Serotonin mediated changes in corticotropin releasing factor mRNA expression and feeding behavior isolated to the hypothalamic paraventricular nuclei

Fenfluramine reduces hunger and promotes body weight loss by increasing central serotonin (5-HT) signaling. More recently, neuropeptides have been linked to the regulation of feeding behavior, metabolism and body weight. To examine possible interactions between 5-HT and neuropeptides in appetite control, fenfluramine (200 nmol/0.5 μl/side) was administered directly into the hypothalamic paraventricular nuclei (PVN) of male rats. Bilateral fenfluramine produced significant hypophagia and increased expression of PVN corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) mRNA and neuropeptide Y (NPY) mRNA in the arcuate nucleus within the first hour after drug administration. Fenfluramine\u27s effects on feeding behavior and mRNA expression were blocked by PVN injections of a 5-HT1–2 receptor antagonist, metergoline (15 nmol/0.5 μl/side). These data suggest that 5-HT neurons targeting hypothalamic paraventricular CRF neurons may participate in an appetite control circuit for reducing food intake

High-entropy high-hardness metal carbides discovered by entropy descriptors

High-entropy materials have attracted considerable interest due to the combination of useful properties and promising applications. Predicting their formation remains the major hindrance to the discovery of new systems. Here we propose a descriptor - entropy forming ability - for addressing synthesizability from first principles. The formalism, based on the energy distribution spectrum of randomized calculations, captures the accessibility of equally-sampled states near the ground state and quantifies configurational disorder capable of stabilizing high-entropy homogeneous phases. The methodology is applied to disordered refractory 5-metal carbides - promising candidates for high-hardness applications. The descriptor correctly predicts the ease with which compositions can be experimentally synthesized as rock-salt high-entropy homogeneous phases, validating the ansatz, and in some cases, going beyond intuition. Several of these materials exhibit hardness up to 50% higher than rule of mixtures estimations. The entropy descriptor method has the potential to accelerate the search for high-entropy systems by rationally combining first principles with experimental synthesis and characterization.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Creating More Engaging Course Lectures

Modern students expect a lot out of their college experience. With increasing economic uncertainly, they are also evaluating the value that a college education can provide beyond many of the free, professional-quality resources available across the internet. This means post-secondary educators need to adapt to the learning expectations of their students and create more engaging course presentations that can capture and retain their students’ attention. Common lecture formats remain effective in efficiently presenting new ideas and concepts to large groups, but visual aids used alongside a lecture are usually uninspiring. Even worse, the design of many PowerPoint slide decks used during a lecture can cause cognitive overloading, sensory conflict and hinder effective communication. In this paper, I will discuss how to make PowerPoint presentations more visually appealing and more effective when used in a classroom lecture. Additionally, I will discuss the techniques and tools available when developing an effective PowerPoint presentation

Just-Right Government: Interstate Compacts and Multistate Governance in an Era of Political Polarization, Policy Paralysis, and Bad-Faith Partisanship

Those committed to addressing the political, economic, and moral crises of the day— voting rights, racial justice, reproductive autonomy, gaping inequality, LGBTQ rights, and public health and safety—don’t know where to turn. Federal legislative and regulatory pathways are choked off by senators quick to filibuster and by judges eager to strike down agency rules and orders. State pathways, in turn, are compromised by limited capacity, collective action problems, externalities, scant economies of scale, and—in many jurisdictions—a toxic political culture hostile to even the most anodyne government interventions. Recognizing the limited options available on a binary (that is, federal or state) governance roadmap, this Article prescribes charting a third pathway: interstate agreements and compacts. Such arrangements—largely unnecessary when Washington is not pathologically dysfunctional—have a long and venerable constitutional pedigree and provide a legally sound and politically expedient “just-right” solution. Grouping clusters of states along the Pacific Ocean, the Amtrak Corridor, and the Upper Midwest, we propose and briefly sketch four major compacts as cornerstones of a Blue New Deal. Beyond detailing the four strategic interventions designed principally to work around the instant federal and state roadblocks (and recognizing similar opportunities for purple and, possibly, red states, too), this Article makes the affirmative, normative case for interstate agreements and compacts playing a long term, regular, and prominent role in twenty-first-century American governance—a case that sounds in democratic theory, administrative law, and political economy

Quantitative analysis of PiB-PET with FreeSurfer ROIs

In vivo quantification of β-amyloid deposition using positron emission tomography is emerging as an important procedure for the early diagnosis of the Alzheimer's disease and is likely to play an important role in upcoming clinical trials of disease modifying agents. However, many groups use manually defined regions, which are non-standard across imaging centers. Analyses often are limited to a handful of regions because of the labor-intensive nature of manual region drawing. In this study, we developed an automatic image quantification protocol based on FreeSurfer, an automated whole brain segmentation tool, for quantitative analysis of amyloid images. Standard manual tracing and FreeSurfer-based analyses were performed in 77 participants including 67 cognitively normal individuals and 10 individuals with early Alzheimer's disease. The manual and FreeSurfer approaches yielded nearly identical estimates of amyloid burden (intraclass correlation = 0.98) as assessed by the mean cortical binding potential. An MRI test-retest study demonstrated excellent reliability of FreeSurfer based regional amyloid burden measurements. The FreeSurfer-based analysis also revealed that the majority of cerebral cortical regions accumulate amyloid in parallel, with slope of accumulation being the primary difference between regions