cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Obesity and Supermarket Access: Proximity or Price?

Objectives. We examined whether physical proximity to supermarkets or supermarket price was more strongly associated with obesity risk.Methods. The Seattle Obesity Study (SOS) collected and geocoded data on home addresses and food shopping destinations for a representative sample of adult residents of King County, Washington. Supermarkets were stratified into 3 price levels based on average cost of the market basket. Sociodemographic and health data were obtained from a telephone survey. Modified Poisson regression was used to test the associations between obesity and supermarket variables.Results. Only 1 in 7 respondents reported shopping at the nearest supermarket. The risk of obesity was not associated with street network distances between home and the nearest supermarket or the supermarket that SOS participants reported as their primary food source. The type of supermarket, by price, was found to be inversely and significantly associated with obesity rates, even after adjusting for individual-level so...
Polarized radiance fields under a dynamic ocean surface: a three-dimensional radiative transfer solution

The hybrid matrix operator, Monte Carlo (HMOMC) method previously reported [Appl. Opt.47, 1063-1071 (2008)APOPAI0003-693510.1364/AO.47.001063] is improved by neglecting higher-order terms in the coupling of the matrix operators and by introducing a dual grid scheme. The computational efficiency for solving the vector radiative transfer equation in a full 3D coupled atmosphere-surface-ocean system is substantially improved, and, thus, large-scale simulations of the radiance distribution become feasible. The improved method is applied to the computation of the polarized radiance field under realistic surface waves simulated by the power spectral density method. To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first time that the polarized radiance field under a dynamic ocean surface and the underwater image of an object above such an ocean surface have been reported.
Nothing but NET

Neutrophils comprise over half of the white blood cells circulating in our bodies. They are the first responders charged with fighting off infection; in response to inflammatory stimuli, they enter tissues to engulf and kill bacteria. It is long established that as part of this process, neutrophils degranulate to release an array of antimicrobial agents. More recently, neutrophils have been found to also secrete chromatin- and neutrophil elastase–rich webs called neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) that bind and effectively kill bacteria. Infections occur frequently after surgical removal of tumors, leading in some cancers to more rapid metastatic relapse and death. The cellular basis for this association remains a mystery, but Cools-Lartigue et al. hypothesized that NETs deposited in response to infection may unwittingly promote metastasis by ensnaring circulating tumor cells (CTCs). The authors tested this hypothesis by inducing sepsis in mice by means of cecal ligation and puncture (CLP), ectopically implanting lung cancer cells, and monitoring dissemination and metastatic outgrowth within the lung and liver. CLP induced the formation of NET-like structures within the liver and lung microvasculature, increased retention of CTCs twofold, and led to a stunning increase in the number and size of liver metastases. In each case, treatment with deoxyribonuclease (DNAse) or neutrophil elastase inhibitor to dissolve NETs or inhibit their function impaired CLP-induced metastasis. Why NETs seemingly trap tumor cells selectively is unknown. For instance, the authors note that red blood cells are impervious to NETs. Are leukocytes as well? What cell surface moieties bind NETs? And although the authors demonstrated that NETs promote tumor cell adhesion and transendothelial migration, how these functions manifest in an ostensible increase in CTC survival and retention needs to be elucidated. In terms of treatment, this study offers strong evidence that anti-NET therapies should be devised to follow up surgical interventions in cancer patient populations. Whether DNAse and/or neutrophil elastase inhibitors will prove to be safe and effective enough, or novel NET-targeting agents need to be developed, remains to be seen. J. Cools-Lartigue et al. , Neutrophil extracellular traps sequester circulating tumor cells and promote metastasis. J. Clin. Invest. 123 , 3446–3458 (2013). [[Full text]][1] [1]: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/67484
Unsupervised Audio Segmentation using Extended Baum-Welch Transformations

Audio segmentation has applications in a variety of contexts, such as audio information retrieval, automatic sound analysis, and as a pre-processing step in speech recognition. Extended Baum-Welch (EBW) transformations are most commonly used as a discriminative technique for estimating parameters of Gaussian mixtures. In this paper, we derive an unsupervised audio segmentation approach using these transformations. We find that our algorithm outperforms both the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and cumulative sum (CUSUM) segmentation methods. In particular, our EBW segmentation algorithm provides improvements over the baseline approaches in detecting landmarks of short duration and minimizing landmark oversegmentation. In addition, we show that the EBW approach provides faster computation compared to the baseline methods.
Antimicrobial Stewardship Programs in Health Care Systems

