• Knowmad Institut

Relationships between bacteria, microphytobenthos and extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) that make up microbial biofilms over bare mudflats were investigated at an hourly frequency during two 14-day spring– neap cycles in winter and summer 2008. Bacterial abundance and total chl a concentration were lower in summer (0.78 × 108 ± SD 0.39 × 108 cell.m−2 and 59.0 ± SD 10.42 mgchla.m−2) than in winter (3.7 × 108 ± SD 1.9 × 108 cell.m−2 and 106.64 ± SD 11.29 mgchla.m−2), coinciding with a high abundance of the gastropod Peringia ulvae in summer, which subsequently impacted 1st-cm chl a concentration by intense grazing. Bound and colloidal EPS carbohydrate temporal patterns were similar in winter (5.71 ± SD 3.95 and 4.67 ± SD 3.45 μg.g−1, respectively) butwere different in summer (14.9±SD 4.05 and 5.60±SD 4.50 μg.g−1, respectively). Carbohydrate colloidal EPS appeared to be related to light and salinity, while 1st-mm chl a concentration was negatively affected by strong salinities and predation pressure by P. ulvae. The fluctuations of colloidal carbohydrates were remarkably similar in the two seasons with peaks just after spring tideswhen the highest irradiance was received by microphytobenthic cells. Apparently, colloidal EPS carbohydrates can protect cells against the high salinity values ranging from 32.3 to 50.4 PSU. The presence of bound EPS carbohydrates may be linked to sediment colonization and resistance of biofilm activity. Proteins in EPS were absent in winter and represented a small proportion in summer (10%), but they appeared to be a good indicator of potential synergistic effects between MPB and bacteria in summer. Conversely, bound EPS carbohydrates reached high levels in winter, while the number of bacteria decreased simultaneously, suggesting a negative effect on bacterial growth in the absence of proteins in EPS. There was a lower proportion (31%) of low molecular weight EPS in summer than in winter (83%), possibly in relation to desiccation.

Les epanchements pleuraux parapneumoniques representent la principale etiologie des pleuresies infectieuses. Leur incidence est en constante augmentation. Bien qu’ils soient qualifies de « parapneumoniques », l’epidemiologie microbienne est differente de celle des pneumonies avec notamment une plus grande frequence des germes anaerobies. La ponction pleurale exploratrice represente l’etape diagnostique centrale qui permet de distinguer les epanchements parapneumoniques compliques et non compliques. Seuls les epanchements parapneumoniques compliques doivent faire l’objet d’un traitement evacuateur reposant sur la mise en œuvre de ponctions pleurales repetees (PPR), d’un drainage thoracique ou d’une prise en charge chirurgicale. Le choix de la technique evacuatrice premiere reste debattu car il existe peu d’etudes prospectives comparatives. L’utilisation d’agents fibrinolytiques n’a pas fait la preuve de son efficacite sauf lorsqu’ils sont utilises en association a la DNAse. L’antibiotherapie doit etre systematique, precoce et couvrir les germes anaerobies, sauf en cas d’infection a pneumocoque. Il existe peu de donnees sur la place de la kinesitherapie qui reste largement utilisee. La mortalite est elevee et directement influencee par les comorbidites sous-jacentes.

Introduction: Ivermectin has transformed the treatment of parasitic diseases and led to incommensurable benefits to humans and animals. Ivermectin is effective in treating several neglected infectious diseases and recently it has been shown to reduce malaria parasite transmission.Areas covered: Malaria control strategies could benefit from the addition of ivermectin to interrupt the transmission cycle if it is a long lasting formulation or repeatedly administered. In turn, this will help also to control neglected infectious diseases where the elimination goal has been slower to achieve. Despite the relevance of using ivermectin for integrated and sustained disease control, there are still essential questions that remain to be addressed about safety and practicality. The efficacy in various malaria ecologies and the interaction between control tools, either drugs or insecticides, are also important to assess.Expert commentary: Overlapping distribution of several infectious diseases reveals the benefit of integrating control programs against several infectious diseases into one strategy for cost effectiveness and to reach the elimination goals. The use of ivermectin to control malaria transmission will necessitate development and testing of long-lasting formulations or repeated treatments, and implementation of these treatments with other disease control tools may increase the chance of successful and sustained control.

