The Impact of Selective Attention and Musical Training on the Cortical Speech Tracking in the Delta and Theta Frequency Bands.

Oral communication regularly takes place amidst background noise, requiring the ability to selectively attend to a target speech stream. Musical training has been shown to be beneficial for this task. Regarding the underlying neural mechanisms, recent studies showed that the speech envelope is tracked by neural activity in auditory cortex, which plays a role in the neural processing of speech, including speech in noise.

No Evidence of Musical Training Influencing the Cortical Contribution to the Speech-Frequency-Following Response and Its Modulation through Selective Attention.

Musicians can have better abilities to understand speech in adverse condition such as background noise than non-musicians. However, the neural mechanisms behind such enhanced behavioral performances remain largely unclear. Studies have found that the subcortical frequency-following response to the fundamental frequency of speech and its higher harmonics (speech-FFR) may be involved since it is larger in people with musical training than in those without.

The challenge of unprecedented floods and droughts in risk management.

Risk management has reduced vulnerability to floods and droughts globally, yet their impacts are still increasing. An improved understanding of the causes of changing impacts is therefore needed, but has been hampered by a lack of empirical data. On the basis of a global dataset of 45 pairs of events that occurred within the same area, we show that risk management generally reduces the impacts of floods and droughts but faces difficulties in reducing the impacts of unprecedented events of a magnitude not previously experienced.

The Development and Evaluation of a High-Resolution Above Ground Biomass Product for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (2000).

This study details the development of a U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico above-ground forest biomass (agb) product (baseline 2000) developed by the United States Environmental, Protection Agency (epa) that was compared to another AGB product developed by the U.

The impact of pulmonary metastasectomy in patients with previously resected colorectal cancer liver metastases.

Background: 40-50% of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) will develop liver metastases (CRLM) during the course of the disease. One third of these patients will additionally develop pulmonary metastases.

Methods: 137 consecutive patients with CRLM, were analyzed regarding survival data, clinical, histological data and treatment.