Antimicrobial stewardship programs in hospitals seek to optimize antimicrobial prescribing in order to improve individual patient care as well as reduce hospital costs and slow the spread of antimicrobial resistance. With antimicrobial resistance on the rise worldwide and few new agents in development, antimicrobial stewardship programs are more important than ever in ensuring the continued efficacy of available antimicrobials. The design of antimicrobial management programs should be based on the best current understanding of the relationship between antimicrobial use and resistance. Such programs should be administered by multidisciplinary teams composed of infectious diseases physicians, clinical pharmacists, clinical microbiologists, and infection control practitioners and should be actively supported by hospital administrators. Strategies for changing antimicrobial prescribing behavior include education of prescribers regarding proper antimicrobial usage, creation of an antimicrobial formulary with restricted prescribing of targeted agents, and review of antimicrobial prescribing with feedback to prescribers. Clinical computer systems can aid in the implementation of each of these strategies, especially as expert systems able to provide patient-specific data and suggestions at the point of care. Antibiotic rotation strategies control the prescribing process by scheduled changes of antimicrobial classes used for empirical therapy. When instituting an antimicrobial stewardship program, a hospital should tailor its choice of strategies to its needs and available resources.
Flow Tube Kinetics of Gas-Phase CVD Reactions

This paper explores the use of a flow-tube reactor coupled to an FTIR spectrometer to study gas-phase chemical reactions in CVD systems. We show that our apparatus can generate reliable kinetics data by reproducing the literature rate constant for the reaction between O3 and isobutene. We present data from this apparatus on two technologically important systems: TiN from Ti(NMe2)4 (TDMAT) and NH3 and SiO2 from tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) and O3. The results presented include kinetics data for the reaction of Ti(NMe2)4 with NH3 and ND3 at room temperature and the IR spectra of the products from the reaction of TEOS with O3 at 175°C.
Uniform channel decomposition for MIMO communications

Assuming the availability of the channel state information at transmitter (CSIT), we propose a transceiver design which contains a linear precoder and a MMSE-VBLAST detector. We show that this transceiver design can decompose, in a capacity lossless manner, a MIMO channel into multiple subchannels with identical capacities. This uniform channel decomposition (UCD) scheme can provide much convenience for the modulation/demodulation and coding/decoding procedures due to obviating the need of bit allocation. The simulations show that the UCD scheme has excellent performance even without using any error correcting coding.
In normal rat, intraventricularly administered insulin-like growth factor-1 is rapidly cleared from CSF with limited distribution into brain

Putatively active drugs are often intraventricularly administered to gain direct access to brain and circumvent the blood-brain barrier. A few studies on the normal central nervous system (CNS) have shown, however, that the distribution of materials after intraventricular injections is much more limited than presumed and their exit from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is more rapid than generally believed. In this study, we report the intracranial distribution and the clearance from CSF and adjacent CNS tissue of radiolabeled insulin-like growth factor-1 after injection into one lateral ventricle of the normal rat brain. Under barbiturate anesthesia, 125I-labeled insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) was injected into one lateral ventricle of normal Sprague-Dawley rats. The subsequent distribution of IGF-1 through the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) system and into brain, cerebral blood vessels, and systemic blood was measured over time by gamma counting and quantitative autoradiography (QAR). Within 5 min of infusion, IGF-1 had spread from the infused lateral ventricle into and through the third and fourth ventricles. At this time, 25% of the infused IGF-1 had disappeared from the CSF-brain-meningeal system; the half time of this loss was 12 min. The plasma concentration of cleared IGF-1 was, however, very low from 2 to 9 min and only began to rise markedly after 20 min. This delay between loss and gain plus the lack of radiotracer in the cortical subarachnoid space suggested that much of the IGF-1 was cleared into blood via the cranial and/or spinal nerve roots and their associated lymphatic systems rather than periventricular tissue and arachnoid villi. Less than 10% of the injected radioactivity remained in the CSF-brain system after 180 min. The CSF and arteries and arterioles within the subarachnoid cisterns were labeled with IGF-1 within 10 min. Between 60 and 180 min, most of the radioactivity within the cranium was retained within and around these blood vessels and by periaqueductal gray matter. Tissue profiles at two sites next to ventricular CSF showed that IGF-1 penetrated less than 1.25 mm into brain tissue and appreciable 125I-activity remained at the tissue-ventricular CSF interface after 180 min. Our findings suggest that entry of IGF-1 into normal brain parenchyma after lateral ventricle administration is limited by rapid clearance from CSF and brain and slow movement, apparently by diffusion, into the periventricular tissue. Various growth factors and other neuroactive agents have been reported to be neuroprotective within the injured brain after intraventricular administration. It is postulated that the delivery of such factors to neurons and glia in the injured brain may be facilitated by abnormal CSF flow. These several observations suggest that the flow of CSF and entrained solutes may differ considerably between normal and abnormal brain and even among various neuropathologies.
Verification of numerical solutions of the Richards equation using a traveling wave solution

Abstract Efforts to find solutions that can be used for verification of numerical techniques for solving the Richards equation have generated a wealth of approximate and exact analytical solutions. Coefficients of this equation involve two highly non-linear functions related to the soil water potential, the unsaturated hydraulic conductivity, and the soil water content. The known exact solutions for realistic flow geometries are commonly limited to simplified descriptions of unsaturated hydraulic properties, while the approximate solutions involve various simplifications that require additional verification. We present a technique, referred to as the “launch pad” technique, which is based on the traveling wave solution to generate an exact solution of the boundary value problem for the Richards equation. The technique that is applicable to any descriptor of unsaturated hydraulic properties is illustrated on an application involving the infiltration of water into soils with properties described by Brooks–Corey and van Genuchten models. Examples of verification are presented for HYDRUS-1D, a popular numerical computer code for solving the Richards equation.
Systems genetic analysis of peripheral iron parameters in the mouse

Iron homeostasis is one of the most critical functions in living systems. Too little iron can lead to anemia and tissue-specific disorders, such as splenomegaly. Excessive systemic iron is characteristic of hemochromatosis and is implicated in the brain in Parkinson's disease. With the exception of some single gene diseases like hemochromatosis, we know little about genetic-based, individual differences in iron-related parameters and their impact on biology. To model genetic control of iron homeostasis, we measured liver, spleen, and plasma iron concentrations, hematocrit and hemoglobin, transferrin saturation, and total iron-binding capacity in several BXD/Ty recombinant inbred mouse strains derived from C57BL/6 and DBA/2 progenitors. At 120 days of age, the animals were killed for iron analysis. All measures showed genetic-based variability consistent with polygenic influence. Analysis of principal components of the seven measures revealed three factors that we named availability, transport, and storage. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis revealed one suggestive QTL on chromosome 5 for availability, two suggestive QTL (one on chromosome 1 and the other on chromosome 7) for transport, and one weak QTL on chromosome 2 for storage. The results show that iron homeostasis is a complex trait and is influenced by multiple genes.
Improved algorithms for narrowband interference suppression in direct sequence spread spectrum

In 1990 Vijayan and Poor proposed nonlinear predictive methods for suppressing narrowband interference signals in spread spectrum (SS) with significant increase in the SNR improvement. This paper describes a further enhancement of their nonlinear adaptive prediction algorithm, and introduces a nonlinear version of the interpolating filters proposed in previous studies. >
A hardware-based cache pollution filtering mechanism for aggressive prefetches

Aggressive hardware-based and software-based prefetch algorithms for hiding memory access latencies were proposed to bridge the gap of the expanding speed disparity between processors and memory subsystems. As smaller L1 caches prevail in deep submicron processor designs in order to maintain short cache access cycles, cache pollution caused by ineffective prefetches is becoming a major challenge. When too aggressive prefetching are applied, ineffective prefetches not only can offset the benefits of benign prefetches due to pollution but also throttle bus bandwidth, leading to overall performance degradation. A hardware based cache pollution filtering mechanism is proposed to differentiate good and bad prefetches dynamically using a history table. Two schemes-peraddress (PA) based and program counter (PC) based-for triggering prefetches are proposed and evaluated. Our cache pollution filters work in tandem with both hardware and software prefetchers. As shown in the analysis of our simulated results, the cache pollution filters can significantly reduce the number of ineffective prefetches by over 90%, alleviating the excessive memory bandwidth induced by them. The IPC is improved by up to 9% as a result of reduced cache pollution and less competition for the limited number of cache ports
Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The special issue of the Health and Human Rights Journal has emphasized that the basic health of every man and woman is a condition for the achievement of other rights and the basis on which every society thrives and grows. Published in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Secretary-General of the UN Kofi Annan contributed to the issue paying special tribute to the memory of the journals founder and guiding inspiration Dr. Jonathan Mann. Annan also noted that the UN has recognized the relationship between health and human rights making human rights a central cross-cutting priority that would have to be included in the work of every aspect of its efforts in promoting peace and alleviating poverty. Moreover Annan hopes that this universal emphasis on human rights will be reflected at all levels of action and that health finally will be seen not as a blessing to be wished for but as a human right to be fought for.
Pit Initiation at Single Sulfide Inclusions in Stainless Steel I. Electrochemical Microcell Measurements

Electrochemical measurements were performed on single sulfide inclusions within a microcell to study their dissolution behavior and role in the initiation of pitting corrosion of 304 stainless steel in NaCI solutions. It was found that chloride ions catalyzed inclusion dissolution and caused metastable pits and that no metastable pits formed in thiosulfate solutions without chloride. The thiosulfate ion accelerated inclusion dissolution. and when the thiosulfate ion was present above a critical concentration it caused stable pitting, at low concentrations the chloride ion inhibited the aggressive nature of the thiosulfate ion and stifled stable pitting. while at high concentrations the thiosulfate ion inhibited the ability of the chloride ion to cause metastable pitting events. The addition of xanthate ion in combination with electrode activation in copper sulfate was found to inhibit the rate of inclusion dissolution and increase the pitting potential. The initiation of stable pitting was found to depend on the inclusion geometry.
The Failure of the International Laws of War and the Role of Art and Story-Telling as a Self-Help Remedy for Restorative Justice

