation regime if the PCM application potential toward overheating mitigation is to be effectively harvested

Models and algorithms for automatic detection of language evolution : towards finding and interpreting of content in long-term archives

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Karyotype and C-banding analyses of haploid male chromosomes of Apis florea F.

Chromosomes, with detailed karyotype information (number, shape, total length, relative length, arm ratio and centromeric index) and C-banding patterns in the somatic division of haploid male of Apis florae in Iran are described. Samples were obtained from the colonies in south of Iran. Prior to the swarming season, drone-brood cells were added adjoining to the lower rows of the worker-brood cells. Testes from young larvae were removed, fixed in acetic acid methanol (1:3), and stored at -20°C. The slides pretreatment were made by usual air dry method. C-banding and staining was carried out by barium hydroxide and Giemsa solution. Sixteen chromosomes of this species were observed and divided into two groups, 4 metacentric (no.1, 4, 7, 11), 12 sub metacentric and sub telocentric

Harnessing buildings' operational diversity in a computational framework for high-resolution urban energy modeling

To achieve computational efficiency, efforts toward developing urban-scale energy modeling applications frequently rely on various domain simplifications. For instance, heat transfer phenomena are captured using reduced order models. As a consequence, specific aspects pertaining to the temporal dynamics of energy load patterns and their dependency on transient phenomena (e.g., weather conditions, inhabitants’ presence and actions) cannot be realistically represented. To address this circumstance, we have conceived, implemented, and documented a two-step urban energy modeling approach that combines cluster analysis and sampling techniques, full dynamic numeric simulation capability, and stochastic methods. The paper describes the suggested urban energy modeling approach and the embedded cluster analysis supported sampling methodology. More particularly we focus on the aspects of this approach that explicitly involve the representation of inhabitants in urban-scale energy modeling. In this regard, the potential to recover lost dynamic diversity (e.g., in computation of temporal load patterns) due to the deployed reductive sampling is explored. Parametric runs based on stochastic variations of underlying building use profiles facilitate the generation of highly realistic load patterns despite the small number of buildings selected to represent the simulation domain. We illustrate the utility of the proposed urban energy modeling approach to address queries concerning the energy efficiency potential of behaviorally effective instruments. The feasibility of the envisioned scenarios concerning inhabitants and their behavior (high-resolution temporal load prediction, assessment of behavioral variation) is presented in detail via specific instances of district-level energy modeling for the city of Vienna, Austria

Palliative care as the driving force for providing psychological comfort to patients with cancer: A hermeneutic study

Background: Palliative care is an important part of effective cancer care Objectives: The purpose of our study was to explore the lived experiences of nurses providing psychological palliative care for cancer patients in Iran. Methods: A hermeneutic phenomenological study was performed. We interviewed 11 oncology nurses to understand their lived experiences in cancer wards about psychological palliative care. We employed a seven-stage process of data analysis. Results: One constitutive pattern �palliative care as the driving force for providing psychological comfort to patients with cancer� and three associated themes, namely �stress management�, �empathetic behavior�, and �all-embracing outlook�, were identified. Conclusions: The findings present better understanding of the lived experiences of oncology nurses in Iran regarding the phenomena under study. © 2016, Iranian Journal of Cancer Prevention

Planning and establishment of the laboratory information database system for Iranian fisheries research organization

Due to lack of access to comprehensive and up-to-date information regarding equipment, personnel, laboratory services tariffs and chemicals in the laboratories of Iran Fisheries Research Institute and felt the necessity of having this information for optimal management of the laboratories, it was decided with regard to all information needs in this area and using previous experiences in this regard as well as the experiences of other institutions and related organizations at the national (and even international) level, the system would be designed. The main purpose of implementing this plan was to establish and implement a software system based on web technology to create a comprehensive database of the Fisheries Research Institute's laboratories, so that in addition to organizing information, using periodic reports on various related areas a more appropriate monitoring and management system could be applied. Fortunately, after the design and implementation stages, the system in early January 2011 was fully applicable. The main parts of this system include portal; database; advanced data entry, search and reporting capabilities; direct tests order system and discussion forums

Competition and Selection Among Conventions

In many domains, a latent competition among different conventions determines which one will come to dominate. One sees such effects in the success of community jargon, of competing frames in political rhetoric, or of terminology in technical contexts. These effects have become widespread in the online domain, where the data offers the potential to study competition among conventions at a fine-grained level. In analyzing the dynamics of conventions over time, however, even with detailed on-line data, one encounters two significant challenges. First, as conventions evolve, the underlying substance of their meaning tends to change as well; and such substantive changes confound investigations of social effects. Second, the selection of a convention takes place through the complex interactions of individuals within a community, and contention between the users of competing conventions plays a key role in the convention's evolution. Any analysis must take place in the presence of these two issues. In this work we study a setting in which we can cleanly track the competition among conventions. Our analysis is based on the spread of low-level authoring conventions in the eprint arXiv over 24 years: by tracking the spread of macros and other author-defined conventions, we are able to study conventions that vary even as the underlying meaning remains constant. We find that the interaction among co-authors over time plays a crucial role in the selection of them; the distinction between more and less experienced members of the community, and the distinction between conventions with visible versus invisible effects, are both central to the underlying processes. Through our analysis we make predictions at the population level about the ultimate success of different synonymous conventions over time--and at the individual level about the outcome of "fights" between people over convention choices.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017, data at https://github.com/CornellNLP/Macro

Content-Based Quality Estimation for Automatic Subject Indexing of Short Texts under Precision and Recall Constraints

Semantic annotations have to satisfy quality constraints to be useful for digital libraries, which is particularly challenging on large and diverse datasets. Confidence scores of multi-label classification methods typically refer only to the relevance of particular subjects, disregarding indicators of insufficient content representation at the document-level. Therefore, we propose a novel approach that detects documents rather than concepts where quality criteria are met. Our approach uses a deep, multi-layered regression architecture, which comprises a variety of content-based indicators. We evaluated multiple configurations using text collections from law and economics, where the available content is restricted to very short texts. Notably, we demonstrate that the proposed quality estimation technique can determine subsets of the previously unseen data where considerable gains in document-level recall can be achieved, while upholding precision at the same time. Hence, the approach effectively performs a filtering that ensures high data quality standards in operative information retrieval systems.Comment: authors' manuscript, paper submitted to TPDL-2018 conference, 12 page