Catch Shares in Action: United States Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Non-Pollock (Amendment 80) Cooperative Program

The Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands (BSAI) Non-Pollock (Amendment 80) Cooperative Program was one of the first catch share programs designed and implemented to manage fishing interactions with a non-target species. The goals of the program were largely focused on reducing bycatch to enable the fleet to achieve higher retention of groundfish resources. In this program, participants were incentivized to form Cooperatives to receive exclusive access privileges. Key design elements for this program include eligibility requirements, government-approved Cooperative formation, concentration caps, trading restrictions and sideboards, which are catch limits that restrict the transfer of excess fishing capacity to other fisheries not managed under catch shares

Catch Shares in Action: United States Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Crab Rationalization Program

The Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands (BSAI) Crab Rationalization Program (the Rationalization Program) was designed to improve resource conservation, operating efficiency and fishermen's safety while maintaining participation by remote communities. A number of important features account for the diverse natures of stakeholders and the fishery's historical importance to many communities. These include: a unique three-pie approach that defines and assigns different types of privileges to vessel owners, crew and processors; an industry-funded, government-operated loan program to assist new entrants and crew; and voluntary Cooperatives that assist in program administration and fishing coordination

Catch Shares in Action: United States Central Gulf of Alaska Rockfish Cooperative Program

The United States Central Gulf of Alaska Rockfish Cooperative Program was implemented to address economic instability in Kodiak, Alaska, caused by an intense race to fish, fleet overcapitalization, shrinking seasons and timing conflicts with other fisheries. The program is designed to protect historical fishing communities and jobs by extending secure fishing privileges to eligible Cooperatives in tandem with associated delivery restrictions to processors. Key design elements for this program include shareholder eligibility requirements, Cooperative formation, concentration caps, delivery restrictions, prohibition of discards, and sideboard limits, which are catch limits that keep rockfish participants from exceeding their historical levels of participation in other fisheries during the month of July

Rational Design of Mechanism-Based Inhibitors and Activity-Based Probes for the Identification of Retaining α-l-Arabinofuranosidases

Identifying and characterizing the enzymes responsible for an observed activity within a complex eukaryotic catabolic system remains one of the most significant challenges in the study of biomass-degrading systems. The debranching of both complex hemicellulosic and pectinaceous polysaccharides requires the production of α-l-arabinofuranosidases among a wide variety of coexpressed carbohydrate-active enzymes. To selectively detect and identify α-l-arabinofuranosidases produced by fungi grown on complex biomass, potential covalent inhibitors and probes which mimic α-l-arabinofuranosides were sought. The conformational free energy landscapes of free α-l-arabinofuranose and several rationally designed covalent α-l-arabinofuranosidase inhibitors were analyzed. A synthetic route to these inhibitors was subsequently developed based on a key Wittig-Still rearrangement. Through a combination of kinetic measurements, intact mass spectrometry, and structural experiments, the designed inhibitors were shown to efficiently label the catalytic nucleophiles of retaining GH51 and GH54 α-l-arabinofuranosidases. Activity-based probes elaborated from an inhibitor with an aziridine warhead were applied to the identification and characterization of α-l-arabinofuranosidases within the secretome of A. niger grown on arabinan. This method was extended to the detection and identification of α-l-arabinofuranosidases produced by eight biomass-degrading basidiomycete fungi grown on complex biomass. The broad applicability of the cyclophellitol-derived activity-based probes and inhibitors presented here make them a valuable new tool in the characterization of complex eukaryotic carbohydrate-degrading systems and in the high-throughput discovery of α-l-arabinofuranosidases

Magnetic resonance imaging findings in 46 elbows with a radial head fracture

Radial head fractures are common, and may be associated with other injuries of clinical importance. We present the results of a standard additional MRI scan for patients with a radial head fracture. PATIENTS AND METhods: 44 patients (mean age 47 years) with 46 radial head fractures underwent MRI. 17 elbows had a Mason type-I fracture, 23 a Mason type-II fracture, and 6 elbows had a Mason type-III fracture. Associated injuries were found in 35 elbows: 28 elbows had a lateral collateral ligament lesion, 18 had capitellar injury, 1 had a coronoid fracture, and 1 elbow had medial collateral ligament injury. The incidence of associated injuries with radial head fractures found with MRI was high. The clinical relevance should be investigate

The osteoarthritis prevention study (TOPS) - A randomized controlled trial of diet and exercise to prevent Knee Osteoarthritis:Design and rationale

