Provision of trauma teams in Scotland: a national survey

<b>Background and Aims:</b> Trauma is still the leading cause of mortality in the first four decades of life. Despite multiple reports on how trauma care could be improved in the UK, treatment has been shown to be inconsistent and of poor quality. Trauma teams have been shown to have a positive effect on outcome. We aimed to determine the prevalence of trauma teams in Scotland. <b>Methods:</b> We performed a telephone survey of 24 hospitals with Emergency Departments and spoke to the senior clinician regarding provision of trauma teams. <b>Results:</b> 5 (21%) of the hospitals questioned had trauma teams. The most common reasons for not having one were: no problem with current system 8 (44%) and inability to include senior enough staff on the team 6 (24%). <b>Conclusions:</b> There are few trauma teams in Scottish acute hospitals. There was little enthusiasm for introducing them for a variety of reasons. Local evidence of benefit is likely needed before their adoption becomes widespread

Orthorexic tendencies are linked with difficulties with emotion identification and regulation.

Background: Orthorexia nervosa (ON) is characterised by an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating and while it is not recognised as an eating disorder (or any disorder), current research is exploring similarities and differences with such disorders. The literature has shown that individuals with eating disorders have difficulties identifying and describing emotions (known as alexithymia) as well as regulating them. However no research to date has looked at whether people with orthorexic tendencies also suffer from difficulties with emotions. In this paper, we refer to people with orthorexic tendencies but do not assume that their healthy eating is at a pathological level needing clinical attention. Methods: The current study examined this by asking 196 healthy adults with an interest in healthy eating to complete four questionnaires to measure ON (ORTO-15 - reduced to ORTO-7CS), eating psychopathology (EAT-26), alexithymia (TAS-20) and emotion dysregulation (DERS-16). Results: We found that difficulties identifying and regulating emotions was associated with symptoms of ON, similar to what is found in other eating disorders. We suggest that ON behaviours may be used as a coping strategy in order to feel in control in these participants who have poor emotion regulation abilities. Conclusions: Our results show that individuals with ON tendencies may share similar difficulties with emotions compared to other eating disorders. While important, our results are limited by the way we measured ON behaviours and we recommend that further research replicate our findings once a better and more specific tool is developed and validated to screen for ON characteristics more accurately

Current practices in the study of biomolecular condensates: a community comment

The realization that the cell is abundantly compartmentalized into biomolecular condensates has opened new opportunities for understanding the physics and chemistry underlying many cellular processes1, fundamentally changing the study of biology2. The term biomolecular condensate refers to non-stoichiometric assemblies that are composed of multiple types of macromolecules in cells, occur through phase transitions, and can be investigated by using concepts from soft matter physics3. As such, they are intimately related to aqueous two-phase systems4 and water-in-water emulsions5. Condensates possess tunable emergent properties such as interfaces, interfacial tension, viscoelasticity, network structure, dielectric permittivity, and sometimes interphase pH gradients and electric potentials6–14. They can form spontaneously in response to specific cellular conditions or to active processes, and cells appear to have mechanisms to control their size and location15–17. Importantly, in contrast to membrane-enclosed organelles such as mitochondria or peroxisomes, condensates do not require the presence of a surrounding membrane

Two-hundred-year record of biogenic sulfur in a south Greenland ice core (20D)

The concentration of methanesulfonic acid (MSA) was determined in a shallow south central Greenland ice core(20D). This study provides a high-resolution record of the DMS-derived biogenic sulfur in Greenland precipitation over the past 200 years. The mean concentration of MSA is 3.30 ppb(σ = 2.38 ppb,n = 1134). The general trend of MSA is an increase from 3.01 to 4.10 ppb between 1767 and 1900, followed by a steady decrease to 2.34 ppb at the present time. This trend is in marked contrast to that of non-sea-salt sulfate (nss SO42-), which increases dramatically after 1900 due to the input of anthropogenic sulfur. The MSA fraction ((MSA/(MSA+ nss SO42-))* 100) ranges from a mean of 15% in preindustrial ice to less than 5% in recent ice. These MSA fraction suggest that approximately 5 to 40% of the sulfur in recent Greenland ice is of biological origin. It is suggested that there is a significant low-latitude component to the biogenic sulfur in the core and that variations in the MSA fraction reflect changes in the relative strengths of low- and high-latitude inputs. The data shown o evidence for a strong dependence of dimethyl sulfide(DMS) emissions on sea surface temperature during the last century. There is also no indication that the yield of MSA from DMS oxidation has been altered by increased NOx levels over the North Atlantic during this period

