Occipital dermal sinus associated with infectious teratoma in an adult patient affected by Klippel-Feil syndrome: Rare case report and literature review.

Background: The Klippel-Feil syndrome (KFS) is a rare congenital anomaly characterized by the fusion of cervical vertebrae, which may be associated with other malformations, such as dermoid tumors and teratoma. Some theories explain the embryology of these associations. Another condition that may be present is the dermal sinus (DS), communication between intracranial tumors and the subcutaneous tissue, and predisposing infections.

Chronic and immediate refined carbohydrate consumption and facial attractiveness.

The Western diet has undergone a massive switch since the second half of the 20th century, with the massive increase of the consumption of refined carbohydrate associated with many adverse health effects. The physiological mechanisms linked to this consumption, such as hyperglycaemia and hyperinsulinemia, may impact non medical traits such as facial attractiveness. To explore this issue, the relationship between facial attractiveness and immediate and chronic refined carbohydrate consumption estimated by glycemic load was studied for 104 French subjects.

Dataset on onshore groundwaters and offshore submarine spring of a Mediterranean karst aquifer during flow reversal and saltwater intrusion.

Groundwater from various shallow and deep reservoirs converges in interaction with marine waters into the limestone aquifer of the Balaruc peninsula (Thau lagoon, southern France). This aquifer faces temporary phenomena of marine water intrusion through the Vise submarine spring located at -29.5 m below the lagoon level.

Elevated uranium concentration and low activity ratio (U/U) in the Œuf river as the result of groundwater-surface water interaction (Essonne river valley, South of Paris Basin, France).

Uranium (U) is a naturally occurring radioactive heavy metal widely distributed on Earth. Noticeable elevated U concentration and low activity ratio (AR) were occasionally detected in headwater stream of the Essonne river (Seine Basin, France), the namely Œuf river. This paper aims at providing new insight on geogenic U features in headwater streams and examines the role of river-groundwater interaction.

The smell of cooperativeness: Do human body odours advertise cooperative behaviours?

Several physical features influence the perception of how cooperative a potential partner is. While previous work focused on face and voice, it remains unknown whether body odours influence judgements of cooperativeness and if odour-based judgements are accurate. Here, we first collected axillary odours of cooperative and uncooperative male donors through a public good game and used them as olfactory stimuli in a series of tasks examining whether and how they influence cooperative decision-making in an incentivized economic game and ratings of cooperativeness.

Europe-Wide Atmospheric Radionuclide Dispersion by Unprecedented Wildfires in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, April 2020.

From early April 2020, wildfires raged in the highly contaminated areas around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (CNPP), Ukraine. For about 4 weeks, the fires spread around and into the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) and came within a few kilometers of both the CNPP and radioactive waste storage facilities. Wildfires occurred on several occasions throughout the month of April.

Refined Carbohydrate Consumption and Facial Attractiveness.

Since the second half of the 20th century, a massive increase in the consumption of refined carbohydrates has occurred, generating well-described detrimental health effects such as obesity, insulin resistance, type II diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and dental caries. Certain physiological mechanisms involved, particularly through chronic hyperglycaemia and hyperinsulinaemia, suggest that a non-medical trait such as facial attractiveness could also be affected. To explore this possibility, variation in facial attractiveness was evaluated relative to refined carbohydrate consumption.

Effect of early thermal environment on the morphology and performance of a lizard species with bimodal reproduction.

Early developmental environments influence life-history traits and survival of reptiles. In fact, rising global temperatures have already caused widespread extinctions among lizards. Viviparous species might be more susceptible to increasing temperatures because of their inability to meet their energetic demands following rapid environmental changes.

MS-CleanR: A Feature-Filtering Workflow for Untargeted LC-MS Based Metabolomics.

Untargeted metabolomics using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) is currently the gold-standard technique to determine the full chemical diversity in biological samples. However, this approach still has many limitations; notably, the difficulty of accurately estimating the number of unique metabolites profiled among the thousands of MS ion signals arising from chromatograms. Here, we describe a new workflow, MS-CleanR, based on the MS-DIAL/MS-FINDER suite, which tackles feature degeneracy and improves annotation rates.

Speech Acoustic Features: A Comparison of Gay Men, Heterosexual Men, and Heterosexual Women.

Potential differences between homosexual and heterosexual men have been studied on a diverse set of social and biological traits. Regarding acoustic features of speech, researchers have hypothesized a feminization of such characteristics in homosexual men, but previous investigations have so far produced mixed results. Moreover, most studies have been conducted with English-speaking populations, which calls for further cross-linguistic examinations.

Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness.

The sound of the voice has several acoustic features that influence the perception of how cooperative the speaker is. It remains unknown, however, whether these acoustic features are associated with actual cooperative behaviour. This issue is crucial to disentangle whether inferences of traits from voices are based on stereotypes, or facilitate the detection of cooperative partners.

Twenty years of FISH-based translocation analysis for retrospective ionizing radiation biodosimetry.

Purpose: The fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) technique, which easily detects reciprocal translocations, is currently used to estimate doses in retrospective biological dosimetry, after suspected accidental overexposure to ionizing radiation (IR). This study of 42 cases aimed to verify the appropriateness of this assay for radiation dose reconstruction, compared to the dicentric assay, and to evaluate other limitations.

