Characterization of aberrant splicing in pediatric central nervous system tumors reveals as a candidate oncogenic dependency.

Pediatric brain cancer is the leading cause of disease-related mortality in children, and many aggressive tumors still lack effective treatment strategies. We characterized aberrant alternative splicing across pediatric brain tumors, identifying pediatric high-grade gliomas (HGGs) among the most heterogeneous. Annotating these events with UniProt, we identified 11,940 splice events in 5,368 genes leading to potential protein function changes.

Intracranial complications secondary to acute bacterial sinusitis requiring neurosurgical intervention before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective: Intracranial complications of acute bacterial sinusitis are rare pathologies that occur in children, and are associated with significant neurological morbidity and mortality. There is a subjective concern among neurosurgeons that the incidence of this rare disease has increased since the onset of the novel COVID-19 pandemic. The primary objective of this study was to review the presentation and management of patients admitted at the authors' institution with intracranial extension of sinusitis, to better understand the local disease burden relative to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using near misses, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to predict maritime incidents: A U.S. Coast Guard case study.

Two recent trends made this project possible: (1) The recognition that near misses can be predictors of future negative events and (2) enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools that make data analytics accessible for many organizations. Increasingly, organizations are learning from prior incidents to improve safety and reduce accidents. The U.

Clutter resilience via auditory stream segregation in echolocating greater mouse-eared bats.

Bats use echolocation to navigate and hunt in darkness, and must in that process segregate target echoes from unwanted clutter echoes. Bats may do this by approaching a target at steep angles relative to the plane of the background, utilizing their directional transmission and receiving systems to minimize clutter from background objects, but it remains unknown how bats negotiate clutter that cannot be spatially avoided. Here, we tested the hypothesis that when movement no longer offers spatial release, echolocating bats mitigate clutter by calling at lower source levels and longer call intervals to ease auditory streaming.

The relationship between freight train length and the risk of derailment.

In recent years, longer and heavier trains have become more common, primarily driven by efficiency and cost-saving measures in the railroad industry. Regulation of train length is currently under consideration in the United States at both the federal and state levels, because of concerns that longer trains may have a higher risk of derailment, but the relationship between train length and risk of derailment is not yet well understood. In this study, we use data on freight train accidents during the 2013-2022 period from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Rail Equipment Accident and Highway-Rail Grade Crossing Accident databases to estimate the relationship between freight train length and the risk of derailment.

Low hunting costs in an expensive marine mammal predator.

Many large terrestrial mammalian predators use energy-intensive, high-risk, high-gain strategies to pursue large, high-quality prey. However, similar-sized marine mammal predators with even higher field metabolic rates (FMRs) consistently target prey three to six orders of magnitude smaller than themselves. Here, we address the question of how these active and expensive marine mammal predators can gain sufficient energy from consistently targeting small prey during breath-hold dives.

Superfast Lombard response in free-flying, echolocating bats.

Acoustic cues are crucial to communication, navigation, and foraging in many animals, which hence face the problem of detecting and discriminating these cues in fluctuating noise levels from natural or anthropogenic sources. Such auditory dynamics are perhaps most extreme for echolocating bats that navigate and hunt prey on the wing in darkness by listening for weak echo returns from their powerful calls in complex, self-generated umwelts. Due to high absorption of ultrasound in air and fast flight speeds, bats operate with short prey detection ranges and dynamic sensory volumes, leading us to hypothesize that bats employ superfast vocal-motor adjustments to rapidly changing sensory scenes.

Primary intraosseous xanthoma of the frontal bone in a child: illustrative case.

Background: Skull lesions are a common finding in children, with dermoid cysts and eosinophilic granulomas observed most frequently. However, primary intraosseous xanthomas of the calvaria, which are lytic, expansile lesions that develop without underlying hyperlipidemic disease, are rare in children, with only one prior case reported.

Observations: The authors describe the case of a healthy 6-year-old male who presented with a 2-month history of an enlarging midline skull mass that developed after a recent minor trauma.

Daubenton's bats maintain stereotypical echolocation behaviour and a lombard response during target interception in light.

Most bats hunt insects on the wing at night using echolocation as their primary sensory modality, but nevertheless maintain complex eye anatomy and functional vision. This raises the question of how and when insectivorous bats use vision during their largely nocturnal lifestyle. Here, we test the hypothesis that the small insectivorous bat, Myotis daubentonii, relies less on echolocation, or dispenses with it entirely, as visual cues become available during challenging acoustic noise conditions.

The active space of sperm whale codas: inter-click information for intra-unit communication.

Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) are social mega-predators who form stable matrilineal units that often associate within a larger vocal clan. Clan membership is defined by sharing a repertoire of coda types consisting of specific temporal spacings of multi-pulsed clicks. It has been hypothesized that codas communicate membership across socially segregated sympatric clans, but others propose that codas are primarily used for behavioral coordination and social cohesion within a closely spaced social unit.

Technical note: Traumatic atlanto-occipital dislocation and severe subaxial cervical distraction injury in an infant.

