Do corticosteroid injections improve carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms?

Q: Do corticosteroid injections improve carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms? Evidence-based answer: Yes. injected corticosteroids reduce symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) more effectively than placebo or systemic steroids, but no better than anti-inflammatory medication and splinting, from one to 12 weeks after therapy (strength of recommendation [SOR]: A, meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials [RCTs] and consistent RCT). A 40-mg injection of methylprednisolone reduces symptoms as effectively as an 80-mg injection for as long as 10 weeks, but the 80-mg dose reduces progression to surgery at one year (SOR: B, RCT). Long-term effects of injections decrease by 12 months (SOR: B, RCT). After corticosteroid injections, 14% of patients proceed to surgery at one year, and 33% proceed to surgery at 5 years (SOR: B, cohort trial)

Finding a Place for Deliberation and Democracy in the Manufactroversy about Climate Change

Although climate change rhetoric increasingly circulates in public discourse, serious debate about climate change policies have only begun to emerge. An influential component of this hesitance rests in an assumed controversy among climate scientists about the origin and projected scale of climate change impacts. Certain media practices come into question that may perpetuate this sense of doubt: journalistic ethics that demand balance in media reporting and the polarization and simplification of arguments in social media. This presentation explores these spaces where scientific arguments enter the public sphere and how ethics can be used to negotiate the conflict that emerges

Shedding new light on the origin and spread of the brinjal eggplant (Solanum melongena L.; Solanaceae) and its wild relatives

• While brinjal eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) is the second most important solanaceaous vegetable crop, we lack firm knowledge of its evolutionary relationships. This in turn limits efficient use of crop wild relatives in eggplant improvement. Here, we examine the hypothesis of linear step-wise expansion of the eggplant group from Africa to Asia. • We use museum collections to generate nuclear and full-plastome data for all species of the eggplant clade. We combine a phylogenomic approach with distribution data to infer a biogeographic scenario for the clade. • The eggplant clade has Pleistocene origins in northern Africa. Dispersions to tropical Asia gave rise to Solanum insanum, the wild progenitor of the eggplant, and to Africa distinct lineages of widespread and southern-African species. Results suggest that spread of species to southern Africa is recent and was likely facilitated by large mammal herbivores feeding on Solanum fruits (African elephant, impala). • Rather than a linear ‘Out Of Africa’ sequence, our results are more consistent with an initial event into Asia, and subsequent wide dispersion and differentiation across Africa driven by large mammalian herbivores. Our evolutionary results will impact future work on eggplant domestication and use of wild relatives in breeding of this increasingly important solanaceous crop.Peer reviewe

Using species distribution models to inform IUCN Red List assessments

Characterising a species’ geographical extent is central to many conservation assessments, including those of the IUCN Red List of threatened species. The IUCN recommends that extent of occurrence (EOO) to be quantified by drawing a minimum convex polygon (MCP) around known or inferred presence localities. EOO calculated from verified specimens is commonly used in Red List assessments when other data are scarce, as is the case for many threatened plant species. Yet rarely do these estimates incorporate inferred localities from species distribution models (SDMs). A key impediment stems from uncertainty about how SDM predictions relate to EOO. Here we address this issue by comparing the EOOs estimated from specimen localities with EOOs derived from SDMs for plant species occurring in Costa Rica and Panama. We first analyse 20 plant species, with well-known and well-sampled distributions, and train SDMs to subsamples of the data and assess how well the SDM-derived MCPs predict both the MCPs of the subsamples and the MCPs of the complete dataset. We find that when sample sizes are small (5 or 10 samples) the SDM-derived MCPs are actually closer to the complete dataset than to the MCPs of the subsamples, both in terms of EOO and geographically. This occurs when using a probability threshold based on maximum geographical similarity between the SDM-derived MCP and the subsample MCP; other threshold methods performed less well. For the species with less well-known distributions, the SDM-derived EOOs correlate strongly with, but tend to be larger than, EOOs estimated by point data. This implies that a SDM-derived EOO may be more representative of the full EOO than that drawn around known localities. Our findings reveal situations in which SDMs provide useful information that complements the IUCN Red Listing process.This work is supported by Microsoft Research through its PhD Scholarship Programme.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version has been published by Elsevier in Biological Conservation and can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320714002390

Towards a unified approach to detection of faults and cyber-attacks in industrial installations

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThis paper investigates enhancing the ability to detect cyber-attacks by using information and methods related to fault detection. An experimental stand, and an associated simulator have been constructed to enable tests of combined cyber attacks and faults in industrial processes, and, possibly, to distinguish between them. Some scenarios of cyber attacks have been presented, analysed theoretically and then tested on the simulator, demonstrating that detection of cyber attacks by this method is possible.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft