Kikuchi-Fujimoto Disease in a 30-Year-Old Caucasian Female

Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease is a rare, self-limited, histiocytic, necrotizing lymphadenitis first described in Japan in 1972. Necrosis of lymph node tissue is caused by apoptosis and may be virally induced. It commonly presents with cervical lymphadenitis and fever. Despite its low incidence, Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease should be considered in patients with persistent lymphadenopathy. Originally thought to occur only in young Asian women, it is now recognized in other geographic regions. We report a 30-year-old white woman with Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease. We discuss the clinical features, differential diagnosis, radiography, pathology, and outcome

Managing Costa Rica\u27s Waste

In May 2010, Costa Rica passed the Law for the Integrated Management of Residues, which stated that lawmakers would pass specific decrees to improve solid waste management. We worked with GTZ and CYMA to provide recommendations for these decrees. We researched international programs and conducted a focus group and interviews with key stakeholders in order to determine feasible Market-Based Instruments to improve waste management. To this end, we recommend that Costa Rica gradually implement Eco-labeling, Pay-As-You-Throw, and Deposit-Refund

Delivering a “Dose of Hope”: A Faith-Based Program to Increase Older African Americans’ Participation in Clinical Trials

Background: Underrepresentation of older-age racial and ethnic minorities in clinical research is a significant barrier to health in the United States, as it impedes medical research advancement of effective preventive and therapeutic strategies. Objective: The objective of the study was to develop and test the feasibility of a community-developed faith-based intervention and evaluate its potential to increase the number of older African Americans in clinical research. Methods: Using a cluster-randomized design, we worked with six matched churches to enroll at least 210 persons. We provided those in the intervention group churches with three educational sessions on the role of clinical trials in addressing health disparity topics, and those in the comparison group completed surveys at the same timepoints. All persons enrolled in the study received ongoing information via newsletters and direct outreach on an array of clinical studies seeking participants. We evaluated the short-, mid-, and longer-term effects of the interventional program on clinical trial-related outcomes (ie, screening and enrollment)

Computation with Advice

Computation with advice is suggested as generalization of both computation with discrete advice and Type-2 Nondeterminism. Several embodiments of the generic concept are discussed, and the close connection to Weihrauch reducibility is pointed out. As a novel concept, computability with random advice is studied; which corresponds to correct solutions being guessable with positive probability. In the framework of computation with advice, it is possible to define computational complexity for certain concepts of hypercomputation. Finally, some examples are given which illuminate the interplay of uniform and non-uniform techniques in order to investigate both computability with advice and the Weihrauch lattice

Resting-state functional connectivity and reading subskills in children

Individual differences in reading ability have been linked to characteristics of functional connectivity in the brain in both children and adults. However, many previous studies have used single or composite measures of reading, leading to difficulty characterizing the role of functional connectivity in discrete subskills of reading. The present study addresses this issue using resting-state fMRI to examine how resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) related to individual differences in children\u27s reading subskills, including decoding, sight word reading, reading comprehension, and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Findings showed both positive and negative RSFC-behaviour relationships that diverged across different reading subskills. Positive relationships included increasing RSFC among left dorsal and anterior regions with increasing decoding proficiency, and increasing RSFC between the left thalamus and right fusiform gyrus with increasing sight word reading, RAN, and reading comprehension abilities. In contrast, negative relationships suggested greater functional segregation of attentional and reading networks with improved performance on RAN, decoding, and reading comprehension tasks. Importantly, the results suggest that although reading subskills rely to some extent on shared functional networks, there are also distinct functional connections supporting different components of reading ability in children

An Engineered Bivalent Neuregulin Protects Against Doxorubicin-Induced Cardiotoxicity With Reduced Proneoplastic Potential

Background—Doxorubicin (DOXO) is an effective anthracycline chemotherapeutic, but its use is limited by cumulative dose-dependent cardiotoxicity. Neuregulin-1β is an ErbB receptor family ligand that is effective against DOXO-induced cardiomyopathy in experimental models but is also proneoplastic. We previously showed that an engineered bivalent neuregulin-1β (NN) has reduced proneoplastic potential in comparison with the epidermal growth factor–like domain of neuregulin-1β (NRG), an effect mediated by receptor biasing toward ErbB3 homotypic interactions uncommonly formed by native neuregulin-1β. Here, we hypothesized that a newly formulated, covalent NN would be cardioprotective with reduced proneoplastic effects in comparison with NRG. Methods and Results—NN was expressed as a maltose-binding protein fusion in Escherichia coli. As established previously, NN stimulated antineoplastic or cytostatic signaling and phenotype in cancer cells, whereas NRG stimulated proneoplastic signaling and phenotype. In neonatal rat cardiomyocytes, NN and NRG induced similar downstream signaling. NN, like NRG, attenuated the double-stranded DNA breaks associated with DOXO exposure in neonatal rat cardiomyocytes and human cardiomyocytes derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. NN treatment significantly attenuated DOXO-induced decrease in fractional shortening as measured by blinded echocardiography in mice in a chronic cardiomyopathy model (57.7±0.6% versus 50.9±2.6%, P=0.004), whereas native NRG had no significant effect (49.4±3.7% versus 50.9±2.6%, P=0.813). Conclusions—NN is a cardioprotective agent that promotes cardiomyocyte survival and improves cardiac function in DOXO-induced cardiotoxicity. Given the reduced proneoplastic potential of NN versus NRG, NN has translational potential for cardioprotection in patients with cancer receiving anthracyclines.Stem Cell and Regenerative Biolog

