bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
TrimethylamineN-oxide: heart of the microbiota–CVD nexus?
Authors: Naghipour Saba , Cox Amanda J. , Peart Jason N. , Du Toit Eugene F. , Headrick John P. 
Published: July 2020

AbstractWe critically review potential involvement of trimethylamineN-oxide (TMAO) as a link between diet, the gut microbiota and CVD. Generated primarily from dietary choline and carnitine by gut bacteria and hepatic flavin-containing mono-oxygenase (FMO) activity, TMAO could promote cardiometabolic disease when chronically elevated. However, control of circulating TMAO is poorly understood, and diet, age, body mass, sex hormones, renal clearance, FMO3 expression and genetic background may explain as little as 25 % of TMAO variance. The basis of elevations with obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis or CHD is similarly ill-defined, although gut microbiota profiles/remodelling appear critical. Elevated TMAO could promote CVD via inflammation, oxidative stress, scavenger receptor up-regulation, reverse cholesterol transport (RCT) inhibition, and cardiovascular dysfunction. However, concentrations influencing inflammation, scavenger receptors and RCT (≥100 µm) are only achieved in advanced heart failure or chronic kidney disease (CKD), and greatly exceed pathogenicity of <1–5 µmlevels implied in some TMAO–CVD associations. There is also evidence that CVD risk is insensitive to TMAO variance beyond these levels in omnivores and vegetarians, and that major TMAO sources are cardioprotective. Assessing available evidence suggests that modest elevations in TMAO (≤10 µm) are a non-pathogenic consequence of diverse risk factors (ageing, obesity, dyslipidaemia, insulin resistance/diabetes, renal dysfunction), indirectly reflecting CVD risk without participating mechanistically. Nonetheless, TMAO may surpass a pathogenic threshold as a consequence of CVD/CKD, secondarily promoting disease progression. TMAO might thus reflect early CVD risk while providing a prognostic biomarker or secondary target in established disease, although mechanistic contributions to CVD await confirmation.
Assessment of trans-fatty acid content in a sample of foods from the Slovenian food supply using a sales-weighting approach
Authors: Kušar Anita , Hribar Maša , Lavriša Živa , Zupanič Nina , Pivk Kupirovič Urška , Hristov Hristo , Abramovič Helena , Vidrih Rajko , Zlatić Emil , Kokalj Doris , Piskernik Saša , Mencin Marjeta , Peče Petra , Blaznik Urška , Žmitek Katja , Pravst Igor 
Published: July 2020

AbstractObjective:Consumption of trans-fatty acids (TFA) is a well-established risk factor for CVD morbidity and mortality. Our objective was to investigate TFA levels in Slovenian food supply.Design:Cross-sectional study.Setting:Selected foods (n 282) were purchased in Slovenia (2016), and the TFA content was determined. The sample included pre-packed foods with/without declared partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (PHO), as well as non-pre-packed foods. A sales-weighting approach was used to ponder different market shares of the products.Results:While the majority of the investigated samples had low levels of TFA, up to 6·8 g of TFA per 100 g of food was observed in certain foods. Within pre-packed foods (n 207), the highest proportion of samples with high TFA levels was found among cookies with labelled PHO: 69 % (n 18) would exceed European Union regulatory TFA limit (2 g industrial TFA per 100 g of fats), which will be implemented in April 2021. Among the investigated non-pre-packed foods (n 75), only croissants contained notable TFA levels (mean 0·90 (sd 0·97); maximum 3·3 g/100 g), with about half of the samples exceeding 2 g TFA per 100 g of fats.Conclusions:In 2016, some foods in Slovenian food supply still contained notable amounts of TFA. Foods with listed PHO as an ingredient were usually higher in TFA as compared with foods not labelled to contain PHO. Biscuits were identified as the most concerning category of pre-packed foods, while croissants contained highest levels of TFA within non-pre-packed foods.
Developing communities: the Ford Foundation and the global urban crisis, 1958–66
Authors: Collings-Wells Sam 
Published: July 2020

