Decreased spermatogonial quantity in prepubertal boys with leukaemia treated with alkylating agents

Non peer reviewe

Dynamic Interactive Social Cognition Training in Virtual Reality (DiSCoVR) for adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder:A feasibility study

Background: Social cognitive difficulties in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can affect the daily lives of people with ASD profoundly, impacting the development and maintenance of meaningful social relations. Social cognition training (SCT) is commonly used for improving social functioning, but lacks ecological validity and the ability to effectively mimic social situations. Development of virtual reality (VR) interventions, focusing on enhancing social cognition, could add to the effectiveness of SCT within ASD care, by offering a safe, interactive and practical training setting, where generalization of knowledge and skills to the real-world are promoted. In this paper, our primary aim is to evaluate the feasibility and acceptance by participants and therapists of the Dynamic Interactive Social Cognition Method: Training in Virtual Reality (DiSCoVR) protocol as developed for adults with schizophrenic spectrum disorder (SSD), adapted for ASD (DiSCoVR-A). 26 participants, aged 18-63, took part in a pilot study. 22 participants completed baseline and post-assessment, including primary outcome evaluation assessment through a semi-structured interview. Secondary measures focused on social cognition, emotion recognition, mental flexibility, social anxiety, empathy and social responsiveness and were assessed at baseline (T0), post-treatment (T1), and at follow-up (T2) sixteen weeks after completion of the intervention. Results: Our results show that the majority of participant and therapists found the VR intervention acceptable and feasible, as reported in evaluation questionnaires and interviews. Conclusion: These preliminary findings are promising; however, controlled research is needed to further investigate the effectiveness of VR within social cognition training for adults with ASD

Robotic Measurement of Aeolian Processes

Measurements used to study wind shear stress and turbulence, surface roughness, sand flux, and dust emissions are typically obtained from stationary instrumentation, and are thus limited spatially. They are also dependent on deployment of instrumentation for specific events and thus the are limited temporally. We have been adapting a rough-terrain legged robot capable of rapidly traversing desert terrain to serve as a semi-autonomous, reactive mobile sensory platform (RHex [1]), which would not share these limitations. We report on early trials of the robotic platform at the Jornada LTER and White Sands National Monument to test the feasibility of gathering measurements of airflow and rates of particle transport on a dune, assessing the role of roughness elements such as vegetation in modifying the wind shear stresses incident on the surface, and estimating erosion susceptibility in an arid soil. The robot not only serves as a mobile platform for science instruments; it can also perform controlled “kick tests” to locally examine soil strength. We outline a strategy for mapping soil erodibility and its controlling parameters using the unique capabilities of RHex, and the implications for understanding erosion and dust emission from complex terrain

Rapidly changing subglacial hydrological pathways at a tidewater glacier revealed through simultaneous observations of water pressure, supraglacial lakes, meltwater plumes and surface velocities

This work was funded by the Conoco Phillips-Lundin Northern Area Program through the CRIOS project (Calving Rates and Impact On Sea level, http://www.researchinsvalbard.no/project/7037). Penelope How is supported by a NERC PhD studentship.Subglacial hydrological processes at tidewater glaciers remain poorly understood due to the difficulty in obtaining direct measurements and lack of empirical verification for modelling approaches. Here, we investigate the subglacial hydrology of Kronebreen, a fast-flowing tidewater glacier in Svalbard during the 2014 melt season. We combine observations of borehole water pressure, supraglacial lake drainage, surface velocities and plume activity with modelled run-off and water routing to develop a conceptual model that thoroughly encapsulates subglacial drainage at a tidewater glacier. Simultaneous measurements suggest that an early-season episode of subglacial flushing took place during our observation period, and a stable efficient drainage system effectively transported subglacial water through the northern region of the glacier tongue. Drainage pathways through the central and southern regions of the glacier tongue were disrupted throughout the following melt season. Periodic plume activity at the terminus appears to be a signal for modulated subglacial pulsing, i.e. an internally driven storage and release of subglacial meltwater that operates independently of marine influences. This storage is a key control on ice flow in the 2014 melt season. Evidence from this work and previous studies strongly suggests that long-term changes in ice flow at Kronebreen are controlled by the location of efficient/inefficient drainage and the position of regions where water is stored and released.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Folate reference interval estimation in the Dutch general population

Background: Folate functions as an enzyme co-factor within the one-carbon metabolic pathway, providing key metabolites required for DNA synthesis and methylation. Hence, insufficient intake of folate can negatively affect health. As correct interpretation of folate status is dependent on a well-established reference interval, we set out to perform a new estimation following the restandardization of the Roche folate assay against the international folate standard. Materials and methods: The folate reference interval was estimated using samples obtained from the Dutch population-based Lifelines cohort. The reference interval was estimated using two methods: a nonparametric estimation combined with bootstrap resampling and by fitting the data to a gamma distribution. The lower reference limit was verified in a patient cohort by combined measurement of folate and homocysteine. Results: Dependent on the method used for estimation and in- or exclusion of individuals younger than 21 years of age, the lower reference limit ranged from 6.8 to 7.3 nmol/L and the upper reference limit ranged from 26 to 38.5 nmol/L. Applying a lower reference limit of 7.3 nmol/L resulted in the following percentage of folate deficiencies over a period of 12 months: general practitioner 15.5% (IQR 4.0%), general hospital 12.8% (IQR 5.3%), academic hospital 9.6% (IQR 4.3%). Conclusions: We estimated the folate reference interval in the Dutch general population which is not affected by a folic acid fortification program and verified the obtained lower reference limit by homocysteine measurements. Based on our results, we propose a folate reference interval independent of age of 7.3-38.5 nmol/