This interdisciplinary study is an in-depth analysis of a book and a film, The Pianist, written by a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the Warsaw rising, in order to shed some light on the effectiveness of international laws of war and international human rights law in our global society. The study focuses attention on certain international legal principles and norms represented in literature, music, and film. The article asks what role art, music, film, and literature can play during and after the commission of wartime atrocities. Can art prevent further atrocities, assuage victims of catastrophic events, inspire the collective conscience of perpetrators, and protect victims from the reality of pain caused by war and the failure to enforce international laws of armed combat? Can art offer a form of self-help remedy to the victims of massive violence and atrocities without offering retribution to the perpetrator or revenge to the victim? This article investigates the power of art to transcend the ugliness and brutality that war provokes, especially if the combatants and other actors refuse to play by the internationally accepted rules of war. Recognizing through past experience that art cannot prevent atrocities, this article re-examines art's power of effective communication, education, and edification. Is the widespread dissemination of information through artistic media about wartime brutality and futility able to constitute a long-term preventive or palliative measure against the further commission of genocide, war crimes, and human rights violations? International human rights violations and war crimes are being committed today and are increasing in number and degree of atrocity, despite the peace-loving nature of our global society. These crimes may be reduced by the interplay of the traditional retributive form of justice that does not and should not tolerate the impunity of perpetrators and a new form of restorative justice that emphasizes the personhood of the victim through language and expression.
How does a Nascent Industry Project Navigate the Regulatory Structure?: The Cape Wind Project

While much research has studied industry emergence, how a nascent industry confronts the established institutions is poorly understood. Recent institutional analyses have made strides along the cog...
The analysis on the trend of notifiable infectious diseases in Xiamen city with 10 years of application of network reporting system

Objective To Analyze the epidemiological characteristics and the trend of notifiable infectious diseases in Xiamen city during 2004 to 2013, to explore the preventive measures. Methods Descriptive study was employed to analyze the data on the infectious diseases in Xiamen during 2004 to 2013. Results Comparing with the data of 2004, the incidence of category A and B infectious diseases of 2013 was decreased 56.96%. Currently the infectious diseases in Xiamen are mainly composed by blood borne, STD, and air borne infectious disease. The top 5 infectious diseases in incidence are viral hepatitis, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, and diarrhea. measles was epidemic again, and the ascending of incidence of AIDS has ranked the top position among all diseases. As for the Category C diseases, the incidence was increased significantly, however, it was due to the reporting of hand-foot-mouth disease. Conclusions Comparing with the initial period of the application of network reporting system, the current spectrum of infectious diseases has not changed significantly. We should further focus on the control and prevention of viral hepatitis, TB, STD, diarrhea, measles and HFMD and the long-term mechanism on the control and prevention of all above-mentioned diseases should be established.
Closed Convex Hulls of Unitary Orbits in $${C^{*}_{r}(\mathbb{F}_{\infty})}$$ C r ∗ ( F ∞ )

Let $${C^*_r(\mathbb{F}_{\infty})}$$ be the reduced C*-algebra of the free group on infinitely many generators. Say that $${a, b \in C^*_r(\mathbb{F}_{\infty})_{SA}}$$ . Then $${a}$$ is majorized by $${b}$$ if and only if $${a \in \overline{Conv(U(b))}.}$$ In particular, $${\tau(b)1 \in \overline{Conv(U(b))}.}$$ Moreover, in the above results, we provide uniform bounds for the number of unitary conjugates needed for a given approximation. In the above, $${Conv(U(b))}$$ is the convex hull of the unitary orbit of $${b}$$ in $${C^*_r(\mathbb{F}_{\infty})}$$ .
Management of Burn Pain in Children

In addition to humanitarian concerns, the management of pain in children with burn injuries is of importance because control of pain may reduce one aspect of the global stress response that leads to many of the pathophysiologic conditions that follow burns. Nonpharmacologic methods that allow a child more participation in and control of painful events, combined with pharmacologic agents chosen for their effectiveness in the individual child, may be the most successful approach to problems of pain containment in these children.
Neuromorphic-computing-based feedback control: A cognitive supervisory control framework

