An Updated Review of Porcine Deltacoronavirus in Terms of Prevalence, Pathogenicity, Pathogenesis and Antiviral Strategy

The recent experience with SARS-COV-2 has raised our alarm about the cross-species transmissibility of coronaviruses and the emergence of new coronaviruses. Knowledge of this family of viruses needs to be constantly updated. Porcine deltacoronavirus (PDCoV), a newly emerging member of the genus Deltacoronavirus in the family Coronaviridae, is a swine enteropathogen that causes diarrhea in pigs and may lead to death in severe cases. Since PDCoV diarrhea first broke out in the United States in early 2014, PDCoV has been detected in many countries, such as South Korea, Japan and China. More importantly, PDCoV can also infect species other than pigs, and infections have even been reported in children, highlighting its potential for cross-species transmission. A thorough and systematic knowledge of the epidemiology and pathogenesis of PDCoV will not only help us control PDCoV infection, but also enable us to discover the common cellular pathways and key factors of coronaviruses. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge on the prevalence, pathogenicity and infection dynamics, pathogenesis and immune evasion strategies of PDCoV. The existing anti-PDCoV strategies and corresponding mechanisms of PDCoV infection are also introduced, aiming to provide suggestions for the prevention and treatment of PDCoV and zoonotic diseases.

Learning about the Meanings of Ambiguous Words: Evidence from a Word-Meaning Priming Paradigm with Short Narratives

Fluent language comprehension requires readers and listeners to rapidly select an appropriate meaning for each word that they encounter. This meaning selection process is particularly challenging when low-frequency (subordinate) word meanings are used (e.g. the “river bank” meaning of “bank”). Recent word-meaning priming experiments show that recent experience can help to make subordinate word meanings more readily available, and thereby reduce the difficulty in accessing these meanings. One limitation of previous word-meaning priming experiments is that participants encounter the ambiguous words within a list of unconnected single sentences in which each ambiguous word is strongly disambiguated by words within the prime sentence. The current web-based study (N=51) extends this work to replicate word-meaning priming using short 3-sentence narratives as primes in which relatively weak contextual cues in sentence 1 serve to disambiguate a target ambiguous word that occurs in sentence 3. The results from the subsequent word-association test task confirmed that following a short delay (digit span) task the primed (subordinate) meanings were more readily available compared with an unprimed control. This work represents an important first step in moving the word-meaning priming paradigm towards materials that more reflect the varied ways in which ambiguous words are used within natural language.

Immunological causes of obsessive-compulsive disorder: is it time for the concept of an “autoimmune OCD” subtype?

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a highly disabling mental illness that can be divided into frequent primary and rarer organic secondary forms. Its association with secondary autoimmune triggers was introduced through the discovery of Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcal infection (PANDAS) and Pediatric Acute onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome (PANS). Autoimmune encephalitis and systemic autoimmune diseases or other autoimmune brain diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, have also been reported to sometimes present with obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS). Subgroups of patients with OCD show elevated proinflammatory cytokines and autoantibodies against targets that include the basal ganglia. In this conceptual review paper, the clinical manifestations, pathophysiological considerations, diagnostic investigations, and treatment approaches of immune-related secondary OCD are summarized. The novel concept of “autoimmune OCD” is proposed for a small subgroup of OCD patients, and clinical signs based on the PANDAS/PANS criteria and from recent experience with autoimmune encephalitis and autoimmune psychosis are suggested. Red flag signs for “autoimmune OCD” could include (sub)acute onset, unusual age of onset, atypical presentation of OCS with neuropsychiatric features (e.g., disproportionate cognitive deficits) or accompanying neurological symptoms (e.g., movement disorders), autonomic dysfunction, treatment resistance, associations of symptom onset with infections such as group A streptococcus, comorbid autoimmune diseases or malignancies. Clinical investigations may also reveal alterations such as increased levels of anti-basal ganglia or dopamine receptor antibodies or inflammatory changes in the basal ganglia in neuroimaging. Based on these red flag signs, the criteria for a possible, probable, and definite autoimmune OCD subtype are proposed.

