Disentangling sensory precision and prior expectation of change in autism during tactile discrimination.

Predictive coding theories suggest that core symptoms in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may stem from atypical mechanisms of perceptual inference (i.e., inferring the hidden causes of sensations).

Patient and public involvement is suboptimal in randomized controlled trials addressing a chronic condition.

Objectives: To describe patient and public involvement (PPI) in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) addressing a chronic condition and to analyze whether PPI is associated with trial characteristics.

Study Design And Setting: We used PubMed search to identify RCTs addressing a chronic condition and published in journals with a mandatory PPI statement.

Results: Across 101 RCTs; 40 (40%) reported PPI at any stage of the research process.

Improving Widescale Monitoring of Ectoparasite Presence in Northern Canadian Wildlife with the Aid of Citizen Science.

Sampling hides from harvested animals is commonly used for passive monitoring of ectoparasites on wildlife hosts, but often relies heavily on community engagement to obtain spatially and temporally consistent samples. Surveillance of winter ticks () on moose () and caribou () hosts in Yukon, Canada, has relied in part on voluntary submission of hides by hunters since 2011, but few samples were submitted. To enhance sampling efforts on underrepresented moose and caribou hosts, we implemented a three-year citizen science program, the Yukon Winter Tick Monitoring Project (YWTMP), to better engage with hunters in hide sample collection.

Blunted emotion judgments of body movements in Parkinson's disease.

Some of the behavioral disorders observed in Parkinson's disease (PD) may be related to an altered processing of social messages, including emotional expressions. Emotions conveyed by whole body movements may be difficult to generate and be detected by PD patients. The aim of the present study was to compare valence judgments of emotional whole body expressions in individuals with PD and in healthy controls matched for age, gender and education.

Long term simulations of potential oil spills around Cuba.

Simulations over eight years of continuous surface oil spills around Cuba are carried out to identify the most likely stranding (beaching) locations. The open source Lagrangian oil drift model OpenOil is applied with high resolution hydrodynamic forcing. The actual fraction of the released oil mass reaching different regions is calculated, revealing small differences between a light and a heavy crude oil type.

Highly variable upper and abyssal overturning cells in the South Atlantic.

The Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) is a primary mechanism driving oceanic heat redistribution on Earth, thereby affecting Earth's climate and weather. However, the full-depth structure and variability of the MOC are still poorly understood, particularly in the South Atlantic. This study presents unique multiyear records of the oceanic volume transport of both the upper (<~3100 meters) and abyssal (>~3100 meters) overturning cells based on daily moored measurements in the South Atlantic at 34.

First Case of Brucellosis Caused by an Amphibian-type Brucella.

We report the first case of brucellosis caused by an isolate whose genome is identical that of a frog isolate from Texas, demonstrating the zoonotic potential of amphibian-type Brucella. Importantly, with such atypical Brucella, correct diagnosis cannot be performed using routine serological tests or identification methods.

Measuring oil residence time with GPS-drifters, satellites, and Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS).

As oil production worldwide continues to increase, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, marine oil spill preparedness relies on deeper understanding of surface oil spill transport science. This paper describes experiments carried out on a chronic release of crude oil and aims to understand the residence time of oil slicks using a combination of remote sensing platforms and GPS tracked drifters. From April 2017 to August 2018, we performed multiple synchronized deployments of drogued and un-drogued drifters to monitor the life time (residence time) of the surface oil slicks originated from the MC20 spill site, located close to the Mississippi Delta.

High temperature aggravates the effects of pesticides in goldfish.

In human-altered rivers, fish are often conjointly exposed to an increase in water temperature due to global warming and to a contamination by organic pollutants such as pesticides, but their combined effects are still elusive. Thermal and chemical stressors could potentially interact because high temperature increases metabolism and toxicant uptake, and can alter the ability of organisms to set up adequate stress responses and to maintain homeostasis. These combined stressors could thus potentially result in higher level of molecular and cellular damage, and stronger effects on behavior and physiology, but experimental evidence across biological levels is still scarce.

Remote sensing assessment of oil spills near a damaged platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

An oil platform in the Mississippi Canyon 20 (MC-20) site was damaged by Hurricane Ivan in September 2004. In this study, we use medium- to high-resolution (10-30 m) optical remote sensing imagery to systematically assess oil spills near this site for the period between 2004 and 2016. Image analysis detects no surface oil in 2004, but ~40% of the cloud-free images in 2005 show oil slicks, and this number increases to ~70% in 2006-2011, and >80% since 2012.

Risk of venous thromboembolism in association with factor V leiden in cancer patients - The EDITH case-control study.

Background: Cancer and factor V Leiden mutation are both risk factors for venous thromboembolism (VTE). Cancer critically increases the thrombotic risk whereas Factor V Leiden is the most common pro-thrombotic mutation. The impact of the factor V Leiden on the risk of VTE in cancer patients remains uncertain.

Correction to: Adults with Autism Tend to Underestimate the Hidden Environmental Structure: Evidence from a Visual Associative Learning Task.

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake in the article title.

Adults with Autism Tend to Underestimate the Hidden Environmental Structure: Evidence from a Visual Associative Learning Task.

The learning-style theory of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (Qian, Lipkin, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5:77, 2011) states that ASD individuals differ from neurotypics in the way they learn and store information about the environment and its structure. ASD would rather adopt a lookup-table strategy (LUT: memorizing each experience), while neurotypics would favor an interpolation style (INT: extracting regularities to generalize). In a series of visual behavioral tasks, we tested this hypothesis in 20 neurotypical and 20 ASD adults.

Deciphering human motion to discriminate social interactions: a developmental neuroimaging study.

Non-verbal communication plays a major role in social interaction understanding. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the development of the neural networks involved in social interaction recognition based on human motion in children (8-11), adolescents (13-17), and adults (20-41). Participants watched point-light videos depicting two actors interacting or moving independently and were asked whether these agents were interacting or not.

Neuroanatomical Correlates of Recognizing Face Expressions in Mild Stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

Early Alzheimer's disease can involve social disinvestment, possibly as a consequence of impairment of nonverbal communication skills. This study explores whether patients with Alzheimer's disease at the mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia stage have impaired recognition of emotions in facial expressions, and describes neuroanatomical correlates of emotion processing impairment. As part of the ongoing PACO study (personality, Alzheimer's disease and behaviour), 39 patients with Alzheimer's disease at the mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia stage and 39 matched controls completed tests involving discrimination of four basic emotions-happiness, fear, anger, and disgust-on photographs of faces.

Decision-making in a changing world: a study in autism spectrum disorders.

To learn to deal with the unexpected is essential to adaptation to a social, therefore often unpredictable environment. Fourteen adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 15 controls underwent a decision-making task aimed at investigating the influence of either a social or a non-social environment, and its interaction with either a stable (with constant probabilities) or an unstable (with changing probabilities) context on their performance. Participants with ASD presented with difficulties in accessing underlying statistical rules in an unstable context, a deficit especially enhanced in the social environment.

Personality, Alzheimer's disease and behavioural and cognitive symptoms of dementia: the PACO prospective cohort study protocol.

Background: Alzheimer's disease is characterised by a loss of cognitive function and behavioural problems as set out in the term "Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia". These behavioural symptoms have heavy consequences for the patients and their families. A greater understanding of behavioural symptoms risk factors would allow better detection of those patients, a better understanding of crisis situations and better management of these patients.

French 2013 guidelines for antiretroviral therapy of HIV-1 infection in adults.

Introduction: These guidelines are part of the French Experts' recommendations for the management of people living with HIV/AIDS, which were made public and submitted to the French health authorities in September 2013. The objective was to provide updated recommendations for antiretroviral treatment (ART) of HIV-positive adults. Guidelines included the following topics: when to start, what to start, specific situations for the choice of the first session of antiretroviral therapy, optimization of antiretroviral therapy after virologic suppression, and management of virologic failure.

Information content and analysis methods for multi-modal high-throughput biomedical data.

The spectrum of modern molecular high-throughput assaying includes diverse technologies such as microarray gene expression, miRNA expression, proteomics, DNA methylation, among many others. Now that these technologies have matured and become increasingly accessible, the next frontier is to collect "multi-modal" data for the same set of subjects and conduct integrative, multi-level analyses. While multi-modal data does contain distinct biological information that can be useful for answering complex biology questions, its value for predicting clinical phenotypes and contributions of each type of input remain unknown.

Face the hierarchy: ERP and oscillatory brain responses in social rank processing.

Recognition of social hierarchy is a key feature that helps us navigate through our complex social environment. Neuroimaging studies have identified brain structures involved in the processing of hierarchical stimuli but the precise temporal dynamics of brain activity associated with such processing remains largely unknown. Here, we used electroencephalography to examine the effect of social hierarchy on neural responses elicited by faces.

A comprehensive evaluation of multicategory classification methods for microbiomic data.

Background: Recent advances in next-generation DNA sequencing enable rapid high-throughput quantitation of microbial community composition in human samples, opening up a new field of microbiomics. One of the promises of this field is linking abundances of microbial taxa to phenotypic and physiological states, which can inform development of new diagnostic, personalized medicine, and forensic modalities. Prior research has demonstrated the feasibility of applying machine learning methods to perform body site and subject classification with microbiomic data.

Microbiomic signatures of psoriasis: feasibility and methodology comparison.

Psoriasis is a common chronic inflammatory disease of the skin. We sought to use bacterial community abundance data to assess the feasibility of developing multivariate molecular signatures for differentiation of cutaneous psoriatic lesions, clinically unaffected contralateral skin from psoriatic patients, and similar cutaneous loci in matched healthy control subjects. Using 16S rRNA high-throughput DNA sequencing, we assayed the cutaneous microbiome for 51 such matched specimen triplets including subjects of both genders, different age groups, ethnicities and multiple body sites.

New methods for separating causes from effects in genomics data.

Background: The discovery of molecular pathways is a challenging problem and its solution relies on the identification of causal molecular interactions in genomics data. Causal molecular interactions can be discovered using randomized experiments; however such experiments are often costly, infeasible, or unethical. Fortunately, algorithms that infer causal interactions from observational data have been in development for decades, predominantly in the quantitative sciences, and many of them have recently been applied to genomics data.

High prevalence and impact on the quality of life of facial lipoatrophy and other abnormalities in fat tissue distribution in HIV-infected patients treated with antiretroviral therapy.

Few data report the prevalence in actual clinical settings of lipodystrophy (LD), and in particular of facial lipoatrophy (LA), in HIV-infected patients treated with long-term antiretroviral therapy (ART). A French, multicenter, cross-sectional, observational study was conducted in HIV-infected patients on continuous ART for more than 12 months. The main objective was to assess the prevalence of facial LA in this population.