The Fetal Allograft Revisited: Does the Study of an Ancient Invertebrate Species Shed Light on the Role of Natural Killer Cells at the Maternal-Fetal Interface?

Human pregnancy poses a fundamental immunological problem because the placenta and fetus are genetically different from the host mother. Classical transplantation theory has not provided a plausible solution to this problem. Study of naturally occurring allogeneic chimeras in the colonial marine invertebrate, Botryllus schlosseri, has yielded fresh insight into the primitive development of allorecognition, especially regarding the role of natural killer (NK) cells. Uterine NK cells have a unique phenotype that appears to parallel aspects of the NK-like cells in the allorecognition system of B. schlosseri. Most notably, both cell types recognize and reject "missing self" and both are involved in the generation of a common vascular system between two individuals. Chimeric combination in B. schlosseri results in vascular fusion between two individual colonies; uterine NK cells appear essential to the establishment of adequate maternal-fetal circulation. Since human uterine NK cells appear to de-emphasize primary immunological function, it is proposed that they may share the same evolutionary roots as the B. schlosseri allorecognition system rather than a primary origin in immunity

Still Fugacious After All These Years: A Sequel to the Basic Primer on Arkansas Oil and Gas Law

This sequel to the authors\u27 2007 article, Fugacious 1, follows the same outline and considers the same topics as the original article while considering the major developments since Fugacious 1 was published. Whereas Fugacious 1 was a basic primer on Arkansas oil and gas law, this article supplements the development of Arkansas oil and gas law over the last five years through an overview of the litigation concerning the Fayetteville Shale Play. Specifically, the article expands on those topics covered by Fugacious 1 needing revision or supplementation, while simply noting as such the sections where no revision or supplementation is necessary. The authors begin their supplementation by considering the ownership of natural gas found within coal formations and conclude that a coal owner may vent coal-bed methane away from its operations pursuant to safe mining practices while owing nothing to the gas owner for the gas lost as a result thereof. However, the coal owner may not capture and sell the coal-bed methane without the gas owner\u27s permission. Next, the article discusses two recent Arkansas Court of Appeals cases considering reservation language in reservation deeds. The article then discusses the evolution of the Strohacker doctrine in Arkansas, concluding that the area where evidence of knowledge of oil and gas as mineral is relevant is not precisely limited to the county containing the lands. The authors then consider problems with severing minerals, and Arkansas\u27 Duhig doctrine, a bright line rule of property regarding mineral interests which applies to warranty deeds but not to quit-claim deeds. The authors examine a recent case where their opinion from Fugacious 1, that every purported tax forfeiture of a severed mineral interest for a tax year prior to 1986 was void for failure of the tax assessors in Arkansas\u27s various counties to properly subjoin mineral assessments to surface assessments of the same lands prior to 1985 legislation, which removed the subjoinder requirement, was proven correct. The authors discuss ingress and egress, and a recent Arkansas Supreme Court holding where the Court found that Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission\u27s General Rule B-42 requires express permission to conduct seismic testing despite the tester\u27s ingress and egress right. Regarding oil and gas leases, the authors provide a thorough analysis of the revised Ark. Code Ann. § 15-73-701 and its implications to the oil and gas business. The authors finish their supplementation with a discussion of implied covenants in leases and the prudent operator standard codified in Ark. Code Ann. § 15-73-701, the Rule of Capture, and the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission\u27s jurisdiction to interpret contracts. In conclusion, the article notes that as this area of the law continues to develop and generate complex litigation, more issues are sure to sure to arise in the years to come

Still Fugacious After All These Years: A Sequel to the Basic Primer on Arkansas Oil and Gas Law

