Probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust.

The modern energy economy and environmental infrastructure rely on the flow of fluids through fractures in rock. Yet this flow cannot be imaged directly because rocks are opaque to most probes. Here we apply chattering dust, or chemically reactive grains of sucrose containing pockets of pressurized carbon dioxide, to study rock fractures.

Introduction of a green algal squalene synthase enhances squalene accumulation in a strain of sp. PCC 6803.

Squalene is a triterpene which is produced as a precursor for a wide range of terpenoid compounds in many organisms. It has commercial use in food and cosmetics but could also be used as a feedstock for production of chemicals and fuels, if generated sustainably on a large scale. We have engineered a cyanobacterium, sp.

The Impact of Physician Specialization on Clinical and Hospital Outcomes in Patients Undergoing EVAR and TEVAR.

Background: Endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) and Thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) are commonly performed by interventional radiologists, cardiologists, general surgeons, cardiothoracic surgeons, and vascular surgeons, with each specialty having differences in residency structure, operative experience, and subspecialty training. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of surgeon specialty on outcomes following EVAR and TEVAR.

Methods: Patients who underwent EVAR and TEVAR were identified from the 2007 to 2009 Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS).

MapMyFlu: visualizing spatio-temporal relationships between related influenza sequences.

Understanding the molecular dynamics of viral spreading is crucial for anticipating the epidemiological implications of disease outbreaks. In the case of influenza, reassortments or point mutations affect the adaption to new hosts or resistance to anti-viral drugs and can determine whether a new strain will result in a pandemic infection or a less severe progression. To this end, tools integrating molecular information with epidemiological parameters are important to understand how molecular characteristics reflect in the infection dynamics.

Reported fatigue, difficulty, and cardiovascular response to a memory challenge.

Female undergraduates were presented the opportunity to earn a small chance of winning a modest prize by memorizing in 2 min two or six nonsense trigrams (meaningless series of three letters, such as AED). Analysis of cardiovascular measures taken during the work period indicated that systolic blood pressure responses first rose and then fell with self-reported fatigue in the two trigram condition. By contrast, the responses declined with self-reported fatigue in the six trigram condition, starting relatively high and ending low.