Warming and disturbances affect Arctic-boreal vegetation resilience across northwestern North America.

Rapid warming and increasing disturbances in high-latitude regions have caused extensive vegetation shifts and uncertainty in future carbon budgets. Better predictions of vegetation dynamics and functions require characterizing resilience, which indicates the capability of an ecosystem to recover from perturbations. Here, using temporal autocorrelation of remotely sensed greenness, we quantify time-varying vegetation resilience during 2000-2019 across northwestern North American Arctic-boreal ecosystems.

Thermal transport in fullerene-based molecular junctions: molecular dynamics simulations.

We investigate phonon thermal transport of fullerene-based single-molecule junctions by employing classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We compute the thermal conductances of Cfullerene monomers, dimers, and trimers utilizing three distinct MD methods. We observe the equilibration dynamics in one approach, and employ two other nonequilibrium steady state simulation methods.

SARS-CoV-2 infection among physicians over time in Ontario, Canada: a population-based retrospective cohort study.

Aim: To assess this risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection among Ontario physicians by specialty and in comparison with non-physician controls during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, the primary outcome was incident SARS-CoV-2 infection confirmed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Secondary outcomes were hospitalization, use of critical care, and mortality.

Challenges in molecular dynamics simulations of heat exchange statistics.

We study heat exchange in temperature-biased metal-molecule-metal molecular junctions by employing the molecular dynamics simulator LAMMPS. Generating the nonequilibrium steady state with Langevin thermostats at the boundaries of the junction, we show that the average heat current across a gold-alkanedithiol-gold nanojunction behaves physically, with the thermal conductance value matching the literature. In contrast, the full probability distribution function for heat exchange, as generated by the simulator, violates the fundamental fluctuation symmetry for entropy production.

Wildfire-induced increases in photosynthesis in boreal forest ecosystems of North America.

Observations of the annual cycle of atmospheric CO in high northern latitudes provide evidence for an increase in terrestrial metabolism in Arctic tundra and boreal forest ecosystems. However, the mechanisms driving these changes are not yet fully understood. One proposed hypothesis is that ecological change from disturbance, such as wildfire, could increase the magnitude and change the phase of net ecosystem exchange through shifts in plant community composition.

A model shows that fast growing species are the deadliest despite eliciting a strong immune response.

We used to investigate how differences between species in growth rate and mechanisms of pathogenesis influence the outcome of infection. We found that the most rapid germinators and growers and on fly cuticle were the fastest killers, suggesting that pre-penetration competence is key to success. Virulent strains also induced the largest immune response, which did not depend on profuse growth within hosts as virulent toxin-producing strains only proliferated post-mortem while slow-killing strains that were specialized to other insects grew profusely pre-mortem.

COVID Vaccine Hesitancy and Long-Term Traffic Risks.

Background: COVID vaccine hesitancy identifies a discrepancy between personal decisions and public guidelines. We tested whether COVID vaccine hesitancy was associated with the long-term risks of a traffic crash.

Methods: We conducted a population-based longitudinal cohort analysis of adults by determining COVID vaccination status through linkages to electronic medical records.

Renal Dysfunction After Heart Transplant.

Background: Moderate or severe renal dysfunction (MSRD) is a frequent complication after heart transplantation. Strategies to delay progression and improve outcomes, such as renoprotective medications and timely referral to nephrology, remain important in providing care to heart transplant recipients with MSRD.

Research Question: What are chronic renal dysfunction's prevalence, risk factors, and optimal clinical management strategies in heart transplant recipients?

Design: This single-center, cross-sectional study examined patients who received a heart transplant from January 1, 2000, to June 30, 2011, and followed until December 31, 2011.

Genetic variation in disease resistance in Drosophila spp. is mitigated in Drosophila sechellia by specialization to a toxic host.

We found that Drosophila species vary in their susceptibility to the broad-spectrum entomopathogen, Metarhizium anisopliae (strain Ma549). Generalist species were generally more resistant than dietary specialists, with the cactophilic Drosophila buzzatii and Drosophila sechellia, a specialist of the Morinda citrifolia (Morinda) fruit, being most susceptible. Morinda fruit is reported to be toxic to most herbivores because it contains Octanoic Acid (OA).

Traumatic Brain Injury, Sleep, and Melatonin-Intrinsic Changes with Therapeutic Potential.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the most prevalent causes of morbidity in the United States and is associated with numerous chronic sequelae long after the point of injury. One of the most common long-term complaints in patients with TBI is sleep dysfunction. It is reported that alterations in melatonin follow TBI and may be linked with various sleep and circadian disorders directly (via cellular signaling) or indirectly (via free radicals and inflammatory signaling).

The magnitude and pace of photosynthetic recovery after wildfire in California ecosystems.

Wildfire modifies the short- and long-term exchange of carbon between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere, with impacts on ecosystem services such as carbon uptake. Dry western US forests historically experienced low-intensity, frequent fires, with patches across the landscape occupying different points in the fire-recovery trajectory. Contemporary perturbations, such as recent severe fires in California, could shift the historic stand-age distribution and impact the legacy of carbon uptake on the landscape.

Point-of-Care Amenable Detection of and Its Antibiotic Resistance Mutations.

(MG) is an emerging sexually transmitted bacterium. Due to its fastidious and slow-growing nature, MG is difficult to detect through culture-based diagnostics. Like , another bacterial pathogen linked to sexually transmitted infections (STIs), MG has developed resistance to macrolide and fluoroquinolone antibiotics used to treat STIs.

LncRNA XIST regulates breast cancer stem cells by activating proinflammatory IL-6/STAT3 signaling.

Aberrant expression of XIST, a long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) initiating X chromosome inactivation (XCI) in early embryogenesis, is a common feature of breast cancer (BC). However, the roles of post-XCI XIST in breast carcinogenesis remain elusive. Here we identify XIST as a key regulator of breast cancer stem cells (CSCs), which exhibit aldehyde dehydrogenase positive (ALDH) epithelial- (E) and CD24CD44 mesenchymal-like (M) phenotypes.

Locating Partial Discharges in Power Transformers with Convolutional Iterative Filtering.

The most common source of transformer failure is in the insulation, and the most prevalent warning signal for insulation weakness is partial discharge (PD). Locating the positions of these partial discharges would help repair the transformer to prevent failures. This work investigates algorithms that could be deployed to locate the position of a PD event using data from ultra-high frequency (UHF) sensors inside the transformer.