Human Mesenchymal Stem Cell Secretome Driven T Cell Immunomodulation Is IL-10 Dependent

Financial support was provided by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Iraq (S1443) and the Guy Hilton Asthma Trust.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Long-term loblolly pine aboveground growth, canopy dynamics, and economic implications from throughfall exclusion, fertilization, and thinning in southeastern Oklahoma, USA

Loblolly pine (Pinus tadea L.) is the most commercially important timber species in the southern USA. Climate change induced drought, due to longer periods without rainfall, will alter forest growth in the region. Loblolly pine occurs on 21 million ha in the southeast and represents 87% of the regions timber production. The species productivity is likely to face new tests as climate change makes growing conditions more adverse. How climate change might affect common silvicultural practices, like fertilization and thinning, that typically increase stand productivity, is not known. This study, located in the more xeric southeastern Oklahoma, aimed to understand if a plantation regime shift could occur under drier conditions from a growth and efficiency standpoint. A 30% throughfall reduction (drought) treatment from age 5 to 12, fertilization at age 5 and 10, and thinning at age 10 were examined. From stand age 5 to 12, drought treatment decreased standing volume by 7% and fertilization increased standing volume by 8%, offsetting one another, and thus fertilization compensated for potential drought conditions. Additionally, drought-induced plots had +10% basal area growth after meteorological drought conditions subsided. Under current management strategies and potential compensatory growth, loblolly pine plantations appear to be sustainable under a drier climate. Further, efficiency analysis was leveraged to examine all treatment's ability to turn volume growth and stand density into timber products, i.e., pulpwood, chip-n-saw, and sawtimber, at 21, 26, and 31 rotation ages. At all rotation ages, fertilized-thinned stands were perfectly efficient, yet overall fertilization had no effect, and showed negative synergistic interactions with drought (-24% efficient). Thinning had the greatest ability to maintain effective production; non-thinned stands demonstrated a 32% decrease in efficiency. Drought treatment decreased efficiency by 11% after 26 years. Efficiency scores support thinning as a regime staple and fertilization to be ineffective in the long-term. Together, growth analysis supports fertilization to biologically compensate for drought, but efficiency analysis suggests fertilization unable to compensate on a resource-use basis

On Proper Polynomial Maps of C2.\mathbb{C}^2.

Two proper polynomial maps $f_1, f_2 \colon \mathbb{C}^2 \longrightarrow \mathbb{C}^2$ are said to be \emph{equivalent} if there exist $\Phi_1, \Phi_2 \in \textrm{Aut}(\mathbb{C}^2)$ such that $f_2=\Phi_2 \circ f_1 \circ \Phi_1$. We investigate proper polynomial maps of arbitrary topological degree $d \geq 2$ up to equivalence. Under the further assumption that the maps are Galois coverings we also provide the complete description of equivalence classes. This widely extends previous results obtained by Lamy in the case $d=2$.Comment: 15 pages. Final version, to appear in Journal of Geometric Analysi

Secukinumab sustains improvement in signs and symptoms of psoriatic arthritis: 2 year results from the phase 3 FUTURE 2 study

Objectives. To assess long-term efficacy, safety and tolerability of secukinumab up to 104 weeks in patients with active PsA. Methods. Patients with PsA (n = 397) were randomized to s.c. secukinumab 300, 150 or 75 mg or placebo at baseline, weeks 1, 2, 3 and 4 and every 4 weeks thereafter. Placebo-treated patients were re-randomized to receive secukinumab 300 or 150 mg s.c. from week 16 (placebo non-responders) or week 24 (placebo responders). Exploratory endpoints at week 104 included 20, 50 and 70% improvement in ACR criteria (ACR20, 50, 70); 75 and 90% improvement in the Psoriasis Area Severity Index, 28-joint DAS with CRP, presence of dactylitis and enthesitis and other patient-reported outcomes. For binary variables, missing values were imputed; continuous variables were analysed by a mixed-effects model for repeated measures. Results. A total of 86/100 (86%), 76/100 (76%) and 65/99 (66%) patients in the secukinumab 300, 150 and 75 mg groups, respectively, completed 104 weeks. At week 104, ACR20 response rates after multiple imputation in the 300, 150 and 75 mg groups were 69.4, 64.4 and 50.3%, respectively. Sustained clinical improvements were observed through week 104 with secukinumab across other clinically important domains of PsA. Responses were sustained through week 104 regardless of prior anti-TNF-a use. Over the entire treatment period the incidence, type and severity of adverse events were consistent with those reported previously. Conclusion. Secukinumab provided sustained improvements in signs and symptoms and multiple clinical domains in patients of active PsA through 2 years of therapy. Secukinumab was well tolerated, with a safety profile consistent with that reported previously. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov (https://clinicaltrials.gov), NCT0175263

Commenting on music in Juvenal's sixth Satire

The satires of Juvenal were immensely popular in Renaissance Italy, printed in various forms over 70 times in the period 1469-1520, and five times in 1501 alone. The satires contain a wealth of references to instruments, instrumentalists, and playing practices that are frequently used in double entendres connoting lewd acts and infidelity, most potently in the sixth satire. The five Renaissance commentaries printed alongside the satires in 1501 editions suggest how much contemporary scholars wished to say, or indeed not say, about these saucy musical passages. This article will examine the ways in which contemporary commentators unpack and explain musical aspects of the sixth satire, their surprisingly detailed and determined efforts adding up to a distinctive strand of music-historical study that is in evidence across numerous books of commentated classical verse from our 1501 corpus

Looking up music in two ‘encyclopedias’ printed in 1501

A modern user of a printed encyclopedia expects to find concise entries on a wide range of subjects organised alphabetically for ease of reference. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a number of scholarly texts of a particularly long and wide-ranging character were essentially ‘encyclopedized’ through the provision of compendious subject indexes, appearing before the start of the text in some printed editions, to facilitate reference use. Two such texts that enjoyed a particular spike in Italian printed editions in the decades either side of 1501 were Niccolo Perotti's Cornucopiae, and the Aristotelian (or rather pseudo-Aristotelian) Problemata, which was sometimes packaged together with Problemata by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Plutarch. Working with 1501 ‘encyclopedized’ editions of both texts, this essay asks a simple question: what would a reader learn by looking up music-related terms in the indexes

Giovanni Pontano hears the street soundscape of Naples

Giovanni Pontano’s dialogue Antonius can be read almost as a thick description of the soundscape of a Neapolitan street in the mid- to late-15th century, complete with public announcements, street performers, domestic arguments, workers’ banter, charms and spells, processions, errand boys, bells, clocks, cockerels, and much more. Antonius was first printed in 1491, and then in a 1501 Opera edition alongside another dialogue, Charon, Pontano’s treatises De fortitudine, De principe and De obedientia, and his treatises on the “social virtues,” De liberalitate, De benificentia, De magnificentia, De splendore, and De conviventia. Using the street soundscape of Antonius as a framework, this essay interleaves both sonic reportage and reflections on the ethics and purpose of sound drawn from the other works included in the 1501 edition, to construct a rich and surprisingly detailed impression of the urban soundscape as it struck Pontano, or at least as he represented it in a literary context