AbstractBetween 1958 and 1966 the Ford Foundation embarked on a series of pilot projects of ‘urban community development’ in India and the United States. This article will highlight how both of these programmes emerged in response to what Ford officials understood to be a global urban crisis, caused by the migration of ‘backward’ rural populations into the cities. Rather than modernizing under the pressure of urban living, these newcomers appeared to be pooling into pockets of underdevelopment – ‘ghettos’ in the United States and ‘slums’ in India. Ford sought to tackle the problem by encouraging the participation of these marginalized communities in the process of urban renewal, a strategy intended to engineer the psychological modernization of their residents. In practice, however, Ford struggled to control the channels into which these mobilizations flowed, with poor urban residents utilizing the projects to push for radical changes concerning housing, policing, and tenant–landlord relations.
The Gendered Debate: Do Men and Women Communicate Differently in the House of Commons?
Authors: Hargrave Lotte , Langengen Tone 
Published: July 2020

AbstractIt has long been claimed in the gender and politics literature that male and female legislators have different communication styles. The evidence for this claim has come mostly from interviews with legislators as the key informants on gendered differences. We contribute to this literature in two ways: First, we empirically examine speeches by Members of Parliament to establish whether gendered differences are observable in parliamentary debates. Second, we advance existing measurement approaches by testing for multiple dimensions of communication style, providing a more systematic approach to studying gendered speech behavior. Communication style is examined through a content analysis of almost 200 speeches in three parliamentary sessions of the British House of Commons. We find compelling evidence for differences in communication style: women evidence arguments with personal experience, discuss policies in a concrete way, and are less adversarial than men. Our findings have important implications for how political communication styles might improve public engagement with politicians, offer a different focus to the discussion, and improve democratic legitimacy.
A Feminist Call to Be Radical: Linking Women's Health and Planetary Health
Authors: Tanyag Maria 
Published: July 2020

iwishi couldw riteth epoemiwantor eadina timeo fcrisis{repeat}ineed towriteth epoemiwantor eadina timeo fcrisis{repeat}thisi snotth epoemineedtow riteina timeo fcrisis{repeat}thisi sjustat est ofawri terinatimeo fcrisis{repeat}—Teresia Teaiwa (2013)Reflecting on the two previous conversations in Politics & Gender (2015 and 2017) regarding the diverging paths in global political economy and security studies that feminist international relations (IR) scholars have taken, I am reminded of Teresia Teaiwa's poetry, which for me speaks about how crisis gives birth to the radical starting points of our feminist inquiries. We are all undoubtedly on the cusp of ever-intensifying forms of insecurities, and peoples who have least contributed to their creation and hastening are bearing the worst impacts. It is projected that by 2100, the compounded threats that humanity will face as a result of climate change will be in multitudes across five main human systems: health, water, food, economy, infrastructure, and security (Cramer et al. 2018; Mora et al. 2018, 106). The complex consequences of climate change demand an approach that encompasses the interaction effects of different risks and hazards. However, across natural and social sciences so far, the norm has been to focus on specific aspects of human life and to examine hazards–including conflict and violence—in isolation from one another. We then run the risk of misleading ourselves with partial, if not incorrect, assessments of the global processes surrounding climate change. In particular, we are yet to understand the multiscalar dynamics of environmental degradation and extreme weather as they are entangled with other crises such as armed conflicts, health pandemics, economic recessions, and resurgences of authoritarian leadership. Whether feminist or not, we simply cannot afford to think in “camps” instead of “bridges” given the nature of the multiple crises we as humanity are facing. As Anna M. Aganthangelou (2017, 741) points out, “[g]lobal politics are never just ‘economic’ or ‘security’ issues,” so the kind of assumptions we hold and how these inform the questions we raise need to “attend to the highest stake of politics: existence.”
Positive effect of curcumin on experimental peridontitis via suppression of IL-1-beta and IL-6 expression level
Authors: Yetkin Ay Zuhal , Bakır Burcu , Bozkurt Şerife Buket , Kayis Seyit Ali , Hakki Sema Sezgin 
Published: July 2020