Material And Methods: We labeled chromosomes 2, 4, and 12 by 3-color FISH painting to detect translocations on lymphocytes of patients with suspected past IR overexposure.

Women's attractiveness is linked to expected age at menopause.

A great number of studies have shown that features linked to immediate fertility explain a large part of the variance in female attractiveness. This is consistent with an evolutionary perspective, as men are expected to prefer females at the age at which fertility peaks (at least for short-term relationships) in order to increase their reproductive success. However, for long-term relationships, a high residual reproductive value (the expected future reproductive output, linked to age at menopause) becomes relevant as well.

Women in Transition: Experiences of Health and Health Care for Recently Incarcerated Women Living in Community Corrections Facilities.

Health priorities of women after incarceration remain poorly understood, constraining development of interventions targeted at their health during that time. We explored the experience of health and health care after incarceration in a focused ethnography of 28 women who had been released from prison or jail within the past year and were living in community corrections facilities. The women's outlook on health was rooted in a newfound core optimism, but this was constrained by their pressing health-related issues; stress and uncertainty; and the pressures of the criminal justice system.

Women in Transition to Health: A Theory-Based Intervention to Increase Engagement in Care for Women Recently Released From Jail or Prison.

The time after incarceration is widely regarded as tenuous and stressful, and for women living with chronic illness, self-management is yet another stressor. Intervening before the individual is overwhelmed is critical to ensuring success. In this article the Women in Transition to Health, a nurse-led intervention based on Lazarus and Folkman's Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, designed to improve health outcomes in women recently released from jail or prison is described.

Transmission of scrapie prions to primate after an extended silent incubation period.

Classical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (c-BSE) is the only animal prion disease reputed to be zoonotic, causing variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans and having guided protective measures for animal and human health against animal prion diseases. Recently, partial transmissions to humanized mice showed that the zoonotic potential of scrapie might be similar to c-BSE. We here report the direct transmission of a natural classical scrapie isolate to cynomolgus macaque, a highly relevant model for human prion diseases, after a 10-year silent incubation period, with features similar to those reported for human cases of sporadic CJD.

Detection of exosomal prions in blood by immunochemistry techniques.

In most forms of prion diseases, blood is infectious, but detection by immunochemistry techniques of the only available marker of infection (the misfolded prion protein, PrPTSE) in blood remains elusive. We developed a novel method for the detection of PrPTSE in blood of prion-infected rodents based on the finding that PrPTSE is associated with plasma exosomes. However, further purification of the exosomes on a sucrose gradient was necessary to remove plasma immunoglobulins, which interfere with PrPTSE, masking its detection by immunochemistry.

Evaluation of the protection of primates transfused with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease-infected blood products filtered with prion removal devices: a 5-year update.

Background: Analysis of archived appendix samples reveals that one in 2000 individuals in the United Kingdom may carry the infectious prion protein associated with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), raising questions about the risk of transfusion transmission from apparently healthy carriers. Blood leukoreduction shows limited efficiency against prions. Therefore, in absence of antemortem diagnostic tests, prion removal filters, including the P-Capt filter were designed to improve blood transfusion safety.

Synthetic scrapie infectivity: interaction between recombinant PrP and scrapie brain-derived RNA.

The key molecular event in human cerebral proteinopathies, which include Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, is the structural conversion of a specific host protein into a β-sheet-rich conformer. With regards to this common mechanism, it appears difficult to explain the outstanding infectious properties attributed to PrP(Sc), the hallmark of another intriguing family of cerebral proteinopathies known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) or prion diseases. The infectious PrP(Sc) or "prion" is thought to be composed solely of a misfolded form of the otherwise harmless cellular prion protein (PrP(c)).

Removal of exogenous prion infectivity in leukoreduced red blood cells unit by a specific filter designed for human transfusion.

Background: Five cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) infections were attributed to infusion of contaminated blood components, turning to real the interhuman transmissibility of this prion disease from asymptomatic carriers. Preventive policies rely on exclusion from blood donation and benefit of leukoreduction initially implemented against leukotropic viruses. In the absence of available antemortem diagnostic tests, the updated prevalence of silent vCJD infections (1/2000 in the United Kingdom) urges the necessity to enforce blood safety with more efficient active measures able to remove the remaining infectivity.

A method for conducting simultaneous convergent tracer tests in multilayered aquifers.

Forced gradient tracer tests between two boreholes can be used to study contaminant transport processes at the small field scale or investigate the transport properties of an aquifer. Full depth tests, in which tracer samples are collected just from the discharge of the abstraction borehole, often give rise to breakthrough curves with multiple peaks that are usually attributed to different flow paths through the aquifer that can rarely be identified from the test results alone. Tests in selected levels of the aquifer, such as those between packer-isolated sections of the boreholes, are time consuming, expensive; and the identification of major transport pathways is not guaranteed.

Evaluation of the zoonotic potential of transmissible mink encephalopathy.

Successful transmission of Transmissible Mink Encephalopathy (TME) to cattle supports the bovine hypothesis for the still controversial origin of TME outbreaks. Human and primate susceptibility to classical Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (c-BSE) and the transmissibility of L-type BSE to macaques indicate a low cattle-to-primate species barrier. We therefore evaluated the zoonotic potential of cattle-adapted TME.