Histological evaluation of offspring kidneys following prenatal vaping exposure.

A variety of nicotine-containing products have been making their way to the market as alternatives to cigarette smoking. These include, but are not limited to, cigars, pipes, smokeless tobacco, and electronic cigarettes, with the last one being more prevalent than the others. With these alternatives, there are more tobacco users now than ever, with an increase from 1990 to 2017, which contrasts with the reduction in number of smokers observed by the Surgeon General in his Smoking Cessation report between 1990 and 2017, meaning that more and more tobacco users are using these. Pregnant women are advised to switch from cigarettes to electronic cigarettes to reduce the toxic effects on the fetus, however little research has been done on the impact of vaping on child development. In this study investigating the impact of inhalation exposure to a commercial product on reproductive and developmental functions, C57BL/6 dams were exposed to vapor from VuseTM e-cigarette golden tobacco pod for 3 hours/day at two puffs per minute throughout gestation (Vape) or to filtered air (Sham). This resulted in smaller litter sizes, along with greater weights for Vape offspring at birth that returned to average by weaning. At weaning, the female offspring possessed proportionally larger kidneys compared to male. The relative mass of the kidney was lower in Vape female offspring compared to Sham female offspring. Histological analysis on the kidney found a non-statistically significant trend of an interaction between sex and exposure, with a reduction in density of glomeruli and of glomerular area to cortex area ratio only seen in males. In conclusion, there was a significant alteration in the size of the kidney in female pups, and a trend of interaction between sex and exposure resulted in a reduction in the density of the glomeruli in Vape males

Galectins as New Prognostic Markers and Potential Therapeutic Targets for Advanced Prostate Cancers

A better understanding of multimolecular interactions involved in tumor dissemination is required to identify new effective therapies for advanced prostate cancer (PCa). Several groups investigated protein-glycan interactions as critical factors for crosstalk between prostate tumors and their microenvironment. This review both discusses whether the “galectin-signature” might serve as a reliable biomarker for the identification of patients with high risk of metastasis and assesses the galectin-glycan lattices as potential novel targets for anticancer therapies. The ultimate goal of this review is to convey how basic findings related to galectins could be in turn translated into clinical settings for patients with advanced PCa.Fil: Laderach, Diego Jose. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Gentilini, Lucas Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Jaworski, Felipe Martín. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Compagno, Daniel Georges. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentin

Coherent beam superposition of ten diode lasers with a Dammann grating

We demonstrate the use of a binary diffractive optical element in a very simple setup to convert the multilobed beam from a low fill factor array of coherent laser diodes into a quasi-Gaussian beam. The phase profile of the grating is determined with a phase retrieval algorithm. Experimentally, the conversion efficiency reaches more than 44%. We also establish that this setup can be used to make an effective measurement of the coherency of the laser array

Narrow-line coherently combined tapered laser diodes in a Talbot external cavity with a volume Bragg grating

We present the phase locking of an array of index-guided tapered laser diodes. An external cavity based on the self-imaging Talbot effect has been built. A volume Bragg grating is used as the output coupler to stabilize and narrow the spectrum at 976 nm. A power of 1.7 W is achieved in the in-phase single main lobe mode with a high visibility. We have checked that each emitter is locked to the Bragg wavelength with a 100 pm spectrum linewidth. The experimental results compare well with numerical simulations performed with two-dimensional wide-angle finite difference beam propagation method

BRENT: Bidirectional Retrieval Enhanced Norwegian Transformer

Retrieval-based language models are increasingly employed in question-answering tasks. These models search in a corpus of documents for relevant information instead of having all factual knowledge stored in its parameters, thereby enhancing efficiency, transparency, and adaptability. We develop the first Norwegian retrieval-based model by adapting the REALM framework and evaluating it on various tasks. After training, we also separate the language model, which we call the reader, from the retriever components, and show that this can be fine-tuned on a range of downstream tasks. Results show that retrieval augmented language modeling improves the reader's performance on extractive question-answering, suggesting that this type of training improves language models' general ability to use context and that this does not happen at the expense of other abilities such as part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition, and lemmatization. Code, trained models, and data are made publicly available.Comment: Accepted for NoDaLiDa 2023, main conferenc

