Heliophysics and Amateur Radio:Citizen Science Collaborations for Atmospheric, Ionospheric, and Space Physics Research and Operations

The amateur radio community is a global, highly engaged, and technical community with an intense interest in space weather, its underlying physics, and how it impacts radio communications. The large-scale observational capabilities of distributed instrumentation fielded by amateur radio operators and radio science enthusiasts offers a tremendous opportunity to advance the fields of heliophysics, radio science, and space weather. Well-established amateur radio networks like the RBN, WSPRNet, and PSKReporter already provide rich, ever-growing, long-term data of bottomside ionospheric observations. Up-and-coming purpose-built citizen science networks, and their associated novel instruments, offer opportunities for citizen scientists, professional researchers, and industry to field networks for specific science questions and operational needs. Here, we discuss the scientific and technical capabilities of the global amateur radio community, review methods of collaboration between the amateur radio and professional scientific community, and review recent peer-reviewed studies that have made use of amateur radio data and methods. Finally, we present recommendations submitted to the U.S. National Academy of Science Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024–2033 for using amateur radio to further advance heliophysics and for fostering deeper collaborations between the professional science and amateur radio communities. Technical recommendations include increasing support for distributed instrumentation fielded by amateur radio operators and citizen scientists, developing novel transmissions of RF signals that can be used in citizen science experiments, developing new amateur radio modes that simultaneously allow for communications and ionospheric sounding, and formally incorporating the amateur radio community and its observational assets into the Space Weather R2O2R framework. Collaborative recommendations include allocating resources for amateur radio citizen science research projects and activities, developing amateur radio research and educational activities in collaboration with leading organizations within the amateur radio community, facilitating communication and collegiality between professional researchers and amateurs, ensuring that proposed projects are of a mutual benefit to both the professional research and amateur radio communities, and working towards diverse, equitable, and inclusive communities

Increasing Access to Surgical Services in Sub-Saharan Africa: Priorities for National and International Agencies Recommended by the Bellagio Essential Surgery Group

In this Policy Forum, the Bellagio Essential Surgery Group, which was formed to advocate for increased access to surgery in Africa, recommends four priority areas for national and international agencies to target in order to address the surgical burden of disease in sub-Saharan Africa

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

Calcium binding and thermostability of carbohydrate binding module CBM4-2 of Xyn10A from Rhodothermus marinus.

Calcium binding to carbohydrate binding module CBM4-2 of xylanase 10A (Xyn10A) from Rhodothermus marinus was explored using calorimetry, NMR, fluorescence, and absorbance spectroscopy. CBM4-2 binds two calcium ions, one with moderate affinity and one with extremely high affinity. The moderate-affinity site has an association constant of (1.3 +/- 0.3) x 10(5) M(-1) and a binding enthalpy DeltaH(a) of -9.3 +/- 0.4 kJ x mol(-1), while the high-affinity site has an association constant of approximately 10(10) M(-1) and a binding enthalpy DeltaH(a) of -40.5 +/- 0.5 kJ x mol(-1). The locations of the binding sites have been identified by NMR and structural homology, and were verified by site-directed mutagenesis. The high-affinity site consists of the side chains of E11 and D160 and backbone carbonyls of E52 and K55, while the moderate-affinity site comprises the side chain of D29 and backbone carbonyls of L21, A22, V25, and W28. The high-affinity site is in a position analogous to the calcium site in CBM4 structures and in a recent CBM22 structure. Binding of calcium increases the unfolding temperature of the protein (T(m)) by approximately 23 degrees C at pH 7.5. No correlation between binding affinity and T(m) change was noted, as each of the two calcium ions contributes almost equally to the increase in unfolding temperature

Engineered antibodies: new possibilities for brain PET?

Almost 50 million people worldwide are affected by Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common neurodegenerative disorder. Development of disease-modifying therapies would benefit from reliable, non-invasive positron emission tomography (PET) biomarkers for early diagnosis, monitoring of disease progression, and assessment of therapeutic effects. Traditionally, PET ligands have been based on small molecules that, with the right properties, can penetrate the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and visualize targets in the brain. Recently a new class of PET ligands based on antibodies have emerged, mainly in applications related to cancer. While antibodies have advantages such as high specificity and affinity, their passage across the BBB is limited. Thus, to be used as brain PET ligands, antibodies need to be modified for active transport into the brain. Here, we review the development of radioligands based on antibodies for visualization of intrabrain targets. We focus on antibodies modified into a bispecific format, with the capacity to undergo transferrin receptor 1 (TfR1)-mediated transcytosis to enter the brain and access pathological proteins, e.g. amyloid-beta. A number of such antibody ligands have been developed, displaying differences in brain uptake, pharmacokinetics, and ability to bind and visualize the target in the brain of transgenic mice. Potential pathological changes related to neurodegeneration, e.g. misfolded proteins and neuroinflammation, are suggested as future targets for this novel type of radioligand. Challenges are also discussed, such as the temporal match of radionuclide half-life with the ligand's pharmacokinetic profile and translation to human use. In conclusion, brain PET imaging using bispecific antibodies, modified for receptor-mediated transcytosis across the BBB, is a promising method for specifically visualizing molecules in the brain that are difficult to target with traditional small molecule ligands