Contemporary (2001) and ‘Little Ice Age’ glacier extents in the Buordakh Massif, Cherskiy Range, north east Siberia

The Buordakh Massif of the Cherskiy Range of sub-arctic north east Siberia, Russia has a cold continental climate and supports over 80 glaciers. Despite previous research in the region, a georeferenced map of the glaciers has only recently been completed and an enhanced version of it is reproduced in colour here. The mountains of this region reach heights in excess of 3,000 m and the glaciers on their slopes range in size from 0.1 to 10.4 km2. The mapping has been compiled through the interpretation of Landsat 7 ETM+ satellite imagery from August 2001 which has been augmented by data from a field campaign undertaken at the same time. The glaciers of the region are of the cold, ‘firn-less’ continental type and their mass balance relies heavily on the formation of superimposed ice. Moraines which lie in front of the glaciers by up to a few kilometres are believed to date from the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550-1850 AD). Over half of the glaciers mapped have shown marked retreat from these moraines

The reliability of plantar pressure assessment during barefoot level walking in children aged 7-11 years

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Plantar pressure assessment can provide information pertaining to the dynamic loading of the foot, as well as information specific to each region in contact with the ground. There have been few studies which have considered the reliability of plantar pressure data and therefore the purpose of this study was to investigate the reliability of assessing plantar pressure variables in a group of typically developing children, during barefoot level walking.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Forty-five participants, aged 7 to 11 years, were recruited from local primary and secondary schools in East London. Data from three walking trials were collected at both an initial and re-test session, taken one week apart, to determine both the within- and between-session reliability of selected plantar pressure variables. The variables of peak pressure, peak force, pressure-time and force-time integrals were extracted for analysis in the following seven regions of the foot; lateral heel, medial heel, midfoot, 1st metatarsophalangeal joint, 2nd-5th metatarsophalangeal joint, hallux and the lesser toes. Reliability of the data were explored using Intra Class Correlation Coefficients (ICC 3,1 and 3,2) and variability with Coefficients of Variation (CoV's).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The measurements demonstrated moderate to good levels of within-session reliability across all segments of the foot (0.69-0.93), except the lesser toes, which demonstrated poor reliability (0.17-0.50). CoV's across the three repeated trials ranged from 10.12-19.84% for each of the measured variables across all regions of the foot, except the lesser toes which demonstrated the greatest variability within trials (27.15-56.08%). The between-session results demonstrated good levels of reliability across all foot segments (0.79-0.99) except the lesser toes; with moderate levels of reliability reported at this region of the foot (0.58-0.68). The CoV's between-sessions demonstrated that the midfoot (16.41-36.23%) and lesser toe region (29.64-56.61) demonstrated the greatest levels of variability across all the measured variables.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These findings indicate that using the reported protocols, reliable plantar pressure data can be collected in children, aged 7 to 11 years in all regions of the foot except the lesser toes which consistently reported poor-to-moderate levels of reliability and increased variability.</p

A High-Resolution View of Genome-Wide Pneumococcal Transformation

Transformation is an important mechanism of microbial evolution through which bacteria have been observed to rapidly adapt in response to clinical interventions; examples include facilitating vaccine evasion and the development of penicillin resistance in the major respiratory pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae. To characterise the process in detail, the genomes of 124 S. pneumoniae isolates produced through in vitro transformation were sequenced and recombination events detected. Those recombinations importing the selected marker were independent of unselected events elsewhere in the genome, the positions of which were not significantly affected by local sequence similarity between donor and recipient or mismatch repair processes. However, both types of recombinations were sometimes mosaic, with multiple non-contiguous segments originating from the same molecule of donor DNA. The lengths of the unselected events were exponentially distributed with a mean of 2.3 kb, implying that recombinations are stochastically resolved with a fixed per base probability of 4.4×10−4 bp−1. This distribution of recombination sizes, coupled with an observed under representation of large insertions within transferred sequence, suggests transformation has the potential to reduce the size of bacterial genomes, and is unlikely to act as an efficient mechanism for the uptake of accessory genomic loci

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Sediment budget and geomorphic process units of the Swedish Kärkevagge, link to ArcInfo E00 files

Geomorphic process units have been derived in order to allow quantification via GIS techniques at a catchment scale. Mass movement rates based on existing field measurements are employed in the budget calculations. In the Kärkevagge catchment, Northern Sweden, 80% of the area can be identified either as a source area for sediments or as a zone where sediments are deposited. The overall budget for the slopes beneath the rockwalls in the Kärkevagge is approximately 680 t/a whilst about 150 t a–1 are transported into the fluvial system

Metabolic syndrome and growth hormone deficiency in adult survivors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia

BACKGROUND. The purpose of the study was to determine the prevalence of metabolic syndrome, growth hormone deficiency, and cardiovascular risk factors among adult survivors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) treated with or without cranial irradiation. METHODS. Follow-up was undertaken of 75 randomly selected long-term childhood ALL survivors. Testing included fasting insulin, glucose, lipids, and growth hormone (GH) releasing hormone plus arginine stimulation test. The prevalence of metabolic syndrome was compared with population norms from 1999-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES) data, and internally between those with and without past cranial irradiation and those with normal (\u3e16.5 μg/L) versus insufficient (9-16.5 μg/L) versus deficient (\u3c9 μg/L) peak GH secretion. RESULTS. The mean subject age was 30 years and the mean time since ALL diagnosis was 25 years. The prevalence of metabolic syndrome did not differ statistically (P = .87) between study subjects (16.6%) and same-age, same-sex population norms (17.5%). However, 60% of subjects treated with cranial irradiation, compared with 20% of those who were not, had 2 or more of the 5 components of metabolic syndrome. Untreated abnormally low GH was present in 64% of subjects overall and 85% of those who received past cranial irradiation. Cranial irradiation was strongly related to GH deficiency, and in turn lower insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), higher fasting insulin, abdominal obesity, and dyslipidemia, particularly in women. CONCLUSIONS. Hematologists who treat childhood ALL patients, and particularly those who provide primary care to adult survivors, should be aware of the potential for long-term GH deficiency and adverse cardiovascular and diabetes risk profiles as a consequence of leukemia treatment. © 2006 American Cancer Society