Vertebrates harbour microbes both internally and externally, and collectively, these microorganisms (the ‘microbiome’) contain genes that outnumber the host's genetic information 10‐fold. The ...majority of the microorganisms associated with vertebrates are found within the gut, where they influence host physiology, immunity and development. The development of next‐generation sequencing has led to a surge in effort to characterize the microbiomes of various vertebrate hosts, a necessary first step to determine the functional role these communities play in host evolution or ecology. This shift away from a culture‐based microbiological approach, limited in taxonomic breadth, has resulted in the emergence of patterns suggesting a core vertebrate microbiome dominated by members of the bacterial phyla Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria and Firmicutes. Still, there is a substantial variation in the methodology used to characterize the microbiome, from differences in sample type to issues of sampling captive or wild hosts, and the majority (>90%) of studies have characterized the microbiome of mammals, which represent just 8% of described vertebrate species. Here, we review the state of microbiome studies of nonmammalian vertebrates and provide a synthesis of emerging patterns in the microbiome of those organisms. We highlight the importance of collection methods, and the need for greater taxonomic sampling of natural rather than captive hosts, a shift in approach that is needed to draw ecologically and evolutionarily relevant inferences. Finally, we recommend future directions for vertebrate microbiome research, so that attempts can be made to determine the role that microbial communities play in vertebrate biology and evolution.
Abstract
Background
Fungal diseases range from relatively-minor superficial and mucosal infections to severe, life-threatening systemic infections. Delayed diagnosis and treatment can lead to poor ...patient outcomes and high medical costs. The overall burden of fungal diseases in the United States is challenging to quantify, because they are likely substantially underdiagnosed.
Methods
To estimate the total, national, direct medical costs associated with fungal diseases from a healthcare payer perspective, we used insurance claims data from the Truven Health MarketScan 2014 Research Databases, combined with hospital discharge data from the 2014 Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project National Inpatient Sample and outpatient visit data from the 2005–2014 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. All costs were adjusted to 2017 dollars.
Results
We estimate that fungal diseases cost more than $7.2 billion in 2017, including $4.5 billion from 75055 hospitalizations and $2.6 billion from 8993230 outpatient visits. Hospitalizations for Candida infections (n = 26735, total cost $1.4 billion) and Aspergillus infections (n = 14820, total cost $1.2 billion) accounted for the highest total hospitalization costs of any disease. Over half of outpatient visits were for dermatophyte infections (4981444 visits, total cost $802 million), and 3639037 visits occurred for non-invasive candidiasis (total cost $1.6 billion).
Conclusions
Fungal diseases impose a considerable economic burden on the healthcare system. Our results likely underestimate their true costs, because they are underdiagnosed. More comprehensive estimates of the public health impact of these diseases are needed to improve their recognition, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.
To provide insight into the burden of fungal diseases in the United States, we used several administrative data sources to estimate their total direct healthcare costs. We estimate that fungal disease healthcare costs exceed $7 billion annually.
Amidst declarations of planetary emergency and reports that the window for limiting climate change to 1.5 °C is rapidly closing, global average temperatures and fossil fuel emissions continue to ...rise. Global fossil CO2 emissions have grown three years consecutively: +1.5% in 2017, +2.1% in 2018, and our slower central projection of +0.6% in 2019 (range of -0.32% to 1.5%) to 37 2 Gt CO2 (Friedlingstein et al 2019 Earth Syst. Sci. Data accepted), after a temporary growth hiatus from 2014 to 2016. Economic indicators and trends in global natural gas and oil use suggest a further rise in emissions in 2020 is likely. CO2 emissions are decreasing slowly in many industrialized regions, including the European Union (preliminary estimate of −1.7% -3.4% to +0.1% for 2019, −0.8%/yr for 2003-2018) and United States (−1.7% -3.7% to +0.3% in 2019, −0.8%/yr for 2003-2018), while emissions continue growing in India (+1.8% +0.7% to 3.7% in 2019, +5.1%/yr for 2003-2018), China (+2.6% +0.7% to 4.4% in 2019, +0.4%/yr for 2003-2018), and rest of the world ((+0.5% −0.8% to 1.8% in 2019, +1.4%/yr for 2003-2018). Two under-appreciated trends suggest continued long-term growth in both oil and natural gas use is likely. Because per capita oil consumption in the US and Europe remains 5- to 20-fold higher than in China and India, increasing vehicle ownership and air travel in Asia are poised to increase global CO2 emissions from oil over the next decade or more. Liquified natural gas exports from Australia and the United States are surging, lowering natural gas prices in Asia and increasing global access to this fossil resource. To counterbalance increasing emissions, we need accelerated energy efficiency improvements and reduced consumption, rapid deployment of electric vehicles, carbon capture and storage technologies, and a decarbonized electricity grid, with new renewable capacities replacing fossil fuels, not supplementing them. Stronger global commitments and carbon pricing would help implement such policies at scale and in time.
Knots, links, and long-range magic Fliss, Jackson R.
The journal of high energy physics,
04/2021, Letnik:
2021, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
A
bstract
We study the extent to which knot and link states (that is, states in 3d Chern-Simons theory prepared by path integration on knot and link complements) can or cannot be described by ...stabilizer states. States which are not classical mixtures of stabilizer states are known as “magic states” and play a key role in quantum resource theory. By implementing a particular magic monotone known as the “mana” we quantify the magic of knot and link states. In particular, for SU(2)
k
Chern-Simons theory we show that knot and link states are generically magical. For link states, we further investigate the mana associated to correlations between separate boundaries which characterizes the state’s long-range magic. Our numerical results suggest that the magic of a majority of link states is entirely long-range. We make these statements sharper for torus links.
