Detection of Real-Time Changes in Direction of COVID-19 Transmission Using National- and State-Level Epidemic Trends Based on R Estimates - United States Overall and New Mexico, April-October 2024.

Public health practitioners rely on timely surveillance data for planning and decision-making; however, surveillance data are often subject to delays. Epidemic trend categories, based on time-varying effective reproductive number (R) estimates that use nowcasting methods, can mitigate reporting lags in surveillance data and detect changes in community transmission before reporting is completed. CDC analyzed the performance of epidemic trend categories for COVID-19 during summer 2024 in the United States and at the state level in New Mexico.

Rabies surveillance in the United States during 2021.

Objective: To provide epidemiological information on the occurrence of animal and human rabies in the US during 2021 and summaries of 2021 rabies surveillance for Canada and Mexico.

Procedures: State and territorial public health departments and USDA Wildlife Services provided data on animals submitted for rabies testing in 2021. Data were analyzed temporally and geographically to assess trends in domestic animal and wildlife rabies cases.

Transcriptomic and Histological Analysis of the Greentail Prawn (Metapenaeus bennettae) Following Light Crude Oil Exposure.

Oil spills pose a significant threat to marine biodiversity. Crude oil can partition into sediments where it may be persistent, placing benthic species such as decapods at particular risk of exposure. Transcriptomic and histological tools are often used to investigate the effects of hydrocarbon exposure on marine organisms following oil spill events, allowing for the identification of metabolic pathways impacted by oil exposure.

Projected resurgence of COVID-19 in the United States in July-December 2021 resulting from the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant and faltering vaccination.

What Is Already Known About This Topic?: The highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant has begun to cause increases in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in parts of the United States. With slowed vaccination uptake, this novel variant is expected to increase the risk of pandemic resurgence in the US in July-December 2021.

What Is Added By This Report?: Data from nine mechanistic models project substantial resurgences of COVID-19 across the US resulting from the more transmissible Delta variant.

High-Pressure CO Electroreduction at Silver Produces Ethanol and Propanol.

Reducing CO to long-chain carbon products is attractive considering such products are typically more valuable than shorter ones. However, the best electrocatalyst for making such products from CO , copper, lacks selectivity. By studying alternate C producing catalysts we can increase our mechanistic understanding, which is beneficial for improving catalyst performance.

Modeling of Future COVID-19 Cases, Hospitalizations, and Deaths, by Vaccination Rates and Nonpharmaceutical Intervention Scenarios - United States, April-September 2021.

After a period of rapidly declining U.S. COVID-19 incidence during January-March 2021, increases occurred in several jurisdictions (1,2) despite the rapid rollout of a large-scale vaccination program.

Alkaline air: changing perspectives on nitrogen and air pollution in an ammonia-rich world.

Ammonia and ammonium have received less attention than other forms of air pollution, with limited progress in controlling emissions at UK, European and global scales. By contrast, these compounds have been of significant past interest to science and society, the recollection of which can inform future strategies. Sal ammoniac (, ) is found to have been extremely valuable in long-distance trade ( AD 600-1150) from Egypt and China, where 6-8 kg N could purchase a human life, while air pollution associated with collection was attributed to this nitrogen form.

Is there a gender gap in chemical sciences scholarly communication?

The Royal Society of Chemistry is committed to investigating and addressing the barriers and biases which face women in the chemical sciences. The cornerstone of this is a thorough analysis of data regarding submissions, review and citations for Royal Society of Chemistry journals from January 2014 until July 2018, since the number and impact of publications and citations are an important factor when seeking research funding and for the progression of academic career. We have applied standard statistical techniques to multiple data sources to perform this analysis, and have investigated whether interactions between variables are significant in affecting various outcomes (author gender; reviewer gender; reviewer recommendations and submission outcome) in addition to considering variables individually.

Methods for Rapid Mobility Estimation to Support Outbreak Response.

When pressed for time, outbreak investigators often use homogeneous mixing models to model infectious diseases in data-poor regions. But recent outbreaks such as the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa have shown the limitations of this approach in an era of increasing urbanization and connectivity. Both outbreak detection and predictive modeling depend on realistic estimates of human and disease mobility, but these data are difficult to acquire in a timely manner.

Precautions for Patients Taking Tamoxifen.

Tamoxifen is a lifesaving treatment for millions of breast cancer patients worldwide. Yet taking tamoxifen may be challenging for some patients due to issues of compliance, drug interactions, and surgical considerations. Educating patients with a one-page teaching sheet, "Precautions for Patients Taking Tamoxifen," may improve tamoxifen's effectiveness and prevent complications.

Chemlistem: chemical named entity recognition using recurrent neural networks.

Chemical named entity recognition (NER) has traditionally been dominated by conditional random fields (CRF)-based approaches but given the success of the artificial neural network techniques known as "deep learning" we decided to examine them as an alternative to CRFs. We present here several chemical named entity recognition systems. The first system translates the traditional CRF-based idioms into a deep learning framework, using rich per-token features and neural word embeddings, and producing a sequence of tags using bidirectional long short term memory (LSTM) networks-a type of recurrent neural net.

Monitoring sublethal changes in fish physiology following exposure to a light, unweathered crude oil.

Biomarkers are frequently used to determine the exposure of fish to petroleum hydrocarbons following an oil spill. These biomarkers must be chosen carefully if they are to be used to determine sublethal toxic impacts as well as oil exposure. Many commonly used biomarkers relate to the metabolism of high molecular weight, typically pyrogenic, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are not abundant in unweathered crude oil.

Improving the learning of chemical-protein interactions from literature using transfer learning and specialized word embeddings.

