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Neurodiversity-Affirming Principles in Oncology Treatment: A Lived-Experience Case Study.
Full text linkCancer care, with its complex and variable protocols, frequent appointments, and high-stress, may present additional challenges for neurodivergent patients, and suitable care accommodations are necessary. Yet, a dearth of literature and an associated understanding on neuro-inclusive cancer care exists. The current case study aims to: (1) explore and identify barriers and challenges to neurodivergent cancer care; and (2) generate neuro-inclusive oncology-specific recommendations to guide healthcare providers in offering neuro-affirming care. To do this, we present the first author's lived experience navigating stage IV breast cancer as a neurodivergent individual and psychologist, exploring barriers and challenges encountered. Her personal and professional experience uniquely positions her to offer insights into this intersection. Based on her experience, and complemented by published data, we generate recommendations for neuro-inclusive care. Challenges and barriers identified include limited oncology provider knowledge, awareness, and tolerance of neurodivergence, and insufficient suitable accommodations to difficulties with standard care practices. Recommendations encompass six domains: patient communication, physical environments, physical pain, administrative approaches, technology usage, and systemic revisions. Clinical, training, and research recommendations and implications are reported. Clinical implications include raising awareness around the lack of neurodivergent-affirming cancer care. We highlight the need for neuro-inclusive training for all staff interacting with neurodivergent patients. Such training should be embedded into graduate programs and professional development. We call for co-designed training (development and delivery) and research, and highlight the lack of current available research. We note the need for empirically driven universal guidelines for neuro-inclusive oncology care, which we hope will be informed by the present study
Gender, firm performance, and FDI supply-purchase spillovers in emerging markets
Full text linkThe paper measures gender premium (or penalties) in productivity and innovation using firm-level data from 32 emerging economies. Further, we estimate whether the gender status of local firms in FDI recipient countries, as well as the ownership structure of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs), matters for the size of spillovers from supply and purchase links between local firms and MNEs. Our results show that female-owned firms are on average less innovative and productive. These gender performance handicaps cancel out Total factor productivity (TFP) gains through supply linkages with MNEs. In general, domestic firms benefit from the supply of inputs to MNEs not only in terms of TFP, but also in a number of characteristics related to innovation, and this highlights the importance of backward spillovers on the performance of FDI host countries. Nonetheless, domestic female-owned firms cannot reap any of these gains. There is also a gender penalty imposed by MNEs on local firms’ TFP. Female-owned MNEs do not promote technology transfer through spillovers to local firms, which might be another explanation for why domestic firms do not usually experience productivity gains when purchasing inputs from foreign firms. Akeymessage of the present paper is that enhancing productivity in emerging economies depends on mitigating factors that cause gender discrimination. Eliminating any gender penalty in firm performance will also help local firms absorb spillovers from MNEs
Predicting the intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese with manipulated and intact tonal information for normal-hearing listeners.
Full text linkObjective indices for predicting speech intelligibility offer a quick and convenient alternative to behavioral measures of speech intelligibility. However, most such indices are designed for a specific language, such as English, and they do not take adequate account of tonal information in speech when applied to languages like Mandarin Chinese (hereafter called Mandarin) for which the patterns of fundamental frequency (F0) variation play an important role in distinguishing speech sounds with similar phonetic content. To address this, two experiments with normal-hearing listeners were conducted examining: (1) The impact of manipulations of tonal information on the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences presented in speech-shaped noise (SSN) at several signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs); (2) The intelligibility of Mandarin sentences with intact tonal information presented in SSN, pink noise, and babble at several SNRs. The outcomes were not correctly predicted by the Hearing Aid Speech Perception Index (HASPI-V1). A new intelligibility metric was developed that used one acoustic feature from HASPI-V1 plus Hilbert time envelope and temporal fine structure information from multiple frequency bands. For the new metric, the Pearson correlation between obtained and predicted intelligibility was 0.923 and the root mean square error was 0.119. The new metric provides a potential tool for evaluating Mandarin intelligibility
Developing differences: early-life effects and evolutionary medicine.
Full text linkVariation in early-life conditions can trigger developmental switches that lead to predictable individual differences in adult behaviour and physiology. Despite evidence for such early-life effects being widespread both in humans and throughout the animal kingdom, the evolutionary causes and consequences of this developmental plasticity remain unclear. The current issue aims to bring together studies of early-life effects from the fields of both evolutionary ecology and biomedicine to synthesise and advance current knowledge of how information is used during development, the mechanisms involved, and how early-life effects evolved. We hope this will stimulate further research into early-life effects, improving our understanding of why individuals differ and how this might influence their susceptibility to disease. This article is part of the theme issue 'Developing differences: early-life effects and evolutionary medicine'
Inside the black box of manufacturing
Full text linkThe economic value of manufactured goods increasingly depends on activities that are officially categorised as belonging to other sectors of the economy.
Therefore - for the purpose of industrial strategy, most advanced economies, including the UK, are
not counting manufacturing the right way. For example, a range of manufacturing-related technical services are excluded from the manufacturing category in the national accounts, such as R&D, industrial design, analysis and testing.
The authors propose a new analytical framework for policymakers that is more useful than the existing system of industry classification codes. This reflects a fuller understanding of how firms self-organise into their industry communities. Essentially, policymakers need to have a more holistic sense of the industrial system.
