The Brain's Best Kept Secret Is Its Degenerate Structure.

Degeneracy is defined as multiple sets of solutions that can produce very similar system performance. Degeneracy is seen across phylogenetic scales, in all kinds of organisms. In neuroscience, degeneracy can be seen in the constellation of biophysical properties that produce a neuron's characteristic intrinsic properties and/or the constellation of mechanisms that determine circuit outputs or behavior.

Peer support for patients with opioid use disorder in the emergency department: A narrative review.

Faced with a growing opioid overdose crisis, emergency departments (EDs) are increasingly hiring peers-people with lived experiences of addiction and recovery-to work with patients in the ED who have opioid use disorders (OUDs) or who have experienced an opioid overdose. Despite a clear need for more support for patients with OUD and rapid expansion in grant funding for peer programs, there are limited data on how these programs affect clinical outcomes and how they are best implemented within the ED. In this narrative review, we synthesize the existing evidence on how to develop and implement peer programs for OUD in the ED setting.

Enrollment of dengue patients in a prospective cohort study in Umphang District, Thailand, during the COVID-19 pandemic: Implications for research and policy.

Background And Aims: Dengue is endemic in Thailand and imposes a high burden on the health system and society. We conducted a prospective cohort study in Umphang District, Tak Province, Thailand, to investigate the share of dengue cases with long symptoms and their duration. Here we present the results of the enrollment process during the COVID-19 pandemic with implications and challenges for research and policy.

Complimentary Addictions: Pharmaceutical Experimentalism and the Problem of Recovery in Baltimore.

In Baltimore, clients in methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) experiment with prescription medicine and in doing so face new risks of noncompliance as they tread this blurry line between medical and illegal. This can potentially lead to suspension from drug treatment programs, resulting in clients finding the next most suitable treatment center to enroll into. I argue that the close interaction between drug treatment centers and illegal markets results in new pharmaceutical dependencies, forms of self-care as well as suspicions toward, but also among clients, about their intentions to recover.

glycan sequencing by electronic excitation dissociation MS-guided MS analysis on an Omnitrap-Orbitrap hybrid instrument.

Comprehensive glycan sequencing remains an elusive goal due to the structural diversity and complexity of glycans. Present strategies employing collision-induced dissociation (CID) and higher energy collisional dissociation (HCD)-based multi-stage tandem mass spectrometry (MS) or MS/MS combined with sequential exoglycosidase digestions are inherently low-throughput and difficult to automate. Compared to CID and HCD, electron transfer dissociation (ETD) and electron capture dissociation (ECD) each generate more cross-ring cleavages informative about linkage positions, but electronic excitation dissociation (EED) exceeds the information content of all other methods and is also applicable to analysis of singly charged precursors.

Quality of life burden on United States infants and caregivers due to lower respiratory tract infection and adjusting for selective testing: Pilot prospective observational study.

Background And Aims: Policymakers need data about the burden of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI) among infants. This study estimates quality of life (QoL) for otherwise healthy term US infants with RSV-LRTI and their caregivers, previously limited to premature and hospitalized infants, and corrects for selective testing.

Methods: The study enrolled infants <1 year with a clinically diagnosed LRTI encounter between January and May 2021.

Influenza pandemics throughout Brazilian history.

Brazil has experienced several major epidemics of influenza, and the most destructive was in 1918-1919. This article focuses on mortality, mitigation policies, and the consequences of pandemic influenza during the national period. We provide the first mortality estimates for the 1890-1894 influenza pandemic and correct figures for later epidemics.

Association of Lifetime History of Traumatic Brain Injury With Prescription Opioid Use and Misuse Among Adults.

Objective: To investigate associations of lifetime history of traumatic brain injury (TBI) with prescription opioid use and misuse among noninstitutionalized adults.

Participants: Ohio Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) participants in the 2018 cohort who completed the prescription opioid and lifetime history of TBI modules (n = 3448).

Design: Secondary analyses of a statewide population-based cross-sectional survey.

FRACTAL DIMENSION ESTIMATION WITH PERSISTENT HOMOLOGY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY.

We propose that the recently defined persistent homology dimensions are a practical tool for fractal dimension estimation of point samples. We implement an algorithm to estimate the persistent homology dimension, and compare its performance to classical methods to compute the correlation and box-counting dimensions in examples of self-similar fractals, chaotic attractors, and an empirical dataset. The performance of the 0-dimensional persistent homology dimension is comparable to that of the correlation dimension, and better than box-counting.

Video Recording Can Conveniently Assay Mosquito Locomotor Activity.

Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti are perhaps the best studied mosquito species and important carriers of human malaria and arbovirus, respectively. Mosquitoes have daily rhythms in behaviors and show a wide range of activity patterns. Although Anopheles is known to be principally nocturnal and Aedes principally diurnal, details of mosquito activity are not easily assayed in the laboratory.

The Quest for Compensation for Research-Related Injury in the United States: A New Proposal.

In the U.S., there is no requirement for research sponsors to compensate human research subjects who experience injuries as a result of their participation.

Clarifying the relationship between trait empathy and action-based resonance indexed by EEG mu-rhythm suppression.

Sensorimotor resonance, the vicarious activation of the sensory motor system during observation of another's actions, is thought to contribute to important social functions including empathy. Previous research has shown that sensorimotor resonance, as measured by suppression of the electrophysiological (EEG) mu rhythm, is predicted by trait empathy, but findings are inconsistent. Here we report data from a high-powered study (N = 252) to clarify the relationship between sensorimotor resonance as indexed by mu suppression during action observation and trait empathy as measured by the well-established Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI).

A Probabilistic Programming Approach to Protein Structure Superposition.

Optimal superposition of protein structures or other biological molecules is crucial for understanding their structure, function, dynamics and evolution. Here, we investigate the use of probabilistic programming to superimpose protein structures guided by a Bayesian model. Our model THESEUS-PP is based on the THESEUS model, a probabilistic model of protein superposition based on rotation, translation and perturbation of an underlying, latent mean structure.

Expression and Purification of Active Recombinant Human Alpha-1 Antitrypsin (AAT) from Escherichia coli.

Well-established genetic manipulation procedures along with a fast doubling time, the ability to grow in inexpensive media, and easy scaleup make Escherichia coli (E. coli) a preferred recombinant protein expression platform. Human alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT) and other serpins are easily expressed in E.

Shouldn't Dead Be Dead?: The Search for a Uniform Definition of Death.

In 1968, the definition of death in the United States was expanded to include not just death by cardiopulmonary criteria, but also death by neurologic criteria. We explore the way the definition has been modified by the medical and legal communities over the past 50 years and address the medical, legal and ethical controversies associated with the definition at present, with a particular highlight on the Supreme Court of Nevada Case of Aden Hailu.

Multiple Sources of Prescription Payment and Risky Opioid Therapy Among Veterans.

Background: Opioid overdose and other related harms are a major source of morbidity and mortality among US Veterans, in part due to high-risk opioid prescribing.

Objectives: We sought to determine whether having multiple sources of payment for opioids-as a marker for out-of-system access-is associated with risky opioid therapy among veterans.

Research Design: Cross-sectional study examining the association between multiple sources of payment and risky opioid therapy among all individuals with Veterans Health Administration (VHA) payment for opioid analgesic prescriptions in Kentucky during fiscal year 2014-2015.

Effort Not Speed Characterizes Comprehension of Spoken Sentences by Older Adults with Mild Hearing Impairment.

In spite of the rapidity of everyday speech, older adults tend to keep up relatively well in day-to-day listening. In laboratory settings older adults do not respond as quickly as younger adults in off-line tests of sentence comprehension, but the question is whether comprehension itself is actually slower. Two unique features of the human eye were used to address this question.

Two Visual Pathways in Primates Based on Sampling of Space: Exploitation and Exploration of Visual Information.

Evidence is strong that the visual pathway is segregated into two distinct streams-ventral and dorsal. Two proposals theorize that the pathways are segregated in function: The ventral stream processes information about object identity, whereas the dorsal stream, according to one model, processes information about either object location, and according to another, is responsible in executing movements under visual control. The models are influential; however recent experimental evidence challenges them, e.

Filamentous Phages As a Model System in Soft Matter Physics.

Filamentous phages have unique physical properties, such as uniform particle lengths, that are not found in other model systems of rod-like colloidal particles. Consequently, suspensions of such phages provided powerful model systems that have advanced our understanding of soft matter physics in general and liquid crystals in particular. We described some of these advances.

Working Memory Load Affects Processing Time in Spoken Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye-Movements.

In daily life, speech perception is usually accompanied by other tasks that tap into working memory capacity. However, the role of working memory on speech processing is not clear. The goal of this study was to examine how working memory load affects the timeline for spoken word recognition in ideal listening conditions.

Evolution and intelligent design in drug development.

Sophisticated protein kinase networks, empowering complexity in higher organisms, are also drivers of devastating diseases such as cancer. Accordingly, these enzymes have become major drug targets of the twenty-first century. However, the holy grail of designing specific kinase inhibitors aimed at specific cancers has not been found.