Newest and Lowest Rated Papers
Antibiotic-Independent Adaptive Effects of Antibiotic Resistance Mutations
Ruth Hershberg
Trends in Genetics·2017·58 citations
No abstract available
No ratings yet
View paper →Estuarine Aquacultures at the Crossroads of Animal Production and Antibacterial Resistance: A Metagenomic Approach to the Resistome
Daniel G. Silva, Célia P. F. Domingues, João F. Figueiredo, Francisco Dionisio, Ana Botelho, Teresa Nogueira
Biology·2022·8 citations
<jats:p>It is recognized that the spread of antibiotic resistance (AR) genes among aquatic environments, including aquaculture and the human environment, can have detrimental effects on human and animal health and the ecosystem. Thus, when transmitted to the human microbiome or pathogens, resistance genes risk human health by compromising the eventual treatment of infections with antibiotic therapy. This study aimed to define the resistance profile of aquaculture farms and their potential risk for spreading. Twenty-four sediments from oyster and gilthead sea bream aquaculture farms located in three Portuguese river estuaries (17 sediments from Sado, 4 from Aveiro, and 3 from Lima) were studied by comparative metagenomic analysis. The computation of the diversity of genes conferring resistance per antibiotic class revealed a significant increase in aminoglycosides, beta-lactams, disinfectants, quinolones, and tetracyclines counts. In all geographic locations under study, the most diverse AR genes confer resistance to the macrolides, tetracyclines and oxazolidinones classes, all of which are medically important for human and animal therapies, as well as resistance to disinfectants. The diversity of mobile genetic elements correlated with the number of AR genes such as tetracyclines, suggesting that AR could be easily mobilized among bacterial genomes and microbiomes.</jats:p>
No ratings yet
View paper →Universidade Federal da Bahia: Babado real: um breve panorama da moda lolita no Brasil
Paim, Lyane yasmin menezes
repositorio.ufba.br·2021
No abstract available
No ratings yet
View paper →Validation of sputum Gram stain for treatment of community-acquired pneumonia and healthcare-associated pneumonia: a prospective observational study
Hajime Fukuyama, Shin Yamashiro, Kiyoshi Kinjo, Hitoshi Tamaki, Tomoo Kishaba
BMC Infectious Diseases·2014·69 citations
No abstract available
No ratings yet
View paper →Database of Metagenomes of Sediments from Estuarine Aquaculture Farms in Portugal—AquaRAM Project Collection
Teresa Nogueira, Daniel G. Silva, Susana Lopes, Ana Botelho
Data·2022
<jats:p>Aquaculture farms and estuarine environments close to human activities play a critical role in the interaction between aquatic and terrestrial surroundings and animal and human health. The AquaRAM project aimed to study estuarine aquaculture farms in Portugal as a reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes and the potential of its spread due to mobile genetic elements. We have assembled a collection of metagenomic data from 30 sediment samples from oysters, mussels, and gilt-head sea bream aquaculture farms. This collection includes samples of the estuarine environment of three rivers and one lagoon located from the north to the south of Portugal, namely, the Lima River in Viana do Castelo, Aveiro Lagoon in Aveiro, Tagus River in Alcochete, and Sado River in Setúbal. Statistical data from the raw metagenome files, as well as the file sizes of the assembled nucleotide and protein sequences, are also presented. The link to the statistics and the download page for all the metagenomes is also listed below.</jats:p>
No ratings yet
View paper →ECCC - TR25-207
Madhu Sudan
eccc.weizmann.ac.il
Homepage of the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity located at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
No ratings yet
View paper →A tutorial on how to do a Mokken scale analysis on your test and questionnaire data
Klaas Sijtsma, L. Andries van der Ark
British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology·2016·200 citations
<jats:p>
Over the past decade, Mokken scale analysis (
<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">MSA</jats:styled-content>
) has rapidly grown in popularity among researchers from many different research areas. This tutorial provides researchers with a set of techniques and a procedure for their application, such that the construction of scales that have superior measurement properties is further optimized, taking full advantage of the properties of
<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">MSA</jats:styled-content>
. First, we define the conceptual context of
<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">MSA</jats:styled-content>
, discuss the two item response theory (
<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">IRT</jats:styled-content>
) models that constitute the basis of
<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">MSA</jats:styled-content>
, and discuss how these models differ from other
<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">IRT</jats:styled-content>
models. Second, we discuss dos and don'ts for
<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">MSA</jats:styled-content>
; the don'ts include misunderstandings we have frequently encountered with researchers in our three decades of experience with real‐data
<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">MSA</jats:styled-content>
. Third, we discuss a methodology for
<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">MSA</jats:styled-content>
on real data that consist of a sample of persons who have provided scores on a set of items that, depending on the composition of the item set, constitute the basis for one or more scales, and we use the methodology to analyse an example real‐data set.
</jats:p>
No ratings yet
View paper →The Science of Art
Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran, William Hirstein
No abstract available
No ratings yet
View paper →Why Evolution Still Matters for Cancer — Insights from Across the Animal Kingdom A big paper from our team in Cancer Discovery
Athena Aktipis
Substack·2026
Why Evolution Still Matters for Cancer — Insights from Across the Animal Kingdom
A big paper from our team in Cancer Discovery (https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/15/1/227/750844/Cancer-Prevalence-across-VertebratesCancer-across) looks at cancer prevalence across vertebrate species. This is the largest study of its kind, using over 16,000 veterinary necropsy records from 292 species of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals to understand how often different animals actually get cancer and why that might be.
