Goal-Focused Emotion-Regulation Therapy (GET) for young adult survivors of testicular cancer: a pilot randomized controlled trial of a biobehavioral intervention protocol.

BackgroundTesticular cancer diagnosis and treatment, especially given its threat to sexuality and reproductive health, can be distressing in the formative period of young adulthood and the majority of young survivors experience impairing, distressing, and modifiable adverse outcomes that can persist long after medical treatment. These include psychological distress, impairment in pursuit of life goals, persistent physical side effects, elevated risk of secondary malignancies and chronic illness, and biobehavioral burden (e.g., enhanced inflammation, dysregulated diurnal stress hormones). However, few targeted interventions exist to assist young survivors in renegotiating life goals and regulating cancer-related emotions, and none focus on reducing the burden of morbidity via biobehavioral mechanisms. This paper describes the methodology of a randomized controlled biobehavioral trial designed to investigate the feasibility and preliminary impact of a novel intervention, Goal-focused Emotion-Regulation Therapy (GET), aimed at improving distress symptoms, emotion regulation, goal navigation skills, and stress-sensitive biomarkers in young adult testicular cancer patients.MethodsParticipants will be randomized to receive six sessions of GET or Individual Supportive Therapy (ISP) delivered over 8 weeks. In addition to indicators of intervention feasibility, we will measure primary (depressive and anxiety symptoms) and secondary (emotion regulation and goal navigation skills, career confusion) psychological outcomes prior to (T0), immediately after (T1), and 12 weeks after (T2) intervention. Additionally, identified biomarkers will be measured at baseline and at T2.DiscussionGET may have the potential to improve self-regulation across biobehavioral domains, improve overall cancer adjustment, and address the need for targeted supportive care interventions for young adult cancer survivors.Trial registrationClinicaltrials.gov, NCT04150848. Registered on 28 October 2019

Pay Attention to How You Drive: Safe and Adaptive Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Off-Road Driving

Autonomous off-road driving is challenging as risky actions taken by the robot may lead to catastrophic damage. As such, developing controllers in simulation is often desirable as it provides a safer and more economical alternative. However, accurately modeling robot dynamics is difficult due to the complex robot dynamics and terrain interactions in unstructured environments. Domain randomization addresses this problem by randomizing simulation dynamics parameters, however this approach sacrifices performance for robustness leading to policies that are sub-optimal for any target dynamics. We introduce a novel model-based reinforcement learning approach that aims to balance robustness with adaptability. Our approach trains a System Identification Transformer (SIT) and an Adaptive Dynamics Model (ADM) under a variety of simulated dynamics. The SIT uses attention mechanisms to distill state-transition observations from the target system into a context vector, which provides an abstraction for its target dynamics. Conditioned on this, the ADM probabilistically models the system's dynamics. Online, we use a Risk-Aware Model Predictive Path Integral controller (MPPI) to safely control the robot under its current understanding of the dynamics. We demonstrate in simulation as well as in multiple real-world environments that this approach enables safer behaviors upon initialization and becomes less conservative (i.e. faster) as its understanding of the target system dynamics improves with more observations. In particular, our approach results in an approximately 41% improvement in lap-time over the non-adaptive baseline while remaining safe across different environments

Tube-side mass transfer for hollow fibre membrane contactors operated in the low Graetz range

Transformation of the tube-side mass transfer coefficient derived in hollow fibre membrane contactors (HFMC) of different characteristic length scales (equivalent diameter and fibre length) has been studied when operated in the low Graetz range (Gz < 10). Within the low Gz range, mass transfer is generally described by the Graetz problem (Sh=3.67) which assumes that the concentration profile comprises a constant shape over the fibre radius. In this study, it is experimentally evidenced that this assumption over predicts mass transfer within the low Graetz range. Furthermore, within the low Gz range (below 2), a proportional relationship between the experimentally determined mass transfer coefficient (Kov) and the Graetz number has been identified. For Gz numbers below 2, the experimental Sh number approached unity, which suggests that mass transfer is strongly dependent upon diffusion. However, within this diffusion controlled region of mass transfer, tube-side fluid velocity remained important. For Gz numbers above 2, Sh could be satisfactorily described by extension to the Lévêque solution, which can be ascribed to the constrained growth of the concentration boundary layer adjacent to the fibre wall. Importantly this study demonstrates that whilst mass transfer in the low Graetz range does not explicitly conform to either the Graetz problem or classical Lévêque solution, it is possible to transform the experimentally derived overall mass transfer coefficient (Kov) between characteristic length scales (dh and L). This was corroborated by comparison of the empirical relationship determined in this study (Sh=0.36Gz) with previously published studies operated in the low Gz range. This analysis provides important insight for process design when slow tube-side flows, or low Schmidt numbers (coincident with gases) constrain operation of hollow fibre membrane contactors to the low Gz range

The GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey. VIII. Final Data Release -- The Effect of Group Environment on the Gas Content of Massive Galaxies

We present the final data release from the GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey (GASS), a large Arecibo program that measured the HI properties for an unbiased sample of ~800 galaxies with stellar masses greater than 10^10 Msun and redshifts 0.025<z<0.05. This release includes new Arecibo observations for 250 galaxies. We use the full GASS sample to investigate environmental effects on the cold gas content of massive galaxies at fixed stellar mass. The environment is characterized in terms of dark matter halo mass, obtained by cross-matching our sample with the SDSS group catalog of Yang et al. Our analysis provides, for the first time, clear statistical evidence that massive galaxies located in halos with masses of 10^13-10^14 Msun have at least 0.4 dex less HI than objects in lower density environments. The process responsible for the suppression of gas in group galaxies most likely drives the observed quenching of the star formation in these systems. Our findings strongly support the importance of the group environment for galaxy evolution, and have profound implications for semi-analytic models of galaxy formation, which currently do not allow for stripping of the cold interstellar medium in galaxy groups.Comment: 36 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Version with supplementary material available at http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/GASS/pubs.php . GASS released data can be found at http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/GASS/data.ph

Oxygen vacancy induced structural variations of exfoliated monolayer MnO2 sheets

We report findings on the structural stability of exfoliated monolayer MnO2 sheets. Our study reveals that monolayer MnO2 sheets display two specific kinds of structural modification under electron irradiation. An atomic reconstruction (2 x 1) and a phase of MnO, induced by ordered oxygen vacancies, were identified by transmission electron microscopy techniques and further characterized by comparison with density-functional theory calculations. These findings are expected to significantly broaden current knowledge of the structural stability of ultrathin layered sheets

Using RNase sequence specificity to refine the identification of RNA-protein binding regions

Massively parallel pyrosequencing is a high-throughput technology that can sequence hundreds of thousands of DNA/RNA fragments in a single experiment. Combining it with immunoprecipitation-based biochemical assays, such as cross-linking immunoprecipitation (CLIP), provides a genome-wide method to detect the sites at which proteins bind DNA or RNA. In a CLIP-pyrosequencing experiment, the resolutions of the detected protein binding regions are partially determined by the length of the detected RNA fragments (CLIP amplicons) after trimming by RNase digestion. The lengths of these fragments usually range from 50-70 nucleotides. Many genomic regions are marked by multiple RNA fragments. In this paper, we report an empirical approach to refine the localization of protein binding regions by using the distribution pattern of the detected RNA fragments and the sequence specificity of RNase digestion. We present two regions to which multiple amplicons map as examples to demonstrate this approach

Aspherical Supernova Shock Breakout and the Observations of Supernova 2008D

Shock breakout is the earliest, readily-observable emission from a core-collapse supernova explosion. Observing supernova shock breakout may yield information about the nature of the supernova shock prior to exiting the progenitor and, in turn, about the core-collapse supernova mechanism itself. X-ray Outburst 080109, later associated with SN 2008D, is a very well-observed example of shock breakout from a core-collapse supernova. Despite excellent observational coverage and detailed modeling, fundamental information about the shock breakout, such as the radius of breakout and driver of the light curve time scale, is still uncertain. The models constructed for explaining the shock breakout emission from SN 2008D all assume spherical symmetry. We present a study of the observational characteristics of {\it aspherical} shock breakout from stripped-envelope core-collapse supernovae. We conduct two-dimensional, jet-driven supernova simulations from stripped-envelope progenitors and calculate the resulting shock breakout X-ray spectra and light curves. The X-ray spectra evolve significantly in time as the shocks expand outward and are not well-fit by single-temperature and radius black bodies. The time scale of the X-ray burst light curve of the shock breakout is related to the shock crossing time of the progenitor, not the much shorter light crossing time that sets the light curve time scale in spherical breakouts. This could explain the long shock breakout light curve time scale observed for XRO 080109/SN 2008D.Comment: 16 pages, 29 figures. Accepted to Ap