My Deep Sea, My Backyard: a pilot study to build capacity for global deep-ocean exploration and research.

The deep ocean is the largest ecosystem on the planet, constituting greater than 90% of all habitable space. Over three-quarters of countries globally have deep ocean within their Exclusive Economic Zones. While maintaining deep-ocean function is key to ensuring planetary health, deficiencies in knowledge and governance, as well as inequitable global capacity, challenge our ability to safeguard the resilience of this vast realm, leaving the fate of the deep ocean in the hands of a few.

A Successful Organized Effort to Improve Operating Room First-Case Starts in a Tertiary Academic Medical Center.

Background: Operating room (OR) inefficiency drives up cost, decreases revenue, and leads to surgeon, staff, and patient dissatisfaction. Given a low mean first-case start rate in our tertiary academic medical center, we developed a process to improve first-case start rates in an effort to increase OR efficiency.

Methods: A working group of the OR Executive Committee was constituted to develop and implement a multistep operational plan.

Divergent estimates of herd-wide caribou calf survival: Ecological factors and methodological biases.

Population monitoring is a critical part of effective wildlife management, but methods are prone to biases that can hinder our ability to accurately track changes in populations through time. Calf survival plays an important role in ungulate population dynamics and can be monitored using telemetry and herd composition surveys. These methods, however, are susceptible to unrepresentative sampling and violations of the assumption of equal detectability, respectively.

Geometry of the ideal free distribution: individual behavioural variation and annual reproductive success in aggregations of a social ungulate.

Variation in social environment can mitigate risks and rewards associated with occupying a particular patch. We aim to integrate Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) and Geometry of the Selfish Herd (GSH) to address an apparent conflict in their predictions of equal mean fitness between patches (IFD) and declining fitness benefits within a patch (GSH). We tested these hypotheses in a socio-spatial context using individual caribou that were aggregated or disaggregated during calving and varied in their annual reproductive success (ARS).

SimSurvey: An R package for comparing the design and analysis of surveys by simulating spatially-correlated populations.

Populations often show complex spatial and temporal dynamics, creating challenges in designing and implementing effective surveys. Inappropriate sampling designs can potentially lead to both under-sampling (reducing precision) and over-sampling (through the extensive and potentially expensive sampling of correlated metrics). These issues can be difficult to identify and avoid in sample surveys of fish populations as they tend to be costly and comprised of multiple levels of sampling.

Controlling postoperative use of i.v. acetaminophen at an academic medical center.

Purpose: Results of an interprofessional formulary initiative to decrease postoperative prescribing of i.v. acetaminophen are reported.

Implementing a novel movement-based approach to inferring parturition and neonate caribou calf survival.

In ungulates, parturition is correlated with a reduction in movement rate. With advances in movement-based technologies comes an opportunity to develop new techniques to assess reproduction in wild ungulates that are less invasive and reduce biases. DeMars et al.

Spatiotemporal heterogeneity in prey abundance and vulnerability shapes the foraging tactics of an omnivore.

Prey abundance and prey vulnerability vary across space and time, but we know little about how they mediate predator-prey interactions and predator foraging tactics. To evaluate the interplay between prey abundance, prey vulnerability and predator space use, we examined patterns of black bear (Ursus americanus) predation of caribou (Rangifer tarandus) neonates in Newfoundland, Canada using data from 317 collared individuals (9 bears, 34 adult female caribou, 274 caribou calves). During the caribou calving season, we predicted that landscape features would influence calf vulnerability to bear predation, and that bears would actively hunt calves by selecting areas associated with increased calf vulnerability.

Hyperglycemic Hyperosmolar State During Induction Chemotherapy for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

We present the case of a 16-year-old boy who presented with fatigue, polyuria, and polydipsia while on chemotherapy for his relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Blood gas examination confirmed the diagnosis of hyperosmolar hyperglycemic state. The etiology for his hyperglycemia was most likely a result of oral glucocorticoid therapy combined with asparaginase therapy-both are a cornerstone of induction chemotherapy for ALL.