Summary
Background
Member states of the World Health Organization have adopted resolutions aiming to achieve ‘no increase on obesity levels’ by 2025 (based on 2010 levels) for infants, adolescents ...and adults.
Objectives
We aimed to assess the scale of the problem facing health planners and service providers.
Methods and Results
Using data prepared by the Global Burden of Disease collaborative for 2000 and 2013, we have estimated that by 2025 some 268 million children aged 5‐17 years may be overweight, including 91 million obese, assuming no policy interventions have proven effective at changing current trends. We have also estimated the likely numbers of children in 2025 with obesity‐related comorbidities: impaired glucose tolerance (12 million), type 2 diabetes (4 million), hypertension (27 million) and hepatic steatosis (38 million). A supplemental table provides estimates for each of 184 nations.
Conclusion
The 2025 targets are unlikely to be met, and health service providers will need to plan for a significant increase in obesity‐linked comorbidities.
Climate stabilization remains elusive, with increased greenhouse gas concentrations already increasing global average surface temperatures 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels (World Meteorological ...Organization 2019). Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel use, deforestation, and other anthropogenic sources reached ~ 43 billion metric tonnes in 2019 (Friedlingstein et al 2019, Jackson et al 2019). Storms, floods, and other extreme weather events displaced a record 7 million people in the first half of 2019 (IDMC 2019). When global mean surface temperature four million years ago was 2°C–3°C warmer than today (a likely temperature increase before the end of the century), ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica melted and parts of East Antarctica’s ice retreated, causing sea levels to rise 10–20 m (World Meteorological Organization 2019).
Methane (CH4) emissions have contributed almost one quarter of the cumulative radiative forcings for CO2, CH4, and N2O (nitrous oxide) combined since 1750 (Etminan et al 2016). Although methane is far less abundant in the atmosphere than CO2, it absorbs thermal infrared radiation much
more efficiently and, in consequence, has a global warming potential (GWP) ~86 times stronger per unit mass than CO2 on a 20-year timescale and 28-
times more powerful on a 100-year time scale (IPCC 2014).
Global average methane concentrations in the atmosphere reached ~1875 parts per billion (ppb) at the end of 2019, more than two-and-a-half times
preindustrial levels (Dlugokencky 2020). The largest methane sources include anthropogenic emissions from agriculture, waste, and the extraction and use of fossil fuels as well as natural emissions from wetlands, freshwater systems, and geological sources (Kirschke et al 2013, Saunois et al 2016a, Ganesan et al 2019). Here, we summarize new estimates of the global methane budget based on the analysis of Saunois et al (2020) for the year 2017, the last year of the new Global Methane Budget and the most recent year data are fully available. We compare these estimates to mean values for the reference ‘stabilization’ period of 2000–2006 when atmospheric CH4 concentrations were relatively stable. We present data for sources and sinks and provide insights for the geographical regions and economic sectors where emissions have changed the most over recent decades.
Advances in the analysis of amplicon sequence datasets have introduced a methodological shift in how research teams investigate microbial biodiversity, away from sequence identity-based clustering ...(producing Operational Taxonomic Units, OTUs) to denoising methods (producing amplicon sequence variants, ASVs). While denoising methods have several inherent properties that make them desirable compared to clustering-based methods, questions remain as to the influence that these pipelines have on the ecological patterns being assessed, especially when compared to other methodological choices made when processing data (e.g. rarefaction) and computing diversity indices. We compared the respective influences of two widely used methods, namely DADA2 (a denoising method) vs. Mothur (a clustering method) on 16S rRNA gene amplicon datasets (hypervariable region v4), and compared such effects to the rarefaction of the community table and OTU identity threshold (97% vs. 99%) on the ecological signals detected. We used a dataset comprising freshwater invertebrate (three Unionidae species) gut and environmental (sediment, seston) communities sampled in six rivers in the southeastern USA. We ranked the respective effects of each methodological choice on alpha and beta diversity, and taxonomic composition. The choice of the pipeline significantly influenced alpha and beta diversities and changed the ecological signal detected, especially on presence/absence indices such as the richness index and unweighted Unifrac. Interestingly, the discrepancy between OTU and ASV-based diversity metrics could be attenuated by the use of rarefaction. The identification of major classes and genera also revealed significant discrepancies across pipelines. Compared to the pipeline's effect, OTU threshold and rarefaction had a minimal impact on all measurements.
Unlike CO2, atmospheric methane concentrations are rising faster than at any time in the past two decades and, since 2014, are now approaching the most greenhouse-gas-intensive scenarios. The reasons ...for this renewed growth are still unclear, primarily because of uncertainties in the global methane budget. New analysis suggests that the recent rapid rise in global methane concentrations is predominantly biogenic-most likely from agriculture-with smaller contributions from fossil fuel use and possibly wetlands. Additional attention is urgently needed to quantify and reduce methane emissions. Methane mitigation offers rapid climate benefits and economic, health and agricultural co-benefits that are highly complementary to CO2 mitigation.
A novel slotted substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) leaky-wave antenna is proposed. This antenna works in the TE 10 mode of the SIW. Leakage is obtained by introducing a periodic set of transverse ...slots on the top of the SIW, which interrupt the current flow on the top wall. It is seen that three modes (a leaky mode, a proper waveguide mode, and a surface-wave-like mode) can all propagate on this structure. The wavenumbers of the modes are calculated theoretically and are numerically evaluated by HFSS simulation. The leakage loss, dielectric loss, and conductor loss are also analyzed. A uniform slotted SIW leaky-wave antenna is designed that has good beam scanning from near broadside (though not exactly at broadside) to forward endfire. This type of SIW leaky-wave antenna has a wide impedance bandwidth and a narrow beam that scans with frequency. Measured results are consistent with the simulation and the theoretical analysis.
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