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The demand for transplantable kidneys continues to outstrip supply, and the risk of donor-derived infection limits utilization. The effect of donor or recipient HBV status, defined by surface antigen (HBsAg) positivity, on long-term survival outcomes of kidney transplant (KT) is unknown. We conducted a retrospective cohort study based on Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) data from 2000 to 2019. We identified three cohorts based on donor (D) or recipient (R) HBsAg status: D-R-, D-R+, and D+R-. Pairwise comparisons of patient survival (PS) and all-cause graft survival (GS) after propensity score matching were performed to assess the effect of HBV infection in KT recipients. Results showed that there were no statistically significant differences in PS and GS among D-R-, D-R+, and D+R- groups, nor was the patient or graft survival different between donor and recipient HBsAg+ status. Finally, in 2019 kidney discard rates were 15% higher for HBsAg+ deceased donors compared to HBsAg- donors. HBsAg+ status was not associated with worse PS or GS after KT. Prior to broadly advocating utilization of HbsAg+ kidneys, further studies assessing KT recipient morbidity and safety are necessary. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Lipomas of the uterus and of the urinary bladder are rare. Their coexistence is even rarer Ultrasound can play a key role in their diagnosis. We report a case of coexisting of the uterus and the urinary bladder in a 61-year-old woman.

As reported in The New York Times (Bennhold, 2015), Khadiza Sultana was a bright 16-year-old schoolgirl. She excelled in her classes, receiving nothing but straight A's in all her courses. Her professors praised her for achieving beyond their expectations. She was a devoted daughter, especially so to her mother after the death of Khadiza's father a few years ago. She loved fashion, Twitter, and British football teams. “She was the girl you wanted to be like,” said one 14-year-old girl from the grade below her.

People often use indirect speech, for example, when trying to bribe a police officer by asking whether there might be "a way to take care of things without all the paperwork." Recent game theoretic accounts suggest that a speaker uses indirect speech to reduce public accountability for socially risky behaviors. The present studies examine a secondary function of indirect speech use: increasing the perceived moral permissibility of an action. Participants report that indirect speech is associated with reduced accountability for unethical behavior, as well as increased moral permissibility and increased likelihood of unethical behavior. Importantly, moral permissibility was a stronger mediator of the effect of indirect speech on likelihood of action, for judgments of one's own versus others' unethical action. In sum, the motorist who bribes the police officer with winks and nudges may not only avoid public punishment but also maintain the sense that his actions are morally permissible.

Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum, and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. The current study examines whether children's concept recall similarly is sensitive to the degree of conceptual counterintuitiveness (operationalized as a concept's number of ontological domain violations) for items presented in the context of a fictional narrative. Seven-to-nine-year old children who listened to a story including both intuitive and counterintuitive concepts recalled the counterintuitive concepts containing one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2) but not three (Experiment 3) violations of intuitive ontological expectations significantly more and in greater detail than the intuitive concepts, both immediately after hearing the story and one week later. We conclude that one or two violations of expectation may be a cognitive optimum for children: they are more inferentially rich and therefore more memorable, whereas three or more violations diminish memorability for target concepts. These results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early- emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices whose primary form and content is not derived from arbitrary custom or the social environment alone.

RATIONALE Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight-time-of-flight (TOF-TOF) post-source decay (PSD) tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) has seen increasing use for analysis of non-digested protein ions for top-down proteomic identification. However, there is no commonly accepted calibrant for this purpose beyond the use of peptide calibrants whose fragment ions span a lower mass-to-charge (m/z) range. METHODS We have used the PSD-generated fragment ions of disulfide-reduced/alkylated thioredoxin (AlkTrx) for TOF-TOF calibration in reflectron mode for the purpose of PSD-MS/MS analysis. The average m/z values of AlkTrx fragment ions were used for calibration. The quality of the calibration was assessed from the observed fragment ion mass error of MS/MS of the YahO protein from an unfractionated bacterial cell lysate of Escherichia coli O157:H7 as well as from MS/MS of bovine ubiquitin. The fragment ion mass errors of these two analytes were also used to assess instrument calibration using the monoisotopic fragment ions of [Glu1]-fibrinopeptide B (GluFib). RESULTS A general improvement in fragment ion mass accuracy was observed using the AlkTrx calibration compared to the GluFib calibration which resulted in a more significant top-down proteomic identification of these analyte proteins. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that AlkTrx may be useful as a calibrant for MALDI-TOF-TOF-PSD-MS/MS of small and modest-sized protein ions. The uniform fragmentation efficiency of YahO across its sequence suggests that it may be useful as a post-calibration standard to assess PSD-MS/MS instrument performance as well as establishing appropriate top-down proteomic fragment ion tolerances. Published 2012. This article is a US Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.

The Islamic philosophical, mystical, and theological sub-traditions have each made characteristic assumptions about the human person, including an incorporation of substance dualism in distinctive manners. Advances in the brain sciences of the last half century, which include a widespread acceptance of death as the end of essential brain function, require the abandonment of dualistic notions of the human person that assert an immaterial and incorporeal soul separate from a body. In this article, I trace classical Islamic notions of death and the soul, the modern definition of death as "brain death," and some contemporary Islamic responses to this definition. I argue that a completely naturalistic account of human personhood in the Islamic tradition is the best and most viable alternative for the future. This corporeal monistic account of Muslim personhood as embodied consciousness incorporates the insights of pre-modern Muslim thinkers yet rehabilitates their characteristic mistakes and thus has the advantages of neuroscientific validity and modern relevance in trans-cultural ethical discourse; it also helps to alleviate organ shortages in countries with majority Muslim populations, a serious ethical impasse of recent years.