julilili42/papers huggingface dataset:
Further Evidence for the Binding and Retrieval of Control-States From the Flanker Task
2021-09-01

Abstract. In response-interference tasks, congruency effects are reduced in trials that follow an incongruent trial. This congruence sequence effect (CSE) has been taken to reflect top-down cognitive control processes that monitor for and intervene in case of conflict. In contrast, episodic-memory accounts explain CSEs with bottom-up retrieval of stimulus-response links. Reconciling these opposing views, an emerging perspective holds that memory stores instances of control – abstract control-states – creating a shortcut for effortful control processes. Support comes from a study that assessed CSEs in a prime-target task. Here, repeating an irrelevant context feature boosted CSEs, possibly by retrieving previously stored control-states. We present a conceptual replication using the Eriksen flanker task because previous research found that CSEs in the flanker task reflect different control mechanisms than CSEs in the prime-target task. We measured CSEs while controlling for stimulus–response memory effects and manipulated contextual information (vertical spatial location) independently from the stimulus information, which introduced the conflict (horizontal spatial location). Results replicate previous findings – CSEs increased for context-repetition compared to context-changes. This study shows that retrieval of control-states is not limited to a specific task or context feature and therefore generalizes the notion that abstract control parameters are stored into trial-specific event files.
Spinal meningioma surgery in the elderly: who can benefit from it?
2021-09-01

Surgery for spinal meningioma in elderly (KPS≥40 and ASA≤III) leads to a significant improvement of McCormick, KPS and mCSS postoperatively. This leads to a higher rate of self-dependency and thereby probably to an improvement of quality of life in elderly. However, special attention for systemic complications is necessary.
Microbial Phylogenetic Context Using Phylogenetic Outlines
2021-09-01

Abstract Microbial studies typically involve the sequencing and assembly of draft genomes for individual microbes or whole microbiomes. Given a draft genome, one first task is to determine its phylogenetic context, that is, to place it relative to the set of related reference genomes. We provide a new interactive graphical tool that addresses this task using Mash sketches to compare against all bacterial and archaeal representative genomes in the Genome Taxonomy Database taxonomy, all within the framework of SplitsTree5. The phylogenetic context of the query sequences is then displayed as a phylogenetic outline, a new type of phylogenetic network that is more general than a phylogenetic tree, but significantly less complex than other types of phylogenetic networks. We propose to use such networks, rather than trees, to represent phylogenetic context, because they can express uncertainty in the placement of taxa, whereas a tree must always commit to a specific branching pattern. We illustrate the new method using a number of draft genomes of different assembly quality.
A unique yet technically simple type of joint allows for the high mobility of scorpion tails
2021-09-01

Although being one of the most well-known animal groups, functional and constructional aspects of scorpions and especially of their tail (metasoma) have so far been overlooked. This tail represents a special construction, as it consists of five tube-shaped segments made up of strong cuticle, which are movable against each other and thus manoeuvre the notorious stinger both quickly and very precisely in space. This high mobility of an exoskeletal structure can be attributed to the connection between the segments described here for the first time. This joint allows for the twisting and bending at the same time in a single, simple construction: adjoining metasomal segments each possess an almost circular opening posteriorly, where the next segment is lodged. Anteriorly, these segments possess two saddle-like protrusions laterally, which are able to rotate in two directions on the rim of the posterior circular opening of the previous segment allowing for twisting and bending. The metasomal joint is particularly noteworthy since its mechanism can be compared to that of arthropod appendages. The scorpion metasoma is actually the only known case in Chelicerata, in which an entire body section has been modified to perform tasks similar to that of an appendage while containing digestive organs. The joint mechanism can also inspire technical applications, for instance in robotics.
arhomme: An implementation of the Arellano and Bonhomme (2017) estimator for quantile regression with selection correction
2021-09-01

Despite constituting a major theoretical breakthrough, the quantile selection model of Arellano and Bonhomme (2017, Econometrica 85: 1–28) based on copulas has not found its way into many empirical applications. We introduce the command arhomme, which implements different variants of the estimator along with standard errors based on bootstrapping and subsampling. We illustrate the command by replicating parts of the empirical application in the original article and a related application in Arellano and Bonhomme (2018, Handbook of Quantile Regression, chap. 13).
Extracorporeal Circulation (ECLS/ECMO) for Cardio-circulatory Failure—Summary of the S3 Guideline
2021-09-01

In Germany, a remarkable increase in the usage of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) and extracorporeal life support (ECLS) systems has been observed throughout the last year with approximately 3,000 annual ECLS/ECMO implantations since 2015. Despite the widespread use of ECLS/ECMO, there is still lack of evidence-based recommendations and guidelines, particularly associated with indications, contraindications, limitations, and management.[1]
Treatment Trends of Adult Brachial Plexus Injury: A Bibliometric Analysis
2021-09-01

