Conscientiousness predicts greater recovery from negative emotion

Greater levels of conscientiousness have been associated with lower levels of negative affect. We focus on one mechanism through which conscientiousness may decrease negative affect: effective emotion regulation, as reflected by greater recovery from negative stimuli. In 273 adults who were 35 - 85 years old, we collected self-report measures of personality including conscientiousness and its self-control facet, followed on average 2 years later by psychophysiological measures of emotional reactivity and recovery. Among middle-aged adults (35 - 65 years old), the measures of conscientiousness and self-control predicted greater recovery from, but not reactivity to, negative emotional stimuli. The effect of conscientiousness and self-control on recovery was not driven by other personality variables or by greater task adherence on the part of high conscientiousness individuals. In addition, the effect was specific to negative emotional stimuli and did not hold for neutral or positive emotional stimuli

“Girls on the Move” intervention protocol for increasing physical activity among low-active underserved urban girls: a group randomized trial

Abstract Background Increasing moderate to vigorous physical activity among urban girls of low socioeconomic status is both a challenge and a public health priority. Physical activity interventions targeting exclusively girls remain limited, and maintenance of moderate to vigorous physical activity during the post-intervention period has been difficult to maintain. The main aim of the 5-year “Girls on the Move” group randomized trial is to evaluate the efficacy of a comprehensive school-based intervention in increasing girls’ minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity and improving cardiovascular fitness, body mass index, and percent body fat immediately post-intervention (after 17 weeks) and at 9-month post-intervention follow-up (9 months after end of intervention). Methods/Design A total of 24 urban middle schools in the Midwestern U.S. will be randomized to either receive the intervention or serve as a control (N = 1200 girls). The intervention, based on the Health Promotion Model and Self-Determination Theory, will include: (1) two face-to-face motivational, individually tailored counseling sessions with a registered nurse, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the intervention period; (2) an interactive Internet-based session during which each girl receives individually tailored motivational and feedback messages via iPad at 11 weeks (shortly after midpoint of intervention); and (3) a 90-minute after-school physical activity club. Racially diverse, low-active, 10- to 14-year-old 5th to 8th-grade girls will complete questionnaires and physical measures at baseline and post-intervention (n = 50 per school). Minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity will be assessed with accelerometers. Cardiovascular fitness will be assessed by estimating VO2 max with PACER (Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run) scores. Height and weight will be assessed to calculate body mass index. Percent body fat will be estimated with a foot-to-foot bioelectric impedance scale. Linear mixed effects regression analyses will be performed to assess intervention effects. Discussion This multi-component approach is expected to improve girls’ moderate to vigorous physical activity and related physical outcomes. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT01503333http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112470/1/12889_2013_Article_5394.pd

Girls on the Move” intervention protocol for increasing physical activity among low-active underserved urban girls: a group randomized trial

Background: Increasing moderate to vigorous physical activity among urban girls of low socioeconomic status is both a challenge and a public health priority. Physical activity interventions targeting exclusively girls remain limited, and maintenance of moderate to vigorous physical activity during the post-intervention period has been difficult to maintain. The main aim of the 5-year “Girls on the Move” group randomized trial is to evaluate the efficacy of a comprehensive school-based intervention in increasing girls’ minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity and improving cardiovascular fitness, body mass index, and percent body fat immediately post-intervention (after 17 weeks) and at 9-month post-intervention follow-up (9 months after end of intervention). Methods/Design: A total of 24 urban middle schools in the Midwestern U.S. will be randomized to either receive the intervention or serve as a control (N = 1200 girls). The intervention, based on the Health Promotion Model and Self-Determination Theory, will include: (1) two face-to-face motivational, individually tailored counseling sessions with a registered nurse, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the intervention period; (2) an interactive Internet-based session during which each girl receives individually tailored motivational and feedback messages via iPad at 11 weeks (shortly after midpoint of intervention); and (3) a 90-minute after-school physical activity club. Racially diverse, low-active, 10- to 14-year-old 5th to 8th-grade girls will complete questionnaires and physical measures at baseline and post-intervention (n = 50 per school). Minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity will be assessed with accelerometers. Cardiovascular fitness will be assessed by estimating VO2 max with PACER (Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run) scores. Height and weight will be assessed to calculate body mass index. Percent body fat will be estimated with a foot-to-foot bioelectric impedance scale. Linear mixed effects regression analyses will be performed to assess intervention effects. Discussion: This multi-component approach is expected to improve girls’ moderate to vigorous physical activity and related physical outcomes

Ovarian leydig cell hyperplasia: an unusual case of virilization in a postmenopausal woman.

