Explaining events of strong decoupling from CO and NO emissions in the OECD 1994-2016.

Decoupling economic growth from emissions is vital to achieve the environmental targets postulated by the Paris agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper analyzes a set of factors that have the potential to increase the rate of emissions decoupling in 35 OECD countries 1994-2016. It takes on an encompassing approach focusing on emissions decoupling from two pollutant types carbon dioxide (CO) and nitrogen oxide (NO) as well as emissions decoupling from both production-and consumption-based CO emissions.

Selectivity and robustness of sparse coding networks.

We investigate how the population nonlinearities resulting from lateral inhibition and thresholding in sparse coding networks influence neural response selectivity and robustness. We show that when compared to pointwise nonlinear models, such population nonlinearities improve the selectivity to a preferred stimulus and protect against adversarial perturbations of the input. These findings are predicted from the geometry of the single-neuron iso-response surface, which provides new insight into the relationship between selectivity and adversarial robustness.

Mimicking brain tissue binding in an in vitro model of the blood-brain barrier illustrates differences between in vitro and in vivo methods for assessing the rate of brain penetration.

Assessing the rate of drug delivery to the central nervous system (CNS) in vitro has been used for decades to predict whether CNS drug candidates are likely to attain their pharmacological targets, located within the brain parenchyma, at an effective dose. The predictive value of in vitro blood-brain barrier (BBB) models is therefore frequently assessed by comparing in vitro BBB permeability, usually quoted as the endothelial permeability coefficient (P) or apparent permeability (P), to their rate of BBB permeation measured in vivo, the latter being commonly assessed in rodents. In collaboration with AstraZeneca (DMPK department, Södertälje, Sweden), the in vitro BBB permeability (P and P) of 27 marketed CNS drugs has been determined using a bovine in vitro BBB model and compared to their in vivo permeability (P), obtained by rat in-situ brain perfusion.

RetroDISCO: Clearing technique to improve quantification of retrograde labeled motor neurons of intact mouse spinal cords.

Background: Quantification of the number of axons reinnervating a target organ is often used to assess regeneration after peripheral nerve repair, but because of axonal branching, this method can overestimate the number of motor neurons regenerating across an injury. Current methods to count the number of regenerated motor neurons include retrograde labeling followed by cryosectioning and counting labeled motor neuron cell bodies, however, the process of sectioning introduces error from potential double counting of cells in adjacent sections.

New Method: We describe a method, retroDISCO, that optically clears whole mouse spinal cord without loss of fluorescent signal to allow imaging of retrograde labeled motor neurons using confocal microscopy.