Background: Brachial plexus injury is often debilitating because it can severely impair upper extremity function and, thus, quality of life. The surgical treatment of injuries to the brachial plexus is very demanding because it requires a profound understanding of the anatomy and expertise in microsurgery. The aim of this study was to get an overview of the landscape in adult brachial plexus injury surgery, and to understand how this has changed over the years. Methods: The most frequently cited articles in English relevant to adult brachial plexus injury were identified through the Web of Science online database. Results: The average number of citations per article was 32.8 (median 24, range 4–158). Authors from 26 countries contributed to our list, and the US was the biggest contributor. Almost half of all nerve transfer cases were described by Asian authors. Amongst nerve transfer, the spinal accessory nerve was the preferred donor overall, except in Asia, where intercostal nerves were preferred. Distal nerve transfers were described more often than plexo-plexal and extra-plexal-to-plexal transfers. The most common grafts were sural nerve grafts and vascularized ulnar nerve grafts, which became popular in the last decade. Conclusions: Our study sheds light on the regional variations in treatment trends of adult brachial plexus injury, and on the evolution of the field over the last 30 years. The articles included in our analysis are an excellent foundation for those interested in the surgical management of brachial plexus injuries.
Seal bomb explosion sound source characterization
2021-09-01

Small explosive charges, called seal bombs, used by commercial fisheries to deter marine mammals from depredation and accidental bycatch during fishing operations, produce high level sounds that may negatively impact nearby animals. Seal bombs were exploded underwater and recorded at various ranges with a calibrated hydrophone to characterize the pulse waveforms and to provide appropriate propagation loss models for source level (SL) estimates. Waveform refraction became important at about 1500 m slant range with approximately spherical spreading losses observed at shorter ranges. The SL for seal bombs was estimated to be 233 dB re 1 μPa m; however, for impulses such as explosions, better metrics integrate over the pulse duration, accounting for the total energy in the pulse, including source pressure impulse, estimated as 193 Pa m s, and sound exposure source level, estimated as 197 dB re 1 μPa2 m2 s over a 2 ms window. Accounting for the whole 100 ms waveform, including the bubble pulses and sea surface reflections, sound exposure source level was 203 dB re 1 μPa2 m2 s. Furthermore, integrating the energy over an entire event period of multiple explosions (i.e., cumulative sound exposure level) should be considered when evaluating impact.
The Moral Virtue of Being Understanding
2021-09-01

Abstract Being understanding is a moral virtue. But what exactly is it that an understanding person does excellently? And what exactly makes it a moral virtue, rather than (merely) an intellectual one? Stephen Grimm suggests that an understanding person judges other people’s moral failings accurately without being too permissive or too judgemental. I argue against this view and develop an alternative one. First I demonstrate that judging other people’s failures accurately is neither necessary nor sufficient for being understanding and that Grimm leaves the moral nature of being understanding underexplored. I then draw on a related discussion on the moral virtue of open-mindedness and argue that a virtue is a moral one when it is a corrective to selfish and other weak inclinations that pull us away from feeling and acting as the situation demands. In order to fill in what this means in the case of being understanding, I turn to Iris Murdoch’s notion of attention. Being understanding, I argue, is the virtue of appropriately attending to others who are in a difficult situation.
The Role and Views of Ophthalmologists During the COVID-19 Pandemic
2021-09-01

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced the work of ophthalmologists. Based on the limited response rate, certain statements were only possible to evaluate for the European Union: with a noticeable reduction in patient numbers, delay in treatment was a major worry. Measures to protect and reassure patients should be undertaken, especially regarding those with vision-threatening diseases requiring treatment.
Does Becoming Fit Mean Feeling (f)it? A Comparison of Physiological and Experiential Fitness Data From the iReAct Study
2021-09-01

