1,517 research outputs found
Impact of COPD and anemia on motor and cognitive performance in the general older population: results from the English longitudinal study of ageing
Background: Cognitive and motor-performance decline with age and the process is accelerated by decline in general health. In this study, we aimed to estimate the effects of COPD and HB levels on cognitive and motor performance in the general older population and assess potential interaction.
Methods: The English Longitudinal Study of Aging is a population-based cohort study including measurements of lung-function and HB levels together with cognitive and motor performance testing. Data were collected from 5709 participants including three measurement time over eight years. COPD was defined using lung-function-parameters and clinical symptoms. HB was assessed continuously and low HB was defined using clinical anemia cutoffs. Linear mixed-effects regression models were used to quantify the associations of COPD and HB with outcome measures, both individually and in combination.
Results: Participants with both low HB and COPD demonstrated worse motor performance compared to individuals with only one exposure, resulting in up to 1 s (95%CI, 0.04–1.8) longer time needed to complete the five times sit to stand task than what would be expected based on purely additive effects. Additionally in individuals with COPD, the time to complete the motor-performance task per unit decrease in continuous HB levels was longer than in participants without COPD after full adjustment for confounding (up to 1.38 s/unit HB level, 95% CI: 0.65–2.11).
Conclusion: In persons with COPD low HB levels may contribute to low motor-performance in a supra additive fashion. Further studies should re-evaluate whether earlier treatment of lower HB in these individuals might be beneficial
Mining the Metabiome: Identifying Novel Natural Products from Microbial Communities
Microbial-derived natural products provide the foundation for most of the chemotherapeutic arsenal available to contemporary medicine. In the face of a dwindling pipeline of new lead structures identified by traditional culturing techniques and an increasing need for new therapeutics, surveys of microbial biosynthetic diversity across environmental metabiomes have revealed enormous reservoirs of as yet untapped natural products chemistry. In this review, we touch on the historical context of microbial natural product discovery and discuss innovations and technological advances that are facilitating culture-dependent and culture-independent access to new chemistry from environmental microbiomes with the goal of reinvigorating the small molecule therapeutics discovery pipeline. We highlight the successful strategies that have emerged and some of the challenges that must be overcome to enable the development of high-throughput methods for natural product discovery from complex microbial communities
Observation of many-body localization of interacting fermions in a quasi-random optical lattice
We experimentally observe many-body localization of interacting fermions in a
one-dimensional quasi-random optical lattice. We identify the many-body
localization transition through the relaxation dynamics of an
initially-prepared charge density wave. For sufficiently weak disorder the time
evolution appears ergodic and thermalizing, erasing all remnants of the initial
order. In contrast, above a critical disorder strength a significant portion of
the initial ordering persists, thereby serving as an effective order parameter
for localization. The stationary density wave order and the critical disorder
value show a distinctive dependence on the interaction strength, in agreement
with numerical simulations. We connect this dependence to the ubiquitous
logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy characterizing the generic many-body
localized phase.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures + supplementary informatio
Multi-Name Credit Derivatives
The problem addressed in this report is that of pricing multi-name credit derivatives. These are default guarantee contracts on a basket of “names” whose default rates are correlated
Index guiding dependent effects in implant and oxide confined vertical-cavity lasers
Includes bibliographical references.Implant and oxide confined vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers are compared in terms of properties dependent upon the nature of index guiding in the two structures including CW threshold current scaling with size, light-current linearity, pulsed operation delay, and beam profiles. The oxide confined lasers, fabricated by wet thermal oxidation, have a built-in index guide and thus exhibit substantially better properties than do lasers from the same wafer fabricated by proton implantation which rely on a thermal lens to reduce diffraction losses.This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DEAC04-94AL85000
Coupling Identical one-dimensional Many-Body Localized Systems
We experimentally study the effects of coupling one-dimensional many-body localized systems with identical disorder. Using a gas of ultracold fermions in an optical lattice, we artificially prepare an initial charge density wave in an array of 1D tubes with quasirandom on-site disorder and monitor the subsequent dynamics over several thousand tunneling times. We find a strikingly different behavior between many-body localization and Anderson localization. While the noninteracting Anderson case remains localized, in the interacting case any coupling between the tubes leads to a delocalization of the entire system
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