In the present study, the relationships among the developments of beliefs in a just world (BJW; i.e., a principle to perceive the world as orderly and just), moral development, and attitudes toward human rights were studied with Dutch adolescents. BJW were thought to be either coping cognitions or precursors of moral development that affect attitudes toward human rights. Across age such early moral conceptions were expected to be replaced by more sophisticated forms of reasoning enabling individuals to handle a world that is not orderly or just. In the study, 138 adolescents divided over three age groups participated (mean ages 13, 15, and 17 years). They were presented with the Scale for just world beliefs, the Defining Issue Test, and the Attitudes Toward Human Rights Inventory. No relationships could be demonstrated between BJW and moral development and attitudes toward human rights. The findings support the suggestion that BJW represent a coping mechanism.

The adverse side-effects associated with opioid administration restrain their use as analgesic drugs and call for new solutions to treat pain. Two kyotorphin derivatives, kyotorphin-amide (KTP–NH2) and ibuprofen–KTP–NH2 (IbKTP–NH2) are promising alternatives to opioids: they trigger analgesia via an indirect opioid mechanism and are highly effective in several pain models following systemic delivery. In vivo side-effects of KTP–NH2 and IbKTP–NH2 are, however, unknown and were evaluated in the present study using male adult Wistar rats. For comparison purposes, morphine and tramadol, two clinically relevant opioids, were also studied. Results showed that KTP-derivatives do not cause constipation after systemic administration, in contrast to morphine. Also, no alterations were observed in blood pressure or in food and water intake, which were only affected by tramadol. A reduction in micturition was detected after KTP–NH2 or tramadol administrations. A moderate locomotion decline was detected after IbKTP–NH2-treatment. The side-effect profile of KTP–NH2 and IbKTP–NH2 support the existence of opioid-based mechanisms in their analgesic actions. The conjugation of a strong analgesic activity with the absence of the major side-effects associated to opioids highlights the potential of both KTP–NH2 and IbKTP–NH2 as advantageous alternatives over current opioids. Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal) is acknowledged for funding: SFRH/BD/42158/2007 fellowship to M. Ribeiro and SFRH/BI/51213/2010 fellowship (for doctorate) to S. Sá Santos associated to Marie Curie IAPP. Marie Curie Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways (European Commission) is also acknowledged for funding (FP7-PEOPLE-2007-3-1-IAPP. Project 230654). The authors acknowledge and appreciate the financial support received from Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa and Fundação Amadeu Dias, Portugal (Project No. 2010029) © Springer-Verlag 2013

© 2015 IEEE. We analyze postings in the Turn to Islam forum using techniques based on singular value decomposition (SVD) and the deep learning technique of stacked denoising autoencoders (SDAE). Models based on frequent words and jihadist language intensity are used, and the results compared. Our main conclusion is that SDAE approaches, while clearly discovering structure in document-word matrices, do not yet provide a natural interpretation strategy, limiting their practical usefulness. In contrast, SVD approaches provide interpretable models, primarily because of the coupling between document and word variation patterns.

Optoelectronic measurements of carbon nanotube transistors have shown a wide variety of sensitivites to the incident light. Direct photocurrent processes compete with a number of extrinsic mechanisms. Here we show that visible light absorption in the silicon substrate generates a photovoltage that can electrically gate the nanotube device. The photocurrent induced by the changing gate voltage can be significantly larger than that due to direct electron-hole pair generation in the nanotube. The dominance of photogating in these devices is confirmed by the power and position dependence of the resulting photocurrent. The power dependence is strongly non-linear and photocurrents are measured through the device even when the laser illuminates up to 1~mm from the nanotube. Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures

AbstractScientific studies often require assessment of similarity between ordered sets of values. Each set, containing one value for every dimension or class of data, can be conveniently represented as a vector. The commonly used metrics for vector similarity include angle-based metrics, such as cosine similarity or Pearson correlation, which compare the relative patterns of values, and distance-based metrics, such as the Euclidean distance, which compare the magnitudes of values. Here we evaluate a newly proposed metric, pairwise relative distance (PRED), which considers both relative patterns and magnitudes to provide a single measure of vector similarity. PRED essentially reveals whether the vectors are so similar that their values across the classes are separable. By comparing PRED to other common metrics in a variety of applications, we show that PRED provides a stable chance level irrespective of the number of classes, is invariant to global translation and scaling operations on data, has high dynamic range and low variability in handling noisy data, and can handle multi-dimensional data, as in the case of vectors containing temporal or population responses for each class. We also found that PRED can be adapted to function as a reliable metric of class separability even for datasets that lack the vector structure and simply contain multiple values for each class.