Abstract. This study examined the effect of curcumin on T-helper (Th17) and T-regulatory (Treg) cells regarding the mRNA of cytokines/mediators in the gingiva. Thirty-five male albino Wistar rats were divided into four groups: Group 1: periodontitis (n = 9); Group 2: periodontitis with curcumin treatment (n = 8); Group 3: periodontally healthy with curcumin treatment (n = 10); and Group 4: periodontally healthy (n = 8). Curcumin was administered via oral gavage (30 mg/kg/day) for a total of 15 days. The gingival tissues were investigated regarding mRNA expressions of Th17/Treg cytokines with qRT-PCR. The distributional properties of the data were evaluated using the Anderson-Darling normality test. Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests were employed for multiple group comparisons. Partial least squares regression discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) was used to evaluate the degree of contribution of each mRNA to the separation of treatment groups. When the periodontitis groups were compared, curcumin treatment resulted in lower IL-1β (Group 2 median: 0.002, Group 1 median: 0.12) and IL-6 (Group 2 median: 0.031, Group 1 median: 0.078) and higher IL-17 (Group 2 median: 1.07, Group 1 median: 0.583) relative mRNA expression in Group 2 than in Group 1 (p < 0.001). Group 3 also had higher IL-10 relative expression (median: 0.067) than Groups 1 and 4 (median: 0.028, 0.007, respectively. p < 0.001). These results indicate that curcumin might be a promising agent for the prevention and/or treatment of periodontal diseases due to its decreasing effect on IL-1β and IL-6 mRNA expression.
Tracking Seasonal and Interannual Variability in Photosynthetic Downregulation in Response to Water Stress at a Temperate Deciduous Forest
Authors: He Liyin , Wood Jeffrey D. , Sun Ying , Magney Troy , Dutta Debsunder , Köhler Philipp , Zhang Yongguang , Yin Yi , Frankenberg Christian 
Published: July 2020

AbstractThe understanding and modeling of photosynthetic dynamics affected by climate variability can be highly uncertain. In this paper, we examined a well‐characterized eddy covariance site in a drought‐prone temperate deciduous broadleaf forest combining tower measurements and satellite observations. We find that an increase in spring temperature usually leads to enhanced spring gross primary production (GPP), but a GPP reduction in late growing season due to water limitation. We evaluated how well a coupled fluorescence‐photosynthesis model (SCOPE) and satellite data sets track the interannual and seasonal variations of tower GPP from 2007 to 2016. In SCOPE, a simple stress factor scaling of Vcmax as a linear function of observed predawn leaf water potential (ψpd) shows a good agreement between modeled and measured interannual variations in both GPP and solar‐induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment‐2 (GOME‐2). The modeled and satellite‐observed changes in SIFyield are ~30% smaller than corresponding changes in light use efficiency (LUE) under severe stress, for which a common linear SIF to GPP scaling would underestimate the stress reduction in GPP. Overall, GOME‐2 SIF tracks interannual tower GPP variations better than satellite vegetations indices (VIs) representing canopy “greenness.” However, it is still challenging to attribute observed SIF variations unequivocally to greenness or physiological changes due to large GOME‐2 footprint. Higher‐resolution SIF data sets (e.g., TROPOMI) already show the potential to well capture the downregulation of late‐season GPP and could pave the way to better disentangle canopy structural and physiological changes in the future.
Automated River Plastic Monitoring Using Deep Learning and Cameras
Authors: van Lieshout Colin , van Oeveren Kees , van Emmerik Tim , Postma Eric 
Published: July 2020

