Current understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes underlying island biodiversity is heavily shaped by empirical data from plants and birds, although arthropods comprise the overwhelming ...majority of known animal species, and as such can provide key insights into processes governing biodiversity. Novel high throughput sequencing (HTS) approaches are now emerging as powerful tools to overcome limitations in the availability of arthropod biodiversity data, and hence provide insights into these processes. Here, we explored how these tools might be most effectively exploited for comprehensive and comparable inventory and monitoring of insular arthropod biodiversity. We first reviewed the strengths, limitations and potential synergies among existing approaches of high throughput barcode sequencing. We considered how this could be complemented with deep learning approaches applied to image analysis to study arthropod biodiversity. We then explored how these approaches could be implemented within the framework of an island Genomic Observatories Network (iGON) for the advancement of fundamental and applied understanding of island biodiversity. To this end, we identified seven island biology themes at the interface of ecology, evolution and conservation biology, within which collective and harmonized efforts in HTS arthropod inventory could yield significant advances in island biodiversity research.
Place recognition is a challenging problem in mobile robotics, especially in unstructured environments or under viewpoint and illumination changes. Most LiDAR-based methods rely on geometrical ...features to overcome such challenges, as generally scene geometry is invariant to these changes, but tend to affect camera-based solutions significantly. Compared to cameras, however, LiDARs lack the strong and descriptive appearance information that imaging can provide. To combine the benefits of geometry and appearance, we propose coupling the conventional geometric information from the LiDAR with its calibrated intensity return. This strategy extracts extremely useful information in the form of a new descriptor design, coined ISHOT, outperforming popular state-of-the-art geometric-only descriptors by significant margin in our local descriptor evaluation. To complete the framework, we furthermore develop a probabilistic keypoint voting place recognition algorithm, leveraging the new descriptor and yielding sublinear place recognition performance. The efficacy of our approach is validated in challenging global localization experiments in large-scale built-up and unstructured environments.
Background. Interleukin 6 (IL-6), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and D-dimer levels are linked to adverse outcomes in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, but the strength of ...their associations with different clinical end points warrants investigation. Methods. Participants receiving standard of care in 2 HIV trials with measured biomarker levels were followed to ascertain all-cause death, non-AIDS-related death, AIDS, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and non-AIDS-defining malignancies. Hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of each end point for quartiles and Iog₂ -transformed IL-6, hsCRP, and D-dimer levels were calculated using Cox models. Marginal models modelling multiple events tested for equal effects of biomarker levels on different end points. Results. Among 4304 participants, there were 157 all-cause deaths, 117 non-AIDS-related deaths, 101 AIDS cases, 121 CVD cases, and 99 non-AIDS-defining malignancies. IL-6 was more strongly associated with most end points, compared with hsCRP. IL-6 appeared to be a stronger predictor than D-dimer for CVD and non-AIDS-defining malignancies, but 95% CIs overlapped.Independent associations of IL-6 were stronger for non-AIDS-related death (HR, 1.71; 95% CI, 1.43-2.04) and all-cause death (HR, 1.56; 95% CI, 1.33-1.84) and similar for CVD (HR, 1.35; 95% CI, 1.12-1.62) and non-AIDS-defining malignancies (HR, 1.30; 95% CI, 1.06-1.61). There was heterogeneity of IL-6 (P<.001) but not hsCRP (P=.15) or D-dimer (P=.20) as a predictor for different end points. Conclusions. IL-6 is a stronger predictor of fatal events than of CVD and non-AIDS-defining malignancies. Adjuvant antiinflammatory and antithrombotic therapies should be tested in HIV-infected individuals.