Background: Osteoarthritis (OA), the leading cause of disability among adults, has no cure and is associated with significant comorbidities. The premise of this randomized clinical trial is that, in a population at risk, a 48-month program of dietary weight loss and exercise will result in less incident structural knee OA compared to control. Methods/design: The Osteoarthritis Prevention Study (TOPS) is a Phase III, assessor-blinded, 48-month, parallel 2 arm, multicenter randomized clinical trial designed to reduce the incidence of structural knee OA. The study objective is to assess the effects of a dietary weight loss, exercise, and weight-loss maintenance program in preventing the development of structural knee OA in females at risk for the disease. TOPS will recruit 1230 ambulatory, community dwelling females with obesity (Body Mass Index (BMI) ​≥ ​30 ​kg/m2) and aged ≥50 years with no radiographic (Kellgren-Lawrence grade ≤1) and no magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) evidence of OA in the eligible knee, with no or infrequent knee pain. Incident structural knee OA (defined as tibiofemoral and/or patellofemoral OA on MRI) assessed at 48-months from intervention initiation using the MRI Osteoarthritis Knee Score (MOAKS) is the primary outcome. Secondary outcomes include knee pain, 6-min walk distance, health-related quality of life, knee joint loading during gait, inflammatory biomarkers, and self-efficacy. Cost effectiveness and budgetary impact analyses will determine the value and affordability of this intervention. Discussion: This study will assess the efficacy and cost effectiveness of a dietary weight loss, exercise, and weight-loss maintenance program designed to reduce incident knee OA.Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT05946044.</p

Empathy matters: ERP evidence for inter-individual differences in social language processing

When an adult claims he cannot sleep without his teddy bear, people tend to react surprised. Language interpretation is, thus, influenced by social context, such as who the speaker is. The present study reveals inter-individual differences in brain reactivity to social aspects of language. Whereas women showed brain reactivity when stereotype-based inferences about a speaker conflicted with the content of the message, men did not. This sex difference in social information processing can be explained by a specific cognitive trait, one’s ability to empathize. Individuals who empathize to a greater degree revealed larger N400 effects (as well as a larger increase in γ-band power) to socially relevant information. These results indicate that individuals with high-empathizing skills are able to rapidly integrate information about the speaker with the content of the message, as they make use of voice-based inferences about the speaker to process language in a top-down manner. Alternatively, individuals with lower empathizing skills did not use information about social stereotypes in implicit sentence comprehension, but rather took a more bottom-up approach to the processing of these social pragmatic sentences

Report from the second cytomegalovirus and immunosenescence workshop.

The Second International Workshop on CMV & Immunosenescence was held in Cambridge, UK, 2-4th December, 2010. The presentations covered four separate sessions: cytomegalovirus and T cell phenotypes; T cell memory frequency, inflation and immunosenescence; cytomegalovirus in aging, mortality and disease states; and the immunobiology of cytomegalovirus-specific T cells and effects of the virus on vaccination. This commentary summarizes the major findings of these presentations and references subsequently published work from the presenter laboratory where appropriate and draws together major themes that were subsequently discussed along with new areas of interest that were highlighted by this discussion.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

hardRain: An R package for quick, automated rainfall detection in ecoacoustic datasets using a threshold-based approach

The increasing demand for cost-efficient biodiversity data at large spatiotemporal scales has led to an increase in the collection of large ecoacoustic datasets. Whilst the ease of collection and storage of audio data has rapidly increased and costs fallen, methods for robust analysis of the data have not developed so quickly. Identification and classification of audio signals to species level is extremely desirable, but reliability can be highly affected by non-target noise, especially rainfall. Despite this demand, there are few easily applicable pre-processing methods available for rainfall detection for conservation practitioners and ecologists. Here, we use threshold values of two simple measures, Power Spectrum Density (amplitude) and Signal-to-Noise Ratio at two frequency bands, to differentiate between the presence and absence of heavy rainfall. We assess the effect of using different threshold values on Accuracy and Specificity. We apply the method to four datasets from both tropical and temperate regions, and find that it has up to 99% accuracy on tropical datasets (e.g. from the Brazilian Amazon), but performs less well in temperate environments. This is likely due to the intensity of rainfall in tropical forests and its falling on dense, broadleaf vegetation amplifying the sound. We show that by choosing between different threshold values, informed trade-offs can be made between Accuracy and Specificity, thus allowing the exclusion of large amounts of audio data containing rainfall in all locations without the loss of data not containing rain. We assess the impact of using different sample sizes of audio data to set threshold values, and find that 200 15 s audio files represents an optimal trade-off between effort, accuracy and specificity in most scenarios. This methodology and accompanying R package ‘hardRain’ is the first automated rainfall detection tool for pre-processing large acoustic datasets without the need for any additional rain gauge data