Population-level susceptibility, severity and spread of pandemic influenza: design of, and initial results from, a pre-pandemic and hibernating pandemic phase study using cross-sectional data from the Health Survey for England (HSE)

Background: Assessing severity and spread of a novel influenza strain at the start of a pandemic is critical for informing a targeted and proportional response. It requires community-level studies to estimate the burden of infection and disease. Rapidly initiating such studies in a pandemic is difficult. The study aims to establish an efficient system allowing real-time assessment of population susceptibility, spread of infection and clinical attack rates in the event of a pandemic. / Methods: We developed and appended additional survey questions and specimen collection to the Health Survey for England (HSE) – a large, annual, rolling nationally representative general population survey recruiting throughout the year – to enable rapid population-based surveys of influenza infection and disease during a pandemic. Using these surveys we can assess the spread of the virus geographically, by age and through time. The data generated can also provide denominators for national estimates of case fatality and hospitalisation rates. Phase 1: we compared retrospectively collected HSE illness rates during the first two infection waves of the 2009 pandemic with the Flu Watch study (a prospective community cohort). Monthly and seasonal age-specific rates of illness and proportion vaccinated were compared. Phase 2: we piloted blood specimen and data collection alongside the 2012–13 HSE. We are developing laboratory methods and protocols for real-time serological assays of a novel pandemic influenza virus using these specimens, and automated programmes for analysing and reporting illness and infection rates. Phase 3: during inter-pandemic years, the study enters a holding phase, where it is included in the yearly HSE ethics application and planning procedures, allowing rapid triggering in a pandemic. Phase 4: once retriggered, the study will utilise the methods developed in phase 2 to monitor the severity and spread of the pandemic in real time. / Results: Phase 1: the rates of reported illness during the first two waves in the HSE underestimated the community burden as measured by Flu Watch, but the patterns of illness by age and time were broadly comparable. The extent of underestimation was greatest for HSE participants interviewed later in the year compared with those interviewed closer to the pandemic. Vaccine uptake in the HSE study was comparable to independent national estimates and the Flu Watch study. Phases 2 and 3: illness data and serological samples from 2018 participants were collected in the 2012–13 HSE and transferred to the University College London Hospital. In the 2013 HSE and onwards, this project was included in the annual HSE ethics and planning rounds. / Conclusions: The HSE’s underestimation of illness rates during the first two waves of the pandemic is probably due to recall bias and the limitation of being able to report only one illness when multiple illnesses per season can occur. Changes to the illness questions (reporting only recent illnesses) should help minimise these issues. Additional prospective follow-up could improve measurement of disease incidence. The representative nature of the HSE allows accurate measurements of vaccine uptake. / Study registration: This study is registered as ISRCTN80214280. / Funding: This project was funded by the NIHR Public Health Research programme and will be published in full in Public Health Research; Vol. 3, No. 6. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information

Body odor quality predicts behavioral attractiveness in humans

Growing effort is being made to understand how different attractive physical traits co-vary within individuals, partly because this might indicate an underlying index of genetic quality. In humans, attention has focused on potential markers of quality such as facial attractiveness, axillary odor quality, the second-to-fourth digit (2D:4D) ratio and body mass index (BMI). Here we extend this approach to include visually-assessed kinesic cues (nonverbal behavior linked to movement) which are statistically independent of structural physical traits. The utility of such kinesic cues in mate assessment is controversial, particularly during everyday conversational contexts, as they could be unreliable and susceptible to deception. However, we show here that the attractiveness of nonverbal behavior, in 20 male participants, is predicted by perceived quality of their axillary body odor. This finding indicates covariation between two desirable traits in different sensory modalities. Depending on two different rating contexts (either a simple attractiveness rating or a rating for long-term partners by 10 female raters not using hormonal contraception), we also found significant relationships between perceived attractiveness of nonverbal behavior and BMI, and between axillary odor ratings and 2D:4D ratio. Axillary odor pleasantness was the single attribute that consistently predicted attractiveness of nonverbal behavior. Our results demonstrate that nonverbal kinesic cues could reliably reveal mate quality, at least in males, and could corroborate and contribute to mate assessment based on other physical traits

Bilateral Assessment of Functional Tasks for Robot-assisted Therapy Applications

This article presents a novel evaluation system along with methods to evaluate bilateral coordination of arm function on activities of daily living tasks before and after robot-assisted therapy. An affordable bilateral assessment system (BiAS) consisting of two mini-passive measuring units modeled as three degree of freedom robots is described. The process for evaluating functional tasks using the BiAS is presented and we demonstrate its ability to measure wrist kinematic trajectories. Three metrics, phase difference, movement overlap, and task completion time, are used to evaluate the BiAS system on a bilateral symmetric (bi-drink) and a bilateral asymmetric (bi-pour) functional task. Wrist position and velocity trajectories are evaluated using these metrics to provide insight into temporal and spatial bilateral deficits after stroke. The BiAS system quantified movements of the wrists during functional tasks and detected differences in impaired and unimpaired arm movements. Case studies showed that stroke patients compared to healthy subjects move slower and are less likely to use their arm simultaneously even when the functional task requires simultaneous movement. After robot-assisted therapy, interlimb coordination spatial deficits moved toward normal coordination on functional tasks

The emerging structure of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: where does Evo-Devo fit in?

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) debate is gaining ground in contemporary evolutionary biology. In parallel, a number of philosophical standpoints have emerged in an attempt to clarify what exactly is represented by the EES. For Massimo Pigliucci, we are in the wake of the newest instantiation of a persisting Kuhnian paradigm; in contrast, Telmo Pievani has contended that the transition to an EES could be best represented as a progressive reformation of a prior Lakatosian scientific research program, with the extension of its Neo-Darwinian core and the addition of a brand-new protective belt of assumptions and auxiliary hypotheses. Here, we argue that those philosophical vantage points are not the only ways to interpret what current proposals to ‘extend’ the Modern Synthesis-derived ‘standard evolutionary theory’ (SET) entail in terms of theoretical change in evolutionary biology. We specifically propose the image of the emergent EES as a vast network of models and interweaved representations that, instantiated in diverse practices, are connected and related in multiple ways. Under that assumption, the EES could be articulated around a paraconsistent network of evolutionary theories (including some elements of the SET), as well as models, practices and representation systems of contemporary evolutionary biology, with edges and nodes that change their position and centrality as a consequence of the co-construction and stabilization of facts and historical discussions revolving around the epistemic goals of this area of the life sciences. We then critically examine the purported structure of the EES—published by Laland and collaborators in 2015—in light of our own network-based proposal. Finally, we consider which epistemic units of Evo-Devo are present or still missing from the EES, in preparation for further analyses of the topic of explanatory integration in this conceptual framework

THE RHYTHM OF FAIRALL 9. I. OBSERVING THE SPECTRAL VARIABILITY WITH XMM-NEWTON AND NuSTAR

© 2016. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. We present a multi-epoch X-ray spectral analysis of the Seyfert 1 galaxy Fairall 9. Our analysis shows that Fairall 9 displays unique spectral variability in that its ratio residuals to a simple absorbed power law in the 0.5-10 keV band remain constant with time in spite of large variations in flux. This behavior implies an unchanging source geometry and the same emission processes continuously at work at the timescale probed. With the constraints from NuSTAR on the broad-band spectral shape, it is clear that the soft excess in this source is a superposition of two different processes, one being blurred ionized reflection in the innermost parts of the accretion disk, and the other a continuum component such as a spatially distinct Comptonizing region. Alternatively, a more complex primary Comptonization component together with blurred ionized reflection could be responsible

