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An outbreak of morbidity and mortality in an African dwarf frog ( Hymenochirus curtipes) colony was reported following arrival at an animal research facility. Animals were found dead on arrival or became moribund shortly thereafter, and additional animals showed clinical signs of lethargy, weight loss, and anorexia over the following 3 weeks. Externally, some affected animals presented with multifocal areas of hyperemia in the inguinal and axillary areas and on the limbs, and mottled tan discoloration along the ventral abdomen. Histologically, lesions were consistent with generalized septicemia, characterized by granulomatous meningitis, otitis media, peritonitis (coelomitis), myocarditis and pericarditis, nephritis, pneumonia, and arthritis. Gram staining identified gram-negative rod-shaped bacteria free within tissues and within macrophages. Culture results of coelomic swabs identified moderate to numerous Elizabethkingia miricola. Testing of water from tanks housing affected animals showed elevated levels of nitrites and ammonia, and the presence of Citrobacter, Aeromonas, Pseudomonas, and Staphylococcus spp. cultured from several tank biofilters. E miricola is a newly recognized and rapidly emerging opportunistic pathogen in anurans and has been reported as a cause of septicemia in humans. This report documents the first occurrence of E. miricola septicemia in African dwarf frogs and illustrates the importance of this potential pathogen in the laboratory setting for amphibian research colonies, as well as those individuals directly working with them.

This paper analyses the precarity of tourism in viral pandemic times through an analysis of animal-human relations in China’s panda and valley tourism at Dajiuzhai. Drawing on a tour to Dajiuzhai to see giant pandas and the valleys of Jiuzhai, which was disrupted midway by increased viral infections, we trace ethnographically how disruptions in tourism emerge in the micro-setting of a single viral-hit tour and highlight the roles of natural agents, pandas, valleys and virus play, alongside humans in tourism’s fluid assemblages. Desire/wish to encounter pandas motivated the formation of a fluid constellation of tourism objects, species and humans, which was aligned towards the goal of a stable tourism experience but persistently disturbed. Animal-human relation-based tourism assemblage at Dajiuzhai was found to be a fluid spatiality that coped with Covid-19 disruptions through responses at attractions involving health checks and declarations but remained precarious despite its transformational potentialities.

COVID-19 surveillance across the United States is essential to tracking and mitigating the pandemic, but data representing cases and deaths may be impacted by attribute, spatial, and temporal uncer...

Inter-individual variation in the number of copies of the mitochondrial genome, termed mitochondrial DNA copy number (mtDNA-CN), reflects mitochondrial function and has been associated with various aging-related diseases. We examined 415,422 exomes of self-reported White ancestry individuals from the UK Biobank and tested the impact of rare variants, both at the level of single variants and through aggregate variant-set tests, on mtDNA-CN. A survey across nine variant sets tested enrichment of putatively causal variants and identified 14 genes at experiment-wide significance and three genes at marginal significance. These included associations at known mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome genes (mtDNA helicase TWNK, p=5.7×10−29; mitochondrial transcription factor TFAM, p=4.3×10−13; mtDNA maintenance exonuclease MGME1, p=1.3×10−6) and the V617F dominant gain-of-function mutation in the tyrosine kinase JAK2 (p=7.1×10−17) associated with myeloproliferative disease. Novel genes included the ATP-dependent protease CLPX (p=9.9×10−9) involved with mitochondrial proteome quality and the mitochondrial adenylate kinase AK2 (p=5.3×10−8) involved with hematopoiesis. The most significant association was a missense variant in SAMHD1 (p=4.2×10−28), found on a rare, 1.2 Mb shared ancestral haplotype on chromosome 20. SAMHD1 encodes a cytoplasmic host restriction factor involved with viral defense response and the mitochondrial nucleotide salvage pathway, and is associated with Aicardi-Goutières syndrome 5, a childhood encephalopathy and chronic inflammatory response disorder. Rare variants were enriched in Mendelian mtDNA depletion syndrome loci, and these variants further implicated core processes in mtDNA replication, nucleoid structure formation, and maintenance. Together, these data indicate strong-effect mutations from the nuclear genome contribute to the genetic architecture of mtDNA-CN.

This study explores the evolution and, in particular, the renewal of a declined craft cluster with a 1000-year history of ceramic production in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, China. Attention is dra...

Distributed spatial infrastructures leveraging cloud computing technologies can tackle issues of disparate data sources and address the need for data‐driven knowledge discovery and more sophisticated spatial analysis central to the COVID‐19 pandemic. We implement a new, open source spatial middleware component (libgeoda) and system design to scale development quickly to effectively meet the need for surveilling county‐level metrics in a rapidly changing pandemic landscape. We incorporate, wrangle, and analyze multiple data streams from volunteered and crowdsourced environments to leverage multiple data perspectives. We integrate explorative spatial data analysis (ESDA) and statistical hotspot standards to detect infectious disease clusters in real time, building on decades of research in GIScience and spatial statistics. We scale the computational infrastructure to provide equitable access to data and insights across the entire USA, demanding a basic but high‐quality standard of ESDA techniques. Finally, we engage a research coalition and incorporate principles of user‐centered design to ground the direction and design of Atlas application development.

In a search for potential causes of increased prolapse incidence in grey short-tailed opossum colonies, samples from the gastrointestinal tracts of 94 clinically normal opossums with rectal prolapses were screened forHelicobacterspecies by culture and PCR. Forty strains of two novelHelicobacterspecies which differed from the establishedHelicobactertaxa were isolated from opossums with and without prolapses. One of theHelicobacterspecies was spiral-shaped and urease-negative whereas the otherHelicobacterstrain had fusiform morphology with periplasmic fibres and was urease-positive. 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis revealed that all the isolates had over 99 % sequence identity with each other, and were most closely related toHelicobacter canadensis. Strains from the two novelHelicobacterspecies were subjected togyrBandhsp60gene and whole genome sequence analyses. These two novelHelicobacterspecies formed separate phylogenetic clades, divergent from other knownHelicobacterspecies. The bacteria were confirmed as novelHelicobacterspecies based on digital DNA–DNA hybridization and average nucleotide identity analysis of their genomes, for which we propose the namesHelicobacter monodelphidissp. nov. with the type strain MIT 15-1451T(=LMG 29780T=NCTC 14189T) andHelicobacter didelphidarumsp. nov with type strain MIT 17-337T(=LMG 31024T=NCTC 14188T)

Occlusive thrombosis is a central pathological event in heart attack, stroke, thromboembolism, etc. Therefore, pharmacological thrombolysis or anticoagulation is used for treating these diseases. However, systemic administration of such drugs causes hemorrhagic side-effects. Therefore, there is significant clinical interest in strategies for enhanced drug delivery to clots while minimizing systemic effects. One such strategy is by using drug-carrying nanoparticles surface-decorated with clot-binding ligands. Efforts in this area have focused on binding to singular targets in clots, e.g. platelets, fibrin, collagen, vWF or endothelium. Targeting vWF, collagen or endothelium maybe sub-optimal since in vivo these entities will be rapidly covered by platelets and leukocytes, and thus inaccessible for sufficient nanoparticle binding. In contrast, activated platelets and fibrin are majorly accessible for particle-binding, but their relative distribution in clots is highly heterogeneous. We hypothesized that combination-targeting of 'platelets + fibrin' will render higher clot-binding efficacy of nanoparticles, compared to targeting platelets or fibrin singularly. To test this, we utilized liposomes as model nanoparticles, decorated their surface with platelet-binding peptides (PBP) or fibrin-binding peptides (FBP) or combination (PBP + FBP) at controlled compositions, and evaluated their binding to human blood clots in vitro and in a mouse thrombosis model in vivo. In parallel, we developed a computational model of nanoparticle binding to single versus combination entities in clots. Our studies indicate that combination targeting of 'platelets + fibrin' enhances the clot-anchorage efficacy of nanoparticles while utilizing lower ligand densities, compared to targeting platelets or fibrin only. These findings provide important insights for vascular nanomedicine design.