AbstractQuantifying plastic pollution on surface water is essential to understand and mitigate the impact of plastic pollution to the environment. Current monitoring methods such as visual counting are labor intensive. This limits the feasibility of scaling to long‐term monitoring at multiple locations. We present an automated method for monitoring plastic pollution that overcomes this limitation. Floating macroplastics are detected from images of the water surface using deep learning. We perform an experimental evaluation of our method using images from bridge‐mounted cameras at five different river locations across Jakarta, Indonesia. The four main results of the experimental evaluation are as follows. First, we realize a method that obtains a reliable estimate of plastic density (68.7% precision). Our monitoring method successfully distinguishes plastics from environmental elements, such as water surface reflection and organic waste. Second, when trained on one location, the method generalizes well to new locations with relatively similar conditions without retraining (≈50% average precision). Third, generalization to new locations with considerably different conditions can be boosted by retraining on only 50 objects of the new location (improving precision from ≈20% to ≈42%). Fourth, our method matches visual counting methods and detects ≈35% more plastics, even more so during periods of plastic transport rates of above 10 items per meter per minute. Taken together, these results demonstrate that our method is a promising way of monitoring plastic pollution. By extending the variety of the data set the monitoring method can be readily applied at a larger scale.
Relationships Among Decadal Changes in Nitrate and Salinity in the Eastern and Western North Pacific Ocean After 2000
Authors: Kouketsu Shinya , Sasano Daisuke , Osafune Satoshi , Aoyama Michio 
Published: July 2020

AbstractDecadal changes in nitrate and preformed nitrate, as detected by the most accurate observations possible, were small in the subsurface layer around the subarctic front in the North Pacific Ocean. However, the patterns of differences in vertical sections were similar to those in repeat observations along survey Line P and were caused mainly by decadal rather than year‐to‐year changes. The changes in nitrate and preformed nitrate along Line P after 1996 were correlated with those based on high‐accuracy observational data along 165°E (with lags of a few years). Whereas similar relationships at bidecadal timescales were reported previously based on more long‐term historical data, the high‐accuracy methods in this study allowed us to detect smaller decade‐scale differences and compare the amplitudes of the changes. Furthermore, the patterns of changes were correlated with those for salinity, which a previous study considered to be formed mainly by eastward propagation of the decadal changes observed in the western part of the northern North Pacific. The time lags between the time series for nitrate and preformed nitrate were similar to the time required for the salinity anomalies to reach the Alaska Gyre from the western part of the subarctic front, which suggests that changes in the western part of the northern North Pacific Ocean affect those in the eastern part.
Heat Production and Tidally Driven Fluid Flow in the Permeable Core of Enceladus
Authors: Liao Yang , Nimmo Francis , Neufeld Jerome A. 
Published: July 2020

AbstractSaturn's moon Enceladus has a global subsurface ocean and a porous rocky core in which water‐rock reactions likely occur; it is thus regarded as a potentially habitable environment. For icy moons like Enceladus, tidal heating is considered to be the main heating mechanism, which has generally been modeled using viscoelastic solid rheologies in existing studies. Here we provide a new framework for calculating tidal heating based on a poroviscoelastic model in which the porous solid and interstitial fluid deformation are coupled. We show that the total heating rate predicted for a poroviscoelastic core is significantly larger than that predicted using a classical viscoelastic model for intermediate to large (>1014 Pa·s) rock viscosities. The periodic deformation of the porous rock matrix is accompanied by interstitial pore fluid flow, and the combined effects through viscous dissipation result in high heat fluxes particularly at the poles. The heat generated in the rock matrix is also enhanced due to the high compressibility of the porous matrix structure. For a sufficiently compressible core and high permeability, the total heat production can exceed 10 GW—a large fraction of the moon's total heat budget—without requiring unrealistically low solid viscosities. The partitioning of heating between rock and fluid constituents depends most sensitively on the viscosity of the rock matrix. As the core of Enceladus warms and weakens over time, pore fluid motion likely shifts from pressure‐driven local oscillations to buoyancy‐driven global hydrothermal convection, and the core transitions from fluid‐dominated to rock‐dominated heating.
Accelerated Multilevel Monte Carlo With Kernel‐Based Smoothing and Latinized Stratification
Authors: Taverniers Søren , Bosma Sebastian B. M. , Tartakovsky Daniel M. 
Published: July 2020