In this paper, we propose and explain a novel control system that mimics the intrinsic human thinking and decision-making processes. Specifically, we propose a neuromorphic-computing-based cognitive feedback control framework, which consists of a neuronic network model and a hybrid controller, for the supervisory control of a general dynamical system. The dynamical system is controlled by the hybrid controller embedded with consensus and optimization, while the neuronal network model mimics the brain dynamics and determines the safe/unsafe mode of the hybrid controller. Several theoretical results are given, and computer simulation with unknown disturbances added helps illustrate the ideas presented in this paper.
UAV data for multi-temporal Landsat analysis of historic reforestation: a case study in Costa Rica

The use of the Landsat constellation to quantify historic deforestation and reforestation over time is well established. This analysis, however, requires ground-referenced data that is often inaccessible in remote areas or expensive if no existing high-resolution satellite imagery exists. In response, we evaluate the capability of unmanned aerial vehicle UAV imagery to serve as ground-reference data for identifying land-cover classes in Landsat imagery. We then apply these classes to quantify 30 years of historical deforestation and reforestation of an ecological reserve in Costa Rica. While spatial and spectral disparities between the sensors limit the generalization of the approach, our results demonstrate the ability of UAV and Landsat data to inexpensively classify a reserve’s historic land cover over time and suggest an 11 year period for land cover to transition from pasture to secondary forest in lowland tropical environments.
ACDC Agency: Food and Politics with Community College Students at Vassar

The food at the All-College Dining Commons (ACDC) at Vassar College stinks. Not that is literally smells foul; it just isn’t very good. The high-achieving community college students in the Exploring Transfer Program (ET) eat breakfast and dinner there for the five weeks that they are studying at Vassar. Ironically, the course I co-taught in ET for two summers, with the Chair of Environmental Studies, is entitled Feast or Famine: Food, Society, Environment . This course is a survey of issues concerning food systems, such as industrial farming, the role of agricultural lobbyists in Washington, overfishing, food sovereignty in developing countries, food stamps, food deserts, the USDA, FDA, WTO, IMF, etc. And yet, with all of the knowledge the students are gleaning from authors like Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry and myriad others, they have to eat the crappy food at ACDC. We have had students in this course from Argentina, Bosnia, Bourkina Faso, China, El Salvador, Ghana, Guyana, Haiti, Italy, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, the Philippines, Sweden, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. They come from community colleges mostly in the New York area, but also from as far away as Boston, Maine, Los Angeles, and Dine Community College, which is on a Navajo reservation in Northern Arizona. This program—over 30 years old and with over 1,000 alumni—is a sort of academic boot camp for community college students who hope to transfer to an elite liberal arts college, a Research 1 university, or an Ivy League school. It’s a full scholarship program during which they take two courses in five weeks, each team-taught by a community college professor and a Vassar professor. “AC/DC” seems an apt metaphor for the ET program; not for its pop-metal connotations but because of the fact that it demands that students that are accustomed to operating in one current suddenly adjust to quite another. The question that arises out of the experience of eating ACDC, though—of being low-income, immigrant, first-generation college students, studying at one of the whitest and most expensive schools in the country and yet being forced to eat poor food—is “how do they develop a sense of personal agency,” since that is what the transition through community college and onto a school like Vassar requires.
Ion dynamics in magnetotail reconnection in the presence of density asymmetry

We present the first dual-spacecraft observations of antiparallel, asymmetric magnetic reconnection in the Earth's magnetotail. The measurements were made with the comprehensive instrumentation of the ARTEMIS mission at the lunar distance near the dusk flank. The north lobe had high-density mantle and boundary layer plasma, while the south lobe had a much lower density, consistent with the prevailing solar wind conditions. The two spacecraft observed a finite width reconnection flow channel emanating from a tailward moving X line. Within the jet, the Hall magnetic field polarity corresponding to the high-density north lobe was enhanced, and the peak flow velocity was shifted toward the low-density south side, consistent with expectations from simulations. Two counterstreaming populations are seen in the distribution functions in most parts of the exhaust, in contrast to single-population convective flows reported in a previous asymmetric magnetotail reconnection event. Furthermore, the density difference of the two distinct mixing populations of different density is visible in the exhaust distributions up to ∼150di downstream of the X line. We observe no signatures of Speiser-like ion motion near the neutral plane, in agreement with theoretical expectations for asymmetric boundary conditions.
Reactive CeO2 nanofluids for UV protective films

