The Effect of Task Interruptions and Reliable Cues on Detection Changes Within Dynamic Scenes

Interruptions are a common problem for attention and pose a threat to visual task performance. The Memory for Goals (MFG) theory suggests that strongly and accurately encoded cues can assist the ability to resume a primary task after an interruption (Altmann & Trafton, 2002). Encoded cues can undergo an activation decay during an interruption and become forgotten. Currently, there has been limited research on how visual interruptions affect cued recall within a dynamic environment. Thus, the goal of the present study was to examine the effect of cuing and task interruptions on change detection within dynamic scenes. Undergraduate students watched 24 videos (12 with interruptions and 12 without) and answered general questions about the scene. Of the 24 videos, 8 contained a single object that underwent a perceptual feature change in color, brightness, appearance, or disappearance. Participants were assigned to one of three cueing conditions (reliable, unreliable, or no cue). It was predicted that the reliable cue group would report more changes than the unreliable and no cue groups. It was also predicted that more changes would be detected within uninterrupted than interrupted trials. Findings from the present study supported most of these predictions. Participants correctly detected more object changes during uninterrupted trials. Additionally, the reliable cue group correctly detected more object changes during uninterrupted trials. However, providing reliable cues had no effect when interruptions were present. Overall, these results support the MFG theory suggesting that visual interruptions may have allowed the encoded cues to decay resulting in poorer change detection performance compared to uninterrupted viewing conditions

Gepotidacin for the Treatment of Uncomplicated Urogenital Gonorrhea: A Phase 2, Randomized, Dose-Ranging, Single-Oral Dose Evaluation

Background: In this phase 2 study, we evaluated the efficacy and safety of oral gepotidacin, a novel triazaacenaphthylene bacterial type II topoisomerase inhibitor, for the treatment of uncomplicated urogenital gonorrhea. Methods: Adult participants with suspected urogenital gonorrhea were enrolled and completed baseline (day 1) and test-of-cure (days 4-8) visits. Pretreatment and posttreatment urogenital swabs were collected for Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG) culture and susceptibility testing. Pharyngeal and rectal swab specimens were collected if there were known exposures. Participants were stratified by gender and randomized 1:1 to receive a 1500-mg or 3000-mg single oral dose of gepotidacin. Results: The microbiologically evaluable population consisted of 69 participants, with NG isolated from 69 (100%) urogenital, 2 (3%) pharyngeal, and 3 (4%) rectal specimens. Microbiological eradication of NG was achieved by 97%, 95%, and 96% of participants (lower 1-sided exact 95% confidence interval bound, 85.1%, 84.7%, and 89.1%, respectively) for the 1500-mg, 3000-mg, and combined dose groups, respectively. Microbiological cure was achieved in 66/69 (96%) urogenital infections. All 3 failures were NG isolates that demonstrated the highest observed gepotidacin minimum inhibitory concentration of 1 µg/mL and a common gene mutation. At the pharyngeal and rectal sites, 1/2 and 3/3 NG isolates, respectively, demonstrated microbiological cure. There were no treatment-limiting adverse events for either dose. Conclusions: This study demonstrated that single, oral doses of gepotidacin were ≥95% effective for bacterial eradication of NG in adult participants with uncomplicated urogenital gonorrhea

New varying speed of light theories

We review recent work on the possibility of a varying speed of light (VSL). We start by discussing the physical meaning of a varying $c$, dispelling the myth that the constancy of $c$ is a matter of logical consistency. We then summarize the main VSL mechanisms proposed so far: hard breaking of Lorentz invariance; bimetric theories (where the speeds of gravity and light are not the same); locally Lorentz invariant VSL theories; theories exhibiting a color dependent speed of light; varying $c$ induced by extra dimensions (e.g. in the brane-world scenario); and field theories where VSL results from vacuum polarization or CPT violation. We show how VSL scenarios may solve the cosmological problems usually tackled by inflation, and also how they may produce a scale-invariant spectrum of Gaussian fluctuations, capable of explaining the WMAP data. We then review the connection between VSL and theories of quantum gravity, showing how ``doubly special'' relativity has emerged as a VSL effective model of quantum space-time, with observational implications for ultra high energy cosmic rays and gamma ray bursts. Some recent work on the physics of ``black'' holes and other compact objects in VSL theories is also described, highlighting phenomena associated with spatial (as opposed to temporal) variations in $c$. Finally we describe the observational status of the theory. The evidence is currently slim -- redshift dependence in the atomic fine structure, anomalies with ultra high energy cosmic rays, and (to a much lesser extent) the acceleration of the universe and the WMAP data. The constraints (e.g. those arising from nucleosynthesis or geological bounds) are tight, but not insurmountable. We conclude with the observational predictions of the theory, and the prospects for its refutation or vindication.Comment: Final versio

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Genomic Relationships, Novel Loci, and Pleiotropic Mechanisms across Eight Psychiatric Disorders

Genetic influences on psychiatric disorders transcend diagnostic boundaries, suggesting substantial pleiotropy of contributing loci. However, the nature and mechanisms of these pleiotropic effects remain unclear. We performed analyses of 232,964 cases and 494,162 controls from genome-wide studies of anorexia nervosa, attention-deficit/hyper-activity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and Tourette syndrome. Genetic correlation analyses revealed a meaningful structure within the eight disorders, identifying three groups of inter-related disorders. Meta-analysis across these eight disorders detected 109 loci associated with at least two psychiatric disorders, including 23 loci with pleiotropic effects on four or more disorders and 11 loci with antagonistic effects on multiple disorders. The pleiotropic loci are located within genes that show heightened expression in the brain throughout the lifespan, beginning prenatally in the second trimester, and play prominent roles in neurodevelopmental processes. These findings have important implications for psychiatric nosology, drug development, and risk prediction.Peer reviewe

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

Dissecting the Shared Genetic Architecture of Suicide Attempt, Psychiatric Disorders, and Known Risk Factors

Background Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, and nonfatal suicide attempts, which occur far more frequently, are a major source of disability and social and economic burden. Both have substantial genetic etiology, which is partially shared and partially distinct from that of related psychiatric disorders. Methods We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 29,782 suicide attempt (SA) cases and 519,961 controls in the International Suicide Genetics Consortium (ISGC). The GWAS of SA was conditioned on psychiatric disorders using GWAS summary statistics via multitrait-based conditional and joint analysis, to remove genetic effects on SA mediated by psychiatric disorders. We investigated the shared and divergent genetic architectures of SA, psychiatric disorders, and other known risk factors. Results Two loci reached genome-wide significance for SA: the major histocompatibility complex and an intergenic locus on chromosome 7, the latter of which remained associated with SA after conditioning on psychiatric disorders and replicated in an independent cohort from the Million Veteran Program. This locus has been implicated in risk-taking behavior, smoking, and insomnia. SA showed strong genetic correlation with psychiatric disorders, particularly major depression, and also with smoking, pain, risk-taking behavior, sleep disturbances, lower educational attainment, reproductive traits, lower socioeconomic status, and poorer general health. After conditioning on psychiatric disorders, the genetic correlations between SA and psychiatric disorders decreased, whereas those with nonpsychiatric traits remained largely unchanged. Conclusions Our results identify a risk locus that contributes more strongly to SA than other phenotypes and suggest a shared underlying biology between SA and known risk factors that is not mediated by psychiatric disorders.Peer reviewe

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead