Greater and More Natural Use of the Upper Limbs During Everyday Life by Former Amputees Versus Prosthesis Users

Hand loss profoundly impacts daily functioning. Reversal of amputation through hand replantation or transplantation offers an alternative to prosthetics for some. Whether recipients exhibit more extensive and natural limb use during everyday life than prosthesis users is, however, unknown. We asked unilateral, below-elbow amputees (N = 22), hand graft recipients (transplants N = 4; replants N = 2), and healthy matched controls (N = 20) to wear wireless accelerometers distally on their forearms/prostheses and proximally on their upper arms. These units captured limb activity over 3 days within participants’ natural environments. Graft recipients exhibited heavier reliance on their affected hands compared to amputees’ reliance on their prostheses, P < .001. Likewise, reliance on the injured side upper arm was also greater for hand graft recipients than amputees, regardless of whether they were wearing their prostheses, P < .05 in both cases. Hand graft recipients, like healthy controls, also relied more on forearm vs upper arm movements when controlling their limbs, P < .001. Compared with conventional prosthesis users, graft recipients exhibited more extensive and natural functioning of the upper limbs during everyday activities. This information is an important addition to other considerations when evaluating risk-benefit of these treatment alternatives.

ARBITRATION JUDICIARY – NEW QUALITY OF DISPUTE RESOLUTION

Arbitration judiciary, often referred to as arbitration, is commonly presented in the literature as one of the alternative methods of dispute resolution. The objections to the irregularities of the judicial state system and legitimate expectations in terms of reducing the time and costs of the proceedings guarantee the parties real access to court and protection of their rights by drawing up an arbitration clause. As part of the mutual relations of arbitration with respect to alternative dispute resolution methods, it should be emphasized that arbitration is a real alternative to the state justice administered by the common courts. It is also worth pointing to the possibilities and the need for disputes resolution by arbitration constituting as an important addition to the course of justice made by courts. The consistent intention to resolve the conflict reflected in the arbitration agreement and the exceptional opportunities for the parties to participate in the arbitration proceedings constitute a new content of the culture and legal awareness of citizens and the creation of modern mutual relations between the parties of broadly understood civil law relations. An arbitration clause, the implementation of arbitration proceedings and the resolution of a dispute within the framework of arbitration may and should therefore constitute a new quality in the administration of justice.

Auditory-vocal integration impairment: New challenges and opportunities for voice assessment and therapy

This reflection paper addresses the importance of the interaction between voice perception and voice production, emphasizing the processes of auditory-vocal integration that are not yet widely reported in the context of voice clinicians. Given the above, this article seeks to 1) highlight the important link between voice production and voice perception and 2) consider whether this relationship might be exploited clinically for diagnostic purposes and therapeutic benefit. Existing theories on speech production and its interaction with auditory perception provide context for discussing why the evaluation of auditory-vocal processes could help identify associated origins of dysphonia and inform the clinician around appropriate management strategies. Incorporating auditory-vocal integration assessment through sensorimotor adaptation paradigm testing could prove to be an important addition to voice assessment protocols at the clinical level. Further, if future studies can specify the means to manipulate and enhance a person’s auditory-vocal integration, the efficiency of voice therapy could be increased, leading to improved quality of life for people with voice disorders.

Do chimpanzee pant hoots have semantic content?

I read with great interest the exciting study by Leroux et al. [(2021) Anim Behav 179, 49–50] who investigated the nature of pant-hoot–food-call combinations in a community of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) at the Budongo Conservation Field Station, Budongo Forest, Uganda. The authors propose, among others, that they reveal the first evidence that wild chimpanzees are able “to combine meaning-bearing units into larger structures” (i.e., that they are capable of semantic compositionality and, by extension, syntax). Their analysis represents an important addition to a growing body of research and discussions on communicational combinatoriality in wild primates and specifically apes, and, by extension, extinct hominins. Incidentally, I have recently published a paper in Animal Cognition in which I also suggested, based on a reanalysis of existing data, that wild chimpanzees can display semantic compositionality and syntax in their communication [Gabrić (2021) Anim Cogn, online ahead of print]. In the present commentary, I argue that Leroux et al.’s (2021) interpretation of the data may be ungrounded given that (1) unlike for food calls, there is currently very little if any indication in the scientific literature that pant-hoots have semantic content (i.e., are meaningful) and given that (2) Leroux et al. (2021) did not investigate their a priori assumption that the observed pant-hoots are in fact semantic. Since pant-hoots feature prominently in the chimpanzee vocal repertoire and the debate on their eventual semanticity is still wide open, this represents a fine opportunity to revisit this issue in the context of Leroux et al.’s (2021) study. Their paper further raises several other less significant questions.

