Increasing fruit and vegetable intake: "Five a day" versus "just one more"

The present randomized controlled intervention study tested the hypothesis that a personally adaptable and realistic "just 1 more" goal would be more effective for increasing fruits and vegetables (FV) intake compared to the common "5 a day" goal. Study participants (N = 84 students, 85% female) consumed less than 4 servings of FVs per day at recruitment. During the 1-week intervention, participants randomized to the 5aday-group were asked to eat 5 servings of FVs/day; participants of the just1more-group were asked to eat 1 serving more of FVs than they usually did, and participants of the control group were instructed to eat as usual. Measurements were taken before (T1), directly following (T2), and 1 week after (T3) the intervention. Participants in the 5aday-group increased their average FV intake significantly by about one serving from 2.49 at T1 to 3.45 servings/day at T3. At T3, only the 5aday-group — not the just1-more-group — had a significantly higher FV intake than the control group. Contrary to the hypothesis, the "5 a day" goal was more effective than "just 1 more" for increasing FV intake. Results of our study support the rationale of the "5 a day" campaign, at least in the short term

Measuring Fractality

When investigating fractal phenomena, the following questions are fundamental for the applied researcher: (1) What are essential statistical properties of 1/f noise? (2) Which estimators are available for measuring fractality? (3) Which measurement instruments are appropriate and how are they applied? The purpose of this article is to give clear and comprehensible answers to these questions. First, theoretical characteristics of a fractal pattern (self-similarity, long memory, power law) and the related fractal parameters (the Hurst coefficient, the scaling exponent α, the fractional differencing parameter d of the autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average methodology, the power exponent β of the spectral analysis) are discussed. Then, estimators of fractal parameters from different software packages commonly used by applied researchers (R, SAS, SPSS) are introduced and evaluated. Advantages, disadvantages, and constrains of the popular estimators (d^ML, power spectral density, detrended fluctuation analysis, signal summation conversion) are illustrated by elaborate examples. Finally, crucial steps of fractal analysis (plotting time series data, autocorrelation, and spectral functions; performing stationarity tests; choosing an adequate estimator; estimating fractal parameters; distinguishing fractal processes from short-memory patterns) are demonstrated with empirical time series

Intrinsic excitation-inhibition imbalance affects medial prefrontal cortex differently in autistic men versus women

Excitation-inhibition (E:I) imbalance is theorized as an important pathophysiological mechanism in autism. Autism affects males more frequently than females and sex-related mechanisms (e.g., X-linked genes, androgen hormones) can influence E:I balance. This suggests that E:I imbalance may affect autism differently in males versus females. With a combination of in-silico modeling and in-vivo chemogenetic manipulations in mice, we first show that a time-series metric estimated from fMRI BOLD signal, the Hurst exponent (H), can be an index for underlying change in the synaptic E:I ratio. In autism we find that H is reduced, indicating increased excitation, in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) of autistic males but not females. Increasingly intact MPFC H is also associated with heightened ability to behaviorally camouflage social-communicative difficulties, but only in autistic females. This work suggests that H in BOLD can index synaptic E:I ratio and that E:I imbalance affects autistic males and females differently

Long-Range Temporal Correlations Reflect Treatment Response in the Electroencephalogram of Patients with Infantile Spasms

Infantile spasms syndrome is an epileptic encephalopathy in which prompt diagnosis and treatment initiation are critical to therapeutic response. Diagnosis of the disease heavily depends on the identification of characteristic electroencephalographic (EEG) patterns, including hypsarrhythmia. However, visual assessment of the presence and characteristics of hypsarrhythmia is challenging because multiple variants of the pattern exist, leading to poor inter-rater reliability. We investigated whether a quantitative measurement of the control of neural synchrony in the EEGs of infantile spasms patients could be used to reliably distinguish the presence of hypsarrhythmia and indicate successful treatment outcomes. We used autocorrelation and Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) to measure the strength of long-range temporal correlations in 21 infantile spasms patients before and after treatment and 21 control subjects. The strength of long-range temporal correlations was significantly lower in patients with hypsarrhythmia than control patients, indicating decreased control of neural synchrony. There was no difference between patients without hypsarrhythmia and control patients. Further, the presence of hypsarrhythmia could be classified based on the DFA exponent and intercept with 92% accuracy using a support vector machine. Successful treatment was marked by a larger increase in the DFA exponent compared to those in which spasms persisted. These results suggest that the strength of long-range temporal correlations is a marker of pathological cortical activity that correlates with treatment response. Combined with current clinical measures, this quantitative tool has the potential to aid objective identification of hypsarrhythmia and assessment of treatment efficacy to inform clinical decision-making

Performance of the Johansen test in time series measured on different scales.

Performance of the Johansen test in time series measured on different scales.</p

Modeling Vector Boson Scattering in the Hadronic Final State with MadGraph5_aMC@NLO

Vector boson scattering (VBS) is a process that occurs when vector bosons, the spin-1 fundamental particles of the Standard Model (SM), are radiated by quarks accelerated to high energies in a collider environment. These bosons may interact with each other before decaying due to their instability. This process is of interest because of its strong sensitivity to physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM): occurring in the high-energy regime at the cutting edge of modern technology, VBS is one of few processes able to probe the coupling of the gauge fields to each other, as well as to the Higgs field, both of which are sensitive to new physics which may spoil the delicate cancellations required to maintain unitarity. In particular, the polarization states of the massive vector bosons—the W and Z, carriers of the weak interaction—are acquired as a direct consequence of electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). EWSB has been at the frontier of known physics since the Higgs boson was confirmed to exist in 2012. VBS has three possible decay channels: fully leptonic, semi-leptonic, and all-hadronic. We focus on the all-hadronic channel, in which each boson begets two quarks, to take advantage of its higher branching ratio: nearly half of all VBS events decay through this channel. With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in a period of long shutdown as it is upgraded to reach higher luminosities, one of the major steps in VBS analyses is to separate the BSM-sensitive electroweak VBS from chromodynamically-induced (QCD) diboson production, in which vector bosons do not interact; furthermore, a deeper understanding of EWSB requires the various polarization states to be distinguished from each other. To these ends, simulation is a critical component of analyses, as VBS is among the rarest processes at the LHC and overwhelmed by backgrounds with larger cross sections. We investigate the viability of employing the MadGraph5_aMC@NLO suite to generate VBS events, successfully producing electroweak, QCD, and mixed samples of all possible combinations of weak bosons: the same-sign WW, opposite-sign WW, WZ, and ZZ channels. Furthermore, we create working samples of these VBS channels with enforced polarization: both bosons longitudinally polarized, both transversely polarized, and one of each. We provide histograms that report differences in the angular distributions of the produced events, showing how to distinguish the modes of production and polarizations based on kinematic topology

Performance of the Johansen test in time series with floor and ceiling effects.

Performance of the Johansen test in time series with floor and ceiling effects.</p

Performance of the Johansen test in dependence of sample size.

Performance of the Johansen test in dependence of sample size.</p