A pilot biomechanical assessment of curling deliveries:is toe sliding more likely to cause knee injury than flatfoot sliding?

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to determine whether toe sliding is more likely to cause knee injuries than flatfoot sliding in curling.METHODS: Twelve curlers participated in the study, each delivering 12 stones. Six stones per volunteer were delivered using a flatfoot slide and six were delivered using a toe slide. The Pedar-X in-shoe pressure system recorded the plantar pressure during each of the slides, while a sagittal plane digital video recorded the body position of the curler. Measurements were taken from the video recordings using a software overlay program (MB Ruler), and this, combined with the Pedar-X data, gave the overall joint force in the tuck knee.RESULTS: The knee joint force for toe sliding was more than double that of flatfoot sliding (p&lt;0.05). There was a strong correlation between the increase in knee joint force and the increase in the moment arm of the ground reaction force. Images produced using the three-dimensional Vicon system confirm that toe sliding produces a larger moment arm than flatfoot sliding.CONCLUSION: Injuries are more likely to occur in toe sliding, compared with flatfoot sliding, due to the increase in force and moment, pushing the weight of the curler forward over the knee, which could make the adopted position less stable. Curlers might consider avoiding toe sliding to reduce the risk of knee injuries if the two types of delivery could be performed equally well.</p

Recruitment, Retainment, and Biomarkers of Response:A Pilot Trial of Lithium in Humans With Mild Cognitive Impairment

Lithium has been used for decades to treat Bipolar Disorder. Some of its therapeutic benefits may be through inhibition of Glycogen Synthase Kinase (GSK)-3. Enhanced GSK3 activity associates with development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), therefore lithium is a currently used therapeutic with potential to be repurposed for prevention of Dementia. An important step toward a clinical trial for AD prevention using lithium is to establish the dose of lithium that blocks GSK3 in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a high-risk condition for progression to AD. We investigated volunteer recruitment, retention, and tolerance in this population, and assessed biomarkers of GSK3 in MCI compared to control and after lithium treatment. Recruitment was close to target, with higher than anticipated interest. Drop out was not related to lithium blood concentration. Indeed, 33% of the withdrawals were in the first week of very low dose lithium. Most made it through to the highest dose of lithium with no adverse events. We analyzed 18 potential biomarkers of GSK3 biology in rat PBMCs, but only four of these gave a robust reproducible baseline signal. The only biomarker that was modified by acute lithium injection in the rat was the inhibitory phosphorylation of Ser9 of GSK3beta (enhanced in PBMCs) and this associated with reduced activity of GSK3beta. In contrast to the rat PBMC preparations the protein quality of the human PBMC preparations was extremely variable. There was no difference between GSK3 biomarkers in MCI and control PBMC preparations and no significant effect of chronic lithium on the robust GSK3 biomarkers, indicating that the dose reached may not be sufficient to modify these markers. In summary, the high interest from the MCI population, and the lack of any adverse events, suggest that it would be relatively straightforward and safe to recruit to a larger clinical trial within this dosing regimen. However, it is clear that we will need an improved PBMC isolation process along with more robust, sensitive, and validated biomarkers of GSK3 function, in order to use GSK3 pathway regulation in human PBMC preparations as a biomarker of GSK3 inhibitor efficacy, within a clinical trial setting.</p

Immigration and labor in tourism: The case of Canada

Canada has relied on a steady flow of immigrants throughout its modern existence, and that influx keeps growing. According to Tourism HR Canada, the increase in tourism demand leads to new jobs being created, especially in metropolitan areas. However, the current Canadian population is not able to fill the demand, and immigrants as a source of labor will become increasingly needed in the tourism and hospitality sector. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the importance of immigration on the Canadian labor tourism market and its role in the tourism sector. Labor challenges are a threat to the destination competitiveness. This study relies on secondary data that were collected by Stats Canada. Increased immigration has a mitigating impact on shortages. Evidence strongly supports that immigration may be one of the major determinants to the successful growth of Canada’s tourism

Establishing state of motion through two-dimensional foot and shoe print analysis:A pilot study

According to the College of Podiatry, footprints rank among the most frequent forms of evidence found at crime scenes, and the recent ascension of forensic podiatry reflects the importance of footwear and barefoot traces in contemporary forensic practice. In this context, this pilot study focused on whether it is possible to distinguish between walking and running states using parameters derived from two-dimensional foot or shoe prints. Eleven subjects moved along four tracks (barefoot walking; barefoot running; footwear walking; footwear running) while having their bare feet or footwear stained with artificial blood and their footstep patterns recorded. Contact stains and associated bloodstain patterns were collected, and body movements were recorded through three-dimensional motion capture. Barefoot walking prints were found to be larger than barefoot static prints (1.789 ± 0.481 cm; p &lt; 0.001) and barefoot running prints (0.635 ± 0.405 cm; p = 0.006). No correlation was observed for footwear prints. Running trials were more associated with the presence of both passive and cast off stains than walking trials, and the quantity of additional associated stains surrounding individual foot and shoe prints was also higher in running states. Furthermore, a previously proposed equation predicted speed with a high degree of accuracy (within 6%) and may be used for clinical assessment of walking speed. Contact stains, associated bloodstain patterns and stride length measurements may serve to ascertain state of motion in real crime scene scenarios, and future studies may be capable of designing statistical frameworks which could be used in courts of law