Regular exercise fosters fitness-enhancing benefits. We assume that exercise interventions become successful and sustainable if physiological benefits of exercise are also subjectively perceivable. The goal of this study was to examine how young inactive adults physiologically respond to an exercise intervention and how those responses are subjectively experienced . Furthermore, we aimed to assess whether the sequence of two distinct endurance-based exercise modes has an impact on physiological and subjectively experienced physical fitness. Thirty-one young inactive adults were assessed for this substudy of the larger iReAct study. Participants were randomly assigned to a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) or a moderate-intensity continuous training (MICT) group for 6 weeks and subsequently switched groups for a second training period. Physiological fitness data was collected at baseline, follow-up I, and follow-up II using a graded cardiopulmonary exercise test. Subjectively reconstructed (i.e., retrospective constructions) experiences relating to physical fitness were assessed at follow-up II using a biographical mapping method. A repeated-measures one-way ANOVA on each training group was performed to see whether physiological and subjectively experienced fitness differed across training periods. The rate of change between all variables was calculated for the first and the second training period in order to compare the agreement between physiological and subjective fitness improvements. Participants increased their fitness across the intervention period both physiologically and subjectively. However, the rate of change depended on the sequence of the two training modes. While VO 2max increased significantly in both training periods in the MICT-HIIT sequence, a significant increase in VO 2max in the HIIT-MICT sequence was only observed in the HIIT period. Participants similarly perceived those increases subjectively in their exercise-related physical fitness, although they experienced a significant decrease in the second period of the HIIT-MICT sequence. For subjectively perceived physical fitness relating to everyday activities, significant increases were only observed for the first period of the MICT-HIIT sequence. Young inactive adults can improve both their physiological and their subjectively perceived fitness through regular exercise. However, exercise modes and their sequence can make a substantial difference regarding measured and perceived physical fitness. Additionally, despite a favorable tendency toward HIIT over MICT, inter- and intra-individual variability, particularly in the subjective experiences of fitness, reiterates the necessity of individualized approaches to exercise.
The developmental trajectory of object recognition robustness: comparing children, adults, and CNNs
2021-09-01

Core object recognition refers to the ability to rapidly recognize objects in natural scenes across identity-preserving transformations, such as variation in perspective, size or lighting. In laboratory object recognition tasks using 2D images, adults and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) perform close to ceiling. However, while current CNNs perform poorly on distorted images, adults' performance is robust against a wide range of distortions. It remains an open question whether this robustness is the result of superior information representation and processing in the human brain, or due to extensive experience (training) with distorted visual input during childhood. In case of the latter, we would expect robustness to be low in early childhood and increase with age. Here we investigated the developmental trajectory of core object recognition robustness. We first evaluated children's and adults' object classification performance on undistorted images and then systematically tested how recognition accuracy degrades when images are distorted by salt-and-pepper noise, eidolons, or texture-shape conflicts. Based on 22,000 psychophysical trials collected in children aged 4–15 years, our results show that: First, while overall performance improves with age, already the youngest children showed remarkable robustness and outperformed standard CNNs on moderately distorted images. Second, weaker overall performance in younger children is due to weak performance on a small subset of image categories, not reduced performance across all categories. Third, when recognizing objects, children—like adults but unlike standard CNNs—heavily rely on shape but not on texture cues. Our results suggest that robustness emerges early in the developmental trajectory of human object recognition and is already in place by the age of four. The robustness gap between humans and standard CNNs thus cannot be explained by a mere accumulation of experience with distorted visual input, and is more likely explained by a difference in visual information representation and processing.
KS01.3.A Tumoral MHC class II expression in gliomas drives T cell exhaustion
2021-09-01

Abstract BACKGROUND Neoepitopes are presented on major histocompatibility class II (MHCII) molecules. In glioma, for instance, the recurrent driver mutation IDH1R132H was shown to bear an MHCII-restricted epitope in preclinical and clinical vaccine studies. The general relevance of MHCII expression in glioma for antitumor immunity, however, remains unknown. Here we evaluate stromal and tumoral MHCII expression, functionality, and its association with survival in gliomas. MATERIAL AND METHODS Immunostaining of human glioma tissues was used to identify tumoral, endothelial, and microglial MHCII expression and to enumerate T cell infiltrates. To gain insights into tumoral MHCII expression, bulk transcriptomic data from TCGA and single-cell transcriptomic data from publicly available datasets were analyzed. MHC ligandome analyses of an MHCII+ glioma cell line and human glioma tissues were used to determine the functionality of MHCII in vitro and ex vivo. Functional in vitro co-culture assays with an HLA-DR-matched tetanus toxoid (TT) epitope-overexpressing glioma cell line and in vitro-expanded TT-reactive T cells from healthy donors were used to examine direct target recognition by T helper cells. CRISPR-Cas9-mediated knockout of MHCII in preclinical hypermutant glioblastoma cell line GL261 was employed to further validate the consequences of tumoral MHCII expression and to probe potential clinical intervention with existing therapies. RESULTS MHCII is expressed in the majority of gliomas and associated with increased infiltration of T cells. In 10% of the analyzed glioma tissues and a subset of single cells, tumoral MHCII expression is detected. Clinical and transcriptomic data reveal that tumoral MHCII is associated with poor prognosis, cytokine responses, immune inhibition and T cell differentiation. Ligandome analyses evidence presentation of peptides by MHCII molecules on glioma cells. In in vitro assays, TT-reactive T helper cells specifically produce IFNg when co-cultured with MHCII+ glioma cells upon the presence of co-stimulation. In agreement with the clinical data, preclinical murine models demonstrate that tumoral MHCII expression leads to reduced survival. Co-culture assay shows that tumoral MHCII results in upregulation of PD-1 on T helper cells antigen-specifically. Concordantly, immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy slows the disease progression of mice carrying MHCII+ tumors. CONCLUSION MHCII is expressed in gliomas by a subset of tumor cells. Although tumoral MHCII is functional, it is associated with poor survival in both clinical data and preclinical models. T cell exhaustion induced by tumoral MHCII expression can, in part, be overcome by ICB in vivo. Further experiments are required to decipher tumor cell intrinsic and microenvironmental consequences of tumoral MHCII expression.
Early Eukaryotes in the Lakhanda Biota (Mesoproterozoic, Southeastern Siberia)—Morphological and Geochemical Evidence
2021-09-01

