A ducted, biomimetic nipple replicates breastfeeding mechanics through ontogeny in an infant animal model.

Background: Although there are known physiological and developmental benefits for breastfed infants, many infants must be bottle-fed for a variety of reasons. We hypothesize that some of these health disparities are caused by biomechanical differences in milk acquisition between breastfeeding and bottle feeding (suction versus expression) that are caused by fundamental structural differences between breast tissue (which has narrow ducts) and bottle nipples (which are hollow).

Methods: To evaluate if a biomimetic, ducted bottle nipple elicits suckling physiology that is more similar to breastfeeding than conventional bottle feeding, we studied suckling in full-term infant pigs, a validated animal model for infant feeding.

Understanding rural adaptation to smoke from wildfires and forest management: insights for aligning approaches with community contexts.

Background: Rural communities are increasingly impacted by smoke produced by wildfires and forest management activties. Understanding local influences on smoke adaptation and mitigation is critical to social adaptation as fire risk continues to rise.

Aims: We sought to determine the role of local social context in smoke adaptation and gauge interest in adaptation strategies that might reduce exposure.

Graduate Record Examination Removal From Admissions and Physician Assistant/Associate Student Diversity.

Introduction: This study examined demographic characteristics among physician assistant/associate (PA) program applicants who were offered admission and among matriculants at 5 PA programs that eliminated the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) admissions requirement.

Methods: Collated admissions data for 4 cycles were categorized into 2 periods, one representing 2 cycles before GRE removal (GRE period) and one representing 2 cycles after GRE removal (no-GRE period). Chi-square analyses were used to compare percentages of applicants offered admission and percentages of matriculants who were from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine (URiM), were first-generation college students, and who reported economic disadvantage (ED) across the 2 periods.

The effect of early physical therapy intervention on case duration and physical therapy visits in acute work-related musculoskeletal injuries across body regions: A retrospective cohort study.

Objective: To evaluate how initiating physical therapy (PT) early affected (1) case duration and (2) the number of PT visits, in patients with acute work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs).

Design: A retrospective cohort study of 83 846 patients with WMSDs who were receiving occupational health services between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2022.

Methods: Patients were categorized according to the time from injury to initiating PT (0-2 days, 3-7 days, 8-12 days, and 13+ days).

Multi-year profiles of T3 are positively correlated with corticosterone in male bowhead whale baleen.

Thyroid hormones play an important role in the regulation of growth, development, metabolism, thermoregulation, and migration. Very little information exists on patterns of thyroid hormone concentrations in healthy mysticete whales, as many studies have focused on ill, entangled, or stranded whales, making it difficult to interpret thyroid hormone trends. In this study, we used a unique sample-set of bowhead whale baleen plates to explore the long-term interrelationships between triiodothyronine (T3), the most biologically active thyroid hormone, corticosterone, testosterone, and nitrogen isotope ratios (δN) (proxies for stress, reproduction, and diet, respectively) to investigate the role T3 may play in the physiology of healthy cetaceans.

Infant pigs demonstrate motor adaptation across multiple physiologic functions during feeding in response to dynamic changes in milk flow rate.

Safe and effective infant feeding requires precise coordination of sucking, swallowing, and breathing, yet disruptions in this coordination affect a significant number of infants. Altering sensory input, such as bottle nipple flow rate, is used to address poor coordination in infants. However, prior studies often compare different nipples used across different feeds, which introduces confounding variables and limits insight into neuromotor responses.

The Effect of Language Background and Grade Level on Fricative Production of Children Learning Mandarin in a Chinese-English Bilingual Program.

Purpose: This study aims to examine how language background and grade level influence the voiceless sibilant fricative production of two groups of children enrolled in a Mandarin-English bilingual school in Canada. One group of children was exposed to Mandarin at home as heritage language (HL), and the other group had little to no exposure to Mandarin until they started learning it as a second language (L2) at school.

Method: Eighty-two children in Grades 1, 3, or 5 as well as 12 teachers engaged in picture-naming tasks in both English and Mandarin.

The impact of bioinformatic choices on variant identification accuracy.

