Investigating the Kappa Effect Elicited Through Concurrent Visual and Tactile Stimulation.

The experience of time and space in subjective perception is closely connected. The Kappa effect refers to the phenomenon where the perceived duration of the time interval between stimuli is influenced by the spatial distance between them. In this study, we aimed to explore the Kappa effect from a psychophysical perspective.

High prevalence of the recently identified clonal lineage ST1299/CT3109 among vancomycin-resistant strains isolated from municipal wastewater.

Previously, we demonstrated that the majority of vancomycin-resistant (VREfm) strains from in-patients of the University Hospital Erlangen, Germany, belonged to only three clonal lineages, namely ST117/CT71 and two novel ST1299 lineages classified as CT3109 and CT1903. The goal of the current study was (i) to investigate whether VREfm is also detectable in wastewater of the city of Erlangen, (ii) to identify their molecular features, and (iii) to clarify whether VREfm could arise from the community of the city of Erlangen or can be (directly) connected to nosocomial infections in the hospital setting. From April to May 2023, a total of 244 VREfm strains from raw wastewater of the city of Erlangen were analyzed by core genome multilocus sequence typing (cgMLST).

The Aspergillus galactomannan Ag VIRCLIA® Monotest and the sõna Aspergillus galactomannan lateral flow assay show comparable performance for the diagnosis of invasive aspergillosis.

Background: Rapid galactomannan tests, such as the sõna Aspergillus GM Lateral Flow Assay (GM-LFA) and the Aspergillus Galactomannan Ag VIRCLIA® Monotest (GM-Monotest), which are suitable for the analysis of single samples, have the potential to accelerate diagnosis of invasive aspergillosis (IA).

Objectives: To compare the performance of the GM-Monotest and the GM-LFA for the diagnosis of IA.

Patients/methods: Two patient cohorts were analysed: adults who had received an allogeneic haematopoietic stem-cell transplant (alloHSCT-cohort) and patients with proven/probable IA from a 5-year period (cross-sectional IA-cohort).

Impaired brain-heart axis in focal epilepsy: Alterations in information flow and implications for seizure dynamics.

This study delves into functional brain-heart interplay (BHI) dynamics during interictal periods before and after seizure events in focal epilepsy. Our analysis focuses on elucidating the causal interaction between cortical and autonomic nervous system (ANS) oscillations, employing electroencephalography and heart rate variability series. The dataset for this investigation comprises 47 seizure events from 14 independent subjects, obtained from the publicly available Siena Dataset.