Education competitiveness is a key feature of national competitiveness. It is crucial for nations to develop and enhance student and teacher potential to increase national competitiveness. The decreasing population of children has caused a series of social problems in many developed countries, directly affecting education and com.petitiveness in an international environment. In Taiwan, a low birthrate has had a large impact on schools at every level because of a substantial decrease in enrollment and a surplus of teachers. Therefore, close attention must be paid to these trends. In this study, combining a whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and support vector regression (WOASVR) was proposed to determine trends of student and teacher numbers in Taiwan for higher accuracy in time-series forecasting analysis. To select the most suitable support vector kernel parameters, WOA was applied. Data collected from the Ministry of Education datasets of student and teacher numbers between 1991 and 2018 were used to examine the proposed method. Analysis revealed that the numbers of students and teachers decreased annually except in private primary schools. A comparison of the forecasting results obtained from WOASVR and other common models indicated that WOASVR provided the lowest mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean square error (RMSE) for all analyzed datasets. Forecasting performed using the WOASVR method can provide accurate data for use in developing education policies and responses.

The potential value of industrial heritage for developing tourism has attracted increasing attention worldwide. In China, there is an emerging trend of the reuse of industrial heritage sites to develop industrial heritage tourism as ‘creative parks’. Studies have found that over-commodification is occurring while protection of the historical and cultural value of contemporary industrial heritage is neglected during the process of redevelopment. However, detailed research on the processes and mechanisms of over-commodification is limited. A qualitative approach is adopted to examine the development process of a typical industrial heritage tourism destination, Nanfeng Kiln District in Foshan, China. Through application of a creative destruction model, the relationships and interplay of a variety of actors in this process are uncovered. Mitchell's model of creative destruction is applied to explain the transformative process of tourist destinations whose development has occurred based on the commodif...

Studies on industrial heritage and industrial tourism development at the city level in China are limited. Through a web content analysis of the industrial components in cities’ images and tourism, this paper attempts to explore whether old industrial cities are promoting industrial heritage tourism and rebuilding postindustrial images. A total of 20 traditionally industrial cities were selected as samples for data collection based on the content of their official websites, and this study finds that industrial heritage and industrial tourism are rarely promoted or even mentioned on those websites, indicating that industrial culture is gradually being eroded in China. Traditional Chinese industrial cities tend to look for opportunities to participate in global competition rather than reflecting and preserving their past through the process of urban development. More attention should be paid in the future to integrating industrial culture into Chinese urban development, both in academic research and ...

With the growing number of older adults becoming a global concern, developed countries have focused on education as a means to promote successful aging. Previous research has focused on the effects of gender and age on learning satisfaction among senior students. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the interactive effects of age and gender on learning satisfaction of senior university students. To investigate these effects, a learning satisfaction questionnaire was administered to 485 students enrolled in the Division of Continuing and Extension Education (DCEE) at the National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences in Taiwan. The data collected were subsequently examined by means of descriptive statistics and univariate analysis of variance. The results revealed that respondents were generally satisfied with the DCEE program. However, the standard deviation scores for learning satisfaction were slightly higher for males than for females. Furthermore, an interactive effect was identi...

The World Health Organization has urged countries to prioritize dementia in their public health policies. Dementia poses a tremendous socioeconomic burden, and the accurate prediction of the annual increase in prevalence is essential for establishing strategies to cope with its effects. The present study established a model based on the architecture of the long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network for predicting the number of dementia cases in Taiwan, which considers the effects of age and sex on the prevalence of dementia. The LSTM network is a variant of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which possesses a special gate structure and avoids the problems in RNNs of gradient explosion, gradient vanishing, and long-term memory failure. A number of patients diagnosed as having dementia from 1997 to 2017 was collected in annual units from a data set extracted from the Health Insurance Database of the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Taiwan. To further verify the validity of the proposed model, the LSTM network was compared with three types of models: statistical models (exponential smoothing (ETS), autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA), trigonometric seasonality, Box–Cox transformation, autoregressive moving average errors, and trend seasonal components model (TBATS)), hybrid models (support vector regression (SVR), particle swarm optimization–based support vector regression (PSOSVR)), and deep learning model (artificial neural networks (ANN)). The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), root-mean-square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and R-squared (R2) were used to evaluate the model performances. The results indicated that the LSTM network has higher prediction accuracy than the three types of models for forecasting the prevalence of dementia in Taiwan.