This sequel to the authors\u27 2007 article, Fugacious 1, follows the same outline and considers the same topics as the original article while considering the major developments since Fugacious 1 was published. Whereas Fugacious 1 was a basic primer on Arkansas oil and gas law, this article supplements the development of Arkansas oil and gas law over the last five years through an overview of the litigation concerning the Fayetteville Shale Play. Specifically, the article expands on those topics covered by Fugacious 1 needing revision or supplementation, while simply noting as such the sections where no revision or supplementation is necessary. The authors begin their supplementation by considering the ownership of natural gas found within coal formations and conclude that a coal owner may vent coal-bed methane away from its operations pursuant to safe mining practices while owing nothing to the gas owner for the gas lost as a result thereof. However, the coal owner may not capture and sell the coal-bed methane without the gas owner\u27s permission. Next, the article discusses two recent Arkansas Court of Appeals cases considering reservation language in reservation deeds. The article then discusses the evolution of the Strohacker doctrine in Arkansas, concluding that the area where evidence of knowledge of oil and gas as mineral is relevant is not precisely limited to the county containing the lands. The authors then consider problems with severing minerals, and Arkansas\u27 Duhig doctrine, a bright line rule of property regarding mineral interests which applies to warranty deeds but not to quit-claim deeds. The authors examine a recent case where their opinion from Fugacious 1, that every purported tax forfeiture of a severed mineral interest for a tax year prior to 1986 was void for failure of the tax assessors in Arkansas\u27s various counties to properly subjoin mineral assessments to surface assessments of the same lands prior to 1985 legislation, which removed the subjoinder requirement, was proven correct. The authors discuss ingress and egress, and a recent Arkansas Supreme Court holding where the Court found that Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission\u27s General Rule B-42 requires express permission to conduct seismic testing despite the tester\u27s ingress and egress right. Regarding oil and gas leases, the authors provide a thorough analysis of the revised Ark. Code Ann. § 15-73-701 and its implications to the oil and gas business. The authors finish their supplementation with a discussion of implied covenants in leases and the prudent operator standard codified in Ark. Code Ann. § 15-73-701, the Rule of Capture, and the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission\u27s jurisdiction to interpret contracts. In conclusion, the article notes that as this area of the law continues to develop and generate complex litigation, more issues are sure to sure to arise in the years to come

Well, Now, Ain\u27t That Just Fugacious!: A Basic Primer on Arkansas Oil and Gas Law

This brief introduction about oil and gas law in Arkansas is intended to help lawyers to better serve their clients and to explore the most important issues and concepts of a complex area of the law. This introduction into oil and gas involves the following: unfamiliar definitions; familiar words that are peculiar to this area of the law; new legal doctrines that are also peculiar to this area of the law; practice pointers in conveyance and estate planning in which involve mineral rights; discussions of tax forfeitures; adverse possession and surface rights, as they relate to these rights a blueprint of a typical oil and gas lease; an explanation of certain covenants that the law adds to or reads into those mineral leases; an explanation of the origins and fallacies of the common law Rule of Capture, leading into a discussion of Arkansas\u27s current oil and gas regulatory environments; and finally, an explication of the practical and philosophical underpinnings of oil and gas law and practice

The Fetal Allograft Revisited: Does the Study of an Ancient Invertebrate Species Shed Light on the Role of Natural Killer Cells at the Maternal-Fetal Interface?

Human pregnancy poses a fundamental immunological problem because the placenta and fetus are genetically different from the host mother. Classical transplantation theory has not provided a plausible solution to this problem. Study of naturally occurring allogeneic chimeras in the colonial marine invertebrate, Botryllus schlosseri, has yielded fresh insight into the primitive development of allorecognition, especially regarding the role of natural killer (NK) cells. Uterine NK cells have a unique phenotype that appears to parallel aspects of the NK-like cells in the allorecognition system of B. schlosseri. Most notably, both cell types recognize and reject “missing self” and both are involved in the generation of a common vascular system between two individuals. Chimeric combination in B. schlosseri results in vascular fusion between two individual colonies; uterine NK cells appear essential to the establishment of adequate maternal-fetal circulation. Since human uterine NK cells appear to de-emphasize primary immunological function, it is proposed that they may share the same evolutionary roots as the B. schlosseri allorecognition system rather than a primary origin in immunity

Neonatal pain detection in videos using the iCOPEvid dataset and an ensemble of descriptors extracted from Gaussian of Local Descriptors

Diagnosing pain in neonates is difficult but critical. Although approximately thirty manual pain instruments have been developed for neonatal pain diagnosis, most are complex, multifactorial, and geared toward research. The goals of this work are twofold: 1) to develop a new video dataset for automatic neonatal pain detection called iCOPEvid (infant Classification Of Pain Expressions videos), and 2) to present a classification system that sets a challenging comparison performance on this dataset. The iCOPEvid dataset contains 234 videos of 49 neonates experiencing a set of noxious stimuli, a period of rest, and an acute pain stimulus. From these videos 20 s segments are extracted and grouped into two classes: pain (49) and nopain (185), with the nopain video segments handpicked to produce a highly challenging dataset. An ensemble of twelve global and local descriptors with a Bag-of-Features approach is utilized to improve the performance of some new descriptors based on Gaussian of Local Descriptors (GOLD). The basic classifier used in the ensembles is the Support Vector Machine, and decisions are combined by sum rule. These results are compared with standard methods, some deep learning approaches, and 185 human assessments. Our best machine learning methods are shown to outperform the human judges