Histological Evaluation of Offspring Kidneys following Prenatal Vaping

Pregnant women are advised to switch from cigarettes to electronic cigarettes to reduce the toxic effects on the fetus, however little research has been done on the impact of vaping on child development. In this study investigating the impact of inhalation exposure to a commercial product on reproductive and developmental functions, C57BL/6 dams were exposed to vapor from VuseTM e-cigarette golden tobacco pod for 3 hours/day at two puffs per minute throughout gestation (Vape) or to filtered air (Sham). This resulted in smaller litter sizes, along with greater weights for Vape offspring at birth that returned to average by weaning. At weaning, the female offspring possessed proportionally larger kidneys compared to male. Histological analysis on the kidney found a non-statistically significant trend of an interaction between sex and exposure, with a reduction in density of glomeruli and of glomerular area to cortex area ratio only seen in males. In conclusion, there was a significant alteration in the size of the kidney in female pups, and a trend of interaction between sex and exposure resulted in a reduction in the density of the glomeruli in Vape males

Frequency of Dental Caries in Four Historical Populations from the Chalcolithic to the Middle Ages

The majority of dental carie studies over the course of historical period underline mainly the prevalence evolution, the role of carbohydrates consumption and the impact of access to dietary resources. The purpose of the present investigation was to compare population samples from two archaeological periods the Chacolithic and Middle Age taking into account the geographical and socio economical situation. The study concerned four archaelogical sites in south west France and population samples an inlander for the Chalcolithic Age, an inlander, an costal and urban for the Middle Age. The materials studied included a total of 127 maxillaries, 103 mandibles and 3316 teeth. Data recorded allowed us to display that the Chalcolithic population sample had the lowest carie percentage and the rural inlander population samples of Middle Age the highest; in all cases molars were teeth most often affected. These ones differences could be explained according to time period, carious lesions were usually less recorded in the Chalcolithic Age than the Middle because of a lesser cultivation of cereals like in les Treilles Chacolithic population sample. In the Middle Age population samples, the rural inland sample Marsan showed the highest frequency of caries and ate more cereal than the coastal Vilarnau and the poor urban St Michel population samples, the first one ate fish and Mediterranean vegetal and fruits and the second one met difficulties to food access, in both cases the consumption of carbohydrates was lesser than Marsan population sample who lived in a geographical land convice to cereals cultivation

The environmental impact of the consumption of fishery and aquaculture products in France

In the context of climate change, diet is a key driver of environmental impacts. Previous research has emphasized the environmental benefit of increasing consumption of fishery and aquaculture products (FAPs) in Europe. However, increasing the proportion of FAPs in consumer diets could also lead to a transfer of environmental damage from earth to sea. It is thus important to evaluate the environmental impacts of FAPs on marine ecosystems globally. For that purpose, an original database characterizing the origin of FAPs consumed in France has been constructed, and matched to indicators of environmental impact. Use of the database revealed that the FAPs in the French diets (1.7 Mt live weight) had a corresponding primary production required (PPR) worth 1252 Mt, with an impact per ton of product live weight worth 2622 kg CO2 eq. for climate change, 18 kg PO(4)(3)(-)eq. for eutrophication, and 26,604 MJ for energy use. Some heterogeneity across species was found, implying that the species composition of the FAPS consumed had a strong influence on environmental footprint. Furthermore, production methods also substantially affect global impact. The results show that, among FAPS consumed in France, trawled crustaceans and farmed shrimps or prawns are the greatest contributors to global warming (27,800 and 13,344 kg CO2 eq. per ton live weight, respectively), despite good performances regarding trophic level based ecosystem indicators (a PPR of 3 and 9 Mt respectively). Shellfish register the smallest footprint both globally and at ecosystem level (545 kg CO2 eq., 1 kg PO43- eq., 10,414 MJ, and a PPR of 5 Mt per ton live weight). Our result suggest that, to avoid a transfer of environmental burden from land to sea, policies aimed at promoting consumption of FAPs in European diets should be refined to take account of differential impacts across species, origin and production methods of those FAPs. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe