Anion exchange membrane soil nitrate predicts turfgrass color and yield.

Desirable nitrogen (N) management practices for turfgrass supply sufficient N for high quality turf while limiting excess soil N. Previous studies suggested the potential of anion exchange membranes (AEMs) for predicting turfgrass color, quality, or yield. However, these studies suggested a wide range of critical soil nitrate-nitrogen (NO3-N) values across sample dates. A field experiment, in randomized complete block design with treatments consisting of nine N application rates, was conducted on a mixed species cool-season turfgrass lawn across two growing seasons. Every 2 wk from May to October, turfgrass color was assessed with three different reflectance meters, and soil NO3-N was measured with in situ AEMs. Cate-Nelson models were developed comparing relative reflectance value and yield to AEM desorbed soil NO3-N pooled across all sample dates. These models predicted critical AEM soil NO3-N values from 0. 45 to 1.4 micro g cm-2 d-1. Turf had a low probability of further positive response to AEM soil NO3-N greater than these critical values. These results suggest that soil NO3-N critical values from AEMs may be applicable across sample dates and years and may serve to guide N fertilization to limit excess soil NO3-N

Induced Parity Nonconserving Interaction and Enhancement of Two-Nucleon Parity Nonconserving Forces

Two-nucleon parity nonconserving (PNC) interaction induced by the single-particle PNC weak potential and the two-nucleon residual strong interaction is considered. An approximate analytical formula for this Induced PNC Interaction (IPNCI) between proton and neutron is derived ($Q({\bf r} {\bf \sigma}_{p} \times {\bf \sigma}_{n}) \delta({\bf r}_{p}-{\bf r}_{n})$), and the interaction constant is estimated. As a result of coherent contributions from the nucleons to the PNC potential, IPNCI is an order of magnitude stronger ($\sim A^{1/3}$) than the residual weak two-nucleon interaction and has a different coordinate and isotopic structure (e.g., the strongest part of IPNCI does not contribute to the PNC mean field). IPNCI plays an important role in the formation of PNC effects, e.g., in neutron-nucleus reactions. In that case, it is a technical way to take into account the contribution of the distant (small) components of a compound state which dominates the result. The absence of such enhancement ($\sim A^{1/3}$) in the case of T- and P-odd interaction completes the picture.Comment: Phys. Rev. C, to appear; 17 pages, revtex 3, no figure

Comparing the efficacy, safety, and utility of intensive insulin algorithms for a primary care practice

Diabetes management is firmly based within the primary care community. Landmark randomized, controlled trials have demonstrated that even modest reductions in glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) can yield improvements in economic and medical end-points. Diabetes is a chronic, progressive disease associated with loss of pancreatic β-cell function. Therefore, most patients will eventually require insulin therapies in order to achieve their individualized targeted HbA1c as their β-cell function and mass wanes. Although clinicians understand the importance of early insulin initiation, there is little agreement as to when to introduce insulin as a therapeutic option. Once initiated, questions remain as to whether to allow the patients to self-titrate their dose or whether the dosing should be tightly regulated by the clinician. Physicians have many evidence-based basal insulin protocols from which to choose, all of which have been shown to drive HbA1c levels to the American Diabetes Association target of ≤7%. This article will discuss ways by which insulin therapies can be effectively introduced to patients within busy primary care practices. Published evidence-based basal insulin protocols will be evaluated for safety and efficacy

Effect of nesiritide in patients with acute decompensated heart failure

Background Nesiritide is approved in the United States for early relief of dyspnea in patients with acute heart failure. Previous meta-analyses have raised questions regarding renal toxicity and the mortality associated with this agent. Methods We randomly assigned 7141 patients who were hospitalized with acute heart failure to receive either nesiritide or placebo for 24 to 168 hours in addition to standard care. Coprimary end points were the change in dyspnea at 6 and 24 hours, as measured on a 7-point Likert scale, and the composite end point of rehospitalization for heart failure or death within 30 days. Results Patients randomly assigned to nesiritide, as compared with those assigned to placebo, more frequently reported markedly or moderately improved dyspnea at 6 hours (44.5% vs. 42.1%, P = 0.03) and 24 hours (68.2% vs. 66.1%, P = 0.007), but the prespecified level for significance (P≤0.005 for both assessments or P≤0.0025 for either) was not met. The rate of rehospitalization for heart failure or death from any cause within 30 days was 9.4% in the nesiritide group versus 10.1% in the placebo group (absolute difference, −0.7 percentage points; 95% confidence interval [CI], −2.1 to 0.7; P = 0.31). There were no significant differences in rates of death from any cause at 30 days (3.6% with nesiritide vs. 4.0% with placebo; absolute difference, −0.4 percentage points; 95% CI, −1.3 to 0.5) or rates of worsening renal function, defined by more than a 25% decrease in the estimated glomerular filtration rate (31.4% vs. 29.5%; odds ratio, 1.09; 95% CI, 0.98 to 1.21; P = 0.11). Conclusions Nesiritide was not associated with an increase or a decrease in the rate of death and rehospitalization and had a small, nonsignificant effect on dyspnea when used in combination with other therapies. It was not associated with a worsening of renal function, but it was associated with an increase in rates of hypotension. On the basis of these results, nesiritide cannot be recommended for routine use in the broad population of patients with acute heart failure. (Funded by Scios; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00475852.

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