Precisely this pattern is what Welch and Meselson found recently when they took a closer look at more DNA surrounding the hsp82 locus in bdelloids — the same gene that was initially assumed to harbour divergent 'Meselson effect' alleles. It turns out that the regions around the four copies of the hsp82 gene do come in two pairs. Between them, the pairs have four genes in common and the order an...

Inflammation is a hallmark of bronchial asthma. Inflammatory cells both in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) and bronchial biopsies of asthmatic patients have been studied and correlated with functional or clinical parameters. We have recently attempted to assess airway inflammation by a visual endoscopic scoring system. The purpose of this study was to compare our own endoscopic scoring system with...

Language recognition with support vector machines and shifteddelta cepstral features has been an excellent performer in NISTsponsored language evaluation for many years. A novel improvement of this method has been the introduction of hybrid SVM/GMM systems. These systems use GMM supervectors as an SVM expansion for classification. In prior work, methods for scoring SVM/GMM systems have been int...

Creativity assessment commonly uses open-ended divergent thinking tasks. The typical methods for scoring these tasks (uniqueness scoring and subjective ratings) are time-intensive, however, so it is impractical for researchers to include divergent thinking as an ancillary construct. The present research evaluated snapshot scoring of divergent thinking tasks, in which the set of responses receiv...

DUPISTAD (NCT04033367) evaluated the impact of dupilumab on sleep. Adults with moderate-to-severe AD (EASI ≥12, Pruritus numerical rating scale (NRS) ≥ 3 and sleep NRS ≥5) were randomized 2:1 to 300mg every 2 weeks (q2w) or placebo for 12 (W12); both groups permitted concomitant topical corticosteroids. The primary efficacy endpoint was quality percentage change from baseline W12, assessed by 1...

Rationale: Adults with atopic dermatitis (AD) have an increased risk for thromboembolic events. Clotting factors been shown to impact Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) colonization. However, the interplay between pediatric AD, thrombin, and S. remain under investigated. Methods: To assess thrombin in AD we performed a plasma generation assay on samples from Mechanisms of Progression Atopic Derm...