Outbreak of Aeromonas hydrophila wound infections association with mud football

On 16 February 2002, a total of 26 people presented to the emergency department of the local hospital in the rural town of Collie in southwest Western Australia with many infected scratches and pustules distributed over their bodies. All of the patients had participated in a “mud football” competition the previous day, in which there had been 100 participants. One patient required removal of an infected thumbnail, and another required surgical debridement of an infected toe. Aeromonas hydrophila was isolated from all 3 patients from whom swab specimens were obtained. To prepare the mud football fields, a paddock was irrigated with water that was pumped from an adjacent river during the 1-month period before the competition. A. hydrophila was subsequently isolated from a water sample obtained from the river. This is the first published report of an outbreak of A. hydrophila wound infections associated with exposure to mud.Hassan Vally, Amanda Whittle, Scott Cameron, Gary K. Dowse and Tony Watso

Now the wars are over: The past, present and future of Scottish battlefields

Battlefield archaeology has provided a new way of appreciating historic battlefields. This paper provides a summary of the long history of warfare and conflict in Scotland which has given rise to a large number of battlefield sites. Recent moves to highlight the archaeological importance of these sites, in the form of Historic Scotland’s Battlefields Inventory are discussed, along with some of the problems associated with the preservation and management of these important cultural sites

Tunable magnetic exchange interactions in manganese-doped inverted core/shell ZnSe/CdSe nanocrystals

Magnetic doping of semiconductor nanostructures is actively pursued for applications in magnetic memory and spin-based electronics. Central to these efforts is a drive to control the interaction strength between carriers (electrons and holes) and the embedded magnetic atoms. In this respect, colloidal nanocrystal heterostructures provide great flexibility via growth-controlled `engineering' of electron and hole wavefunctions within individual nanocrystals. Here we demonstrate a widely tunable magnetic sp-d exchange interaction between electron-hole excitations (excitons) and paramagnetic manganese ions using `inverted' core-shell nanocrystals composed of Mn-doped ZnSe cores overcoated with undoped shells of narrower-gap CdSe. Magnetic circular dichroism studies reveal giant Zeeman spin splittings of the band-edge exciton that, surprisingly, are tunable in both magnitude and sign. Effective exciton g-factors are controllably tuned from -200 to +30 solely by increasing the CdSe shell thickness, demonstrating that strong quantum confinement and wavefunction engineering in heterostructured nanocrystal materials can be utilized to manipulate carrier-Mn wavefunction overlap and the sp-d exchange parameters themselves.Comment: To appear in Nature Materials; 18 pages, 4 figures + Supp. Inf

Future needs and requirements for AMS C-14 standards and reference materials

C-14 measurement uses a number of standards and reference materials with different properties. Historically the absolute calibration of C-14 measurement was tied to 1890 wood, through the 'primary' standard of NBS-OxI (produced by the National Bureau of Standards, now NIST - National Institute of Standards and technology) subsequently replaced by NBS-OxII. These are both internationally calibrated and certified materials, whose C-14 activities are known absolutely. A second tier of materials, often called secondary standards or reference materials, and including internationally recognised materials such as ANU-sucrose (now also IAEA-C6), Chinese - sucrose and the IAEA C1-C6 series, augmented by additional oxalic acid samples are also used routinely. The activity of these materials has been estimated from large numbers of measurements made by many laboratories. Recently, further natural materials from the Third and Fourth International Radiocarbon Inter- comparisons (TIRI and FIRI) have been added to this list. The activities of these standards and reference materials span both the applied C-14 age range and the chemical composition range of typical samples, but this is not achieved uniformly and there is a continuing need for reference materials for laboratory quality control and measurement-traceability purposes. In this paper, we review the development of C-14 Standards and reference materials and consider the future requirements for such materials within the C-14 AMS community

Vectorlike Confinement at the LHC

We argue for the plausibility of a broad class of vectorlike confining gauge theories at the TeV scale which interact with the Standard Model predominantly via gauge interactions. These theories have a rich phenomenology at the LHC if confinement occurs at the TeV scale, while ensuring negligible impact on precision electroweak and flavor observables. Spin-1 bound states can be resonantly produced via their mixing with Standard Model gauge bosons. The resonances promptly decay to pseudo-Goldstone bosons, some of which promptly decay to a pair of Standard Model gauge bosons, while others are charged and stable on collider time scales. The diverse set of final states with little background include multiple photons and leptons, missing energy, massive stable charged particles and the possibility of highly displaced vertices in dilepton, leptoquark or diquark decays. Among others, a novel experimental signature of resonance reconstruction out of massive stable charged particles is highlighted. Some of the long-lived states also constitute Dark Matter candidates.Comment: 33 pages, 6 figures. v4: expanded discussion of Z_2 symmetry for stability, one reference adde

Species recovery in the united states: Increasing the effectiveness of the endangered species act

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has succeeded in shielding hundreds of species from extinction and improving species recovery over time. However, recovery for most species officially protected by the ESA - i.e., listed species-has been harder to achieve than initially envisioned. Threats to species are persistent and pervasive, funding has been insufficient, the distribution of money among listed species is highly uneven, and at least 10 times more species than are actually listed probably qualify for listing. Moreover, many listed species will require ongoing management for the foreseeable future to protect them from persistent threats. Climate change will exacerbate this problem and increase both species risk and management uncertainty, requiring more intensive and controversial management strategies to prevent species from going extinct

Therapeutic Effect of a Poly(ADP-Ribose) Polymerase-1 Inhibitor on Experimental Arthritis by Downregulating Inflammation and Th1 Response

Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1) synthesizes and transfers ADP ribose polymers to target proteins, and regulates DNA repair and genomic integrity maintenance. PARP-1 also plays a crucial role in the progression of the inflammatory response, and its inhibition confers protection in several models of inflammatory disorders. Here, we investigate the impact of a selective PARP-1 inhibitor in experimental arthritis. PARP-1 inhibition with 5-aminoisoquinolinone (AIQ) significantly reduces incidence and severity of established collagen-induced arthritis, completely abrogating joint swelling and destruction of cartilage and bone. The therapeutic effect of AIQ is associated with a striking reduction of the two deleterious components of the disease, i.e. the Th1-driven autoimmune and inflammatory responses. AIQ downregulates the production of various inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, decreases the antigen-specific Th1-cell expansion, and induces the production of the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10. Our results provide evidence of the contribution of PARP-1 to the progression of arthritis and identify this protein as a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis

Fungal iron availability during deep seated candidiasis is defined by a complex interplay involving systemic and local events

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Carboniferous plant physiology breaks the mold

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155970/1/nph16460-sup-0001-SupInfo.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155970/2/nph16460_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155970/3/nph16460.pd