The Ursinus Weekly, November 25, 1963

John F. Kennedy buried at Arlington today: Assassination saddens world • Students react to news of murder • Assassination historically • President\u27s life in review • A statement about John Kennedy • Oswald murdered Sunday • Chapel service held in memory of Kennedy • Editorial: Riderless horse; Reign of reason • Letters to the editor • Students petition for corrective measures at 6th Ave. & Main St. • Candace Sprecher struck by auto • Student editors at Scranton\u27s press conference • Messiah to be presented Dec. 12 • Tara theme of Senior Ball • Donald Barnhouse, TV 10 newscaster to speak • Soviets speak at Phila. Council: UC students question • College group visits Saint Gabriels • Lyndon Baines Johnson sworn in as 36 President Friday November 22, 1963 • Lecture presented on Rome Council • Greek gleanings • Curtain Club\u27s first theatre in round production December 6 • Teacher exams to be given Feb. 15https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/weekly/1259/thumbnail.jp

The bear circadian clock doesn’t ‘sleep’ during winter dormancy

Most biological functions are synchronized to the environmental light:dark cycle via a circadian timekeeping system. Bears exhibit shallow torpor combined with metabolic suppression during winter dormancy. We sought to confirm that free-running circadian rhythms of body temperature (Tb) and activity were expressed in torpid grizzly (brown) bears and that they were functionally responsive to environmental light. We also measured activity and ambient light exposures in denning wild bears to determine if rhythms were evident and what the photic conditions of their natural dens were. Lastly, we used cultured skin fibroblasts obtained from captive torpid bears to assess molecular clock operation in peripheral tissues. Circadian parameters were estimated using robust wavelet transforms and maximum entropy spectral analyses

1H-NMR urinary metabolomic profiling for diagnosis of gastric cancer

Background: Metabolomics has shown promise in gastric cancer (GC) detection. This research sought to identify whether GC has a unique urinary metabolomic profile compared with benign gastric disease (BN) and healthy (HE) patients. Methods: Urine from 43 GC, 40 BN, and 40 matched HE patients was analysed using 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR) spectroscopy, generating 77 reproducible metabolites (QC-RSD Results: GC displayed a clear discriminatory biomarker profile; the BN profile overlapped with GC and HE. LASSO-LR identified three discriminatory metabolites: 2-hydroxyisobutyrate, 3-indoxylsulfate, and alanine, which produced a discriminatory model with an area under the ROC of 0.95. Conclusions: GC patients have a distinct urinary metabolite profile. This study shows clinical potential for metabolic profiling for early GC diagnosis

Measurement in Economics and Social Science

The paper discusses measurement, primarily in economics, from both analytical and historical perspectives. The historical section traces the commitment to ordinalism on the part of economic theorists from the doctrinal disputes between classical economics and marginalism, through the struggle of orthodox economics against socialism down to the cold-war alliance between mathematical social science and anti-communist ideology. In economics the commitment to ordinalism led to the separation of theory from the quantitative measures that are computed in practice: price and quantity indexes, consumer surplus and real national product. The commitment to ordinality entered political science, via Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’, effectively merging it with economics, and ensuring its sterility. How can a field that has as its central result the impossibility of democracy contribute to the design of democratic institutions? The analytical part of the paper deals with the quantitative measures mentioned above. I begin with the conceptual clarification that what these measures try to achieve is a restoration of the money metric that is lost when prices are variable. I conclude that there is only one measure that can be embedded in a satisfactory economic theory, free from unreasonable restrictions. It is the Törnqvist index as an approximation to its theoretical counterpart the Divisia index. The statistical agencies have at various times produced different measures for real national product and its components, as well as related concepts. I argue that all of these are flawed and that a single deflator should be used for the aggregate and the components. Ideally this should be a chained Törnqvist price index defined on aggregate consumption. The social sciences are split. The economic approach is abstract, focused on the assumption of rational and informed behavior, and tends to the political right. The sociological approach is empirical, stresses the non-rational aspects of human behavior and tends to the political left. I argue that the split is due to the fact that the empirical and theoretical traditions were never joined in the social sciences as they were in the natural sciences. I also argue that measurement can potentially help in healing this split

Soybean cultivar UA 5213C

Disclosed a soybean cultivar designated UA 5213C. The invention relates to the seeds of this cultivar, to the plants, to the plant parts, and to methods for producing progeny of the cultivar. The invention also relates to methods for producing a soybean plant containing in its genetic material one or more transgenes and to the transgenic soybean plants and plant parts produced by those methods. The invention also relates to soybean cultivars or breeding cultivars, and plant parts derived from this cultivar, and to methods for producing other soybean cultivars, lines, or plant parts derived from it. The invention further relates to hybrid soybean seeds, plants, and plant parts produced by crossing this cultivar with another soybean cultivar

Soybean cultivar UA Kirksey

The soybean cultivar UA Kirksey is disclosed. The invention relates to the seeds of the cultivar , to the plants of cultivar, to the plant parts of cultivar, and to methods for producing progeny of it. Methods for producing a soybean plant containing in its genetic material one or more transgenes and to the transgenic soybean plants and plant parts produced by those methods are described. The invention also relates to: soybean cultivars or breeding cultivars, and plant parts derived from the cultivar; to methods for producing other soybean cultivars, lines, or plant parts derived from it, and to the soybean plants, varieties, and their parts derived from use of those methods. The invention also relates to hybrid soybean seeds, plants, and plant parts produced by crossing cultivar UA Kirksey with another soybean cultivar