DISK–WIND CONNECTION DURING THE HEARTBEATS OF GRS 1915+105

Disk and wind signatures are seen in the soft state of Galactic black holes, while the jet is seen in the hard state. Here we study the disk–wind connection in the ρ class of variability in GRS 1915+105 using a joint NuSTAR–Chandra observation. The source shows 50 s limit cycle oscillations. By including new information provided by the reflection spectrum and using phase-resolved spectroscopy, we find that the change in the inner disk inferred from the blackbody emission is not matched by reflection measurements. The latter is almost constant, independent of the continuum model. The two radii are comparable only if the disk temperature color correction factor changes, an effect that could be due to the changing opacity of the disk caused by changes in metal abundances. The disk inclination is similar to that inferred from the jet axis, and oscillates by ~10°. The simultaneous Chandra data show the presence of two wind components with velocities between 500 and 5000 km s⁻¹, and possibly two more with velocities reaching 20,000 km s⁻¹ (~0.06 c). The column densities are ~5 × 10²² cm⁻². An upper limit to the wind response time of 2 s is measured, implying a launch radius of <6 × 10¹° cm. The changes in wind velocity and absorbed flux require the geometry of the wind to change during the oscillations, constraining the wind to be launched from a distance of 290–1300 r _g from the black hole. Both data sets support fundamental model predictions in which a bulge originates in the inner disk and moves outward as the instability progresses.This work made use of data from the NuSTAR mission, a project led by the California Institute of Technology, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This work is also based on observations made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory

Under pressure: Response urgency modulates striatal and insula activity during decision-making under risk

When deciding whether to bet in situations that involve potential monetary loss or gain (mixed gambles), a subjective sense of pressure can influence the evaluation of the expected utility associated with each choice option. Here, we explored how gambling decisions, their psychophysiological and neural counterparts are modulated by an induced sense of urgency to respond. Urgency influenced decision times and evoked heart rate responses, interacting with the expected value of each gamble. Using functional MRI, we observed that this interaction was associated with changes in the activity of the striatum, a critical region for both reward and choice selection, and within the insula, a region implicated as the substrate of affective feelings arising from interoceptive signals which influence motivational behavior. Our findings bridge current psychophysiological and neurobiological models of value representation and action-programming, identifying the striatum and insular cortex as the key substrates of decision-making under risk and urgency

A Tunable Two-impurity Kondo system in an atomic point contact

Two magnetic atoms, one attached to the tip of a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) and one adsorbed on a metal surface, each constituting a Kondo system, have been proposed as one of the simplest conceivable systems potentially exhibiting quantum critical behaviour. We have succeeded in implementing this concept experimentally for cobalt dimers clamped between an STM tip and a gold surface. Control of the tip-sample distance with sub-picometer resolution allows us to tune the interaction between the two cobalt atoms with unprecedented precision. Electronic transport measurements on this two-impurity Kondo system reveal a rich physical scenario which is governed by a crossover from local Kondo screening to non-local singlet formation due to antiferromagnetic coupling as a function of separation of the cobalt atoms.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Developing standards for reporting implementation studies of complex interventions (StaRI): a systematic review and e-Delphi

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited

Effects of beta-alanine supplementation on brain homocarnosine/carnosine signal and cognitive function: an exploratory study

Objectives: Two independent studies were conducted to examine the effects of 28 d of beta-alanine supplementation at 6.4 g d-1 on brain homocarnosine/carnosine signal in omnivores and vegetarians (Study 1) and on cognitive function before and after exercise in trained cyclists (Study 2). Methods: In Study 1, seven healthy vegetarians (3 women and 4 men) and seven age- and sex-matched omnivores undertook a brain 1H-MRS exam at baseline and after beta-alanine supplementation. In study 2, nineteen trained male cyclists completed four 20-Km cycling time trials (two pre supplementation and two post supplementation), with a battery of cognitive function tests (Stroop test, Sternberg paradigm, Rapid Visual Information Processing task) being performed before and after exercise on each occasion. Results: In Study 1, there were no within-group effects of beta-alanine supplementation on brain homocarnosine/carnosine signal in either vegetarians (p = 0.99) or omnivores (p = 0.27); nor was there any effect when data from both groups were pooled (p = 0.19). Similarly, there was no group by time interaction for brain homocarnosine/carnosine signal (p = 0.27). In study 2, exercise improved cognitive function across all tests (P0.05) of beta-alanine supplementation on response times or accuracy for the Stroop test, Sternberg paradigm or RVIP task at rest or after exercise. Conclusion: 28 d of beta-alanine supplementation at 6.4g d-1 appeared not to influence brain homocarnosine/ carnosine signal in either omnivores or vegetarians; nor did it influence cognitive function before or after exercise in trained cyclists