Objective. To report an unusual case of ovarian Leydig cell hyperplasia resulting in virilization in a postmenopausal woman. Methods. Patient\u27s medical history and pertinent literature were reviewed. Results. A 64-year-old woman presented with virilization with worsening hirsutism, deepening of her voice, male musculature, and male pattern alopecia. Her pertinent past medical history included type 1 diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension. Her pertinent past surgical history included hysterectomy due to fibroids. On further work-up, her serum total testosterone was 506 ng/dL (nl range: 2-45) and free testosterone was 40 pg/mL (nl range: 0.1-6.4). After ruling out adrenal causes, the patient underwent an empiric bilateral oophorectomy that showed Leydig cell hyperplasia on pathology. Six weeks postoperatively, serum testosterone was undetectable with significant clinical improvement. Conclusion. Postmenopausal hyperandrogenism can be the result of numerous etiologies ranging from normal physiologic changes to ovarian or rarely adrenal tumors. Our patient was found to have Leydig cell hyperplasia of her ovaries, a rarely reported cause of virilization

Facile Synthesis and Catalysis of Pure-Silica and Heteroatom LTA

Zeolite A (LTA) has many large-scale uses in separations and ion exchange applications. Because of the high aluminum content and lack of high-temperature stability, applications in catalysis, while highly desired, have been extremely limited. Herein, we report a robust method to prepare pure-silica, aluminosilicate (product Si/Al = 12–42), and titanosilicate LTA in fluoride media using a simple, imidazolium-based organic structure-directing agent. The aluminosilicate material is an active catalyst for the methanol-to-olefins reaction with higher product selectivities to butenes as well as C_5 and C_6 products than the commercialized silicoalumniophosphate or zeolite analogue that both have the chabazite framework (SAPO-34 and SSZ-13, respectively). The crystal structures of the as-made and calcined pure-silica materials were solved using single-crystal X-ray diffraction, providing information about the occluded organics and fluoride as well as structural information

The Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer consensus statement on immunotherapy for the treatment of prostate carcinoma.

Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed malignancy and second leading cause of cancer death among men in the United States. In recent years, several new agents, including cancer immunotherapies, have been approved or are currently being investigated in late-stage clinical trials for the management of advanced prostate cancer. Therefore, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) convened a multidisciplinary panel, including physicians, nurses, and patient advocates, to develop consensus recommendations for the clinical application of immunotherapy for prostate cancer patients. To do so, a systematic literature search was performed to identify high-impact papers from 2006 until 2014 and was further supplemented with literature provided by the panel. Results from the consensus panel voting and discussion as well as the literature review were used to rate supporting evidence and generate recommendations for the use of immunotherapy in prostate cancer patients. Sipuleucel-T, an autologous dendritic cell vaccine, is the first and currently only immunotherapeutic agent approved for the clinical management of metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). The consensus panel utilized this model to discuss immunotherapy in the treatment of prostate cancer, issues related to patient selection, monitoring of patients during and post treatment, and sequence/combination with other anti-cancer treatments. Potential immunotherapies emerging from late-stage clinical trials are also discussed. As immunotherapy evolves as a therapeutic option for the treatment of prostate cancer, these recommendations will be updated accordingly

Robust Machine Learning Applied to Astronomical Datasets III: Probabilistic Photometric Redshifts for Galaxies and Quasars in the SDSS and GALEX