The findings are equally relevant for local and regional industrial strategy, as well as national
industrial strategy. Geographical clusters of technological capabilities defy the conventional
demarcation between manufacturing and services, and some clusters of capabilities span the different categories of industry classification codes. Therefore, regional authorities should be strategising for geographically clustered value chains rather than conventional sectors
Overview of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES)
Full text linkWe present an overview of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), an ambitious program of infrared imaging and spectroscopy in the GOODS-S and GOODS-N deep fields, designed to study galaxy evolution from high redshift to cosmic noon. JADES uses about 770 hr of Cycle 1 guaranteed time largely from the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument teams. In GOODS-S, in and around the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and Chandra Deep Field South, JADES produces a deep imaging region of ∼42 arcmin2 with over 100 hr of exposure time spread over nine NIRCam filters, including two medium-band filters. This is extended at medium depth in GOODS-S and GOODS-N with NIRCam imaging of ∼167 arcmin2, averaging 25 hr of exposure over 8–10 filters. In both fields, we conduct extensive NIRSpec multiobject spectroscopy, including two deep pointings of 55 hr exposure time, 14 medium pointings of ∼12 hr, and 15 shallower pointings of ∼4 hr, targeting over 5000 Hubble Space Telescope– and JWST-detected faint sources with five low-, medium-, and high-resolution dispersers covering 0.6–5.3 μm. Finally, JADES extends redward via coordinated parallels with the JWST Mid-Infrared Instrument, featuring ∼10 arcmin2 with 43 hr of exposure at 7.7 μm and thrice that area with 1.4–6.8 hr of exposure at 12.8 and 15 μm. For nearly 30 yr, the GOODS-S and GOODS-N fields have been developed as the premier deep fields on the sky; JADES is now providing a compelling start on JWST's legacy in these fields
Flexible surface acoustic wave technology for enhancing transdermal drug delivery.
Full text linkTransdermal drug delivery provides therapeutic benefits over enteric or injection delivery because its transdermal routes provide more consistent concentrations of drug and avoid issues of drugs affecting kidneys and liver functions. Many technologies have been evaluated to enhance drug delivery through the relatively impervious epidermal layer of the skin. However, precise delivery of large hydrophilic molecules is still a great challenge even though microneedles or other energized (such as electrical, thermal, or ultrasonic) patches have been used, which are often difficult to be integrated into small wearable devices. This study developed a flexible surface acoustic wave (SAW) patch platform to facilitate transdermal delivery of macromolecules with fluorescein isothiocyanates up to 2000 kDa. Two surrogates of human skin were used to evaluate SAW based energized devices, i.e., delivering dextran through agarose gels and across stratum corneum of pig skin into the epidermis. Results showed that the 2000 kDa fluorescent molecules have been delivered up to 1.1 mm in agarose gel, and the fluorescent molecules from 4 to 2000 kDa have been delivered up to 100 µm and 25 µm in porcine skin tissue, respectively. Mechanical agitation, localised streaming, and acousto-thermal effect generated on the skin surface were identified as the main mechanisms for promoting drug transdermal transportation, although micro/nanoscale acoustic cavitation induced by SAWs could also have its contribution. SAW enhanced transdermal drug delivery is dependent on the combined effects of wave frequency and intensity, duration of applied acoustic waves, temperature, and drug molecules molecular weights
Regional Cardiac Energy Metabolism Differences at 7T in Healthy, Diabetic, and Heart Failure Patients
No full textMotivation: Heart failure and diabetes are characterized by impaired myocardial energetics. While SGLT2 inhibitors such as dapagliflozin improve outcomes, the mechanistic basis of their effects remains unclear.
Goal: To investigate whether regional cardiac energy metabolism differs between healthy volunteers, diabetic patients, and heart failure patients, and whether dapagliflozin treatment modulates these changes.
Approach: We applied high-resolution ³¹P-MRSI using a novel dipole-loop array coil to measure regional PCr/ATP ratios at 7T and correlated them with functional cardiac parameters acquired at 3T.
Results: We identified significant regional metabolic differences between groups and strong correlations with CS, RS, GLS, GRS, and peak filling rate, supporting the value of ³¹P-MRSI in mechanistic studies
Sequential Inference for Non-Gaussian Additive Processes
Full text linkIn this paper, we introduce dynamical models based on Stochastic Differential Equations (SDE)s driven by additive processes. Additive processes are intuitively obtained as time-varying versions of Lvy processes, and we adopt this formalism to model properties that may change over time, for example the skewness of the process. While the framework is quite general, we take an -stable process with time-varying skew as a concrete example, demonstrating the effect of time-varying skew on the expected direction of motion of an object. The framework is constructed based on a generalised shot-noise representation of an additive process. We show how to perform joint inference about states and skew of the model, based on a marginalised particle filter framework. Finally, performance is demonstrated on both simulated and real data and improved performance is observed compared with competitor models
Decoding non-coding SNPs: systems genomics modelling dissects the heterogeneity of IBD.
Full text linkGenome-wide association studies have identified numerous susceptibility loci in complex diseases, such as chronic immune-mediated inflammatory disorders (IMIDs), yet their impact on pathomechanisms remains poorly understood. Low effect sizes, polygenicity, and predominance within non-coding genomic regions remain major challenges to the functional interpretation of IMID-associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). To address this, we present a novel systems genomics approach which models the cumulative impact of non-coding SNPs on downstream cellular signalling and gene regulatory networks. Applying this to the prototypical chronic IMIDs of Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), both forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), we individually analysed 2,636 patient genomes. Signals from non-coding SNPs were found to propagate towards well-established and novel CD- and UC-associated pathogenic pathways through the signalling and gene regulatory layers. The SNP-propagated gene regulatory networks stratified CD and UC patients into distinct clusters corresponding to cell type-specific gene dysregulation and potential therapeutic response. This approach bridges the gap between genotype and phenotype, laying the foundations for accelerating precision medicine in complex diseases