Non-thermal atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJs) are capable of generating cold plasma plumes that are not confined by electrodes, which makes them very attractive for bio-medical applications. ...In the present work, the inactivation efficiency of cold APPJ was evaluated against three pathogenic microorganisms with different cell wall characteristics. The Gram-positive bacterium Enterococcus faecalis (ATCC 29212), the Gram-negative bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa (ATCC 15442) and the fungus Candida albicans (SC 5314) were plated on standard Petri dishes filled with specific culture media. The plasma jet with mean power of 1.8W was directed perpendicularly on agar plates and the system was flushed with pure helium at two different flows, 2.0 and 4.0SLM. During the treatments, time and distance between nozzle and agar were varied. The presence of excited reactive species was confirmed by optical emission spectroscopy. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was applied for investigation of cell morphology. The microbicidal efficiency was evaluated by measuring the area of inhibition zone (where there was no cell growth). For different flows of helium, no significant difference of inhibition zone size was noted for the same microbial species. However, high flows led to formation of non-homogenous inhibition zones, presenting microcolonies distributed through the inactivated region. The Gram-positive bacterium was more susceptible to the plasma antimicrobial effects than the other microorganisms.
•A cold APPJ was employed for inhibition of three pathogenic microbial species.•Shorter distances lead to more efficient decontamination of fungi.•High flow rates promote formation of irregular inhibition zones.•Plasma jet treatment causes cell damage suggesting loss of cellular content.
Despite islands contributing only 6.7% of land surface area, they harbor ~20% of the Earth’s biodiversity, but unfortunately also ~50% of the threatened species and 75% of the known extinctions since ...the European expansion around the globe. Due to their geological and geographic history and characteristics, islands act simultaneously as cradles of evolutionary diversity and museums of formerly widespread lineages—elements that permit islands to achieve an outstanding endemicity. Nevertheless, the majority of these endemic species are inherently vulnerable due to genetic and demographic factors linked with the way islands are colonized. Here, we stress the great variation of islands in their physical geography (area, isolation, altitude, latitude) and history (age, human colonization, human density). We provide examples of some of the most species rich and iconic insular radiations. Next, we analyze the natural vulnerability of the insular biota, linked to genetic and demographic factors as a result of founder events as well as the typically small population sizes of many island species. We note that, whereas evolution toward island syndromes (including size shifts, derived insular woodiness, altered dispersal ability, loss of defense traits, reduction in clutch size) might have improved the ability of species to thrive under natural conditions on islands, it has simultaneously made island biota disproportionately vulnerable to anthropogenic pressures such as habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive species, and climate change. This has led to the documented extinction of at least 800 insular species in the past 500 years, in addition to the many that had already gone extinct following the arrival of first human colonists on islands in prehistoric times. Finally, we summarize current scientific knowledge on the ongoing biodiversity loss on islands worldwide and express our serious concern that the current trajectory will continue to decimate the unique and irreplaceable natural heritage of the world’s islands. We conclude that drastic actions are urgently needed to bend the curve of the alarming rates of island biodiversity loss.
Sub-Neptunes with \(2-3R_\oplus\) are intermediate in size between rocky planets and Neptune-sized planets. The orbital properties and bulk compositions of transiting sub-Neptunes provide clues to ...the formation and evolution of close-in small planets. In this paper, we present the discovery and follow-up of four sub-Neptunes orbiting M dwarfs (TOI-782, TOI-1448, TOI-2120, and TOI-2406), three of which were newly validated by ground-based follow-up observations and statistical analyses. TOI-782 b, TOI-1448 b, TOI-2120 b, and TOI-2406 b have radii of \(R_\mathrm{p} = 2.740^{+0.082}_{-0.079}\,R_\oplus\), \(2.769^{+0.073}_{-0.068}\,R_\oplus\), \(2.120\pm0.067\,R_\oplus\), and \(2.830^{+0.068}_{-0.066}\,R_\oplus\) and orbital periods of \(P = 8.02\), \(8.11\), \(5.80\), and \(3.08\)\,days, respectively. Doppler monitoring with Subaru/InfraRed Doppler instrument led to 2\(\sigma\) upper limits on the masses of \(<19.1\ M_\oplus\), \(<19.5\ M_\oplus\), \(<6.8\ M_\oplus\), and \(<15.6\ M_\oplus\) for TOI-782 b, TOI-1448 b, TOI-2120 b, and TOI-2406 b, respectively. The mass-radius relationship of these four sub-Neptunes testifies to the existence of volatile material in their interiors. These four sub-Neptunes, which are located above the so-called ``radius valley'', are likely to retain a significant atmosphere and/or an icy mantle on the core, such as a water world. We find that at least three of the four sub-Neptunes (TOI-782 b, TOI-2120 b, and TOI-2406 b) orbiting M dwarfs older than 1 Gyr, are likely to have eccentricities of \(e \sim 0.2-0.3\). The fact that tidal circularization of their orbits is not achieved over 1 Gyr suggests inefficient tidal dissipation in their interiors.