Going to the exclusive show : exhibition strategies and moviegoing memories of Disneys animated feature films in Ghent (1937-1982)

This is a case study of the exploitation and experience of Disney's animated feature films from the 1930s to the 1980s in Ghent (Belgium). It is a historical study of programming practices and financial strategies which constructed childhood memories on watching Disney. The study is a contribution to a historical understanding of the implications of global distribution of film as cultural products and the counter pull of localism. Using a multi-method approach, the argument is made that the scarce screenings were strategically programmed to uplift the moviegoing experience into something out of the ordinary in everyday life. Programming and revenue data characterize the screenings as exclusive and generating high intakes. Consequently, the remembered screenings did not exhale an easy accessible social status nor an image of pervasiveness of popular childhood film, contradictory to conventional accounts of Disney's ubiquity in popular culture

Consensus Pathways Implicated in Prognosis of Colorectal Cancer Identified Through Systematic Enrichment Analysis of Gene Expression Profiling Studies

Background: A large number of gene expression profiling (GEP) studies on prognosis of colorectal cancer (CRC) has been performed, but no reliable gene signature for prediction of CRC prognosis has been found. Bioinformatic enrichment tools are a powerful approach to identify biological processes in high-throughput data analysis. Principal Findings: We have for the first time collected the results from the 23 so far published independent GEP studies on CRC prognosis. In these 23 studies, 1475 unique, mapped genes were identified, from which 124 (8.4%) were reported in at least two studies, with 54 of them showing consisting direction in expression change between the single studies. Using these data, we attempted to overcome the lack of reproducibility observed in the genes reported in individual GEP studies by carrying out a pathway-based enrichment analysis. We used up to ten tools for overrepresentation analysis of Gene Ontology (GO) categories or Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways in each of the three gene lists (1475, 124 and 54 genes). This strategy, based on testing multiple tools, allowed us to identify the oxidative phosphorylation chain and the extracellular matrix receptor interaction categories, as well as a general category related to cell proliferation and apoptosis, as the only significantly and consistently overrepresented pathways in the three gene lists, which were reported by several enrichment tools. Conclusions: Our pathway-based enrichment analysis of 23 independent gene expression profiling studies on prognosis of CRC identified significantly and consistently overrepresented prognostic categories for CRC. These overrepresented categories have been functionally clearly related with cancer progression, and deserve further investigation

Views of new internal medicine faculty of their preparedness and competence in physician-patient communication

BACKGROUND: We sought to assess self-rated importance of the medical interview to clinical practice and competence in physician-patient communication among new internal medicine faculty at an academic medical center. METHODS: Since 2001, new internal medicine faculty at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine (Rochester, Minnesota) have completed a survey on physician-patient communication. The survey asks the new faculty to rate their overall competence in medical interviewing, the importance of the medical interview to their practice, their confidence and adequacy of previous training in handling eight frequently encountered challenging communication scenarios, and whether they would benefit from additional communication training. RESULTS: Between 2001 and 2004, 75 general internists and internal medicine subspecialists were appointed to the faculty, and of these, 58 (77%) completed the survey. The faculty rated (on a 10-point scale) the importance of the medical interview higher than their competence in interviewing; this difference was significant (average ± SD, 9.4 ± 1.0 vs 7.7 ± 1.2, P < .001). Similar results were obtained by sex, age, specialty, years since residency or fellowship training, and perceived benefit of training. Experienced faculty rated their competence in medical interviewing and the importance of the medical interview higher than recent graduates (ie, less than one year since training). For each challenging communication scenario, the new faculty rated the adequacy of their previous training in handling the scenario relatively low. A majority (57%) said they would benefit from additional communication training. CONCLUSION: Although new internal medicine faculty rate high the importance of the medical interview, they rate their competence and adequacy of previous training in medical interviewing relatively low, and many indicate that they would benefit from additional communication training. These results should encourage academic medical centers to make curricula in physician-patient communication available to their faculty members because many of them not only care for patients, but also teach clinical skills, including communication skills, to trainees