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Abstract Background The world’s fast disappearing mangrove forests have low plant diversity and are often assumed to also have a species-poor insect fauna. We here compare the tropical arthropod fauna across a freshwater swamp and six different forest types (rain-, swamp, dry-coastal, urban, freshwater swamp, mangroves) based on 140,000 barcoded specimens belonging to ca. 8500 species. Results We find that the globally imperiled habitat “mangroves” is an overlooked hotspot for insect diversity. Our study reveals a species-rich mangrove insect fauna (>3000 species in Singapore alone) that is distinct (>50% of species are mangrove-specific) and has high species turnover across Southeast and East Asia. For most habitats, plant diversity is a good predictor of insect diversity, but mangroves are an exception and compensate for a comparatively low number of phytophagous and fungivorous insect species by supporting an unusually rich community of predators whose larvae feed in the productive mudflats. For the remaining tropical habitats, the insect communities have diversity patterns that are largely congruent across guilds. Conclusions The discovery of such a sizeable and distinct insect fauna in a globally threatened habitat underlines how little is known about global insect biodiversity. We here show how such knowledge gaps can be closed quickly with new cost-effective NGS barcoding techniques.

Ebstein's anomaly (EA) is a rare cyanotic form of congenital heart disease (CHD) characterized by apical displacement of the tricuspid valve, with resultant hemodynamic and electrical manifestations. The severity of symptoms is determined by the degree of apical displacement and deformity and incompetence of the tricuspid valve. As a result, patients with EA can be severely symptomatic during infancy and childhood or can be incidentally discovered in the sixth or seventh decade of life. Hallmarks of Ebstein's anomaly include progressive cyanosis, right-sided heart failure, and tachyarrhythmias, among which tachyarrhythmias (most commonly atrial, but also ventricular) are the most common presenting symptoms in Ebstein's anomaly patients during adulthood. This review aims to provide insight into the genetic and electrophysiological (EP) basis underlying the tachyarrhythmias encountered when managing patients with EA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Species extinctions increase at a global scale; therefore, rapid inventorying of our planet's biodiversity is becoming more and more important. As insects represent the highest portion of the fauna and play key ecological roles, it is a pressing need to investigate their biodiversity and accelerate species discovery, especially for understudied insect groups, also known as "dark taxa." Phoridae (Diptera) are a great example of a "dark taxon," in particular the genus Megaselia Rondani.The use of integrative methodologies is the best approach to face up to the task of describing hyperdiverse and dark taxa, as morphology alone can be imprecise and slow, and molecular methods alone are often insufficient and lead to errors.Here, we used the Large‐Scale Integrative Taxonomy (LIT) approach to sort 9000 Megaselia into 277 putative species based on DNA barcodes. Each cluster passed through an evaluation of the predictors for incongruence indices between clusters and morphology (maximum p‐distance, stability index), and a subset of specimens were morphologically examined.We provided species estimates with Chao1, and our results suggest a 15% increase in species richness on our dataset. As this estimate was mostly based on samples from southern Germany, the species count will likely increase with expanded geographic sampling. This is a step forward in the study of this taxon, despite the fact that the German insect fauna is one of the best known in Europe and boasts more than one hundred years of study on phorids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airport surface congestion can lead to significantly long taxi‐out times, thus resulting in increased fuel‐burn costs as well as excessive emissions of greenhouse gases. To curtail this undesirable syndrome, in this article, we propose a new penalty‐based dynamic departure pushback control (PDPC) strategy, which employs a linear penalty function dependent not only on the taxiway queue limit but also on the current queue length to ration the pushback frequency at airports, and trades taxiway queueing times with gate‐hold delays to minimize the total operational cost (fuel‐burn and gate‐hold costs). Using data from Beijing Capital International (PEK) airport, four different departure pushback control policies, namely: (i) no‐control (baseline case); (ii) traditional K$$ K $$‐control; (iii) PDPC with a constant taxiway limit; and (iv) PDPC with varying taxiway limits; are compared. Detailed Monte Carlo simulations, which showcase the sensitivity of the total cost function to various problem parameters are presented, and our results indicate that deploying the PDPC policy results in a 42% reduction in total operational costs and a 68% reduction in fuel‐burn (kg) as compared to the baseline case. To analytically reinforce these simulation results, an iterative Markov chain‐based optimization algorithm is also developed to