Introduction: Traumatic injuries of the spine requiring surgery are rare in infancy. Fusion procedures in the very young are not well-described at the atlanto-occipital junction or subaxial spine. Here we describe novel segmental posterior instrumentation in a severe spinal column disruption in an infant.

Systematic review and cumulative analysis of clinical properties of BRAF V600E mutations in PLNTY histological samples.

Purpose: Polymorphous low-grade neuroepithelial tumors of the young (PLNTY) represent a rare pediatric-type tumor that most commonly presents as medically refractory epilepsy. PLNTY has only recently been recognized as a distinct clinical entity, having been first described in 2016 and added to the World Health Organization classification of CNS tumors in 2021. Molecular studies have determined that PLNTY is uniformly driven by aberrant MAPK pathway activation, with most tumors carrying either a BRAF V600E mutation or activating FGFR2 or FGFR3 fusion protein.

Invasive Multimodality Neuromonitoring to Manage Cerebral Edema in Pediatric Myelin Oligodendrocyte Glycoprotein Antibody-Associated Disease.

Background: Myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody-associated disease (MOGAD) is an inflammatory disorder of the CNS with a variety of clinical manifestations, including cerebral edema.

Case Summary: A 7-year-old boy presented with headaches, nausea, and somnolence. He was found to have cerebral edema that progressed to brainstem herniation.

Large sensory volumes enable Southern elephant seals to exploit sparse deep-sea prey.

The ability of echolocating toothed whales to detect and classify prey at long ranges enables efficient searching and stalking of sparse prey in these time-limited dives. However, nonecholocating deep-diving seals such as elephant seals appear to have much less sensory advantage over their prey. Both elephant seals and their prey rely on visual and hydrodynamic cues that may be detectable only at short ranges in the deep ocean, leading us to hypothesize that elephant seals must adopt a less efficient reactive mode of hunting that requires high prey densities.

Wild harbour porpoises startle and flee at low received levels from acoustic harassment device.

Acoustic Harassment Devices (AHD) are widely used to deter marine mammals from aquaculture depredation, and from pile driving operations that may otherwise cause hearing damage. However, little is known about the behavioural and physiological effects of these devices. Here, we investigate the physiological and behavioural responses of harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) to a commercial AHD in Danish waters.

Implications of porpoise echolocation and dive behaviour on passive acoustic monitoring.

Harbour porpoises are visually inconspicuous but highly soniferous echolocating marine predators that are regularly studied using passive acoustic monitoring (PAM). PAM can provide quality data on animal abundance, human impact, habitat use, and behaviour. The probability of detecting porpoise clicks within a given area (P̂) is a key metric when interpreting PAM data.

Middle meningeal artery embolization in the management of chronic subdural hematoma in medically complex pediatric neurosurgical patients: technical note.

Middle meningeal artery (MMA) embolization has gained acceptance as a treatment for chronic subdural hematoma (cSDH) in adult patients but has not been well described in pediatric patients. Standard cSDH treatment has historically consisted of burr hole drainage with or without subdural drain placement. However, due to the high rate of recurrence and frequency of comorbidities within this population, as both pediatric and adult patients with cSDH frequently have concurrent cardiac disease and a need for anticoagulant therapies, MMA embolization has increasingly demonstrated its value as both an adjunctive and primary treatment.

Dramatic Response to Anti-IL-6 Receptor Therapy in Children With Life-Threatening Myelin Oligodendrocyte Glycoprotein-Associated Disease.

Objectives: Myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody-associated disease (MOGAD) is an immune-mediated neuroinflammatory disorder leading to demyelination of the CNS. Interleukin (IL)-6 receptor blockade is under study in relapsing MOGAD as a preventative strategy, but little is known about the role of such treatment for acute MOGAD attacks.

Methods: We discuss the cases of a 7-year-old boy and a 15-year-old adolescent boy with severe acute CNS demyelination and malignant cerebral edema with early brain herniation associated with clearly positive serum titers of MOG-IgG, whose symptoms were incompletely responsive to standard acute therapies (high-dose steroids, IV immunoglobulins (IVIGs), and therapeutic plasma exchange).

OpenPBTA: The Open Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas.

Pediatric brain and spinal cancers are collectively the leading disease-related cause of death in children; thus, we urgently need curative therapeutic strategies for these tumors. To accelerate such discoveries, the Children's Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) and Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC) created a systematic process for tumor biobanking, model generation, and sequencing with immediate access to harmonized data. We leverage these data to establish OpenPBTA, an open collaborative project with over 40 scalable analysis modules that genomically characterize 1,074 pediatric brain tumors.

Cheap gulp foraging of a giga-predator enables efficient exploitation of sparse prey.

The giant rorqual whales are believed to have a massive food turnover driven by a high-intake lunge feeding style aptly described as the world's largest biomechanical action. This high-drag feeding behavior is thought to limit dive times and constrain rorquals to target only the densest prey patches, making them vulnerable to disturbance and habitat change. Using biologging tags to estimate energy expenditure as a function of feeding rates on 23 humpback whales, we show that lunge feeding is energetically cheap.