MTN-001: Randomized Pharmacokinetic Cross-Over Study Comparing Tenofovir Vaginal Gel and Oral Tablets in Vaginal Tissue and Other Compartments

Background: Oral and vaginal preparations of tenofovir as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection have demonstrated variable efficacy in men and women prompting assessment of variation in drug concentration as an explanation. Knowledge of tenofovir concentration and its active form, tenofovir diphosphate, at the putative vaginal and rectal site of action and its relationship to concentrations at multiple other anatomic locations may provide key information for both interpreting PrEP study outcomes and planning future PrEP drug development. Objective: MTN-001 was designed to directly compare oral to vaginal steady-state tenofovir pharmacokinetics in blood, vaginal tissue, and vaginal and rectal fluid in a paired cross-over design. Methods and Findings: We enrolled 144 HIV-uninfected women at 4 US and 3 African clinical research sites in an open label, 3-period crossover study of three different daily tenofovir regimens, each for 6 weeks (oral 300 mg tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, vaginal 1% tenofovir gel [40 mg], or both). Serum concentrations after vaginal dosing were 56-fold lower than after oral dosing (p<0.001). Vaginal tissue tenofovir diphosphate was quantifiable in ≥90% of women with vaginal dosing and only 19% of women with oral dosing. Vaginal tissue tenofovir diphosphate was ≥130-fold higher with vaginal compared to oral dosing (p<0.001). Rectal fluid tenofovir concentrations in vaginal dosing periods were higher than concentrations measured in the oral only dosing period (p<0.03). Conclusions: Compared to oral dosing, vaginal dosing achieved much lower serum concentrations and much higher vaginal tissue concentrations. Even allowing for 100-fold concentration differences due to poor adherence or less frequent prescribed dosing, vaginal dosing of tenofovir should provide higher active site concentrations and theoretically greater PrEP efficacy than oral dosing; randomized topical dosing PrEP trials to the contrary indicates that factors beyond tenofovir's antiviral effect substantially influence PrEP efficacy. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00592124

Atomoxetine and Citalopram alter brain network organisation in Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease has multiple detrimental effects on motor and cognitive systems in the brain. In contrast to motor deficits, cognitive impairments in Parkinson’s disease are usually not ameliorated, and can even be worsened, by dopaminergic treatments. Recent evidence has shown potential benefits from restoring other neurotransmitter deficits, including noradrenergic and serotonergic transmission. Here, we study global and regional brain network organization using task-free imaging (also known as resting-state), which minimizes performance confounds and the bias towards predetermined networks. Thirty-three patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease were studied three times in a double-blind, placebo-controlled counter-balanced crossover design, following placebo, 40mg-oral atomoxetine (selective noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor) or 30mg-oral citalopram (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). Neuropsychological assessments were performed outside the scanner. Seventy-six controls were scanned without medication to provide normative data for comparison to the patient cohort. Graph theoretical analysis of task-free brain connectivity, with a random 500-node parcellation, was used to measure the effect of disease in placebo-treated state (versus unmedicated controls) and pharmacological intervention (drug versus placebo). Relative to controls, patients on placebo had executive impairments (reduced fluency and inhibitory control), which was reflected in dysfunctional network dynamics in terms of reduced clustering coefficient, hub degree and hub centrality. In patients, atomoxetine improved fluency in proportion to plasma concentration (p=0.006, r2=0.24), and improved response inhibition in proportion to increased hub eigen centrality (p=0.044, r2=0.14). Citalopram did not improve fluency or inhibitory control, but its influence on network integration and efficiency depended on disease severity: clustering (p=0.01, r2=0.22), modularity (p=0.043, r2=0.14) and path length (p=0.006, r2=0.25) increased in patients with milder forms of Parkinson’s disease, but decreased in patients with more advanced disease (UPDRS-III >30). This study supports the use of task-free imaging of brain networks in translational pharmacology of neurodegenerative disorders. We propose that hub connectivity contributes to cognitive performance in Parkinson’s disease, and that noradrenergic treatment strategies can partially restore the neural systems supporting executive function

Trade and Inequality with Limited Labor Mobility: Theory and Evidence from China

Does globalization increase inequality in developing countries, and if so, how? In a theoretical model of a regionally heterogeneous economy, we show how different regional rates of technical progress due to trade and FDI interact with constraints to unskilled labor mobility. As favored regions benefit more from trade, their growing demand for skills drains skilled workers from disadvantaged areas, and average incomes in the former grow faster than in the latter. Moreover, this unbalanced regional growth may also raise inequality within each region. It could even reduce absolute income per capita in the less favored region. We test these predictions with Chinese data from the Open Door era. Results confirm that different regional growth rates ave increased both interregional and intraregional inequality. Moreover, growth of skills-based export industries in coastal regions is associated, other things equal, with lower incomes for the poor in inland provinces