Can Trabecular Bone Score Enhance Fracture Risk Assessment in Long-Distance Runners With Bone Stress Injuries?

Objective: To evaluate the trabecular bone score (TBS) Z scores in long-distance runners with bone stress injuries (BSIs) in whom the bone mineral density (BMD) Z score is more than -1.0 (Aim 1) and whether the number of runners with abnormal TBS Z scores would be higher in those with BSI in trabecular-rich sites as compared with cortical-rich sites (Aim 2).

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Evidence for the utility of quantum computing before fault tolerance.

Quantum computing promises to offer substantial speed-ups over its classical counterpart for certain problems. However, the greatest impediment to realizing its full potential is noise that is inherent to these systems. The widely accepted solution to this challenge is the implementation of fault-tolerant quantum circuits, which is out of reach for current processors.

Error Mitigation for Universal Gates on Encoded Qubits.

The Eastin-Knill theorem states that no quantum error-correcting code can have a universal set of transversal gates. For Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes that can implement Clifford gates transversally, it suffices to provide one additional non-Clifford gate, such as the T gate, to achieve universality. Common methods to implement fault-tolerant T gates, e.

Enabling Biological Nitrogen Fixation for Cereal Crops in Fertilized Fields.

Agricultural productivity relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, yet half of that reactive nitrogen is lost to the environment. There is an urgent need for alternative nitrogen solutions to reduce the water pollution, ozone depletion, atmospheric particulate formation, and global greenhouse gas emissions associated with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use. One such solution is biological nitrogen fixation (BNF), a component of the complex natural nitrogen cycle.

Menstrual Irregularity, Hormonal Contraceptive Use, and Bone Stress Injuries in Collegiate Female Athletes in the United States.

Background: Menstrual irregularity (MI) is common in female athletes and is a component of the Female Athlete Triad (Triad). Many athletes with the Triad are started on hormonal contraceptives (HC) for MI, but this interferes with the ability to monitor menstrual cycle regularity and can mask other causes of MI. There are limited studies investigating the relationship between MI, HC use, and injury in female collegiate athletes.

Biological nitrogen fixation in maize: optimizing nitrogenase expression in a root-associated diazotroph.

Plants depend upon beneficial interactions between roots and root-associated microorganisms for growth promotion, disease suppression, and nutrient availability. This includes the ability of free-living diazotrophic bacteria to supply nitrogen, an ecological role that has been long underappreciated in modern agriculture for efficient crop production systems. Long-term ecological studies in legume-rhizobia interactions have shown that elevated nitrogen inputs can lead to the evolution of less cooperative nitrogen-fixing mutualists.

Error mitigation extends the computational reach of a noisy quantum processor.

Quantum computation, a paradigm of computing that is completely different from classical methods, benefits from theoretically proved speed-ups for certain problems and can be used to study the properties of quantum systems. Yet, because of the inherently fragile nature of the physical computing elements (qubits), achieving quantum advantages over classical computation requires extremely low error rates for qubit operations, as well as substantial physical qubits, to realize fault tolerance via quantum error correction. However, recent theoretical work has shown that the accuracy of computation (based on expectation values of quantum observables) can be enhanced through an extrapolation of results from a collection of experiments of varying noise.

Supervised learning with quantum-enhanced feature spaces.

Machine learning and quantum computing are two technologies that each have the potential to alter how computation is performed to address previously untenable problems. Kernel methods for machine learning are ubiquitous in pattern recognition, with support vector machines (SVMs) being the best known method for classification problems. However, there are limitations to the successful solution to such classification problems when the feature space becomes large, and the kernel functions become computationally expensive to estimate.

Error Mitigation for Short-Depth Quantum Circuits.

Two schemes are presented that mitigate the effect of errors and decoherence in short-depth quantum circuits. The size of the circuits for which these techniques can be applied is limited by the rate at which the errors in the computation are introduced. Near-term applications of early quantum devices, such as quantum simulations, rely on accurate estimates of expectation values to become relevant.

Hardware-efficient variational quantum eigensolver for small molecules and quantum magnets.

Quantum computers can be used to address electronic-structure problems and problems in materials science and condensed matter physics that can be formulated as interacting fermionic problems, problems which stretch the limits of existing high-performance computers. Finding exact solutions to such problems numerically has a computational cost that scales exponentially with the size of the system, and Monte Carlo methods are unsuitable owing to the fermionic sign problem. These limitations of classical computational methods have made solving even few-atom electronic-structure problems interesting for implementation using medium-sized quantum computers.