The results are fascinating, and they help us see cancer not just as a human disease but as an evolutionary problem that all multicellular life has had to deal with. Across the vertebrates, rates of both benign tumors (neoplasia) and malignant cancers vary widely. On average, larger animals and those with higher somatic mutation rates tend to show higher cancer prevalence, while species with long gestation times tend to show lower rates. This challenges some long-held ideas about how body size and lifespan shape cancer risk, and opens up new questions about how different evolutionary strategies affect cancer susceptibility.
One of the most exciting things about this dataset is the opportunity it gives us to identify species that get less cancer than expected, and to study what makes them special. Those biological mechanisms could turn out to be powerful models for cancer suppression and prevention in humans.
If you’ve read The Cheating Cell (https://www.amazon.com/Cheating-Cell-Evolution-Understand-Cancer/dp/0691163847), some of these ideas will feel familiar. In that book I talk about cancer as a breakdown of cooperation in multicellular organisms: cells that stop playing by the rules and begin behaving like independent proliferators. But evolution didn’t just create multicellularity and walk away. Over hundreds of millions of years, species have evolved diverse ways to keep cellular cooperation stable and, in some cases, resist cancer remarkably well. Studies like this one help us see that variation in the wild, and they give us clues about the mechanisms that preserve cooperation even in large, long-lived bodies.
For example, while mammals as a group tend to have higher neoplasia and cancer prevalence than amphibians, reptiles, or birds, there are notable outliers on both ends of the spectrum. Some smaller species show unexpectedly high rates, and some large-bodied animals appear surprisingly resistant. Understanding why these differences exist may unlock strategies for improving cancer prevention and treatment.
This paper is a reminder that cancer is both a clinical challenge and an evolutionary problem, shaped by the same forces that govern cooperation and conflict in multicellular life. When we look across species instead of just within humans or traditional lab animals, we see patterns that would otherwise remain hidden. These patterns reflect life history traits shaped by natural selection — gestation times, body size, metabolism, and perhaps even immune system strategies that have evolved to manage cellular conflict.
One takeaway from this study is that the very traits that make us human — our bodies, lifespans, developmental timing — have deep evolutionary roots that continue to influence cancer risk. By learning from other branches of life’s tree, we gain evolutionary perspective that can inform both basic science and medical strategies.
If The Cheating Cell is about the conflict and cooperation within our own cells, this paper extends that lens out across the vertebrate world, showing how evolution’s solutions can be both diverse and deeply informative.
No ratings yet
View paper →Beauty and Utility in Architecture, Interior Design and in the New European Bauhaus Concepts
Przemyslaw Nowakowski
Buildings·2024·11 citations
<jats:p>Appreciating beauty is a positive human feeling. In architecture and design, it is associated with the usefulness of products to meet needs. Those products are well received by users. The designer’s task is to achieve perfection in their work. The rational design of artificial living environments is also an expression of concern for a sustainable environment. The interdisciplinary New European Bauhaus is interested in these issues. This paper indicates the role of beauty and utility in the built environment. They are analyzed in the context of social and technical conditions and contemporary sustainable design. Its goal is to expand the knowledge of beauty and usefulness in architecture. They are increasingly important in the sustainable development of the built environment. This article uses research methods: interpretive research, analyses, comparisons, logical argumentation, etc. Innovative qualitative research in the form of a checklist is used. This survey can be used to rationally evaluate architecture and interior facilities. It can be helpful for various sustainable aesthetic and functional strategies dedicated to designers and users. It indicates possible directions for further assessment of architecture, e.g., in the context of management, environment and identity in the era of digitalization. It can be helpful in assessing the quality of the built environment.</jats:p>
No ratings yet
View paper →The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
Michael T. Taussig
The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill·2010
Thirty years after its first publication in 1980 seems like a good time to add a sort of afterword to this devil book so as to ponder the nature of anthropology as storytelling and bring you up to date with some changes in the situation described in the first half of the book. But my first interest is with "voice" and the art of writing—that which is the very lifeblood of our work yet rarely gets mentioned. As I see it, our work in anthropology, as much as in philosophy, is a species of poetry, a matter of finding the words and rhythm of language that resonate with what we are writing about. To put it crudely: anthropology studies culture, but in the process "makes" culture as well. To be aware of this is to figure out ways of translating between the known and the unknown without taking away the strangeness of the unknown and, even more important, without blinding oneself and one's readers to the strangeness of the known, that which we take for granted about ourselves and our ingrained ways of life— such as the very idea of the market economy thrown into bold relief by the devil contract exemplified in this book.
No ratings yet
View paper →Harnessing endogenous miR-181a to segregate transgenic antigen receptor expression in developing versus post-thymic T cells in murine hematopoietic chimeras
Eirini P. Papapetrou, Damian Kovalovsky, Laurent Beloeil, Derek Sant’Angelo, Michel Sadelain
Journal of Clinical Investigation·2008·1 citations
No abstract available
No ratings yet
View paper →