Common and gender-specific associations with cocaine use on gray matter volume: Data from the ENIGMA addiction working group

Gray matter volume (GMV) in frontal cortical and limbic regions is susceptible to cocaine-associated reductions in cocaine-dependent individuals (CD) and is negatively associated with duration of cocaine use. Gender differences in CD individuals have been reported clinically and in the context of neural responses to cue-induced craving and stress reactivity. The variability of GMV in select brain areas between men and women (e.g., limbic regions) underscores the importance of exploring interaction effects between gender and cocaine dependence on brain structure. Therefore, voxel-based morphometry data derived from the ENIGMA Addiction Consortium were used to investigate potential gender differences in GMV in CD individuals compared to matched controls (CTL). T1-weighted MRI scans and clinical data were pooled from seven sites yielding 420 gender- and age-matched participants: CD men (CDM, n = 140); CD women (CDW, n = 70); control men (CTLM, n = 140); and control women (CTLW, n = 70). Differences in GMV were assessed using a 2 × 2 ANCOVA, and voxelwise whole-brain linear regressions were conducted to explore relationships between GMV and duration of cocaine use. All analyses were corrected for age, total intracranial volume, and site. Diagnostic differences were predominantly found in frontal regions (CD < CTL). Interestingly, gender × diagnosis interactions in the left anterior insula and left lingual gyrus were also documented, driven by differences in women (CDW < CTLW). Further, lower right hippocampal GMV was associated with greater cocaine duration in CDM. Given the importance of the anterior insula to interoception and the hippocampus to learning contextual associations, results may point to gender-specific mechanisms in cocaine addiction

Hamiltonian submanifolds of regular polytopes

We investigate polyhedral $2k$-manifolds as subcomplexes of the boundary complex of a regular polytope. We call such a subcomplex {\it $k$-Hamiltonian} if it contains the full $k$-skeleton of the polytope. Since the case of the cube is well known and since the case of a simplex was also previously studied (these are so-called {\it super-neighborly triangulations}) we focus on the case of the cross polytope and the sporadic regular 4-polytopes. By our results the existence of 1-Hamiltonian surfaces is now decided for all regular polytopes. Furthermore we investigate 2-Hamiltonian 4-manifolds in the $d$-dimensional cross polytope. These are the "regular cases" satisfying equality in Sparla's inequality. In particular, we present a new example with 16 vertices which is highly symmetric with an automorphism group of order 128. Topologically it is homeomorphic to a connected sum of 7 copies of $S^2 \times S^2$. By this example all regular cases of $n$ vertices with $n < 20$ or, equivalently, all cases of regular $d$-polytopes with $d\leq 9$ are now decided.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figure

HighP–TNano-Mechanics of Polycrystalline Nickel

We have conducted highP–Tsynchrotron X-ray and time-of-flight neutron diffraction experiments as well as indentation measurements to study equation of state, constitutive properties, and hardness of nanocrystalline and bulk nickel. Our lattice volume–pressure data present a clear evidence of elastic softening in nanocrystalline Ni as compared with the bulk nickel. We show that the enhanced overall compressibility of nanocrystalline Ni is a consequence of the higher compressibility of the surface shell of Ni nanocrystals, which supports the results of molecular dynamics simulation and a generalized model of a nanocrystal with expanded surface layer. The analytical methods we developed based on the peak-profile of diffraction data allow us to identify “micro/local” yield due to high stress concentration at the grain-to-grain contacts and “macro/bulk” yield due to deviatoric stress over the entire sample. The graphic approach of our strain/stress analyses can also reveal the corresponding yield strength, grain crushing/growth, work hardening/softening, and thermal relaxation under highP–Tconditions, as well as the intrinsic residual/surface strains in the polycrystalline bulks. From micro-indentation measurements, we found that a low-temperature annealing (T < 0.4 Tm) hardens nanocrystalline Ni, leading to an inverse Hall–Petch relationship. We explain this abnormal Hall–Petch effect in terms of impurity segregation to the grain boundaries of the nanocrystalline Ni

Search for jet extinction in the inclusive jet-pT spectrum from proton-proton collisions at s=8 TeV

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published articles title, journal citation, and DOI.The first search at the LHC for the extinction of QCD jet production is presented, using data collected with the CMS detector corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 10.7  fb−1 of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The extinction model studied in this analysis is motivated by the search for signatures of strong gravity at the TeV scale (terascale gravity) and assumes the existence of string couplings in the strong-coupling limit. In this limit, the string model predicts the suppression of all high-transverse-momentum standard model processes, including jet production, beyond a certain energy scale. To test this prediction, the measured transverse-momentum spectrum is compared to the theoretical prediction of the standard model. No significant deficit of events is found at high transverse momentum. A 95% confidence level lower limit of 3.3 TeV is set on the extinction mass scale

Female chromosome X mosaicism is age-related and preferentially affects the inactivated X chromosome

To investigate large structural clonal mosaicism of chromosome X, we analysed the SNP microarray intensity data of 38,303 women from cancer genome-wide association studies (20,878 cases and 17,425 controls) and detected 124 mosaic X events42Mb in 97 (0.25%) women. Here we show rates for X-chromosome mosaicism are four times higher than mean autosomal rates; X mosaic events more often include the entire chromosome and participants with X events more likely harbour autosomal mosaic events. X mosaicism frequency increases with age (0.11% in 50-year olds; 0.45% in 75-year olds), as reported for Y and autosomes. Methylation array analyses of 33 women with X mosaicism indicate events preferentially involve the inactive X chromosome. Our results provide further evidence that the sex chromosomes undergo mosaic events more frequently than autosomes, which could have implications for understanding the underlying mechanisms of mosaic events and their possible contribution to risk for chronic diseases

Detectable clonal mosaicism and its relationship to aging and cancer

In an analysis of 31,717 cancer cases and 26,136 cancer-free controls from 13 genome-wide association studies, we observed large chromosomal abnormalities in a subset of clones in DNA obtained from blood or buccal samples. We observed mosaic abnormalities, either aneuploidy or copy-neutral loss of heterozygosity, of >2 Mb in size in autosomes of 517 individuals (0.89%), with abnormal cell proportions of between 7% and 95%. In cancer-free individuals, frequency increased with age, from 0.23% under 50 years to 1.91% between 75 and 79 years (P = 4.8 × 10(-8)). Mosaic abnormalities were more frequent in individuals with solid tumors (0.97% versus 0.74% in cancer-free individuals; odds ratio (OR) = 1.25; P = 0.016), with stronger association with cases who had DNA collected before diagnosis or treatment (OR = 1.45; P = 0.0005). Detectable mosaicism was also more common in individuals for whom DNA was collected at least 1 year before diagnosis with leukemia compared to cancer-free individuals (OR = 35.4; P = 3.8 × 10(-11)). These findings underscore the time-dependent nature of somatic events in the etiology of cancer and potentially other late-onset diseases