Therapeutics effects of bovine colostrum applications on gastrointestinal diseases: a systematic review.

Background: Evidence on the effects of bovine colostrum (BC) supplementation on gastrointestinal (GI) diseases is conflicting.

Objectives: This systematic review summarized the findings of clinical trials (CTs) on the effects of BC supplementation on GI diseases.

Methods: A systematic search was conducted in online databases, including PubMed, ISI Web of Science, and Scopus, until March 2021 and updated until December 2023.

Bovine Colostrum in Increased Intestinal Permeability in Healthy Athletes and Patients: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials.

Background: Increasing intestinal permeability causes chronic inflammation, which is one of the etiological factors of many diseases that presently constitute global challenges.

Aims: Considering the importance of developing therapies to eliminate the increased intestinal permeability, in this systematic review and meta-analysis, we analyze the impact of bovine colostrum (BC) on the gut barrier and its permeability.

Methods: Online databases, including PubMed, ISI Web of Science, and Scopus, were searched to find pertinent articles up to March 2022.

Experientially-grounded and distributional semantic vectors uncover dissociable representations of conceptual categories.

Neuronal populations code similar concepts by similar activity patterns across the human brain's semantic networks. However, it is unclear to what extent such meaning-to-symbol mapping reflects distributional statistics, or experiential information grounded in sensorimotor and emotional knowledge. We asked whether integrating distributional and experiential data better distinguished conceptual categories than each method taken separately.

An information-theoretic quantification of the content of communication between brain regions.

Quantifying the amount, content and direction of communication between brain regions is key to understanding brain function. Traditional methods to analyze brain activity based on the Wiener-Granger causality principle quantify the overall information propagated by neural activity between simultaneously recorded brain regions, but do not reveal the information flow about specific features of interest (such as sensory stimuli). Here, we develop a new information theoretic measure termed Feature-specific Information Transfer (FIT), quantifying how much information about a specific feature flows between two regions.

Causal role of a neural system for separating and selecting multidimensional social cognitive information.

People are multi-faceted, typically good at some things but bad at others, and a critical aspect of social judgement is the ability to focus on those traits relevant for the task at hand. However, it remains unknown how the brain supports such context-dependent social judgement. Here, we examine how people represent multidimensional individuals, and how the brain extracts relevant information and filters out irrelevant information when comparing individuals within a specific dimension.

Apoptosis in field and experimental cases of avian influenza HN infection in broiler chickens in Iran.

Avian influenza virus subtype HN is widely circulating around the globe affecting many species of animal including mammals and birds as well as human beings. The virus has pandemic potential due to segmented nature of the viral genome. Ultra-structural features of apoptosis in field and experimental infection of HN avian influenza virus were studied.

Distinct neural representations for prosocial and self-benefiting effort.

Prosocial behaviors-actions that benefit others-are central to individual and societal well-being. Although the mechanisms underlying the financial and moral costs of prosocial behaviors are increasingly understood, this work has often ignored a key influence on behavior: effort. Many prosocial acts are effortful, and people are averse to the costs of exerting them.

Hyper-Immune Bovine Milk as an Immunological and Nutritional Supplement for COVID-19.

Unlabelled: Many different strategies have been used to fight against the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic as a therapeutics or prophylaxis approaches. However, not enough attention has been paid to general and specific immune factors and nutritional components found in hyper-immunized dairy products. Hyper-immune bovine colostrum (HBC) has been used against many different respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts infections during past decades.

Caveats and Nuances of Model-Based and Model-Free Representational Connectivity Analysis.

Brain connectivity analyses have conventionally relied on statistical relationship between one-dimensional summaries of activation in different brain areas. However, summarizing activation patterns within each area to a single dimension ignores the potential statistical dependencies between their multi-dimensional activity patterns. Representational Connectivity Analyses (RCA) is a method that quantifies the relationship between multi-dimensional patterns of activity without reducing the dimensionality of the data.

Distinct neurocomputational mechanisms support informational and socially normative conformity.

A change of mind in response to social influence could be driven by informational conformity to increase accuracy, or by normative conformity to comply with social norms such as reciprocity. Disentangling the behavioural, cognitive, and neurobiological underpinnings of informational and normative conformity have proven elusive. Here, participants underwent fMRI while performing a perceptual task that involved both advice-taking and advice-giving to human and computer partners.

4K-memristor analog-grade passive crossbar circuit.

The superior density of passive analog-grade memristive crossbar circuits enables storing large neural network models directly on specialized neuromorphic chips to avoid costly off-chip communication. To ensure efficient use of such circuits in neuromorphic systems, memristor variations must be substantially lower than those of active memory devices. Here we report a 64 × 64 passive crossbar circuit with ~99% functional nonvolatile metal-oxide memristors.