We apply machine learning in the form of a nearest neighbor instance-based algorithm (NN) to generate full photometric redshift probability density functions (PDFs) for objects in the Fifth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS DR5). We use a conceptually simple but novel application of NN to generate the PDFs - perturbing the object colors by their measurement error - and using the resulting instances of nearest neighbor distributions to generate numerous individual redshifts. When the redshifts are compared to existing SDSS spectroscopic data, we find that the mean value of each PDF has a dispersion between the photometric and spectroscopic redshift consistent with other machine learning techniques, being sigma = 0.0207 +/- 0.0001 for main sample galaxies to r < 17.77 mag, sigma = 0.0243 +/- 0.0002 for luminous red galaxies to r < ~19.2 mag, and sigma = 0.343 +/- 0.005 for quasars to i < 20.3 mag. The PDFs allow the selection of subsets with improved statistics. For quasars, the improvement is dramatic: for those with a single peak in their probability distribution, the dispersion is reduced from 0.343 to sigma = 0.117 +/- 0.010, and the photometric redshift is within 0.3 of the spectroscopic redshift for 99.3 +/- 0.1% of the objects. Thus, for this optical quasar sample, we can virtually eliminate 'catastrophic' photometric redshift estimates. In addition to the SDSS sample, we incorporate ultraviolet photometry from the Third Data Release of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer All-Sky Imaging Survey (GALEX AIS GR3) to create PDFs for objects seen in both surveys. For quasars, the increased coverage of the observed frame UV of the SED results in significant improvement over the full SDSS sample, with sigma = 0.234 +/- 0.010. We demonstrate that this improvement is genuine. [Abridged]Comment: Accepted to ApJ, 10 pages, 12 figures, uses emulateapj.cl

The Leviathan: How to Move 2.9 Million Government Documents Offsite

The concept of moving a university’s historic, 2.9 million item government documents collection offsite was daunting. The actual move of the collection took 24 months. In this move, much was learned about developing a project management plan, including: consult the literature early, anticipate confusion points within the collection, discuss wear-and-tear issues, and understand the effect the move would have on service. The final move required 31 working days over five months of shifting. Afterward, it was found that the repercussions of a move – especially on staff and reference work – can often be more jarring than the move itself.Ye

Aging is associated with positive responding to neutral information but reduced recovery from negative information

Studies on aging and emotion suggest an increase in reported positive affect, a processing bias of positive over negative information, as well as increasingly adaptive regulation in response to negative events with advancing age. These findings imply that older individuals evaluate information differently, resulting in lowered reactivity to, and/or faster recovery from, negative information, while maintaining more positive responding to positive information. We examined this hypothesis in an ongoing study on Midlife in the US (MIDUS II) where emotional reactivity and recovery were assessed in a large number of respondents (N = 159) from a wide age range (36–84 years). We recorded eye-blink startle magnitudes and corrugator activity during and after the presentation of positive, neutral and negative pictures. The most robust age effect was found in response to neutral stimuli, where increasing age is associated with a decreased corrugator and eyeblink startle response to neutral stimuli. These data suggest that an age-related positivity effect does not essentially alter the response to emotion-laden information, but is reflected in a more positive interpretation of affectively ambiguous information. Furthermore, older women showed reduced corrugator recovery from negative pictures relative to the younger women and men, suggesting that an age-related prioritization of well-being is not necessarily reflected in adaptive regulation of negative affect

Discovery and saturation analysis of cancer genes across 21 tumour types

Although a few cancer genes are mutated in a high proportion of tumours of a given type (>20%), most are mutated at intermediate frequencies (2–20%). To explore the feasibility of creating a comprehensive catalogue of cancer genes, we analysed somatic point mutations in exome sequences from 4,742 human cancers and their matched normal-tissue samples across 21 cancer types. We found that large-scale genomic analysis can identify nearly all known cancer genes in these tumour types. Our analysis also identified 33 genes that were not previously known to be significantly mutated in cancer, including genes related to proliferation, apoptosis, genome stability, chromatin regulation, immune evasion, RNA processing and protein homeostasis. Down-sampling analysis indicates that larger sample sizes will reveal many more genes mutated at clinically important frequencies. We estimate that near-saturation may be achieved with 600–5,000 samples per tumour type, depending on background mutation frequency. The results may help to guide the next stage of cancer genomics