Emerging fungal pathogens, such as , the causative agent of Valley fever, or coccidioidomycosis, pose significant clinical and public health challenges. While advances in genomic epidemiology have enhanced our understanding of evolutionary history, effective variant identification is complicated by the genome's structural complexity. Repetitive elements, transposable sequences, and regions of low complexity can lead to incorrect variant calls, affecting downstream analyses.

Optimism and language proficiency predict incidence of and remission from PTSD among climate migrants.

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to examine internal and contextual predictors of two interrelated phenomena among Puerto Rican Hurricane Maria survivors who relocated to the U.S. mainland after the storm: (a) of positive posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) screen among hurricane survivors who had not previously screened positive and (b) from positive PTSD among those who had previously screened positive.

A multi-omics strategy to understand PASC through the RECOVER cohorts: a paradigm for a systems biology approach to the study of chronic conditions.

Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC or "Long COVID"), includes numerous chronic conditions associated with widespread morbidity and rising healthcare costs. PASC has highly variable clinical presentations, and likely includes multiple molecular subtypes, but it remains poorly understood from a molecular and mechanistic standpoint. This hampers the development of rationally targeted therapeutic strategies.

Groundwater Recharge in a Fire-Adapted, Semi-Arid Forest: A Watershed Water Balance Approach.

Climate change induced aridity and Euro-American settlement have altered the historical disturbance and flow regimes of large portions of the ponderosa pine forests of northern Arizona. The increased occurrence of high-severity wildfires due to these changes has led to the establishment of various forest restoration programs to protect the region's forests and their watersheds. In 2014, a paired-watershed monitoring project was implemented to compare the impacts of differing levels of forest thinning to watershed hydrology in seven experimental watersheds nested within the Upper Lake Mary (ULM) watershed in Arizona.

Hotter Nights, Hidden Consequences: An Overlooked Dimension of Climate Change.

Global temperatures are shifting in complex ways due to climate change. While early research focused on rising mean temperatures and its effect on biological outcomes, recent work has shifted toward understanding the influence of temperature variability. In particular, many studies investigate temperature variation by symmetrically expanding daily temperature ranges around a fixed mean or by increasing daytime maximums.

Unravelling the Web of Life: Incomplete Lineage Sorting and Hybridisation as Primary Mechanisms Over Polyploidisation in the Evolutionary Dynamics of Pear Species.

The traditional Tree of Life (ToL) model is increasingly challenged by the Web of Life (WoL) paradigm, which offers a more accurate depiction of organismal phylogeny, particularly in light of the incongruences often observed between gene and species trees. However, the absence of a standardised method for resolving evolutionary mechanisms - such as Incomplete Lineage Sorting (ILS), hybridisation, introgression, polyploidisation, and whole-genome duplication - remains a significant obstacle in defining the WoL. Characterised by extensive hybridisation events, the pear genus Pyrus provides an ideal model for exploring these complexities.

Determination of Provenance Soil Type Using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) Analyses of Ash.

This study demonstrates the feasibility of determining soil provenance from tree ash composition using elemental analysis and chemometric techniques. To date, no published studies have applied chemometric approaches to classify ash for provenance determination following forest fires. In this work, ash was analyzed to distinguish samples based on soil type and geographic location.

Poor Mental Health and Its Impact on Governance Integrity in Developing Economies.

Governance has traditionally been evaluated through political, economic, and institutional considerations, but new research indicates that bad mental health, and especially untreated anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders, can greatly undermine decision-making capabilities and institutional performance. Importantly, the perception of corruption among politicians and administrators has been described as being associated with heightened mental health-related manifestations. However, the direction of the associations between corruption and mental health is not well understood.

Hybrid introgression as a mechanism of rapid evolution and resilience to climate change in a riparian tree species.

Determining whether organisms can undergo adaptive evolution at a pace commensurate with contemporary climate change is critical to understanding and predicting the consequences of such change. Hybrid introgression is a mechanism of rapid evolution by which species may adapt to climatic shifts. Here, we examine variation in growth and survival in a long-term common garden experiment with a foundation tree species to determine if introgression is enhancing climate change resilience.