Pelvic floor muscle function and urinary incontinence in the female athlete.

Urinary incontinence, defined as involuntary leakage of urine, is often considered a disorder of post-partum and post-menopausal women. However, this disorder is not exclusive to older women, as recent research has demonstrated a high prevalence of urinary incontinence among young, nulliparous female athletes. In fact, females participating in repetitive, high-impact sports are at the highest risk for urinary incontinence.

Musculoskeletal Approach to Pelvic Pain.

Visceral and somatic causes of pelvic pain are often inter-related, and a musculoskeletal examination should always be considered for the successful diagnosis and treatment of pelvic pain. For the diverse etiologies of hip pain, there are many unique considerations for the diagnosis and treatment of these various disorders. Pelvic pain is often multidimensional due to the overlap between lumbo-hip-pelvic diagnoses and may require a multidisciplinary approach to evaluation and management.

Comparison of Pain Score Reduction Using Triamcinolone vs. Betamethasone in Transforaminal Epidural Steroid Injections for Lumbosacral Radicular Pain.

Objective: Although the comparative efficacy of particulate vs. nonparticulate steroids for the treatment of radicular pain with transforaminal epidural steroid injection has been investigated, there is minimal literature comparing particulate steroids. The authors aimed to determine whether transforaminal epidural steroid injection with triamcinolone or betamethasone, two particulate corticosteroids, more effectively reduces lumbosacral radicular pain.

Concordant pain provocation during transforaminal epidural steroid injection for lumbosacral radiculopathy: effect on pain outcome and predictive factors.

Background: Anecdotal report suggests that provocation of pain during epidural steroid injection (ESI) that is concordant with typical radicular symptoms predicts pain outcome following injection. However, limited evidence exists that substantiates this theory. Additionally, there is a paucity of literature investigating factors associated with the provocation of pain during ESI.

The effect of protein and calorie intake on prealbumin, complications, length of stay, and function in the acute rehabilitation inpatient with stroke.

Background: Nutrition's impact on stroke rehabilitation outcomes is controversial. Existing studies utilize albumin without correcting for inflammation in nutritional assessments. Here, prealbumin was used and inflammation assessed to determine if nutrition impacts rehabilitation outcomes.

Recognition and rehabilitation of the female athlete triad/tetrad: a multidisciplinary approach.

While the benefits of physical activity are numerous, the female athlete triad poses a significant health risk to young athletes. Emerging research links the triad to endothelial dysfunction--a sentinel event in cardiovascular disease--suggesting that this complex interplay of metabolic and endocrine factors may be described more accurately as a tetrad. Effective treatment of the triad/tetrad requires a multidisciplinary approach.

Modular control of multiple pathways using engineered orthogonal T7 polymerases.

Synthetic genetic sensors and circuits enable programmable control over the timing and conditions of gene expression. They are being increasingly incorporated into the control of complex, multigene pathways and cellular functions. Here, we propose a design strategy to genetically separate the sensing/circuitry functions from the pathway to be controlled.

Preparing projected entangled pair states on a quantum computer.

We present a quantum algorithm to prepare injective projected entangled pair states (PEPS) on a quantum computer, a class of open tensor networks representing quantum states. The run time of our algorithm scales polynomially with the inverse of the minimum condition number of the PEPS projectors and, essentially, with the inverse of the spectral gap of the PEPS's parent Hamiltonian.

Refactoring the nitrogen fixation gene cluster from Klebsiella oxytoca.

Bacterial genes associated with a single trait are often grouped in a contiguous unit of the genome known as a gene cluster. It is difficult to genetically manipulate many gene clusters because of complex, redundant, and integrated host regulation. We have developed a systematic approach to completely specify the genetics of a gene cluster by rebuilding it from the bottom up using only synthetic, well-characterized parts.

Quantum Metropolis sampling.

The original motivation to build a quantum computer came from Feynman, who imagined a machine capable of simulating generic quantum mechanical systems--a task that is believed to be intractable for classical computers. Such a machine could have far-reaching applications in the simulation of many-body quantum physics in condensed-matter, chemical and high-energy systems. Part of Feynman's challenge was met by Lloyd, who showed how to approximately decompose the time evolution operator of interacting quantum particles into a short sequence of elementary gates, suitable for operation on a quantum computer.