Medical Hydrogeology of Asian Deltas: Status of Groundwater Toxicants and Nutrients, and Implications for Human Health

Drinking water, a fluid primarily for human hydration, is also a source of mineral nutrients. Groundwater, a drinking water source for more than 70% of inhabitants living in Asian deltas, has received much attention because of its naturally occurring arsenic, but the linkage of arsenic toxicity with other water constituents has not been studied. In addition, although nutrients are generally provided by food, in under developed rural settings, where people subsist on low nutrient diets, drinking-water-nutrients may supply quantities critical to human health thereby preventing diseases. Here, we show, using augmented datasets from three Asian deltas (Bengal, Mekong, and Red River), that the chemical content of groundwater is so substantial that in some areas individuals obtain up to 50% or more of the recommended daily intake (RDI) of some nutrients (e.g., calcium, magnesium, iron) from just two litres of drinking water. We also show some indications of a spatial association of groundwater nutrients and health outcome using demographic health data from Bangladesh. We therefore suggest that an understanding of the association of non-communicable disease and poor nutrition cannot be developed, particularly in areas with high levels of dissolved solids in water sources, without considering the contribution of drinking water to nutrient and mineral supply

A case study of transport of tropical marine boundary layer and lower tropospheric air masses to the northern midlatitude upper troposphere

Low-ozone (<20 ppbv) air masses were observed in the upper troposphere in northern midlatitudes over the eastern United States and the North Atlantic Ocean on several occasions in October 1997 during the NASA Subsonic Assessment, Ozone and Nitrogen Oxide Experiment (SONEX) mission. Three cases of low-ozone air masses were shown to have originated in the tropical Pacific marine boundary layer or lower troposphere and advected poleward along a warm conveyor belt during a synoptic-scale disturbance. The tropopause was elevated in the region with the low-ozone air mass. Stratospheric intrusions accompanied the disturbances. On the basis of storm track and stratospheric intrusion climatologies, such events appear to be more frequent from September through March than the rest of the year. Copyright 2000 by the American Geophysical Union

The validity and reliability of the exposure index as a metric for estimating the radiation dose to the patient

Introduction With the introduction of digital radiography, the feedback between image quality and over-exposure has been partly lost which in some cases has led to a steady increase in dose. Over the years the introduction of exposure index (EI) has been used to resolve this phenomenon referred to as ‘dose creep’. Even though EI is often vendor specific it is always a related of the radiation exposure to the detector. Due to the nature of this relationship EI can also be used as a patient dose indicator, however this is not widely investigated in literature. Methods A total of 420 dose-area-product (DAP) and EI measurements were taken whilst varying kVp, mAs and body habitus on two different anthropomorphic phantoms (pelvis and chest). Using linear regression, the correlation between EI and DAP were examined. Additionally, two separate region of interest (ROI) placements/per phantom where examined in order to research any effect on EI. Results When dividing the data into subsets, a strong correlation between EI and DAP was shown with all R-squared values > 0.987. Comparison between the ROI placements showed a significant difference between EIs for both placements. Conclusion This research shows a clear relationship between EI and radiation dose which is dependent on a wide variety of factors such as ROI placement, body habitus. In addition, pathology and manufacturer specific EI’s are likely to be of influence as well. Implications for practice The combination of DAP and EI might be used as a patient dose indicator. However, the influencing factors as mentioned in the conclusion should be considered and examined before implementation

New WHO Violence Prevention Information System, an interactive knowledge platform of scientific findings on violence.

Scientific information on violence can be difficult to compile and understand. It is scattered across websites, databases, technical reports and academic journals, and rarely addresses all types of violence. In response, in October 2017 WHO released the Violence Prevention Information System or Violence Info, an online interactive collection of scientific information about the prevalence, consequences, risk factors and preventability of all forms of interpersonal violence. It covers homicide, child maltreatment, youth violence, intimate partner violence, elder abuse and sexual violence

Joint Optical Flow and Temporally Consistent Semantic Segmentation

The importance and demands of visual scene understanding have been steadily increasing along with the active development of autonomous systems. Consequently, there has been a large amount of research dedicated to semantic segmentation and dense motion estimation. In this paper, we propose a method for jointly estimating optical flow and temporally consistent semantic segmentation, which closely connects these two problem domains and leverages each other. Semantic segmentation provides information on plausible physical motion to its associated pixels, and accurate pixel-level temporal correspondences enhance the accuracy of semantic segmentation in the temporal domain. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on the KITTI benchmark, where we observe performance gains for flow and segmentation. We achieve state-of-the-art optical flow results, and outperform all published algorithms by a large margin on challenging, but crucial dynamic objects.Comment: 14 pages, Accepted for CVRSUAD workshop at ECCV 201

The cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p57(Kip2) is epigenetically regulated in carboplatin resistance and results in collateral sensitivity to the CDK inhibitor seliciclib in ovarian cancer

Carboplatin remains a first-line agent in the management of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). Unfortunately, platinum-resistant disease ultimately occurs in most patients. Using a novel EOC cell line with acquired resistance to carboplatin: PEO1CarbR, genome-wide micro-array profiling identified the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p57(Kip2) as specifically downregulated in carboplatin resistance. Presently, we describe confirmation of these preliminary data with a variety of approaches