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There is growing evidence that corporate market power is increasing and affecting monetary policy transmission. This paper develops a partial equilibrium model that highlights the role of financial constraints in shaping the role of markups for the response of firms to monetary policy shocks. We find support for such a role using a large cross-country firm-level dataset for 14 advanced economies.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern has prompted the need for near real-time genomic surveillance to inform public health interventions. In response to this need, the global scientific community, through unprecedented effort, has sequenced and shared over 11 million genomes through GISAID, as of May 2022. This extraordinarily high sampling rate provides a unique opportunity to track the evolution of the virus in near real-time. Here, we present outbreak.info, a platform that currently tracks over 40 million combinations of PANGO lineages and individual mutations, across over 7,000 locations, to provide insights for researchers, public health officials, and the general public. We describe the interpretable and opinionated visualizations in the variant and location focussed reports available in our web application, the pipelines that enable the scalable ingestion of heterogeneous sources of SARS-CoV-2 variant data, and the server infrastructure that enables widespread data dissemination via a high performance API that can be accessed using an R package. We present a case study that illustrates how outbreak.info can be used for genomic surveillance and as a hypothesis generation tool to understand the ongoing pandemic at varying geographic and temporal scales. With an emphasis on scalability, interactivity, interpretability, and reusability, outbreak.info provides a template to enable genomic surveillance at a global and localized scale.

Individuals with pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE) have often been advised against becoming pregnant due to a fear of the exacerbation of existing symptoms, likelihood of inheritance of the disease, and possible obstetric risks associated with the mother and child. PXE is a recessive multisystem disorder that leads to calcification of elastic tissues and fibers that can result in arterial rupture and gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding, possibly endangering the fetus and mother. PXE often manifests in skin lesions as well and the risk of exacerbation is a principal concern. To address these complications and to provide transparent understanding to healthcare providers and mothers of the associated risk factors with pregnancy and PXE, we conducted a comprehensive review of the current literature and found that there is no inherent risk for obstetric complications for PXE pregnancies and patients need not be advised against becoming pregnant as previously suggested. PXE-related pregnancies are unremarkable to the mother’s wellbeing and fetal complications are few, if any at all.

A disruptive area for mobile health (mHealth) in cardiovascular disease relates to the ability of mobile and wearable devices to detect cardiac arrhythmia, with currently a particular focus on atrial fibrillation (AF) ([1–3][1]). It might also provide an opportunity for timely identification of

This study integrates mathematical model in the plan of producing a fish feed formulation by reducing the total cost without neglecting the nutrient requirements. This study focuses on producing the perfect combination of fish feed for Mystus nemurus sp. catfish in different stages of life. The mathematical model developed will consider their required nutrients in each stage, the cost of each ingredient and the amount of nutrients to be consumed (nutrient composition of fish feed ingredients). This research employs AIMMS mathematical software to assist with the computation. The results from this study obtain a much better combination of different ingredients compared to available commercial pellets in terms of nutrient composition and production cost. The combinations yield much cheaper costs yet boosts up the nutrient consumptions, which is an eye-opener for independent local fish farmers. Thorough discussion on utilizing the results with future research directions will also be included.

In addition to excretion of metabolic waste products, organic ionic transporters facilitate uptake of specific compounds of physiological importance. In animals, the organic cation transporter, OCTN1 was found to enable the specific uptake of the unique amino acid, ergothioneine (EGT). EGT can accumulate in the body at up to millimolar concentrations and is believed to function as a physiological antioxidant. However the main function of EGT and the reasons for its active accumulation in the body remain obscure. Through bioinformatic approaches, we identified an analogous EGT transporter in the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans. The present study investigated and characterized deletion mutants of this gene, OCT-1, in the nematodes. Gene deletion mutations of the OCT-1 transporter were shown to decrease overall lifespan of the worms and increase oxidative damage. However the absence of impaired EGT uptake and the inability of excess EGT to rescue the debilitating phenotype indicate that EGT transport does not explain the deleterious effects of the gene deletion.

Dengue virus (DENV) is currently the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral pathogen. DENVs naturally exist as highly heterogeneous populations. Even though the descriptions on DENV diversity are plentiful, only a few studies have narrated the dynamics of intra-epidemic virus diversity at a fine scale. Such accounts are important to decipher the reciprocal relationship between viral evolutionary dynamics and disease transmission that shape dengue epidemiology. In the current study, we present a micro-scale genetic analysis of a monophyletic lineage of DENV-1 genotype III (epidemic lineage) detected from November 2012 to May 2014. The lineage was involved in an unprecedented dengue epidemic in Singapore during 2013–2014. Our findings showed that the epidemic lineage was an ensemble of mutants (variants) originated from an initial mixed viral population. The composition of mutant spectrum was dynamic and positively correlated with case load. The close interaction between viral evolution and transmission intensity indicated that tracking genetic diversity through time is potentially a useful tool to infer DENV transmission dynamics and thereby, to assess the epidemic risk in a disease control perspective. Moreover, such information is salient to understand the viral basis of clinical outcome and immune response variations that is imperative to effective vaccine design.

The objective of this chapter is to map and analyze the available tourism assets and products in the Kingdom of Lesotho. The analysis includes assessments on how to improve performance and sustainability of the tourism industry in Lesotho including greater utilization of existing tourism infrastructure and further development of Lesotho's tourism products. This chapter also addresses the strategic issues of tourism development and how Lesotho could increase the number of its tourists. Tourism development has been identified by the government of Lesotho, the International Monetary Fund as well as the United Nations World Tourism Organization as a sector that can reduce poverty as well as absorb low or semi skilled labor. Boosting the tourism sector in Lesotho would work towards alleviating poverty in the Kingdom overall. This chapter applies a case approach in order to illustrate potential investment opportunities and tourism performance improvements in an existing ski resort in Lesotho.

Antioxidants are often investigated as a promising strategy for extending lifespan. Accordingly, there is significant interest in novel antioxidant compounds derived from natural sources such as plant extracts. However, because lifespan studies are laborious and expensive to conduct, candidate compounds are frequently selected based simply on their in vitro antioxidant efficacy, with the implicit assumption that in vitro antioxidants are also in vivo antioxidants, and that in vivo antioxidants will decrease functionally relevant oxidative damage and thereby extend lifespan. We investigated the validity of these assumptions in the model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans. Nematodes were exposed to 6 plant extracts, selected out of a total of 34 based on a simple in vitro antioxidant assay. We found no correlation between in vitro and in vivo antioxidant capacities. Antioxidant efficacies were also not predictive of lifespan benefits. Further studies into those extracts that produced significant lifespan extension indicated that a direct antioxidant effect is unlikely to be the main factor responsible for the modulation of nematode lifespan.

Since 2005 the Taiwanese government has invested over $1.2 billion into the M-Taiwan program to bolster Taiwan’s broadband mobile communications industry and infrastructure. In addition to building a fiber backbone and providing RD (2) WiFi hot zones in three remote townships to provide on-line job training and Internet access to the indigenous residents; (3) a broadband IP network that provides VoIP and Internet data services to the county government and 27 township offices and their affiliated agencies and schools; and (4) a host of application services that include M-government, M-life and M-learning. This paper gives an overview of the system architecture, the employed technologies, the application services, test results and challenges.