Quantifying the impact of mathematics support on the performance of undergraduate engineering and computing students

The School of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment at Glasgow Caledonian University has provided mathematics support for all students in the school since 2012/13. This paper compares the performance of two groups of undergraduate students; those who engaged with mathematics support, through attending targeted lectures, and those who chose not to engage. Data collected over the five years from 2013/14 to 2017/18 for 4,690 engaging and non-engaging students, enrolled on modules with a substantial mathematical content, were analysed. Module marks achieved at first diet for the two groups of students, at all undergraduate levels, were selected as a measure of how mathematics support impacts on student performance. The study showed that there was a substantial and significant difference between the marks achieved by students that engaged with support and those that did not. Students who engaged on average showed an 8% increase in their module mark compared with those who did not engage

The impact of the lung environment on macrophage development, activation and function:diversity in the face of adversity

The last decade has been somewhat of a renaissance period for the field of macrophage biology. This renewed interest, combined with the advent of new technologies and development of novel model systems to assess different facets of macrophage biology, has led to major advances in our understanding of the diverse roles macrophages play in health, inflammation, infection and repair, and the dominance of tissue environments in influencing all of these areas. Here, we discuss recent developments in our understanding of lung macrophage heterogeneity, ontogeny, metabolism and function in the context of health and disease, and highlight core conceptual advances and key unanswered questions that we believe should be focus of work in the coming years

Searches for supersymmetry in final states containing b-tagged jets with the ATLAS detector

Supersymmetry is one of the most theoretically studied subjects in modern particle physics; so far no direct experimental proof of its existence has been observed. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a machine designed to create high energy particle collisions, which are analysed by multiple experiments, probing the substructure and fundamental properties of matter. The experiment ATLAS is used in this thesis in searches for the signatures supersymmetric particles as they decay. A detailed overview of two signature searches for third generation supersymmetry in events with b-tagged jets is the main focus of this thesis. A data-driven technique for estimating the Multi-jet background in zero lepton final state signatures is additionally presented. The firrst search used a dataset with an integrated luminosity of 3.2 fb−1 collected in 2015 during Run-II of the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The analysis was optimised for a simplified signal model in which only the supersymmetric partners of the bottom quark are pair-produced in LHC collisions. No significant excess above the Standard Model background was observed, setting 95% CL limits on the masses of the scalar bottom quark and lightest neutralino. Many sophisticated techniques for estimating the Standard Model backgrounds were employed using Monte-Carlo simulation and data-driven techniques, which are applicable to many hadron collider analyses. The prospects of future discovery of scalar bottom quarks were studied, resolving a 5σ discovery potential above 1 TeV at the High Luminosity LHC for low mass neutralinos. The second search was performed at the end of Run-I of the LHC using a dataset corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb−1 at 8 TeV. The analysis focused on a unique search for the pair-production of scalar top and bottom quarks decaying asymmetrically to neutralinos and charginos in a more complex and arguably more realistic model scenario. The models targeted were inspired by a natural pMSSM scenario with low mass supersymmetry partner of the third generation quarks. Again, no significant deviation from the Standard Model background was observed setting 95% CL limits on the masses of the third generation supersymmetric quarks. The results of the analysis were interpreted in the context of a full pMSSM scan together with many other ATLAS analyses to provide the theoretical community with a more meaningful summary of the exclusion limit on supersymmetric particles set by ATLAS

One-pot homologation of boronic acids : a platform for diversity-oriented synthesis

Formal homologation of sp2-hybridized boronic acids is achieved via cross-coupling of boronic acids with conjunctive haloaryl BMIDA components in the presence of a suitably balanced basic phase. The utility of this approach to provide a platform for diversity-oriented synthesis in discovery medicinal chemistry is demonstrated in the context of the synthesis of a series of analogues of a BET bromodomain inhibitor

Can ChatGPT draft a research article?:An example of population-level vaccine effectiveness analysis

We reflect on our experiences of using Generative Pre-trained Transformer ChatGPT, a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022, to draft a research article. We aim to demonstrate how ChatGPT could help researchers to accelerate drafting their papers. We created a simulated data set of 100 000 health care workers with varying ages, Body Mass Index (BMI), and risk profiles. Simulation data allow analysts to test statistical analysis techniques, such as machine-learning based approaches, without compromising patient privacy. Infections were simulated with a randomized probability of hospitalisation. A subset of these fictitious people was vaccinated with a fictional vaccine that reduced this probability of hospitalisation after infection. We then used ChatGPT to help us decide how to handle the simulated data in order to determine vaccine effectiveness and draft a related research paper. AI-based language models in data analysis and scientific writing are an area of growing interest, and this exemplar analysis aims to contribute to the understanding of how ChatGPT can be used to facilitate these tasks.</p

Guidance for MSS Attendees 2020

Guidance for MSS Attendees 202