Abstract We investigate surface modification by organo-trimethoxysilanes of nano-ceria and if such surface-modified nano-ceria can be transformed into solvent-free nanofluids. We also examine whether simultaneous modification with ionic liquid salts and with acrylate groups yields nanofluids suitable for forming UV-protective films and clear coatings by UV-initiated polymerization. Nominally 3 nm diameter CeO2 was successfully synthesized and surface decorated with an ionic liquid salt and with acrylate groups to produce a core/shell structured solvent-free nanofluid after ion exchange of chloride for a soft polyoxyethylene sulfonate anion. This room temperature nanofluid melts at about −10 °C and exhibits a glass transition at about −71 °C. The melting enthalpy, about 19 J/g, corresponds approximately to the gain in surface free energy of such nanofluid particles upon transforming from the solid state to liquid state. Robust films were made by UV photoinitiation of this nanofluid in combination with ethylene glycol dimethacrylate and with a polyoxyethylene diacrylate to yield cross-linked films with absorption coefficients α350 nm = 6.6 ± 0.8 cm2/mg and α300 nm = 24.5 ± 3.5 cm2/mg. Average near UV protection over 300–350 nm of 1–3 optical density units can be obtained with 0.065–0.19 mg/cm2 of CeO2. These materials appear almost three-fold more effective, per unit ceria, than previously reported clearcoats of nanoceria.
DEVELOPMENTS IN THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF WATER-SOLUBLE POLYMERS

The chapter presents a detailed discussion of water-soluble polymers and a highlight of water-soluble polymer developments over the past 75 years. They exhibit a broad spectrum of properties arising from structural variations of essentially one type of monomer: the pyranose ring. The hydroxyls can be placed in other geometries to affect different reactivities, and in building a polymer from such rings, the linkages between rings can involve any of the hydroxyls. From a recent industrial standpoint, the success of rayon and rayon acetate, as profitable fashion fabrics in the depression years, undoubtedly placed some emphasis on exploring water-soluble derivatives of cellulose—the world's most abundant polymer. The area of water-soluble polymers has grown at a steady rate over the past 50 years, and the polymers that have addressed particular application needs are commercially successful. Some of the growth areas in the next millenium will be in the biological area. In industrial applications, manufacturing costs relative to established products is a primary determinant in the success of any new product. Associative polymers are also discussed in detail in this chapter.
Oxidant-Regulated Gene Expression in Inflammatory Lung Disease

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is characterized by severe hypoxemia, diffuse pulmonary infiltrates and poor lung compliance in the absence of left heart failure1,2. Early pathogenic changes include pulmonary neutrophil sequestration and intravascular fibrin-platelet aggregates3,5. Subsequent injury to the alveolar-capillary barrier leads to increased pulmonary vascular permeability causing progressive lung inflammation and pulmonary edema4. Persistent inflammation frequently leads to fibrosis.
Detecting prehistoric landscape features using thermal, multispectral, and historical imagery analysis at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, Illinois

Abstract Locating the subtle and uneven deposition of human activities across the landscape continues to challenge archaeologists. Existing tools (e.g. excavation, shovel testing, pedestrian survey, and terrestrial geophysics) have proven effective at locating many types of archaeological features but remain time-consuming and difficult to undertake on densely vegetated or topographically complex terrain. As a result of these limitations, key aspects of past communities remain largely outside of archaeological detection and interpretation. This flattening of past lifeways not only affects broader understandings of these communities, but can also negatively impact the preservation of archaeological sites. This paper presents the detection of archaeological features through an analysis of drone-acquired thermal, multispectral, and visible light imagery, alongside historical aerial photography, in the area surrounding Middle Grant Creek (11WI2739), a late prehistoric village located at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Will County, IL. Our investigations discovered a probable housing area and a ritual enclosure, increasing the area of the site from 3.4 ha to 20 ha. The proposed housing and ritual areas of this village also help contextualize finds from the ongoing archaeological excavations at Middle Grant Creek. More broadly, results demonstrate the valuable contributions that these relatively new archaeological survey methods have in shaping our understandings of the archaeological landscape and highlight the importance of integrating them into the archaeological toolkit.
Patient and tumor-related factors for sphincter-preserving surgery in patients with rectal cancer.

e15628Background: Sphincter-preserving surgery (SPS) is associated with better quality of life in post-surgical rectal cancer patients. We aimed to report the factors that determined the likelihood...
CHAPTER 32 – Prolactin: Structure, Function, and Regulation of Secretion

This chapter discusses the structure, functions, and regulation of secretion of prolactin (PRL). Prolactin (PRL)—a protein hormone secreted from the anterior pituitary gland—has been identified in all vertebrate classes. It has numerous and diverse biological functions, including water and electrolyte balance, growth and development, metabolism and endocrine regulation, behavior, immune function, and reproduction. The amino acid sequence and tertiary structure of PRL is closely related to that of growth hormone (GH), also secreted from the anterior pituitary gland. PRL secretion is regulated in a complex manner by a variety of hormones and neurotransmitters and is influenced by photoperiod, sleep patterns, and stress. In nonmammalian vertebrates, the principal form of regulatory input is stimulatory with specific releasing factors (PRL-releasing factors [PRFs]) required for PRL secretion. In addition, there exists an extensive list of factors that demonstrate a stimulatory action on acute PRL release, and the episodic release of pituitary PRL. However, none of these releasing factors has emerged as a required input for normal PRL secretion.
Re-telling the “Story So Far”: Reconsidering Sport and Spirituality in Light of the New Age

