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In 1918, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, excavator of Babylon, Iraq, observed that the depiction of the fantastical “dragon of Babylon” on the sixth century BCE Ishtar Gate must reference a real animal whose closest relatives would be dinosaurs like the iguanodon. Though ignored within archaeology, Koldewey’s comments were taken up in German-American popular science writer Willy Ley’s “romantic zoology” (1941), then by Bernard Heuvelmans (1955), founding figure in the fringe field of cryptozoology. Their interpretations would ultimately inspire expeditions by the International Society of Cryptozoologists in Central Africa to find the Mokele-Mbembe, a “living dinosaur,” and migrate into Young Earth Creationist and ancient aliens theories. An analysis of Koldewey’s marginal academic observation serves as a means of considering the process of knowledge formation and canonization and the unpredictable life of scholarly ideas.Plastic pollution has become a major environmental and societal concern in the last decade. From larger debris to microplastics (MP), this pollution is ubiquitous and particularly affects aquatic ecosystems. MP can be directly or inadvertently ingested by organisms, transferred along the trophic chain, and sometimes translocated into tissues. However, the impacts of such MP exposure on organisms’ biological functions are yet to be fully understood. Here, we used a multi-diagnostic approach at multiple levels of biological organization (from atoms to organisms) to determine how MP affect the biology of a marine fish, the gilthead seabream, Sparus aurata. We exposed juvenile seabreams for 35 days to spherical 10-20 µm polyethylene primary MP through food (Artemia salina pre-exposed to MP) at a concentration of 5 ± 1 µg of MP per gram of fish per day. MP-exposed fish experienced higher mortality, increased abundance of several brain and liver primary metabolites, hepatic and intestinal histological defects, higher assimilation of an essential element (Zn), and lower assimilation of a non-essential element (Ag). In contrast, growth and muscle C/N isotopic profiles were similar between control and MP-exposed fish, while variable patterns were observed for the intestinal microbiome. This comprehensive analysis of biological responses to MP exposure reveals how MP ingestion can cause negligible to profound effects in a fish species and contributes towards a better understanding of the causal mechanisms of its toxicity.Cadmium (Cd) is a ubiquitous environmental contaminant, posing serious threats to aquatic organisms. The aims of the present study were to investigate the effects of long-term Cd exposure on the growth, GH/IGF axis, antioxidant defense and DNA methylation in juvenile Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus). To this end, juvenile Nile tilapia were exposed to 0, 10 and 50 µg∙L-1 Cd for 45 and 90 days. The obtained results revealed that exposure to high concentrations of Cd significantly decreased body mass and body length, and down-regulated mRNA levels of GHRs, IGF-I and IGF-II in the liver of Nile tilapia. Cd exposure induced oxidative stress including the reduction of antioxidant activities and increases of malondialdehyde (MDA) and 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) contents. selleck kinase inhibitor Beside, the global DNA methylation levels significantly decreased with increasing Cd concentration and exposure time, which might result from increased oxidative DNA damage, the down-regulated expression of DNMT3a and DNMT3b and up-regulated expression of TET1 and TET2. In conclusion, long-term Cd exposure could inhibit growth, reduce antioxidant capacity and lead to oxidative damages to lipid and DNA, and decrease global DNA methylation level in juvenile Nile tilapia.

Menstrual phase influences cigarette smoking-related outcomes. Telephone-based cessation programs (e.g., quitlines) may incorporate the role of the menstrual cycle in an effort to tailor interventions for women.

The goal of this preliminary randomized clinical trial was to examine the feasibility and acceptability of timing quit date to menstrual phase in women in a quitline setting.

We recruited treatment-seeking women with regular menstrual cycles between the ages of 18-40years. Participants were randomized to the follicular phase (FP; quit date set 6-8days post onset of menses) or standard of care (SC; no menstrual timing of quit date). All participants received four weeks of nicotine replacement therapy transdermal patch concurrent with six weeks of telephone-based counseling. We explored self-reported and biochemically-verified seven-day point prevalence abstinence at end-of-treatment and three-month follow-up.

