While deforestation rates decline globally they are rising in the Western Amazon. Artisanal-scale gold mining (ASGM) is a large cause of this deforestation and brings with it extensive environmental, ...social, governance, and public health impacts, including large carbon emissions and mercury pollution. Underlying ASGM is a broad network of factors that influence its growth, distribution, and practices such as poverty, flows of legal and illegal capital, conflicting governance, and global economic trends. Despite its central role in land use and land cover change in the Western Amazon and the severity of its social and environmental impacts, it is relatively poorly studied. While ASGM in Southeastern Peru has been quantified previously, doing so is difficult due to the heterogeneous nature of the resulting landscape. Using a novel approach to classify mining that relies on a fusion of CLASlite and the Global Forest Change dataset, two Landsat-based deforestation detection tools, we sought to quantify ASGM-caused deforestation in the period 1984–2017 in the southern Peruvian Amazon and examine trends in the geography, methods, and impacts of ASGM across that time. We identify nearly 100,000 ha of deforestation due to ASGM in the 34-year study period, an increase of 21% compared to previous estimates. Further, we find that 10% of that deforestation occurred in 2017, the highest annual amount of deforestation in the study period, with 53% occurring since 2011. Finally, we demonstrate that not all mining is created equal by examining key patterns and changes in ASGM activity and techniques through time and space. We discuss their connections with, and impacts on, socio-economic factors, such as land tenure, infrastructure, international markets, governance efforts, and social and environmental impacts.
Aging promotes lung function decline and susceptibility to chronic lung diseases, which are the third leading cause of death worldwide. Here, we use single cell transcriptomics and mass ...spectrometry-based proteomics to quantify changes in cellular activity states across 30 cell types and chart the lung proteome of young and old mice. We show that aging leads to increased transcriptional noise, indicating deregulated epigenetic control. We observe cell type-specific effects of aging, uncovering increased cholesterol biosynthesis in type-2 pneumocytes and lipofibroblasts and altered relative frequency of airway epithelial cells as hallmarks of lung aging. Proteomic profiling reveals extracellular matrix remodeling in old mice, including increased collagen IV and XVI and decreased Fraser syndrome complex proteins and collagen XIV. Computational integration of the aging proteome with the single cell transcriptomes predicts the cellular source of regulated proteins and creates an unbiased reference map of the aging lung.
Objectives
Color Doppler ultrasound (CDUS) of the temporal arteries (TA) is becoming the first test to be performed for suspected giant cell arteritis (GCA). Our aim was to assess the added value of ...including CDUS of large vessels (LV) in the diagnosis of GCA.
Methods
We performed an observational and retrospective study of consecutive patients with suspected GCA. Baseline CDUS of the TA and LV (axillary, subclavian, and carotid) were conducted. We defined the CDUS finding as positive if the halo sign was present.
Results
Of 198 patients with suspected GCA, 87 were eventually diagnosed with GCA: 45 (51.7%) had a cranial pattern exclusively, 31 (35.6%) had both a cranial and an LV pattern, and 11 (12.6%) had an isolated LV pattern. CDUS of the TA had a sensitivity of 83.9%, specificity of 97.3%, and positive and negative predictive values (PPV, NPV) of 96.1% and 88.5%, respectively. When LV was added, sensitivity increased to 96.6% and NPV to 98.2%. Specificity was 97.3% and PPV was 96.6%. As for LVs, the axillary, subclavian, and carotid arteries were involved in 87.8%, 77.4%, and 34.4%, respectively. Isolated axillary examination resulted in a loss of 12.2% of patients with LV involvement; however, inclusion of the axillary and subclavian arteries retained 100% of patients with LV involvement.
Conclusions
Detection of GCA by ultrasound should routinely include examinations of the TA and LV (at least the axillary and subclavian arteries) to improve diagnostic accuracy. More than 12% of patients in our cohort had isolated LV involvement.
Key Points
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Extracranial involvement in GCA is very common: half of patients have extracranial vasculitis and more than 12% isolated LV involvement that can be demonstrated with CDUS
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Adding a CDUS examination of LV to TA increased sensitivity (from 83.9 to 96.6%) and the negative predictive value (from 88.5 to 98.2%) for diagnosis of GCA
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In our cohort, if we only examined the axillary arteries, 12.2% of the CGA with LV involvement would not have been diagnosed
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We propose a CDUS protocol that includes examination of the TA and LV (at least the axillary and subclavian arteries) routinely in cases of suspected GCA
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A
bstract
We consider self-dual Yang-Mills theory (SDYM) in four dimensions and its lift to holomorphic BF theory on twistor space. Following the work of Costello and Paquette, we couple SDYM to a ...quartic axion field, which guarantees associativity of the (extended) celestial chiral algebra at the quantum level. We demonstrate how to reproduce their one-loop quantum deformation to the chiral algebra using Koszul duality.