ABSTRACTSport and spirituality is a burgeoning academic area of study (Jirasek, 2015). To date, the field has been dominated by Christian scholarship (Watson & Parker, 2011). Incidentally, the hist...
The Influence of Objective and Perceived Adaptive Capacity on Midwestern Farmers’ Use of Cover Crops

AbstractCover crops are grown between periods of regular crop production or planted into crops with the primary purpose of protecting and improving soil health. These crops possess several resilien...
Neuroergonomics and Vigilance: Probing the Event-Related Cerebral Hemodynamic Response:

Vigilance is an operator’s ability to sustain attentional focus and remain alert for a prolonged period of time in order to monitor for and detect critical task-relevant stimuli (Davies & Parasuram...
Vice Chairs for Research: What They Do & Challenges They Face

The Vice Chair for Research can be a critical member of a radiology department’s leadership team and help guide its research program. There is, however, little information available on what a Vice Chair for Research is expected to do (i.e., a job description) or what types of challenges they are facing in today’s research environment. A survey of radiology Vice Chairs for Research was done to ascertain the characteristics and responsibilities of a typical radiology vice chair for research, and their commonly encountered challenges. The responsibilities were consolidated into 15 major categories with a variety of individual tasks in each one. There were 18 themes identified in terms of challenges, with the top three reported as funding to support research, engaging clinical faculty in collaborative research, and research time for radiologists. These survey results could help radiology departments define the role of their Vice Chair for Research or for those departments without one to formulate a job description for recruiting, and to consider ways to help Vice Chairs meet challenges in order to enhance department research efforts.
A haplotype-based study of BRCA2 and breast cancer risk: The multiethnic cohort

1489 BRCA1 and BRCA2 carry mutations that cause early-onset familial forms of breast cancer, and are involved in DNA repair. While this discovery has unequivocally demonstrated a genetic basis for this disease, known highly penetrant mutations in these genes account for
From Exaptation to Adaptation: Stress, Transposons, and Functions of the Deep Genome

Abstract Adaptation to the environment is indispensable for organismal fitness. The brain is responsible for detection of and adaptation to stressful stimuli. Few molecular mechanisms facilitating this response have been described including neuronal plasticity, neurogenesis, and changes in gene expression. With the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies, large swathes of the noncoding genome have been identified and a role for the deep genome in governing the neural response to stress has been outlined. For instance, in the hippocampus heterochromatin remodeling is observed in gene deserts, here, marking repetitive retroelements selectively for transcriptional silencing. Aberrant retroelement expression is predicted to contribute to functional deficits in stress-sensitive brain regions. Though not yet fully realized, this “junk” represents a novel frontier in stress physiology relevant to many stress-related pathologies.
Reconstructing Sunyaev-Zeldovich clusters in future CMB experiments

We present a new method for component separation aimed to extract SunyaevZeldovich (SZ) galaxy clusters from multifrequency maps of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments. This method is designed to recover non-Gaussian, spatially localized and sparse signals. We first characterize the cluster non-Gaussianity by studying it on simulated SZ maps. We the apply our estimator on simulated observations of the Planck and Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) experiments. The method presented here outperforms multi-frequency Wiener filtering both in the reconstructed average intensity for given input and in the associated error. In the absence of point source contamination, this technique reconstructs the ACT (Planck) bright (big) clusters central y parameter with an intensity which is about 84 (43) per cent of the original input value. The associated error in the reconstruction is about 12 and 27 per cent for the 50 (12) ACT (Planck) clusters considered. For ACT, the error is dominated by beam smearing. In the Planck case the error in the reconstruction is largely determined by the noise level: a noise reduction by a factor 7 would imply almost perfect reconstruction and 10 per cent error for a large sample of clusters. We conclude that the selection function of Planck clusters will strongly depend on the noise properties in different sky regions, as well as from the specific cluster extraction method assumed.
Relations between frontal EEG maturation and inhibitory control in preschool in the prediction of children's early academic skills.

