This current study is a meta-analysis conducted on 63 studies on video-game based cognitive interventions (118 investigations, N = 2,079), which demonstrated a moderate and significant training ...effect on overall gains in cognition, g = 0.25, p < .001. Significant evidence of transfer was found to overall cognition, as well as to attention/perception and higher-order cognition constructs. Examination of specific gameplay features however showed selective and differential transfer to these outcome measures, whereas the genre labels of "action", "strategy", "casual", and "non-casual" were not similarly predictive of outcomes. We therefore recommend that future video-game interventions targeting cognitive enhancements should consider gameplay feature classification approach over existing genre classification, which may provide more fruitful training-related benefits to cognition.
The redox state of Earth's convecting mantle, masked by the lithospheric plates and basaltic magmatism of plate tectonics, is a key unknown in the evolutionary history of our planet. Here we report ...that large, exceptional gem diamonds like the Cullinan, Constellation, and Koh-i-Noor carry direct evidence of crystallization from a redox-sensitive metallic liquid phase in the deep mantle. These sublithospheric diamonds contain inclusions of solidified iron-nickel-carbon-sulfur melt, accompanied by a thin fluid layer of methane ± hydrogen, and sometimes majoritic garnet or former calcium silicate perovskite.The metal-dominated mineral assemblages and reduced volatiles in large gem diamonds indicate formation under metalsaturated conditions. We verify previous predictions that Earth has highly reducing deep mantle regions capable of precipitating a metallic iron phase that contains dissolved carbon and hydrogen.
There are many unanswered questions about the evolution of the ancient 'Silk Roads' across Asia. This is especially the case in their mountainous stretches, where harsh terrain is seen as an ...impediment to travel. Considering the ecology and mobility of inner Asian mountain pastoralists, we use 'flow accumulation' modelling to calculate the annual routes of nomadic societies (from 750 m to 4,000 m elevation). Aggregating 500 iterations of the model reveals a high-resolution flow network that simulates how centuries of seasonal nomadic herding could shape discrete routes of connectivity across the mountains of Asia. We then compare the locations of known high-elevation Silk Road sites with the geography of these optimized herding flows, and find a significant correspondence in mountainous regions. Thus, we argue that highland Silk Road networks (from 750 m to 4,000 m) emerged slowly in relation to long-established mobility patterns of nomadic herders in the mountains of inner Asia.
In the early 1960s, the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was invited by neo-Nazi groups in Australia and Britain to come to their respective countries. On both occasions, the ...minister for immigration in Australia and the home secretary in Britain sought to deny Rockwell entry to the country on the grounds that he was not conducive to the public good and threatened disorder. This was done using the border control and visa system that existed in both countries, which allowed the government to exclude from entry certain individuals that were proponents of extreme or “dangerous” political ideologies. In the post-war period, explicit neo-Nazism was seen as a dangerous ideology and was grounds for exclusion of foreigners, even though domestic political parties espousing the same ideology were allowed to exist. Rockwell never came to Australia, but illicitly entered Britain via Ireland in 1962 before being deported, which highlighted potential problems for the British controlling passage across the Irish Sea. Rockwell’s exclusion and deportation also became a touchpoint for future debates in British politics about the denial of entry and deportation of political figures. This article reveals that the Australian and British governments, while allowing far-right organisations to lawfully exist in their countries, also sought to ban the entry of foreign actors who espoused similar politics. This was due to concerns about potential public disorder and violence, but also allowed both governments to portray white supremacism and racial violence as foreign to their own countries.
A broad collection of technologies, including
e.g.
drug metabolism, biofuel combustion, photochemical decontamination of water, and interfacial passivation in energy production/storage systems rely ...on chemical processes that involve bond-breaking molecular reactions. In this context, a fundamental thermodynamic property of interest is the bond dissociation energy (BDE) which measures the strength of a chemical bond. Fast and accurate prediction of BDEs for arbitrary molecules would lay the groundwork for data-driven projections of complex reaction cascades and hence a deeper understanding of these critical chemical processes and, ultimately, how to reverse design them. In this paper, we propose a chemically inspired graph neural network machine learning model, BonDNet, for the rapid and accurate prediction of BDEs. BonDNet maps the difference between the molecular representations of the reactants and products to the reaction BDE. Because of the use of this difference representation and the introduction of global features, including molecular charge, it is the first machine learning model capable of predicting both homolytic and heterolytic BDEs for molecules of any charge. To test the model, we have constructed a dataset of both homolytic and heterolytic BDEs for neutral and charged (−1 and +1) molecules. BonDNet achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.022 eV for unseen test data, significantly below chemical accuracy (0.043 eV). Besides the ability to handle complex bond dissociation reactions that no previous model could consider, BonDNet distinguishes itself even in only predicting homolytic BDEs for neutral molecules; it achieves an MAE of 0.020 eV on the PubChem BDE dataset, a 20% improvement over the previous best performing model. We gain additional insight into the model's predictions by analyzing the patterns in the features representing the molecules and the bond dissociation reactions, which are qualitatively consistent with chemical rules and intuition. BonDNet is just one application of our general approach to representing and learning chemical reactivity, and it could be easily extended to the prediction of other reaction properties in the future.
Prediction of bond dissociation energies for charged molecules with a graph neural network enabled by global molecular features and reaction difference features between products and reactants.