We present here a combined aggregative short-term load forecasting method for smart grids, a novel methodology that allows us to obtain a global prognosis by summing up the forecasts on the ...compounding individual loads. More accurately, we detail here three new approaches, namely bottom-up aggregation (with and without bias correction), top-down aggregation (with and without bias correction), and regressive aggregation. Further, we have devised an experiment to compare their results, evaluating them with two datasets of real data and showing the feasibility of aggregative forecast combinations for smart grids.
We propose a novel, non-discriminatory classification of monkeypox virus diversity. Together with the World Health Organization, we named three clades (I, IIa and IIb) in order of detection. Within ...IIb, the cause of the current global outbreak, we identified multiple lineages (A.1, A.2, A.1.1 and B.1) to support real-time genomic surveillance.
This evidence‐ and consensus‐based guideline was developed following the methods recommended by Cochrane and the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) working ...group. The conference was held on 1 December 2016. It is a joint initiative of the Dermatology Section of the European Academy of Allergology and Clinical Immunology (EAACI), the EU‐founded network of excellence, the Global Allergy and Asthma European Network (GA²LEN), the European Dermatology Forum (EDF) and the World Allergy Organization (WAO) with the participation of 48 delegates of 42 national and international societies. This guideline was acknowledged and accepted by the European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS). Urticaria is a frequent, mast cell‐driven disease, presenting with wheals, angioedema, or both. The lifetime prevalence for acute urticaria is approximately 20%. Chronic spontaneous urticaria and other chronic forms of urticaria are disabling, impair quality of life and affect performance at work and school. This guideline covers the definition and classification of urticaria, taking into account the recent progress in identifying its causes, eliciting factors and pathomechanisms. In addition, it outlines evidence‐based diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for the different subtypes of urticaria.
In the primary analysis of the HER2CLIMB trial, tucatinib added to trastuzumab and capecitabine significantly improved overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) in patients with human ...epidermal growth factor receptor 2 positive (HER2+) metastatic breast cancer. We report efficacy and safety outcomes, including the final OS and safety outcomes from follow-up in HER2CLIMB.
HER2CLIMB is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in patients with locally advanced or metastatic HER2+ breast cancer, including patients with brain metastases. Patients were randomized 2 : 1 to receive tucatinib or placebo, in combination with trastuzumab and capecitabine. After the primary analysis (median follow-up of 14 months), the protocol was amended to allow for unblinding sites to treatment assignment and cross-over from the placebo combination to the tucatinib combination. Protocol prespecified descriptive analyses of OS, PFS (by investigator assessment), and safety were carried out at ∼2 years from the last patient randomized.
Six hundred and twelve patients enrolled in the HER2CLIMB trial. At a median OS follow-up of 29.6 months, median duration of OS was 24.7 months for the tucatinib combination group versus 19.2 months for the placebo combination group hazard ratio (HR) for death: 0.73, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.59-0.90, P = 0.004 and OS at 2 years was 51% and 40%, respectively. HRs for OS across prespecified subgroups were consistent with the HR for the overall study population. Median duration of PFS was 7.6 months for the tucatinib combination group versus 4.9 months for the placebo combination group (HR for progression or death: 0.57, 95% CI: 0.47-0.70, P < 0.00001) and PFS at 1 year was 29% and 14%, respectively. The tucatinib combination was well tolerated with a low rate of discontinuation due to adverse events.
With additional follow-up, the tucatinib combination provided a clinically meaningful survival benefit for patients with HER2+ metastatic breast cancer.
•Tucatinib combination shows continued prolongation of overall survival in patients with HER2+ metastatic breast cancer.•Overall survival benefit was consistent across all prespecified subgroups, including patients with brain metastases.•The tucatinib combination was well tolerated with a low rate of discontinuation due to adverse events (5.9%).
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