Implicit cognition is impaired and dissociable in a head-injured group with executive deficits

Implicit or non-conscious cognition is traditionally assumed to be robust to pathology but Gomez-Beldarrain et al (1999, 2002) recently showed deficits on a single implicit task after head injury. Laboratory research suggests that implicit processes dissociate. This study therefore examined implicit cognition in 20 head-injured patients and age- and I.Q.-matched controls using a battery of four implicit cognition tasks: a Serial Reaction Time task (SRT), mere exposure effect task, automatic stereotype activation and hidden co-variation detection. Patients were assessed on an extensive neuropsychological battery, and MRI scanned. Inclusion criteria included impairment on at least one measure of executive function. The patient group was impaired relative to the control group on all the implicit cognition tasks except automatic stereotype activation. Effect size analyses using the control mean and standard deviation for reference showed further dissociations across patients and across implicit tasks. Patients impaired on implicit tasks had more cognitive deficits overall than those unimpaired, and a larger Dysexecutive Self/Other discrepancy (DEX) score suggesting greater behavioural problems. Performance on the SRT task correlated with a composite measure of executive function. Head-injury thus produced heterogeneous impairments in the implicit acquisition of new information. Implicit activation of existing knowledge structures appeared intact. Impairments in implicit cognition and executive function may interact to produce dysfunctional behaviour after head-injury. Future comparisons of implicit and explicit cognition should use several measures of each function, to ensure that they measure the latent variable of interest

Flood Management Enhancement Using Remotely Sensed Data

SENTAR, Inc., entered into a cooperative agreement with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in December 1994. The intent of the NASA Cooperative Agreement was to stimulate broad public use, via the Internet, of the very large remote sensing databases maintained by NASA and other agencies, thus stimulating U.S. economic growth, improving the quality of life, and contributing to the implementation of a National Information Infrastructure. SENTAR headed a team of collaborating organizations in meeting the goals of this project. SENTAR's teammates were the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Global Hydrology and Climate Center (GHCC), the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command (USASSDC), and the Alabama Emergency Management Agency (EMA). For this cooperative agreement, SENTAR and its teammates accessed remotely sensed data in the Distributed Active Archive Centers, and other available sources, for use in enhancing the present capabilities for flood disaster management by the Alabama EMA. The project developed a prototype software system for addressing prediction, warning, and damage assessment for floods, though it currently focuses on assessment. The objectives of the prototype system were to demonstrate the added value of remote sensing data for emergency management operations during floods and the ability of the Internet to provide the primary communications medium for the system. To help achieve these objectives, SENTAR developed an integrated interface for the emergency operations staff to simplify acquiring and manipulating source data and data products for use in generating new data products. The prototype system establishes a systems infrastructure designed to expand to include future flood-related data and models or to include other disasters with their associated remote sensing data requirements and distributed data sources. This report covers the specific work performed during the seventh, and final, milestone period of the project, which began on 1 October 1996 and ended on 31 January 1997. In addition, it provides a summary of the entire project

PIF7 controls leaf cell proliferation through an AN3 substitution-39 repression mechanism

Plants are agile, plastic organisms able to adapt to everchanging circumstances. Responding to far-red (FR) wavelengths from nearby vegetation, shade-intolerant species elicit the adaptive shade-avoidance syndrome (SAS), characterized by elongated petioles, leaf hyponasty, and smaller leaves. We utilized end-of-day FR (EODFR) treatments to interrogate molecular processes that underlie the SAS leaf response. Genetic analysis established that PHYTOCHROME-INTERACTING FACTOR 7 (PIF7) is required for EODFR-mediated constraint of leaf blade cell division, while EODFR messenger RNA sequencing data identified ANGUSTIFOLIA3 (AN3) as a potential PIF7 target. We show that PIF7 can suppress AN3 transcription by directly interacting with and sequestering AN3. We also establish that PIF7 and AN3 impose antagonistic control of gene expression via common cis-acting promoter motifs in several cell-cycle regulator genes. EODFR triggers the molecular substitution of AN3 to PIF7 at G-box/PBE-box promoter regions and a switch from promotion to repression of gene expression

Complete abolition of reading and writing ability with a third ventricle colloid cyst: implications for surgical intervention and proposed neural substrates of visual recognition and visual imaging ability.

We report a rare case of a patient unable to read (alexic) and write (agraphic) after a mild head injury. He had preserved speech and comprehension, could spell aloud, identify words spelt aloud and copy letter features. He was unable to visualise letters but showed no problems with digits. Neuropsychological testing revealed general visual memory, processing speed and imaging deficits. Imaging data revealed an 8 mm colloid cyst of the third ventricle that splayed the fornix. Little is known about functions mediated by fornical connectivity, but this region is thought to contribute to memory recall. Other regions thought to mediate letter recognition and letter imagery, visual word form area and visual pathways were intact. We remediated reading and writing by multimodal letter retraining. The study raises issues about the neural substrates of reading, role of fornical tracts to selective memory in the absence of other pathology, and effective remediation strategies for selective functional deficits

Strategies for an environmental zonal evaluation of the City of Winnipeg

v, 39 p. : ill., maps (1 col.)

SynBio2Easy – a biologist-friendly tool for batch operations on SBOL designs with Excel inputs

Practical delivery of Findable, Accessible, Reusable and Interoperable principles for research data management requires expertise, time resource, (meta)data standards and formats, software tools and public repositories. The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL2) metadata standard enables FAIR sharing of the designs of synthetic biology constructs, notably in the repository of the SynBioHub platform. Large libraries of such constructs are increasingly easy to produce in practice, for example, in DNA foundries. However, manual curation of the equivalent libraries of designs remains cumbersome for a typical lab researcher, creating a barrier to data sharing. Here, we present a simple tool SynBio2Easy, which streamlines and automates operations on multiple Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) designs using Microsoft Excel® tables as metadata inputs. The tool provides several utilities for manipulation of SBOL documents and interaction with SynBioHub: for example, generation of a library of plasmids based on an original design template, bulk deposition into SynBioHub, or annotation of existing SBOL component definitions with notes and authorship information. The tool was used to generate and deposit a collection of 3661 cyanobacterium Synechocystis plasmids into the public SynBioHub repository. In the process of developing the software and uploading these data, we evaluated some aspects of the SynBioHub platform and SBOL ecosystem, and we discuss proposals for improvement that could benefit the user community. With software such as SynBio2Easy, we aim to deliver a user-driven tooling to make FAIR a reality at all stages of the project lifecycle in synthetic biology research. Graphical Abstract [Image: see text

Low grade glioma: An Update for Radiologists

With the recent publication of a new World Health Organization (WHO) brain tumour classification that reflects increased understanding of glioma tumour genetics there is a need for radiologists to understand the changes and their implications for patient management. There has also been an increasing trend for adopting earlier, more aggressive surgical approaches to low grade glioma treatment. We will summarise these changes, give some context to the increased role of tumour genetics and discuss the associated implications for radiologists of their adoption. We will discuss the earlier and more radical surgical resection of low grade gliomas and what it means for imaging patients