Objectives: Advanced nursing directives (ANDs) empower nursing staff to provide advanced levels of care before physician assessment. The objectives of this study were (1) to determine whether an AND for right lower quadrant (RLQ) pain could identify children who required any further investigation to diagnose appendicitis and (2) to determine whether children meeting AND criteria had better emergency department (ED) flow metrics compared with those who did not meet the criteria. Methods: Health records of children aged 3 to 17 years presenting to the ED with abdominal pain who were managed using the departmental AND for RLQ pain were reviewed. Primary outcomes included (1) the proportion of patients requiring further investigation to diagnose appendicitis and (2) the time interval from triage to blood draw. Secondary outcomes included additional ED flow metrics, perforation rate, and negative appendectomy rate. Results: An AND was completed for 210 children. Those who met the AND criteria were more likely to undergo further investigation to rule out appendicitis than those who did not meet the criteria (92/137 [67.2%] vs 32/73 [43.8%]; odds ratio [OR], 2.62; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.40–4.90). Time to blood draw was significantly lower for those children meeting the AND criteria (74 vs 162 minutes, P < 0.001) as was time to hospital admission (271 vs 395 minutes, P = 0.008) and appendectomy (498 vs 602 minutes, P = 0.015). The negative appendectomy rate was 8.6% (5/58) for children meeting the AND criteria and 9.1% (2/22) for those not meeting the criteria (OR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.14–10.67); the perforation rate was 29.3% (17/58) and 4.5% (1/22), respectively (OR, 8.17; 95% CI, 1.17–380.86). Conclusions: Children presenting to the ED with RLQ pain who meet the AND criteria are more likely to require further investigation to rule out appendicitis and have better department flow metrics than those who do not meet the criteria. Our results provide further evidence of the utility of ANDs in the ED.

Due to the advance of technology, the American society has become more diverse. A huge population of international students in the U.S. faces unique issues. According to the existing literature, the top-rated anxieties international student faces are generally caused by language anxiety, cultural adjustments, and learning differences and barriers. In the university campus that is being studied in Hawaii, the highest population of students is Asian. As a matter of fact, Hawaii is the only state in USA that does not have a majority of white population. This research study examined anxiety levels as international graduate students living in Hawaii, U.S. This study emphasizes on the wide variety of factors and whether it has an influence on the predicators of anxiety. Learning difficulties and life challenges for international graduate students in Hawaii were also examined. "Communication ability", "interactions with professors", "limited course options", and "course content difficulty" were the most experienced learning difficulties. "Financial crisis", "quality of accommodation", "relationship with people", and "language" were the most experienced life challenges. Understanding the experiences of the international graduate students is important on creating supporting programs to help them personally and academically to fit in the environment.

The Knitting Visualizer aims to highlight the relationship between craft and computation. This demo is targeted at amateur knitters who have a basic familiarity with programming and who would like to develop their own knitting patterns. The demo features two-way translation between Javascript code and a symbolic knitting chart with a preview of the physical product. Future work is planned to improve on this demo.

최근 2세에서 5세 사이 소아의 우식 발생율이 상당히 증가하고 있다. 유아기우식증(Early Childhood Caries)은 향후 영구치의 우식 발생 가능성에 대한 예측인자이며 사회 저소득층과 다문화 가정 자녀에서 특히 발생빈도가 높은데, 이는 충분히 예방과 관리가 가능하다. 만1세때부터 정기적으로 치과를 방문하고 이 때 우식위험도를 체계적으로 평가하여 환자들에게 맞춤형 예방 전략을 제시할 수 있기 때문이다. 유아기우식증의 예방을 위한 CAMBRA (Caries Management by Risk Assessment)에 대해 가장 최신의 개념과 사용법을 소개하고자 한다. 소아치과의사는 CAMBRA를 통해 개개인의 위험인자를 분석하여 연령에 따른 적절한 예방법을 수립하고 향후 우식 발생시 치료방향의 지침을 정하게 된다. 【Early childhood caries prevalence has increased significantly in children ages 2~5 years. ECC disproportionately affects lower socioeconomic and minority groups, is a predictor for future decay, but is preventable and manageable. Caries risk assessment systematically derives a patient's caries risk and is important during an infant oral health visit beginning at age 1. Information obtained through a risk assessment can guide a disease management care path tailored to an individual's age and risk to effectively treat and manage one's caries disease process.】