Phase-dependent climate-predator interactions explain three decades of variation in neonatal caribou survival.

Climate can have direct and indirect effects on population dynamics via changes in resource competition or predation risk, but this influence may be modulated by density- or phase-dependent processes. We hypothesized that for ungulates, climatic conditions close to parturition have a greater influence on the predation risk of neonates during population declines, when females are already under nutritional stress triggered by food limitation. We examined the presence of phase-dependent climate-predator (PDCP) interactions on neonatal ungulate survival by comparing spatial and temporal fluctuations in climatic conditions, cause-specific mortality and per capita resource limitation.

Fluctuation of spuriously elevated troponin I: a case report.

Serum troponin is a useful laboratory study for the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction. However, elevations can also be seen in a variety of other diseases processes. Falsely positive troponin values caused by interference with current troponin assays have been reported.

Natural antibodies against nerve growth factor inhibit in vitro prostate cancer cell metastasis.

Prostate cancer is a major cause of death in older men, and bone metastasis is the primary cause of morbidity and mortality in prostate cancer. Prostate is an abundant source of nerve growth factor (NGF) that is secreted by malignant epithelial cells and utilized as an important autocrine factor for growth and metastasis. We previously showed that intravenous gammaglobulin (IVIg) contains natural antibodies against NGF, which inhibit growth and differentiation of the NGF-dependent cell line PC-12.

Human-specific gain of function in a developmental enhancer.

Changes in gene regulation are thought to have contributed to the evolution of human development. However, in vivo evidence for uniquely human developmental regulatory function has remained elusive. In transgenic mice, a conserved noncoding sequence (HACNS1) that evolved extremely rapidly in humans acted as an enhancer of gene expression that has gained a strong limb expression domain relative to the orthologous elements from chimpanzee and rhesus macaque.

Ultraconservation identifies a small subset of extremely constrained developmental enhancers.

Extended perfect human-rodent sequence identity of at least 200 base pairs (ultraconservation) is potentially indicative of evolutionary or functional uniqueness. We used a transgenic mouse assay to compare the embryonic enhancer activity of 231 noncoding ultraconserved human genome regions with that of 206 extremely conserved regions lacking ultraconservation. Developmental enhancers were equally prevalent in both populations, suggesting instead that ultraconservation identifies a small, functionally indistinct subset of similarly constrained cis-regulatory elements.

Time series analysis of variables associated with daily mean emergency department length of stay.

Study Objective: We measure the effect of various input, throughput, and output factors on daily emergency department (ED) mean length of stay per patient (daily mean length of stay).

Methods: The study was a retrospective review of 93,274 ED visits between April 15, 2002, and December 31, 2003. The association between the daily mean length of stay and the independent variables was assessed with autoregressive moving average time series analysis (ARIMA).

Biologically active anti-nerve growth factor antibodies in commercial intravenous gammaglobulin.

Neurotrophins are regulators of development, survival and function of neuronal and non-neuronal cells, one of the most important of which is nerve growth factor (NGF). Previous studies have demonstrated the presence of antibodies to NGF in normal human serum. It would therefore be predicted that antibodies to NGF would also be present in commercial intravenous gammaglobulin (IVIg).

In vivo enhancer analysis of human conserved non-coding sequences.

Identifying the sequences that direct the spatial and temporal expression of genes and defining their function in vivo remains a significant challenge in the annotation of vertebrate genomes. One major obstacle is the lack of experimentally validated training sets. In this study, we made use of extreme evolutionary sequence conservation as a filter to identify putative gene regulatory elements, and characterized the in vivo enhancer activity of a large group of non-coding elements in the human genome that are conserved in human-pufferfish, Takifugu (Fugu) rubripes, or ultraconserved in human-mouse-rat.