estimate the optimal values of the pushback rate and taxiway queue limit that minimize the total cost function. Such an analytical framework is very useful in the absence of reliable airport data as it only requires estimates of the historical pushback request rates and service times at the taxiway, while yet retaining the capability to closely mirror the simulation results. Our Monte Carlo simulations as well as the Markov chain optimization model validate the strength and impact of the proposed PDPC policy, and demonstrate its practical efficacy in reducing airport surface congestion when applied using data from PEK airport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation for computing Interatomic Potential (IAP) is a very important High-Performance Computing (HPC) application. MD simulation on particles of experimental relevance takes huge computation time, despite using an expensive high-end server. Heterogeneous computing, a combination of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and a computer, is proposed as a solution to compute MD simulation efficiently. In such heterogeneous computation, communication between FPGA and Computer is necessary. One such MD simulation, explained in the paper, is the (Artificial Neural Network) ANN-based IAP computation of gold (Au147& Au309) nanoparticles. MD simulation calculates the forces between atoms and the total energy of the chemical system. This work proposes the novel design and implementation of an ANN IAP-based MD simulation for Au147& Au309using communication protocols, such as Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART) and Ethernet, for communication between the FPGA and the host computer. To improve the latency of MD simulation through heterogeneous computing, Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART) and Ethernet communication protocols were explored to conduct MD simulation of 50,000 cycles. In this study, computation times of 17.54 and 18.70 h were achieved with UART and Ethernet, respectively, compared to the conventional server time of 29 h for Au147nanoparticles. The results pave the way for the development of a Lab-on-a-chip application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Symbiotic relationships with diverse microorganisms are crucial for many aspects of insect biology. However, while our understanding of insect taxonomic diversity and the distribution of insect species in natural communities is limited, we know much less about their microbiota. In the era of rapid biodiversity declines, as researchers increasingly turn towards DNA-based monitoring, developing and broadly implementing approaches for high-throughput and cost-effective characterization of both insect and insect-associated microbial diversity is essential. We need to verify whether approaches such as high-throughput barcoding, a powerful tool for identifying wild insects, would permit subsequent microbiota reconstruction in these specimens. Methods: High-throughput barcoding ("megabarcoding") methods often rely on non-destructive approaches for obtaining template DNA for PCR amplification by leaching DNA out of insect specimens using alkaline buffers such as HotSHOT. This study investigated the impact of HotSHOT on microbial abundance estimates and the reconstructed bacterial community profiles. We addressed this question by comparing quantitative 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing data for HotSHOT-treated or untreated specimens of 16 insect species representing six orders and selected based on the expectation of limited variation among individuals. Results: We find that in 13 species, the treatment significantly reduced microbial abundance estimates, corresponding to an estimated 15-fold decrease in amplifiable 16S rRNA template on average. On the other hand, HotSHOT pre-treatment had a limited effect on microbial community composition. The reconstructed presence of abundant bacteria with known significant effects was not affected. On the other hand, we observed changes in the presence of low-abundance microbes, those close to the reliable detection threshold. Alpha and beta diversity analyses showed compositional differences in only a few species. Conclusion: Our results indicate that HotSHOT pre-treated specimens remain suitable for microbial community composition reconstruction, even if abundance may be hard to estimate. These results indicate that we can cost-effectively combine barcoding with the study of microbiota across wild insect communities. Thus, the voucher specimens obtained using megabarcoding studies targeted at characterizing insect communities can be used for microbiome characterizations. This can substantially aid in speeding up the accumulation of knowledge on the microbiomes of abundant and hyperdiverse insect species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report 3 cases (mean age 48.3 ± 11.6 years) of idiopathic ventricular fibrillation (IVF), in which a triggering premature ventricular complex leading to IVF could not be identified. All patients underwent posterior fascicle transection with empirical linear ablation of the mid-Purkinje potentials identified along the left ventricular interventricular inferior septum, and no ventricular fibrillation recurrence was documented in any of the patients. (Level of Difficulty: Advanced.)