Genomic epidemiology of in Africa.

Histoplasmosis, the disease caused by thermally dimorphic fungi in the genus , is usually associated with pulmonary involvement in healthy individuals and a disseminated syndrome in immunocompromised patients. Among African patients, lung disease is less commonly reported than skin, lymph node, or bone disease. Because different species or strains may be associated with different disease presentations and outcomes, understanding genetic and phenotypic variation in the genus is important for accurate diagnosis and treatment.

Community-Based Intervention to Promote Awareness and Implementation Accuracy of Food and Beverage Tax Policies in Stores on Navajo Nation.

Background: Unhealthy food and beverage taxes are gaining global momentum, but implementation complexities at the retailer level are poorly understood. The only such policy in the United States, a 2014 Navajo Nation legislation, applies a 2% tax to unhealthy foods and beverages, while exempting healthy foods and beverages from their 6% Navajo sales tax. In 2019, approximately half of small stores had not implemented both taxes correctly, primarily the tax exemption.

A Meta-Regression of 18 Wildfire Chronosequences Reveals Key Environmental Drivers and Knowledge Gaps in the Boreal Nitrogen Balance.

Climate change has increased the size and frequency of wildfires across the boreal biome. Severe wildfires in boreal forests have been found to trigger shifts from evergreen to deciduous canopies, which has cascading effects on carbon and nitrogen cycling. Ecosystem productivity and carbon uptake in boreal forests are strongly linked with nitrogen, and Earth system models increasingly depend on our understanding of the nitrogen balance to predict post-fire carbon uptake.

Assessing microbiome engraftment extent following fecal microbiota transplant with q2-fmt.

We present q2-fmt, a QIIME 2 plugin that provides diverse methods for assessing the extent of microbiome engraftment following fecal microbiota transplant. The methods implemented here were informed by a recent literature review on approaches for assessing FMT engraftment, and cover aspects of engraftment including Community Coalescence, Indicator Features, and Resilience. q2-fmt is free for all use, and detailed documentation illustrating worked examples on a real-world data set are provided in the project's documentation.

Multi-phase Training in Virus-Like Particle Synthesis to Foster Science Self-efficacy in Students With Minimal Laboratory Experience.

Science self-efficacy describes the confidence individuals have in their ability to accomplish specific scientific practices. Self-efficacy is one factor linked to success and persistence within STEM fields. The purpose of this protocol is to provide research laboratories with effective methods for teaching and mentoring new students in molecular biology, specifically in the synthesis of virus-like particles (VLPs) derived from bacteriophages.

Genomic Epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 in Ukraine from May 2022 to March 2024 Reveals Omicron Variant Dynamics.

In Ukraine, SARS-CoV-2 detection and national genomic surveillance have been complicated by full-scale war, limited resources, and varying levels of public health infrastructure impacted across the country. Following the Spring of 2022, only a paucity of data have been reported describing the prevalence and variant dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 in the country. Comparative whole genome analysis has overtaken diagnostics as the new gold standard for detecting and tracing emerging variants while showing utility to rapidly inform diagnostics, vaccine strategies, and health policy.

A Review of Abrupt Permafrost Thaw: Definitions, Usage, and a Proposed Conceptual Framework.

Purpose Of Review: We review how 'abrupt thaw' has been used in published studies, compare these definitions to abrupt processes in other Earth science disciplines, and provide a definitive framework for how abrupt thaw should be used in the context of permafrost science.

Recent Findings: We address several aspects of permafrost systems necessary for abrupt thaw to occur and propose a framework for classifying permafrost processes as abrupt thaw in the future. Based on a literature review and our collective expertise, we propose that abrupt thaw refers to thaw processes that lead to a substantial persistent environmental change within a few decades.

Virtual patients, real conversations: ChatGPT advanced voice mode for pain communication training.

Across many healthcare disciplines, clinicians report feeling unprepared to treat and communicate effectively with patients presenting with chronic pain. In-person role-playing activities are resource-intensive, relying on multiple faculty or classmates who cannot provide feedback at the same depth as faculty. ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) offers a novel solution.