Prefrontal cortical contributions to working memory loading, maintenance and recall are parsed by hippocampal-prefrontal oscillatory assembly dynamics

Working memory enables incorporation of recent experience into subsequent decision-making. This processing recruits both prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, where neurons encode task cues, rules and outcomes. However, precisely which information is carried when, and by which neurons, remains unclear. Using population decoding of activity in rat medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and dorsal hippocampal CA1, we confirm that mPFC populations lead in maintaining sample information across delays of an operant non-match to sample task, despite individual neurons firing only transiently. During sample encoding, distinct mPFC subpopulations joined distributed CA1-mPFC cell assemblies hallmarked by 4-5Hz rhythmic modulation; CA1-mPFC assemblies re-emerged during choice episodes, but were not 4-5Hz modulated. Delay-dependent errors arose when attenuated rhythmic assembly activity heralded collapse of sustained mPFC encoding; pharmacological disruption of CA1-mPFC assembly rhythmicity impaired task performance. Our results map component processes of memory-guided decisions onto heterogeneous CA1-mPFC subpopulations and the dynamics of physiologically distinct, distributed cell assemblies.

Effective Evidence-Informed Policy: A Partnership among Government, Implementers, and Researchers

Evidence matters for the effectiveness of public policies,but important informational frictions—that is, resistanceto obtaining or using information on the subject at hand—sometimes prevent it from shaping policy decisions.Hjort et al. (2021) showed that reducing those frictionscan change not only political leaders’ beliefs but alsothe policies they implement. One-way information, fromresearch to policy, may sometimes be insufficient, though.Policymakers may be agnostic about the effectiveness ofan intervention, or they may not know which of its featuresrequire adjustment. A process of policy experimentationmay be needed (Duflo 2017), in which policies arerigorously evaluated at a small scale, the findings of those evaluations inform the policy design, and a new evaluation determines the effectiveness of a fine-tuned version of the intervention, with the assessment continuing until the program is ready to be scaled up. This process requires very close collaboration among government, implementers, and researchers. The means by which evidence is produced is also important. A frequent criticism of researcher-designed interventions is that results may not be relevant. One reason is that pilot programme’s participants or circumstances may be atypical, with the result that the experimental treatment, even if implemented with fidelity, may not achieve similar outcomes in other settings (Al Ubaydli et al. 2017; Vivalt 2017). A second reason is that governments may lack the capability to implement with fidelity interventions tested in randomized control trials. A partnership between policymakers and researchers can help attenuate these concerns. A recent experience in Colombia provides a good example of such a partnership at work. “Let’s All Learn to Read” is an ambitious programme to improve literacy skills among elementary schoolchildren (Grades K–5). Spearheaded by the Luker Foundation, a local nongovernmental organisation, in collaboration with the Secretary of Education of Manizales (Colombia), the programme began with a systematic data collection effort in the municipality’s public primary schools to understand why students were failing to acquire the most basic academic skills. This led to several interventions over many years during which multidisciplinary teams of researchers working in close collaboration with local stakeholders and policymakers designed and evaluated different features of the programme.