This is a case report of the anesthetic management for the hepatic resection of a metastatic paraganglioma in a patient with a history of prior orthotopic liver transplantation. Of interest, the metastatic paraganglioma originated from the donor organ. The patient is an 80-year-old woman with multiple medical problems including a history of cryptogenic cirrhosis who underwent successful orthotopic liver transplantation 9 years prior. She later presented with signs and symptoms of catecholamine excess suggestive of a catecholamine-producing tumor (paraganglioma or pheochromocytoma). Elevated urine catecholamine levels and radiographic evidence of a paraganglioma in the transplanted liver metastatic from the donor organ confirmed the diagnosis. Radiofrequency ablation of the tumor and surgical resection was previously attempted without success. We describe the anesthetic management for the successful resection of the metastatic hepatic paraganglioma, which was complicated by profound intraoperative hypertension and hypotension that necessitated the use of multiple vasoactive infusions, extensive surgical blood loss requiring blood transfusion, and difficult glycemic control in an insulin-dependent diabetic patient. The postoperative course is also described. This unique case presented the anesthesia team with challenges specific to both surgery for hepatic resection as well as for catecholamine-secreting tumors. We are not aware of any reports of paragangliomas of either donor or recipient origin involving a transplanted liver, making this the first such report to the best of our knowledge.

Constraints underlying bimanual coordination have traditionally been explained by dynamic interactions between the effectors. However, the present experiments demonstrate that a fundamental constraint on bimanual performance is the manner in which task goals are represented. In Experiment 1, participants vocalized during in-phase and anti-phase bimanual movements. As expected, most participants spontaneously exhibited temporal coupling between the manual and vocal responses. However, the form of coupling differed for the in-phase and anti-phase conditions. For anti-phase movements, there was a strong bias to produce two vocalizations per cycle; for in-phase movements, participants were equally likely to produce one or two vocalizations per cycle. We hypothesized that the spontaneous vocalizations probed the cognitive representation of the task, and the results indicated that anti-phase movements did entail a more complex event structure than in-phase movements did. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the event structure by having participants vocalize either once or twice per hand cycle. As predicted, coordination stability was reduced when the event structure was more complex.

Quantum dots (QDs) are of high interest in the biomedical field. The most widely used and commercially available CdSe/ZnS QDs have a highly toxic Cd component. High-efficiency luminescent Cd-free Mn-doped ZnSe/ZnS QDs are a reasonable alternative to CdSe/ZnS QDs; however the actual cytotoxicity of ZnSe:Mn/ZnS QDs is relatively unknown. In this study, we apply the ApoTox-GloTM Triplex assay to test for cell cytotoxicity, viability, and induced apoptosis, by treating macrophage cells with different concentrations of peptide-coated ZnSe:Mn/ZnS QDs at four different incubation times: 6, 12, 24, and 48 hours. At the concentrations used, which varied between 0.03 μM to 0.25 μM, the macrophage cells showed very little cytotoxic effect. However, cell viability began to decrease with increasing QD concentration beginning with the 12 hour incubation time, with fairly consistent results for 24 and 48 hour incubation times as well. Also, the macrophage cells expressed a measurable degree of induced apoptosis, which scaled with concentration. While cytotoxicity did not seem to be an issue with macrophage cells treated with the peptide-coated Mn-doped ZnSe/ZnS QDs, the drop in cell viability and the increase in induced apoptosis suggest an antiproliferation effect within the macrophage cell culture.

We discuss analogs of Faber's conjecture for two nested sequences of partial compactifications of the moduli space of smooth pointed curves. We show that their tautological rings are one-dimensional in top degree but sometimes do not satisfy Poincare duality.