Chemical exposure in the environment can adversely affect the biodiversity of living organisms, particularly when persistent chemicals accumulate over time and disrupt the balance of microbial populations. In this study, we examined how chemical contaminants influence microorganisms in sediment and overlaying water samples collected from the Kinnickinnic, Milwaukee, and Menomonee Rivers near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. We characterized these samples using shotgun metagenomic sequencing to assess microbiome diversity and employed chemical analyses to quantify more than 200 compounds spanning 16 broad classes, including pesticides, industrial products, personal care products, and pharmaceuticals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImmunotherapeutics targeting immune checkpoint receptors or their ligands (i.e., immune checkpoint inhibitors), have been groundbreaking in the field of oncology, radically changing the approach to treatment and improving the clinical outcomes of an ever-expanding list of solid tumors and hematological malignancies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSleep is of vital importance in our lives, yet we are far from understanding the neuronal networks that control the amount and timing of sleep. There is substantial conservation of known sleep-regulating transmitters, allowing for studies in simpler organisms to lead the way in gaining insight into the organization of sleep control circuits. In Drosophila melanogaster, we recently showed that optogenetic activation of neurons that produce the neuropeptide Y (NPY)-related transmitter short neuropeptide F (sNPF) increases time spent asleep.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStochastic resonance is a phenomenon possessed by some nonlinear oscillators, in which a weak signal is boosted by noise. Both the monostable and bistable Duffing oscillators can exhibit this property. However, stochastic resonance has a strong frequency-dependence, as only a band of frequencies may be boosted by noise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent years have seen a shift toward alternative nosologies of psychopathology, which frequently include a dimension of externalizing psychopathology. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology is one such framework. Research using data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study has identified a broad-based externalizing dimension, but no research to date has sought to empirically identify finer-grained externalizing subdimensions despite the research benefits associated with the use of homogenous dimensions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe sub-ventricular zone (SVZ) is the most well-characterized neurogenic area in the mammalian brain. We previously showed that in 65% of patients with glioblastoma (GBM), the SVZ is a reservoir of cancer stem-like cells that contribute to treatment resistance and the emergence of recurrence. Here, we build a single-nucleus RNA-sequencing-based microenvironment landscape of the tumor mass and the SVZ of 15 patients and two histologically normal SVZ samples as controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To evaluate cochlear implant speech perception among patients with sporadic inner ear schwannoma who underwent ipsilateral implantation.
Study Design: Retrospective multi-institutional cohort study.
Setting: Eleven tertiary academic medical centers across Germany, Denmark, and the United States.
JAMA Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg
February 2025
Importance: Speech recognition outcomes with a cochlear implant (CI) are highly variable. One factor suggested to correlate with CI-aided speech recognition is frequency-to-place mismatch, or the discrepancy between the natural tonotopic organization of the cochlea and the electric frequency allocation of the CI electrodes within the patient's cochlea.
Objective: To evaluate the association between frequency-to-place mismatch and speech recognition outcomes in a large cohort of postlingually deafened adult CI users, while controlling for various clinical factors known to be associated with those outcomes.
Objective: To report hearing preservation (HP) outcomes based on anticoagulation/antiplatelet use (blood thinner, BT) following cochlear implantation (CI).
Study Design: Retrospective cohort.
Setting: Tertiary referral center.
The success of cellular immunotherapies such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has led to their implementation as a revolutionary treatment option for cancer patients. However, the safe translation of such novel immunotherapies, from non-clinical assessment to first-in-human studies is still hampered by the lack of suitable and models recapitulating the complexity of the human immune system. Additionally, using cells derived from human healthy volunteers in such test systems may not adequately reflect the altered state of the patient's immune system thus potentially underestimating the risk of life-threatening conditions, such as cytokine release syndrome (CRS) following CAR T cell therapy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To assess the factors that drive a patient's selection of cochlear implant (CI) manufacturer.
Study Design: Prospective survey study.
Setting: Tertiary referral center.
Background: In Great Britain, owners are keeping their horses into increasingly older age, reflecting societal changes in human-animal relationships. The uptake of routine veterinary services is reported to reduce as horses age. Horse owners seek information regarding their animal's health from alternative sources before and/or following veterinary involvement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTheoretical and methodological research on threat conditioning provides important neuroscience-informed approaches to studying fear and anxiety. The threat conditioning framework is at the vanguard of physiological and neurobiological research into core mechanistic symptoms of anxiety-related psychopathology, providing detailed models of neural circuitry underlying variability in clinically relevant behaviors (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To map the empirical literature with regards to narrative-based medicine interventions targeting burnout in hospital-based practitioners.
Methods: A systematic search of electronic databases ( = 6) and manual searches was conducted informed by the Joanna Briggs Institute scoping review guidelines. Papers were independently screened for quality.
Causal networks are important for understanding disease signaling alterations. To reveal the network pathways affected in the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and cancer stem cells (CSCs), which are related to the poor prognosis of cancer, the molecular networks and gene expression in diffuse- and intestinal-type gastric cancer (GC) were analyzed. The network pathways in GC were analyzed using Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Vaccination of dogs and cats is considered a mainstay of preventive health, providing benefit to individual animals and the population. This study aimed to assess temporal trends in vaccination and factors associated with vaccination uptake in a large veterinary visiting population of UK cats and dogs.
Methods: The electronic health records (EHRs) of 712,266 dogs and 306,888 cats (voluntarily contributed by 201 veterinary practices) were used to determine the proportion that had record of any type of veterinary vaccination either within one-year or within three-years of attending a participating veterinary practice.
A self-learning physical reservoir computer is demonstrated using an adaptive oscillator. Whereas physical reservoir computing repurposes the dynamics of a physical system for computation through machine learning, adaptive oscillators can innately learn and store information in plastic dynamic states. The adaptive state(s) can be used directly as physical node(s), but these plastic states can also be used to self-learn the optimal reservoir parameters for more complex tasks requiring virtual nodes from the base oscillator.
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