MARINE REQUIREMENTS ELUCIDATION AND THE NATURE OF PRELIMINARY SHIP DESIGN

In 2003 the author produced a paper, entitled “Marine Design – Requirements Elucidation rather than Requirements Engineering”, for the 8th International Marine Design Conference. This was intended to follow on from van Griethuysen’s 2000 IMDC paper “Marine Design – Can Systems Engineering Cope?”, while drawing on the author’s recent experience in, firstly, directing and then being the MoD Future Surface Combatant (FSC) IPT Team Leader in the concept phase for that programme, where the intentions of Smart Procurement were applied. Since leaving the MoD in 2000, the author’s academic endeavours, at UCL, have both refined the ideas in the 2003 paper and, through a diverse range of ship design studies, provided further substantial evidence in favour of that paper’s argument. The current paper was originally presented to the first Institution conference on systems engineering. This is a revised version in the light of the discussion at that conference on the applicability of systems engineering practice to initial ship design and presents the arguments of both papers to a wider audience. The current paper looks at the origins of the concept of Requirements Engineering, within systems engineering, when specifically applied to naval engineering acquisition practice. This is contrasted with consideration of the actual nature of the initial design of physically large and complex systems, typified by modern naval vessels. This is followed by drawing specific insights from a series of design studies undertaken by the UCL Design Research Centre, under the direction of the author. These diverse and wide ranging initial design studies can be seen as examples of the sophistication of Requirements Elucidation, exemplifying how systems engineering practice can be applied to the critical early stages of naval ship design. The paper concludes by looking at the characteristics of the initial or concept design process by seeing Requirements Elucidation, as the strategy to tackle the inherently “wicked problem” of determining what is really wanted of a naval vessel and what can be afforded.

Alternative management of proximal aortic dissection: concept and application

Open surgery remains the mainstay of treatment for acute type A aortic dissection and should be offered to most patients. However, there are elderly patients in which surgical treatment may be deemed extremely high risk or futile. Endovascular treatment approaches have been applied to a small number of these patients and data are limited to case reports and small series. The application of endovascular therapies to ascending aorta is currently limited by anatomical and technical challenges posed by the dynamic motion of the ascending aorta and the proximity of vital structures to intended landing zones (aortic valve, coronary arteries, and supra-aortic branches) and lack of specially designed endografts to address these issues. While thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) has replaced open aortic repair for a suitable lesion in distal aortic dissection, some selected patients with type A aortic dissection at high surgical may be candidates. Hence, there is potential because, in proximal (Stanford type A) dissections, 10–30% of patients are not accepted for surgery, and 30–50% are technically amenable for TEVAR. Recent experience has shown that carefully selected patients with favorable anatomical characteristics may be subject to endovascular stent-graft treatment as a last resort with mixed results. Technical improvement is necessary to offer. satisfactory endovascular options in non-surgical candidates.

Self- and Other-Focused Emotional Intelligence, Situational Emotional Understanding, and Experience of Loss

The links between emotional intelligence and loss are under-researched, even though a lot of studies have investigated the psychological outcomes of traumatic experiences. Many people suffered multiple losses during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a loss of job, money, support services, or loved ones. The loss of a loved one might result in severe psychological trauma, and research suggests that early-life trauma relates to numerous forms of emotion dysregulation, including stress-reactivity. The consequences of loss for people with special needs deserve special attention since it often means not only the loss of a loved one but also the usual way of life. Thus, it is essential to analyze various aspects of loss experience, including the impact on emotional regulation, to reduce the harmful consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this research was to examine emotional intelligence in groups of those who have a recent experience of loss and those who have not and to establish the impact of the experience of loss on the human psyche and mental health. We have analyzed the results of a simple random sample of gymnasium students (n=362). We hypothesized that the recent loss of a loved one diminishes the ability to understand self and other focused emotions as well as situational emotions. The survey has revealed that respondents who experienced the loss of a loved one understood better how individuals felt in the presented situations than those who did not have such experience. The premise that people who have experienced the loss of a loved one have a lower understanding of emotions than their peers who did not have such an experience has not been confirmed.

How Peace Saves Lives? Evidence from Colombia

The victimization of civilians and combatants during internal conflicts causes large and persistent socioeconomic costs. Moreover, it is not clear whether peace negotiations can significantly reduce this burden, as some sources of harm persist well after conflicts end. This is the case of antipersonnel landmines, which are hidden underground and remain active for decades. Looking at the recent experience of Colombia, and using a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we study the conditions under which peace agreements reduce landmine blasts and victimization. Our findings point to the importance of post-conflict information sharing and comprehensive humanitarian mine clearance campaigns.