The Mesoproterozoic Lakhanda Group (~1030 Ma) preserves one of the most diverse communities of pre-Ediacaran eukaryotes. More precisely, the Lakhanda Biota includes more than twenty taxa that have been assigned to eukaryotes with different degrees of confidence. Eight of these taxa meet current criteria for the identification of eukaryotic fossils in ancient records. These include previously described fossils such as ornamented acritarchs (Valeria lophostriata, Trachyhystrichosphaera aimika), filamentous coenocytic organisms (Aimonema ramosa, Palaeovaucheria clavata), as well as fossils with smooth-walled envelopes and single outgrowth structures (Caudosphaera expansa, Germinosphaera bispinosa, and Jacutianema solubila). In addition to these, we found as yet undescribed fossils which share remarkable similarities with Ourasphaira giraldae, a possible higher fungi species known from the (?) Meso- to Neoproterozoic of Arctic Canada. Regardless of the exact systematic affinity, these fossils can confidently be assigned to eukaryotes because of the size and high morphological complexity. Intriguingly, the organic record of the Lakhanda Formation lacks biomarkers indicative of eukaryotes (that is, regular steranes). This finding would be in line with the idea that eukaryotes were present but not significant in Mesoproterozoic marine ecosystems. However, preliminary data from an ongoing study indicate an advanced thermal maturity of the organic matter, emphasizing that this conclusion might not be drawn with absolute confidence.
The control effort to steer self-propelled microswimmers depends on their morphology: comparing symmetric spherical versus asymmetric L -shaped particles
2021-09-01

Active goal-directed motion requires real-time adjustment of control signals depending on the system’s status, also known as control. The amount of information that needs to be processed depends on the desired motion and control, and on the system’s morphology. The morphology of the system may directly effectuate or support the desired motion. This morphology-based reduction to the neuronal ‘control effort’ can be quantified by a novel information-entropy-based approach. Here, we apply this novel measure of ‘control effort’ to active microswimmers of different morphology. Their motion is a combination of directed deterministic and stochastic motion. In spherical microswimmers, the active propulsion leads to linear velocities. Active propulsion of asymmetric L -shaped particles leads to circular or—on tilted substrates—directed motion. Thus, the difference in shape, i.e. the morphology of the particles, directly influence the motion. Here, we quantify how this morphology can be exploited by control schemes for the purpose of steering the particles towards targets. Using computer simulations, we found in both cases a significantly lower control effort for L -shaped particles. However, certain movements can only be achieved by spherical particles. This demonstrates that a suitably designed microswimmer’s morphology might be exploited to perform specific tasks.
Midbrain superior colliculus motor bursts do not dictate saccade kinematics
2021-09-01

The primate superior colliculus (SC) is critical for saccade generation. Its neurons are organized topographically such that the site of neural activation defines the desired size and direction of an executed movement. However, in addition to this spatial code, SC neurons also exhibit a strong motor burst that is tightly synchronized with saccade onset. The functional role of this motor burst, and particularly its stereotypical temporal evolution, has long intrigued oculomotor physiologists. A well-accepted hypothesis is that motor bursts are critical for transforming the SC spatial code into a temporal command for realizing the millisecond-by-millisecond movement kinematics; thus, the site of SC activity dictates saccade dimensions, but the motor bursts define kinematics (e.g. saccade peak velocity). Here, I was motivated by recent observations that SC motor bursts in the upper visual field representation are significantly weaker than bursts in the lower visual field representation (Hafed and Chen, 2016). Moreover, seemingly more lower visual field SC neurons are active for downward saccades than upper visual field neurons are active for upward saccades (due to response field size differences). If SC motor bursts dictate saccade kinematics, then downward saccades should be dramatically different from upward saccades in kinematics. I analyzed thousands of visually-guided, delayed visually-guided, and memory-guided saccades from two monkeys; the saccades ranged in size from microsaccades to approximately 15 deg saccades, and they had different directions. I classified movements as being directed towards upper or lower visual field locations. Even though upper visual field saccades had significantly faster reaction times than lower visual field saccades in all tasks (as expected), kinematics (evidenced by main sequence plots of peak velocity versus amplitude) were very similar. These results suggest that SC motor bursts do not necessarily dictate saccade kinematics, and they motivate future research into the functional role of SC saccade-related activity.