Abstract Maturation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) across the first few years of life is thought to underlie the emergence of inhibitory control (IC) abilities, which may play an important role in children’s early academic success. In this growth curve modeling study (N = 364), we assessed developmental change in children’s resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG) activity (6–9 Hz ‘alpha’ power) from 10 months to 4 years and examined whether the initial levels or amount of change in frontal alpha power were associated with children’s IC at age 4 and indirectly academic skills at age 6. Results indicated that greater increases in frontal alpha power across the study period were associated with better IC, and indirectly with better performance on Woodcock-Johnson tests of reading and math achievement at age 6. Similar associations between change in EEG and age 4 vocabulary were observed but did not mediate an association with academic skills. Similar analyses with posterior alpha power showed no associations with IC. Findings underscore the significance of frontal lobe maturation from infancy to early childhood for children’s intellectual development.
Integral representation bound of the true solution to the BVP of double-sided fractional diffusion advection reaction equation

This paper is devoted to developing the regularity results of the true (classic) solution to the homogeneous BVP of double-sided fractional diffusion advection reaction equation with variable coefficients on the bounded interval. This topic has been controversial in modelling in recent years, especially on the regularity issue. We use a different strategy of raising regularity of the weak solution and prove that, under suitable conditions, the true solution exists and can be represented in the form of fractional integration; furthermore, we show that usually this integral representation cannot be further improved even with smooth coefficients and right-hand side function in the equation. And we find the precise bound for this integral representation to hold, which measures the “best” regularity guaranteed and is in sharp contrast to the case of integer-order elliptic PDEs.
Abstract 2101: Enzymatic methyl-seq: Cytosine methylation detection using picograms of DNA

Cytosine methylation (5mC) is an important regulator of gene expression. Bisulfite sequencing is most commonly used to study 5mCs but it is frequently associated with DNA damage and fragmentation. This can prove problematic when using low amounts of DNA as the damage results in uneven genome coverage as well as biased sequencing data. Here we show data generated using NEBNext® Enzymatic Methyl-Seq (EM-Seq™), an enzymatic alternative to bisulfite conversion. The method has been optimized for low input DNAs ranging from 10 ng to 100 pg. NA12878 DNA was used to demonstrate that the modifications to the protocol permitted accurate representation of global CpG, CHG and CHH methylation. These libraries also displayed similar basic metrics to standard input EM-seq libraries. The GC bias plot was even and there was high CpG coverage with strong correlation between replicates. In addition, the possibility of introducing unique molecular identifiers into this system would be useful for many researchers who use DNA originating from single cells, plasma (cfDNA) and formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) sections. This low input method is robust and reproducible and gives researchers a new tool to tackle studies where DNA has traditionally been limiting. Citation Format: Louise Williams, V. K. Chaithanya Ponnaluri, Vaishnavi Panchapakesa, Romualdas Vaisvila, Matthew A. Campbell, Bradley W. Langhorst, Eileen T. Dimalanta, Theodore B. Davis. Enzymatic methyl-seq: Cytosine methylation detection using picograms of DNA [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2021; 2021 Apr 10-15 and May 17-21. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(13_Suppl):Abstract nr 2101.
Environmental Factors Associated with Physical Activity in Rural U.S. Counties

Background: Rural U.S. adults’ prevalence of meeting physical activity (PA) guidelines is lower than urban adults, yet rural-urban differences in environmental influences of adults’ PA are largely unknown. The study’s objective was to identify rural-urban variations in environmental factors associated with the prevalence of adults meeting PA guidelines. Methods: County-level data for non-frontier counties (n = 2697) were used. A five-category rurality variable was created using the percentage of a county’s population living in a rural area. Factor scores from Factor Analyses (FA) were used in subsequent Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) analyses stratified by rurality to identify associations between environmental factor scores and the prevalence of males and females meeting PA guidelines. Results: FA revealed a 13-variable, four-factor structure of natural, social, recreation, and transportation environments. MLR revealed that natural, social, and recreation environments were associated with PA for males and females, with variation by sex for social environment. The natural environment was associated with PA in all but urban counties; the recreation environment was associated with PA in the urban counties and the two most rural counties. Conclusions: Variations across the rural-urban continuum in environmental factors associated with adults’ PA, highlight the uniqueness of rural PA and the need to further study what succeeds in creating active rural places.
Scalable Resonant Power Clock Generation for Adiabatic Logic Design

In this paper, a scalable and passive component-less power-clock generation for adiabatic logic circuits, inclusive of the adiabatic core, is presented. The power-clock is traditionally a sinusoidal signal, that acts as the power and timing source to adiabatic gates. The slope of the power-clock signal directly impacts the overall energy efficiency of the adiabatic gates. Prior works have considered using LC based power-clock generation circuits, which are often considered costly due to area and high-Q inductor requirements. In this paper, a scalable solution is presented that features a unique innovation for the power clock generation circuit in step-charged circuits designed with resonant clocking. In particular, resonant rotary style clocking is used to provide the low power control to step-charged power clock circuits. SPICE based simulations are performed at 400 MHz on large scale adiabatic implementations of LGSynth’91 benchmark circuits. The overall energy efficiency of the proposed implementations are compared to those of equivalent adiabatic circuits with a traditional LC power-clock solution.