Participants (n=119; FP n=58, SC n=61) were, on average, 33.4years old and smoked 13.6he feasibility and acceptability results indicate that a fully-powered efficacy trial is warranted.To meet the needs of a population of older adults at risk of becoming frail in the context of known limitations to current practice, frameworks have emerged to guide health service development. Typically these frameworks have developed in the hospital sector despite the need for hospital/community sector co-development and adoption. In the present study one such framework – the Senior Friendly Hospital (SFH1) Framework – is examined with an intersectoral lens. The study included a scoping review of literature addressing system-based approaches to improving healthcare of older people as well as a modified Delphi process to incorporate these findings into an expanded framework. Qualitative analysis of the data extracted from the scoping review resulted in the identification of “senior friendly” excerpts that were charted using an apriori matrix provided by the SFH Framework. Researchers conducted thematic analysis of the excerpts to avoid redundancy and wrote statements to optimize thematic clarity. In a modified Delphi process, the statements were subsequently rated for perceived importance, clarity and fit by an intersectoral panel of experts resulting in a refined Senior Friendly Care (sfCare2) Framework comprising 31 statements and 7 guiding principles to consider when implementing improvements in the care of older adults. Finally, a panel of stakeholders were consulted for feedback on the clarity of the framework’s intent and its anticipated impact on care. The sfCare Framework is now available to guide hospital and community-based health service development for older adults.Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a massive disaster in every human life field, including health, education, economics, and tourism, over the last year and a half. Rapid interpretation of COVID-19 patients’ X-ray images is critical for diagnosis and, consequently, treatment of the disease. The major goal of this research is to develop a computational tool that can quickly and accurately determine the severity of an illness using COVID-19 chest X-ray pictures and improve the degree of diagnosis using a modified whale optimization method (WOA). To improve the WOA, a random initialization of the population is integrated during the global search phase. The parameters, coefficient vector (A) and constant value (b), are changed so that the algorithm can explore in the early stages while also exploiting the search space extensively in the latter stages. The efficiency of the proposed modified whale optimization algorithm with population reduction (mWOAPR) method is assessed by using it to segment six benchmark images using multilevel thresholding approach and Kapur’s entropy-based fitness function calculated from the 2D histogram of greyscale images. By gathering three distinct COVID-19 chest X-ray images, the projected algorithm (mWOAPR) is utilized to segment the COVID-19 chest X-ray images. In both benchmark pictures and COVID-19 chest X-ray images, comparisons of the evaluated findings with basic and modified forms of metaheuristic algorithms supported the suggested mWOAPR’s improved performance.Unsupervised pretraining is an integral part of many natural language processing systems, and transfer learning with language models has achieved remarkable results in downstream tasks. In the clinical application of medical code assignment, diagnosis and procedure codes are inferred from lengthy clinical notes such as hospital discharge summaries. However, it is not clear if pretrained models are useful for medical code prediction without further architecture engineering. This paper conducts a comprehensive quantitative analysis of various contextualized language models’ performances, pretrained in different domains, for medical code assignment from clinical notes. We propose a hierarchical fine-tuning architecture to capture interactions between distant words and adopt label-wise attention to exploit label information. Contrary to current trends, we demonstrate that a carefully trained classical CNN outperforms attention-based models on a MIMIC-III subset with frequent codes. Our empirical findings suggest directions for building robust medical code assignment models.KIAA1524 is the gene encoding the human cancerous inhibitor of PP2A (CIP2A) protein which is regarded as a novel target for cancer therapy. It is overexpressed in 65%-90% of tissues in almost all studied human cancers. CIP2A expression correlates with cancer progression, disease aggressivity in lung cancer besides poor survival and resistance to chemotherapy in breast cancer. Herein, a pan-cancer analysis of public gene expression datasets was conducted showing significant upregulation of CIP2A in cancerous and metastatic tissues. CIP2A overexpression also correlated with poor survival of cancer patients. To determine the non-coding variants associated with CIP2A overexpression, 5’UTR and 3’UTR variants were annotated and scored using RegulomeDB and Enformer deep learning model. The 5’UTR variants rs1239349555, rs1576326380, and rs1231839144 were predicted to be potential regulators of CIP2A overexpression scoring best on RegulomeDB annotations with a high “2a” rank of supporting experimental data. These variedicted as a potential intronic splicing mutation that might be responsible for the novel CIP2A variant (NOCIVA) in multiple myeloma. Finally, Enrichment of the Wnt/β-catenin pathway within the CIP2A regulatory gene network suggested potential of therapeutic combinations between FTY720 with Wnt/β-catenin, Plk1 and/or HDAC inhibitors to downregulate CIP2A which has been shown to be essential for the survival of different cancer cell lines.Insomnia is one of the most common sleep disorders which can dramatically impair life quality and negatively affect an individual’s physical and mental health. Recently, various deep learning based methods have been proposed for automatic and objective insomnia detection, owing to the great success of deep learning techniques. However, due to the scarcity of public insomnia data, a deep learning model trained on a dataset with a small number of insomnia subjects may compromise the generalization capacity of the model and eventually limit the performance of insomnia detection. Meanwhile, there have been a number of public EEG datasets collected from a large number of healthy subjects for various sleep research tasks such as sleep staging. Therefore, to utilize such abundant EEG datasets for addressing the data scarcity issue in insomnia detection, in this paper we propose a domain adaptation based model to better extract insomnia related features of the target domain by leveraging stage annotations from the source domain.