AbstractHeterogeneity and a paucity of measurements of key material properties undermine the veracity of quantitative predictions of subsurface flow and transport. For such model forecasts to be useful as a management tool, they must be accompanied by computationally expensive uncertainty quantification, which yields confidence intervals, probability of exceedance, and so forth. We design and implement novel multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) algorithms that accelerate estimation of the cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of quantities of interest, for example, water breakthrough time or oil production rate. Compared to standard non‐smoothed MLMC, the new estimators achieve a significant variance reduction at each discretization level by smoothing the indicator function with a Gaussian kernel or replacing standard Monte Carlo (MC) with the recently developed hierarchical Latinized stratified sampling (HLSS). After validating the kernel‐smoothed MLMC and HLSS‐enhanced MLMC methods on a single‐phase flow test bed, we demonstrate that they are orders of magnitude faster than standard MC for estimating the CDF of breakthrough times in multiphase flow problems.
Forced Changes in the Arctic Freshwater Budget Emerge in the Early 21st Century
Authors: Jahn Alexandra , Laiho Rory 
Published: July 2020

AbstractArctic liquid freshwater (FW) storage has shown a large increase over the past decades, posing the question: Is the Arctic FW budget already showing clear signs of anthropogenic climate change, or are the observed changes the result of multidecadal variability? We show that the observed change in liquid and solid Arctic FW storage is likely already driven by the changing climate, based on ensemble simulations from a state‐of‐the‐art climate model. Generally, the emergence of forced changes in Arctic FW fluxes occurs earlier for oceanic fluxes than for atmospheric or land fluxes. Nares Strait liquid FW flux is the first flux to show emergence outside the range of background variability, with this change potentially already occurring. Other FW fluxes have likely started to shift but have not yet emerged into a completely different regime. Future emissions reductions have the potential to avoid the emergence of some FW fluxes beyond the background variability.
Integrating Perspectives to Understand Lake Ice Dynamics in a Changing World
Authors: Sharma Sapna , Meyer Michael F. , Culpepper Joshua , Yang Xiao , Hampton Stephanie , Berger Stella A. , Brousil Matthew R. , Fradkin Steven C. , Higgins Scott N. , Jankowski Kathi Jo , Kirillin Georgiy , Smits Adrianne P. , Whitaker Emily C. , Yousef Foad , Zhang Shuai 
Published: July 2020

AbstractIce cover plays a critical role in physical, biogeochemical, and ecological processes in lakes. Despite its importance, winter limnology remains relatively understudied. Here, we provide a primer on the predominant drivers of freshwater lake ice cover and the current methodologies used to study lake ice, including in situ and remote sensing observations, physical based models, and experiments. We highlight opportunities for future research by integrating these four disciplines to address key knowledge gaps in our understanding of lake ice dynamics in changing winters. Advances in technology, data integration, and interdisciplinary collaboration will allow the field to move toward developing global forecasts of lake ice cover for small to large lakes across broad spatial and temporal scales, quantifying ice quality and ice thickness, moving from binary to continuous ice records, and determining how winter ice conditions and quality impact ecosystem processes in lakes over winter. Ultimately, integrating disciplines will improve our ability to understand the impacts of changing winters on lake ice.
A spore quality–quantity tradeoff favors diverse sporulation strategies in Bacillus subtilis
Authors: Mutlu Alper , Kaspar Charlotte , Becker Nils , Bischofs Ilka B 
Published: July 2020

Abstract
Quality–quantity tradeoffs govern the production of propagules across taxa and can explain variability in life-history traits in higher organisms. A quality–quantity tradeoff was recently discovered in spore forming bacteria, but whether it impacts fitness is unclear. Here we show both theoretically and experimentally that the nutrient supply during spore revival determines the fitness advantage associated with different sporulation behaviors in Bacillus subtilis. By tuning sporulation rates we generate spore-yield and spore-quality strategists that compete with each other in a microscopic life-cycle assay. The quality (yield) strategist is favored when spore revival is triggered by poor (rich) nutrients. We also show that natural isolates from the gut and soil employ different life-cycle strategies that result from genomic variations in the number of rap-phr signaling systems. Taken together, our results suggest that a spore quality–quantity tradeoff contributes to the evolutionary adaptation of sporulating bacteria.