Global ecosystems and fire: multi-model assessment of fire-induced tree cover and carbon storage reduction

In this study, we use simulations from seven global vegetation models to provide the first multi‐model estimate of fire impacts on global tree cover and the carbon cycle under current climate and anthropogenic land use conditions, averaged for the years 2001‐2012. Fire reduces the tree covered area and vegetation carbon storage by 10%. Regionally the effects are much stronger, up to 20% for certain latitudinal bands, and 17% in savanna regions. Global fire effects on total carbon storage and carbon turnover times are lower with the effect on gross primary productivity (GPP) close to zero. We find the strongest impacts of fire in savanna regions. Climatic conditions in regions with the highest burned area differ from regions with highest absolute fire impact, which are characterized by higher precipitation. Our estimates of fire‐induced vegetation change are lower than previous studies. We attribute these differences to different definitions of vegetation change and effects of anthropogenic land use, which were not considered in previous studies and decreases the impact of fire on tree cover. Accounting for fires significantly improves the spatial patterns of simulated tree cover, which demonstrates the need to represent fire in dynamic vegetation models. Based upon comparisons between models and observations, process understanding and representation in models, we assess a higher confidence in the fire impact on tree cover and vegetation carbon compared to GPP, total carbon storage and turnover times. We have higher confidence in the spatial patterns compared to the global totals of the simulated fire impact. As we used an ensemble of state‐of‐the‐art fire models, including effects of land use and the ensemble median or mean compares better to observational datasets than any individual model, we consider the here presented results to be the current best estimate of global fire effects on ecosystems

PINT: A Modern Software Package for Pulsar Timing

Over the past few decades, the measurement precision of some pulsar-timing experiments has advanced from ~10 us to ~10 ns, revealing many subtle phenomena. Such high precision demands both careful data handling and sophisticated timing models to avoid systematic error. To achieve these goals, we present PINT (PINT Is Not Tempo3), a high-precision Python pulsar timing data analysis package, which is hosted on GitHub and available on Python Package Index (PyPI) as pint-pulsar. PINT is well-tested, validated, object-oriented, and modular, enabling interactive data analysis and providing an extensible and flexible development platform for timing applications. It utilizes well-debugged public Python packages (e.g., the NumPy and Astropy libraries) and modern software development schemes (e.g., version control and efficient development with git and GitHub) and a continually expanding test suite for improved reliability, accuracy, and reproducibility. PINT is developed and implemented without referring to, copying, or transcribing the code from other traditional pulsar timing software packages (e.g., TEMPO and TEMPO2) and therefore provides a robust tool for cross-checking timing analyses and simulating pulse arrival times. In this paper, we describe the design, usage, and validation of PINT, and we compare timing results between it and TEMPO and TEMPO2.Comment: Re-submitted to the Astrophysical Journal at December 31st, 202

Implementation of U.K. Earth system models for CMIP6

We describe the scientific and technical implementation of two models for a core set of experiments contributing to the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). The models used are the physical atmosphere-land-ocean-sea ice model HadGEM3-GC3.1 and the Earth system model UKESM1 which adds a carbon-nitrogen cycle and atmospheric chemistry to HadGEM3-GC3.1. The model results are constrained by the external boundary conditions (forcing data) and initial conditions.We outline the scientific rationale and assumptions made in specifying these. Notable details of the implementation include an ozone redistribution scheme for prescribed ozone simulations (HadGEM3-GC3.1) to avoid inconsistencies with the model's thermal tropopause, and land use change in dynamic vegetation simulations (UKESM1) whose influence will be subject to potential biases in the simulation of background natural vegetation.We discuss the implications of these decisions for interpretation of the simulation results. These simulations are expensive in terms of human and CPU resources and will underpin many further experiments; we describe some of the technical steps taken to ensure their scientific robustness and reproducibility