The relative contribution of climate to changes in lesser prairie-chicken abundance

Citation: Ross, B. E., Haukos, D., Hagen, C., & Pitman, J. (2016). The relative contribution of climate to changes in lesser prairie-chicken abundance. Ecosphere, 7(6), 11. doi:10.1002/ecs2.1323Managing for species using current weather patterns fails to incorporate the uncertainty associated with future climatic conditions; without incorporating potential changes in climate into conservation strategies, management and conservation efforts may fall short or waste valuable resources. Understanding the effects of climate change on species in the Great Plains of North America is especially important, as this region is projected to experience an increased magnitude of climate change. Of particular ecological and conservation interest is the lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus), which was listed as "threatened" under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in May 2014. We used Bayesian hierarchical models to quantify the effects of extreme climatic events (extreme values of the Palmer Drought Severity Index [PDSI]) relative to intermediate (changes in El Nino Southern Oscillation) and long-term climate variability (changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) on trends in lesser prairie-chicken abundance from 1981 to 2014. Our results indicate that lesser prairie-chicken abundance on leks responded to environmental conditions of the year previous by positively responding to wet springs (high PDSI) and negatively to years with hot, dry summers (low PDSI), but had little response to variation in the El Nino Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Additionally, greater variation in abundance on leks was explained by variation in site relative to broad-scale climatic indices. Consequently, lesser prairie-chicken abundance on leks in Kansas is more strongly influenced by extreme drought events during summer than other climatic conditions, which may have negative consequences for the population as drought conditions intensify throughout the Great Plains

Ground robotic measurement of aeolian processes

Models of aeolian processes rely on accurate measurements of the rates of sediment transport by wind, and careful evaluation of the environmental controls of these processes. Existing field approaches typically require intensive, event-based experiments involving dense arrays of instruments. These devices are often cumbersome and logistically difficult to set up and maintain, especially near steep or vegetated dune surfaces. Significant advances in instrumentation are needed to provide the datasets that are required to validate and improve mechanistic models of aeolian sediment transport. Recent advances in robotics show great promise for assisting and amplifying scientists’ efforts to increase the spatial and temporal resolution of many environmental measurements governing sediment transport. The emergence of cheap, agile, human-scale robotic platforms endowed with increasingly sophisticated sensor and motor suites opens up the prospect of deploying programmable, reactive sensor payloads across complex terrain in the service of aeolian science. This paper surveys the need and assesses the opportunities and challenges for amassing novel, highly resolved spatiotemporal datasets for aeolian research using partially-automated ground mobility. We review the limitations of existing measurement approaches for aeolian processes, and discuss how they may be transformed by ground-based robotic platforms, using examples from our initial field experiments. We then review how the need to traverse challenging aeolian terrains and simultaneously make high-resolution measurements of critical variables requires enhanced robotic capability. Finally, we conclude with a look to the future, in which robotic platforms may operate with increasing autonomy in harsh conditions. Besides expanding the completeness of terrestrial datasets, bringing ground-based robots to the aeolian research community may lead to unexpected discoveries that generate new hypotheses to expand the science itself. For more information: Kod*lab (http://kodlab.seas.upenn.edu/

A model for generating synthetic dendrites of cortical neurons

One of the main challenges in neuroscience is to define the detailed structural design of the nervous system. This challenge is one of the first steps towards understanding how neural circuits contribute to the functional organization of the nervous system. In the cerebral cortex pyramidal neurons are key elements in brain function as they represent the most abundant cortical neuronal type and the main source of cortical excitatory synapses. Therefore, many researchers are interested in the analysis of the microanatomy of pyramidal cells since it constitutes an excellent tool for better understanding cortical processing of information. Computational models of neuronal networks based on real cortical circuits have become useful tools for studying certain aspects of the functional organization of the neocortex. Neuronal morphologies (morphological models) represent key features in these functional models. For these purposes, synthetic or virtual dendritic trees can be generated through a morphological model of a given neuronal type based on real morphometric parameters obtained from intracellularly-filled single neurons. This paper presents a new method to construct virtual dendrites by means of sampling a branching model that represents the dendritic morphology. This method has been contrasted using complete basal dendrites from 374 layer II/III pyramidal neurons of the mouse neocortex

Determining Contaminant Distribution and Migration by Integrating Data from Multiple Cone Penetrometer-Based Tools

The cone penetrometer has been used for geologic characterization at the U.S. Department of Energy-owned Savannah River Site for the past seven years