In this paper, we explore the application of artificial neural network ('deep learning') methods to the problem of detecting chemical-protein interactions in PubMed abstracts. We present here a system using multiple Long Short Term Memory layers to analyse candidate interactions, to determine whether there is a relation and which type. A particular feature of our system is the use of unlabelled data, both to pre-train word embeddings and also pre-train LSTM layers in the neural network.

Transcriptomic, lipid, and histological profiles suggest changes in health in fish from a pesticide hot spot.

Barramundi (Lates calcarifer) were collected at the beginning (1st sampling) and end (2nd sampling) of the wet season from Sandy Creek, an agriculturally impacted catchment in the Mackay Whitsundays region of the Great Barrier Reef catchment area, and from Repulse Creek, located approximately 100 km north in Conway National Park, to assess the impacts of pesticide exposure. Gill and liver histology, lipid class composition in muscle, and the hepatic transcriptome were examined. The first sample of Repulse Creek fish showed little tissue damage and low transcript levels of xenobiotic metabolism enzymes.

NEXAFS spectroscopy of ionic liquids: experiments versus calculations.

Experimental near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectra are reported for 12 ionic liquids (ILs) encompassing a range of chemical structures for both the sulfur 1s and nitrogen 1s edges and compared with time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) calculations. The energy scales for the experimental data were carefully calibrated against literature data. Gas phase calculations were performed on lone ions, ion pairs and ion pair dimers, with a wide range of ion pair conformers considered.

Atomic charges of sulfur in ionic liquids: experiments and calculations.

Experimental near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectra, X-ray photoelectron (XP) spectra and Auger electron spectra are reported for sulfur in ionic liquids (ILs) with a range of chemical structures. These values provide experimental measures of the atomic charge in each IL and enable the evaluation of the suitability of NEXAFS spectroscopy and XPS for probing the relative atomic charge of sulfur. In addition, we use Auger electron spectroscopy to show that when XPS binding energies differ by less than 0.

Evaluation of and Feedback for Academic Medicine Leaders: Developing and Implementing the Memorial Method.

Problem: Giving and receiving honest and helpful feedback for leadership development is a common challenge in all types of organizations but particularly in academic medicine.

Approach: At Memorial University of Newfoundland, in 2014, a consensus emerged to develop a new method for evaluating the leadership performance of the discipline chairs, dean, and vice dean, and to provide these leaders with the evaluation results to help them improve their performance. The leaders responsible for developing and implementing this method (called the Memorial Method) decided to use a survey to obtain faculty members' perceptions about their leader's performance.

The environmental impact of sewage and wastewater outfalls in Antarctica: An example from Davis station, East Antarctica.

We present a comprehensive scientific assessment of the environmental impacts of an Antarctic wastewater ocean outfall, at Davis station in East Antarctica. We assessed the effectiveness of current wastewater treatment and disposal requirements under the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty. Macerated wastewater has been discharged from an outfall at Davis since the failure of the secondary treatment plant in 2005.

Inactivation of the CRL4-CDT2-SET8/p21 ubiquitylation and degradation axis underlies the therapeutic efficacy of pevonedistat in melanoma.

Unlabelled: The cullin-based CRL4-CDT2 ubiquitin ligase is emerging as a master regulator of cell proliferation. CRL4-CDT2 prevents re-initiation of DNA replication during the same cell cycle "rereplication" through targeted degradation of CDT1, SET8 and p21 during S-phase of the cell cycle. We show that CDT2 is overexpressed in cutaneous melanoma and predicts poor overall and disease-free survival.

Application of a quantitative histological health index for Antarctic rock cod (Trematomus bernacchii) from Davis Station, East Antarctica.

A quantitative Histological Health Index (HHI) was applied to Antarctic rock cod (Trematomus bernacchii) using gill, liver, spleen, kidney and gonad to assess the impact of wastewater effluent from Davis Station, East Antarctica. A total of 120 fish were collected from 6 sites in the Prydz Bay region of East Antarctica at varying distances from the wastewater outfall. The HHI revealed a greater severity of alteration in fish at the wastewater outfall, which decreased stepwise with distance.

Tracking spatial distribution of human-derived wastewater from Davis Station, East Antarctica, using δ15N and δ13C stable isotopes.

Stable isotope ratios, δ15N and δ13C were effectively used to determine the geographical dispersion of human derived sewage from Davis Station, East Antarctica, using Antarctic rock cod (Trematomus bernacchii). Fish within 0-4 km downstream of the outfall exhibited higher δ15N and δ13C values relative to reference sites. Nitrogen in particular showed a stepped decrease in δ15N with increasing distance from the discharge point by 1-2‰.

Direct evidence of histopathological impacts of wastewater discharge on resident Antarctic fish (Trematomus bernacchii) at Davis Station, East Antarctica.

During the 2009/2010 summer, a comprehensive environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the wastewater discharge at Davis Station, East Antarctica was completed. As part of this, histological alteration of gill and liver tissue in Antarctic Rock-cod (Trematomus bernacchii) from four sites along a spatial gradient from the wastewater outfall were assessed. All fish within 800 m of the outfall exhibited significant histological changes in both tissues.

Peristeen integrated transanal irrigation system successfully treats faecal incontinence in children.

Objective: Faecal incontinence secondary to myelomeningocele, Hirschsprung disease, and anorectal anomalies remains a significant and common problem. We aimed to report our 5-year experience with the Peristeen trans-anal irrigation system (TAIS) to manage such children.

Patients And Method: This study was a combination of a retrospective case note review and assessment using a validated quality of life questionnaire (QOL) to determine pre- and post-TAIS bowel function and continence.

Total colonic aganglionosis: a 15-year single center experience.

Purpose: Total colonic aganglionosis (TCA) is a rare condition, which is challenging to manage. Outcome data are sparse. We aimed to review the demographics, treatment, and outcomes of TCA in our center.