A QPO in Mkn 421 from Archival RXTE Data Smith, Evan; Oramas, Lani; Perlman, Eric
Astrophysical journal/The Astrophysical journal,
06/2023, Volume:
950, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Abstract
We report a 325(−7, +8) day quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) in the X-ray emission of the blazar Mkn 421 based on data obtained with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite. The QPO is ...seen prominently in the ASM data (at least 15 cycles) due to the fact that it has had near-continuous sampling for more than a decade. The PCA data, where the sampling is not uniform and shows many large gaps, provide supporting evidence at lower significance. The QPOs are an important observable in accretion disks, can be modulated by various orbital timescales, and may be generated by a number of mechanisms. They have been studied extensively in X-ray binaries and should be present in active galactic nuclei (AGN) if they are governed by a common set of physical principles. In jetted sources, QPOs can probe jet–disk interactions or helical oscillations. This QPO has previously been claimed intermittently in X-ray, radio, and gamma-ray data, but the continuous, 15 yr extent (1996–2011) of the ASM observations (in which Mkn 421 is the brightest AGN observed) provides a unique window. The QPO appears to be present for nearly the entire extent of the ASM observations. We explore various physical origins and modulating mechanisms, particularly interpretations of the QPO as a result of disk–jet interactions, due to either an accretion disk limit cycle, jet instabilities, or helical motions. Limit cycle oscillations would not interact with either Keplerian or Lense–Thirring modulated oscillations; however, those associated with jet instabilities or helical motions in the jet would likely be modulated by Lense–Thirring precession.
A recent systematic review demonstrated that reinfection rates following eradication of hip and knee periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) may be as high as 29%. This study aimed to develop a ...preoperative risk calculator for assessing patient’s individual risk associated with reinfection following treatment of PJI in total joint arthroplasty (TJA).
A total of 1081 consecutive patients who underwent revision TJA for PJI were evaluated. In total, 293 patients were diagnosed with TJA reinfection. A total of 56 risk factors, including patient characteristics and surgical variables, were evaluated with multivariate regression analysis. Analysis of the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve was performed to evaluate the strength of the predictive model.
Of the 56 risk factors studied, 19 were found to have a significant effect as risk factor for TJA reinfection. The strongest predictors for TJA reinfection included previous PJI treatment techniques such as irrigation and debridement, the number of previous surgical interventions, medical comorbidities such as obesity, drug abuse, depression and smoking, as well as microbiology including the presence of Enterococcus species. The combined area under the receiver operating characteristics curve of the risk calculator for periprosthetic hip and knee joint reinfection was 0.75.
The study findings demonstrate that surgical factors, including previous PJI surgical treatment techniques as well as the number of previous surgeries, alongside microbiology including the presence of Enterococcus species have the strongest effect on the risk for periprosthetic THA and TKA joint reinfection, suggesting the limited applicability of the existing risk calculators for the development of PJI following primary TJA in predicting the risk of periprosthetic joint reinfection.
Introduction
Systemically, changes in serum platelet to lymphocyte ratio (PLR), platelet count to mean platelet volume ratio (PVR), neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and monocyte to lymphocyte ...(MLR) represent primary responses to early inflammation and infection. This study aimed to determine whether PLR, PVR, NLR, and MLR can be useful in diagnosing periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) in total hip arthroplasty (THA) patients.
Methods
A total of 464 patients that underwent revision THA with calculable PLR, PVR, NLR, and MLR in 2 groups was evaluated: 1) 191 patients with a pre-operative diagnosis of PJI, and 2) 273 matched patients treated for revision THA for aseptic complications.
Results
The sensitivity and specificity of PLR combined with erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), C-reactive protein (CRP), synovial white blood cell count (WBC) and synovial polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) (97.9%; 98.5%) is significantly higher than only ESR combined with CRP, synovial WBC and synovial PMN (94.2%; 94.5%; p < 0.01). The sensitivity and specificity of PVR combined with ESR, CRP and synovial WBC, and synovial PMN (98.4%; 98.2%) is higher than only ESR combined with CRP, synovial WBC and synovial PMN (94.2%; 94.5%; p < 0.01).
Conclusion
The study results demonstrate that both PLR and PVR calculated from complete blood counts when combined with serum and synovial fluid markers have increased diagnostic sensitivity and specificity in diagnosing periprosthetic joint infection in THA patients.
Level of evidence:
III, case–control retrospective analysis.
Interfacial reactions are notoriously difficult to characterize, and robust prediction of the chemical evolution and associated functionality of the resulting surface film is one of the grand ...challenges of materials chemistry. The solid–electrolyte interphase (SEI), critical to Li-ion batteries (LIBs), exemplifies such a surface film, and despite decades of work, considerable controversy remains regarding the major components of the SEI as well as their formation mechanisms. Here we use a reaction network to investigate whether lithium ethylene monocarbonate (LEMC) or lithium ethylene dicarbonate (LEDC) is the major organic component of the LIB SEI. Our data-driven, automated methodology is based on a systematic generation of relevant species using a general fragmentation/recombination procedure which provides the basis for a vast thermodynamic reaction landscape, calculated with density functional theory. The shortest pathfinding algorithms are employed to explore the reaction landscape and obtain previously proposed formation mechanisms of LEMC as well as several new reaction pathways and intermediates. For example, we identify two novel LEMC formation mechanisms: one which involves LiH generation and another that involves breaking the (CH2)O–C(O)OLi bond in LEDC. Most importantly, we find that all identified paths, which are also kinetically favorable under the explored conditions, require water as a reactant. This condition severely limits the amount of LEMC that can form, as compared with LEDC, a conclusion that has direct impact on the SEI formation in Li-ion energy storage systems. Finally, the data-driven framework presented here is generally applicable to any electrochemical system and expected to improve our understanding of surface passivation.
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