Medial Frontal Cortex Activity Predicts Information Sampling in Economic Choice.

Decision-making not only requires agents to decide what to choose but also how much information to sample before committing to a choice. Previously established frameworks for economic choice argue for a deliberative process of evidence accumulation across time. These tacitly acknowledge a role of information sampling in that decisions are only made once sufficient evidence is acquired, yet few experiments have explicitly placed information sampling under the participant's control.

Combinatorial optimization by weight annealing in memristive hopfield networks.

The increasing utility of specialized circuits and growing applications of optimization call for the development of efficient hardware accelerator for solving optimization problems. Hopfield neural network is a promising approach for solving combinatorial optimization problems due to the recent demonstrations of efficient mixed-signal implementation based on emerging non-volatile memory devices. Such mixed-signal accelerators also enable very efficient implementation of various annealing techniques, which are essential for finding optimal solutions.

Using distance on the Riemannian manifold to compare representations in brain and in models.

Representational similarity analysis (RSA) summarizes activity patterns for a set of experimental conditions into a matrix composed of pairwise comparisons between activity patterns. Two examples of such matrices are the condition-by-condition inner product and correlation matrix. These representational matrices reside on the manifold of positive semidefinite matrices, called the Riemannian manifold.

Correction: Inferring exemplar discriminability in brain representations.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Allocentric representation in the human amygdala and ventral visual stream.

The hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex are considered the main brain structures for allocentric representation of the external environment. Here, we show that the amygdala and the ventral visual stream are involved in allocentric representation. Thirty-one young men explored 35 virtual environments during high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and were subsequently tested on recall of the allocentric pattern of the objects in each environment-in other words, the positions of the objects relative to each other and to the outer perimeter.

Entorhinal and ventromedial prefrontal cortices abstract and generalize the structure of reinforcement learning problems.

Knowledge of the structure of a problem, such as relationships between stimuli, enables rapid learning and flexible inference. Humans and other animals can abstract this structural knowledge and generalize it to solve new problems. For example, in spatial reasoning, shortest-path inferences are immediate in new environments.

Distinct fronto-temporal substrates of distributional and taxonomic similarity among words: evidence from RSA of BOLD signals.

A class of semantic theories defines concepts in terms of statistical distributions of lexical items, basing meaning on vectors of word co-occurrence frequencies. A different approach emphasizes abstract hierarchical taxonomic relationships among concepts. However, the functional relevance of these different accounts and how they capture information-encoding of lexical meaning in the brain still remains elusive.

Neuronal Computation Underlying Inferential Reasoning in Humans and Mice.

Every day we make decisions critical for adaptation and survival. We repeat actions with known consequences. But we also draw on loosely related events to infer and imagine the outcome of entirely novel choices.

Map Making: Constructing, Combining, and Inferring on Abstract Cognitive Maps.

Cognitive maps enable efficient inferences from limited experience that can guide novel decisions. We tested whether the hippocampus (HC), entorhinal cortex (EC), and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)/medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) organize abstract and discrete relational information into a cognitive map to guide novel inferences. Subjects learned the status of people in two unseen 2D social hierarchies, with each dimension learned on a separate day.

Private-public mappings in human prefrontal cortex.

A core feature of human cognition is an ability to separate private states of mind - what we think or believe - from public actions - what we say or do. This ability is central to successful social interaction - with different social contexts often requiring different mappings between private states and public actions in order to minimise conflict and facilitate communication. Here we investigated how the human brain supports private-public mappings, using an interactive task which required subjects to adapt how they communicated their confidence about a perceptual decision to the social context.

Multi-dimensional connectivity: a conceptual and mathematical review.

The estimation of functional connectivity between regions of the brain, for example based on statistical dependencies between the time series of activity in each region, has become increasingly important in neuroimaging. Typically, multiple time series (e.g.

Inferring exemplar discriminability in brain representations.

Representational distinctions within categories are important in all perceptual modalities and also in cognitive and motor representations. Recent pattern-information studies of brain activity have used condition-rich designs to sample the stimulus space more densely. To test whether brain response patterns discriminate among a set of stimuli (e.

Molecular survey of avian circoviruses in some non-psittacine birds and detection of a novel canary circovirus in a pigeon.

Background: Circoviruses are small, non-enveloped, single stranded DNA viruses. There is scarce information about these agents in non-psittacine birds.

Aims: It is attempted to detect and characterize circoviruses in non-psittacine birds.