Energy is a key ingredient to facilitate economic development in the Middle East. Expectations for a rapidly growing economy in the next decade will likely cause an increase in the fraction of energy ...consumed domestically limiting what is available for export. These challenges are the biggest for resource-rich countries, since their economy is heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports alongside an energy-intensive economy. Thus, the paper addresses the question of how the development of energy systems among resource-rich countries has changed over the past three decades and what role can they play in the sustainable development of the region’s energy system and emission reduction goals? To address this question, we present an overview on energy trends in four resource-rich countries in the Middle East, which nearly account for 76% of the region’s energy-related emissions and about 77% of total energy consumption. These countries are namely, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE. Accordingly, we present a comparative energy analysis between the four countries through examining historical and current energy trends, the structure of energy supply, the status of renewable deployment and energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Results from the analysis showed that inefficient energy production and consumption have played a role in the deterioration of the energy landscape of the four countries compared to the global energy system. Thus, this highlights the necessity for suitable energy strategies and effective policies that will be central to sustainable energy development. The analysis presented here could be used to better understanding of the impacts of current gaps and inefficiencies in large energy consumers in the Middle East.
This work presents and discusses the antiwear behaviour of nanoparticle suspensions in a polyalphaolefin (PAO 6). CuO, ZnO and ZrO2 nanoparticles were separately dispersed at 0.5%, 1.0% and 2.0%wt. ...in PAO 6 using an ultrasonic probe for 2 min. AW properties were obtained using a TE53SLIM tribometer with a block-on-ring configuration. Tests were made under a load of 165 N, sliding speed of 2 m/s and a total distance of 3.066 m. Wear surfaces were analysed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS) after wear tests. The study led to the following conclusions: all nanoparticle suspensions exhibited reductions in friction and wear compared to the base oil; the suspensions with 0.5% of ZnO and ZrO2 had the best general tribological behaviour, exhibiting high friction and wear reduction values even at low deposition levels on the wear surface; CuO suspensions showed the highest friction coefficient and lowest wear per nanoparticle content of 2%; and the antiwear mechanism of nanoparticulate additive was produced by tribo-sintering.
There are heightened concerns globally on emerging drug-resistant superbugs and the lack of new antibiotics for treating human and animal diseases. For the agricultural industry, there is an urgent ...need to develop strategies to replace antibiotics for food-producing animals, especially poultry and livestock. The 2
International Symposium on Alternatives to Antibiotics was held at the World Organization for Animal Health in Paris, France, December 12-15, 2016 to discuss recent scientific developments on strategic antibiotic-free management plans, to evaluate regional differences in policies regarding the reduction of antibiotics in animal agriculture and to develop antibiotic alternatives to combat the global increase in antibiotic resistance. More than 270 participants from academia, government research institutions, regulatory agencies, and private animal industries from >25 different countries came together to discuss recent research and promising novel technologies that could provide alternatives to antibiotics for use in animal health and production; assess challenges associated with their commercialization; and devise actionable strategies to facilitate the development of alternatives to antibiotic growth promoters (AGPs) without hampering animal production. The 3-day meeting consisted of four scientific sessions including vaccines, microbial products, phytochemicals, immune-related products, and innovative drugs, chemicals and enzymes, followed by the last session on regulation and funding. Each session was followed by an expert panel discussion that included industry representatives and session speakers. The session on phytochemicals included talks describing recent research achievements, with examples of successful agricultural use of various phytochemicals as antibiotic alternatives and their mode of action in major agricultural animals (poultry, swine and ruminants). Scientists from industry and academia and government research institutes shared their experience in developing and applying potential antibiotic-alternative phytochemicals commercially to reduce AGPs and to develop a sustainable animal production system in the absence of antibiotics.
The Hh/GLI signaling pathway was originally discovered in Drosophila as a major regulator of segment patterning in development. This pathway consists of a series of ligands (Shh, Ihh, and Dhh), ...transmembrane receptors (Ptch1 and Ptch2), transcription factors (GLI1–3), and signaling regulators (SMO, HHIP, SUFU, PKA, CK1, GSK3β, etc.) that work in concert to repress (Ptch1, Ptch2, SUFU, PKA, CK1, GSK3β) or activate (Shh, Ihh, Dhh, SMO, GLI1–3) the signaling cascade. Not long after the initial discovery, dysregulation of the Hh/GLI signaling pathway was implicated in human disease. Activation of this signaling pathway is observed in many types of cancer, including basal cell carcinoma, medulloblastoma, colorectal, prostate, pancreatic, and many more. Most often, the activation of the Hh/GLI pathway in cancer occurs through a ligand-independent mechanism. However, in benign disease, this activation is mostly ligand-dependent. The upstream signaling component of the receptor complex, SMO, is bypassed, and the GLI family of transcription factors can be activated regardless of ligand binding. Additional mechanisms of pathway activation exist whereby the entirety of the downstream signaling pathway is bypassed, and PTCH1 promotes cell cycle progression and prevents caspase-mediated apoptosis. Throughout this review, we summarize each component of the signaling cascade, non-canonical modes of pathway activation, and the implications in human disease, including cancer.
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