Factors regulating ozone over the United States and its export to the global atmosphere

The factors regulating summertime O3 over the United States and its export to the global atmosphere are examined with a 3-month simulation using a continental scale, three-dimensional photochemical model. It is found that reducing NOx emissions by 50% from 1985 levels would decrease rural O3 concentrations over the eastern United States by about 15% under almost all meteorological conditions, while reducing anthropogenic hydrocarbon emissions by 50% would have less than a 4% effect except in the largest urban plumes. The strongly NOx-limited conditions in the model reflect the dominance of rural areas as sources of O3 on the regional scale. The correlation between O3 concentrations and temperature observed at eastern U.S. sites is attributed in part to the association of high temperatures with regional stagnation, and in part to an actual dependence of O3 production on temperature driven primarily by conversion of NOx to peroxyacetylnitrate (PAN). The net number of O3 molecules produced per molecule of NOx consumed (net O3 production efficiency, accounting for both chemical production and chemical loss of O3) has a mean value of 6.3 in the U.S. boundary layer; it is 3 times higher in the western United States than in the east because of lower NOx concentrations in the west. Approximately 70% of the net chemical production of O3 in the U.S. boundary layer is exported (the rest is deposited). Only 6% of the NOx emitted in the United States is exported out of the U.S. boundary layer as NOx or PAN, but this export contributes disproportionately to total U.S. influence on global tropospheric O3because of the high O3 production efficiency per unit NOx in the remote troposphere. It is estimated that export of U.S. pollution supplies 8 Gmol O3 d−1 to the global troposphere in summer, including 4 Gmol d−1 from direct export of O3 out of the U.S. boundary layer and 4 Gmol d−1 from production of O3 downwind of the United States due to exported NOx. This U.S. pollution source can be compared to estimates of 18–28 Gmol d−1 for the cross-tropopause transport of O3 over the entire northern hemisphere in summer

Evaluation and intercomparison of global atmospheric transport models using Rn-222 and other short-lived tracers

Simulations of Rn-222 and other short-lived tracers are used to evaluate and intercompare the representations of convective and synoptic processes in 20 global atmospheric transport models. Results show that most established three-dimensional models simulate vertical mixing in the troposphere to within the constraints offered by the observed mean Rn-222 concentrations and that subgrid parameterization of convection is essential for this purpose. However, none of the models captures the observed variability of Rn-222 concentrations in the upper troposphere, and none reproduces the high Rn-222 concentrations measured at 200 hPa over Hawaii. The established three-dimensional models reproduce the frequency and magnitude of high- Rn-222 episodes observed at Crozet Island in the Indian Ocean, demonstrating that they can resolve the synoptic-scale transport of continental plumes with no significant numerical diffusion. Large differences between models are found in the rates of meridional transport in the upper troposphere (interhemispheric exchange, exchange between tropics and high latitudes). The four two-dimensional models which participated in the intercomparison tend to underestimate the rate of vertical transport from the lower to the upper troposphere but show concentrations of Rn-222 in the lower troposphere that are comparable to the zonal mean values in the three-dimensional models

Computational Procedure for Predicting Excipient Effects on Protein–Protein Affinities

Protein–protein interactions lie at the center of many biological processes and are a challenge in formulating biological drugs, such as antibodies. A key to mitigating protein association is to use small-molecule additives, i.e., excipients that can weaken protein–protein interactions. Here, we develop a computationally efficient model for predicting the viscosity-reducing effect of different excipient molecules by combining atomic-resolution MD simulations, binding polynomials, and a thermodynamic perturbation theory. In a proof of principle, this method successfully ranks the order of four types of excipients known to reduce the viscosity of solutions of a particular monoclonal antibody. This approach appears useful for predicting the effects of excipients on protein association and phase separation, as well as the effects of buffers on protein solutions