MCMA: A Symbolic Multitrack Contrapuntal Music Archive

We present Multitrack Contrapuntal Music Archive (MCMA, available at https://mcma.readthedocs.io), a symbolic dataset of pieces specifically curated to comprise, for any given polyphonic work, independent voices. So far, MCMA consists only of pieces from the Baroque repertoire but we aim to extend it to other contrapuntal music. MCMA is FAIR-compliant and it is geared towards musicological tasks such as (computational) analysis or education, as it brings to the fore contrapuntal interactions by explicit and independent representation. Furthermore, it affords for a more apt usage of recent advances in the field of natural language processing (e.g., neural machine translation). For example, MCMA can be particularly useful in the context of language-based machine learning models for music generation. Despite its current modest size, we believe MCMA to be an important addition to online contrapuntal music databases, and we thus open it to contributions from the wider community, in the hope that MCMA can continue to grow beyond our efforts. In this article, we provide the rationale for this corpus, suggest possible use cases, offer an overview of the compiling process (data sourcing and processing), and present a brief statistical analysis of the corpus at the time of writing. Finally, future work that we endeavor to undertake is discussed.

The Sensitivity of Wellbeing to Inequalities in Local Wellbeing

<p>Research points to a robust negative relationship between average levels of subjective wellbeing and the distribution of subjective wellbeing. The fact that our wellbeing falls as wellbeing distributions widen suggests we care about inequalities in the lives of others. Central to this relationship is the role of place and human geography. The literature relating wellbeing to inequality in wellbeing is confined almost exclusively to inter-country comparisons. Virtually no attention has been paid to the relationship between wellbeing and inequality within countries - at the level of regions and below. The aim of this thesis is to test the generality of the inter-country evidence in the sub-national context. I present four hypotheses which I test on three separate cross-sectional surveys: the New Zealand Quality of Life Survey, The New Zealand General Social Survey and the survey of Māori wellbeing, Te Kupenga. I follow the literature in using the standard deviation of wellbeing as a measure of wellbeing inequality. In each case the negative relationship between individual wellbeing and wellbeing inequality is clearly identifiable. The wellbeing effect of living in a place one standard deviation higher than another is roughly equivalent to the difference between the wellbeing of someone who is fully employed and someone who is unemployed and looking for work. Clearly we are highly sensitive to disparities in the subjective wellbeing of those around us. I conduct several tests of the psychological drivers that lie behind the wellbeing response to local inequality in wellbeing. The first tests fairness perceptions, and finds sensitivity to wellbeing inequality to be higher among those who do not believe society is intrinsically fair. My test of altruism, while not as convincing empirically, suggests altruistic people may also be less affected by local wellbeing inequality. Both conclusions are consistent with the implied causation running from inequality to wellbeing. While an important addition to the wellbeing literature, the more important implication of my findings is political. As the New Zealand Local Government Act comes up for renewal, the evidence I have assembled strongly supports providing local government with a clear purpose and the necessary funding to address the underlying causes of local inequalities in wellbeing. On empirical grounds alone, reducing wellbeing inequality is likely to make us all much happier.</p>

The Sensitivity of Wellbeing to Inequalities in Local Wellbeing

<p>Research points to a robust negative relationship between average levels of subjective wellbeing and the distribution of subjective wellbeing. The fact that our wellbeing falls as wellbeing distributions widen suggests we care about inequalities in the lives of others. Central to this relationship is the role of place and human geography. The literature relating wellbeing to inequality in wellbeing is confined almost exclusively to inter-country comparisons. Virtually no attention has been paid to the relationship between wellbeing and inequality within countries - at the level of regions and below. The aim of this thesis is to test the generality of the inter-country evidence in the sub-national context. I present four hypotheses which I test on three separate cross-sectional surveys: the New Zealand Quality of Life Survey, The New Zealand General Social Survey and the survey of Māori wellbeing, Te Kupenga. I follow the literature in using the standard deviation of wellbeing as a measure of wellbeing inequality. In each case the negative relationship between individual wellbeing and wellbeing inequality is clearly identifiable. The wellbeing effect of living in a place one standard deviation higher than another is roughly equivalent to the difference between the wellbeing of someone who is fully employed and someone who is unemployed and looking for work. Clearly we are highly sensitive to disparities in the subjective wellbeing of those around us. I conduct several tests of the psychological drivers that lie behind the wellbeing response to local inequality in wellbeing. The first tests fairness perceptions, and finds sensitivity to wellbeing inequality to be higher among those who do not believe society is intrinsically fair. My test of altruism, while not as convincing empirically, suggests altruistic people may also be less affected by local wellbeing inequality. Both conclusions are consistent with the implied causation running from inequality to wellbeing. While an important addition to the wellbeing literature, the more important implication of my findings is political. As the New Zealand Local Government Act comes up for renewal, the evidence I have assembled strongly supports providing local government with a clear purpose and the necessary funding to address the underlying causes of local inequalities in wellbeing. On empirical grounds alone, reducing wellbeing inequality is likely to make us all much happier.</p>

In vitro co-metabolism of epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) by the mucin-degrading bacterium Akkermansia muciniphila

Akkermansia muciniphila is a Gram-negative bacterium that resides within the gut mucus layer, and plays an important role in promoting gut barrier integrity, modulating the immune response and inhibiting gut inflammation. Growth stimulation of A. muciniphila by polyphenols including epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) from difference sources is well-documented. However, no published in vitro culture data on utilization of polyphenols by A. muciniphila are available, and the mechanism of growth-stimulating prebiotic effect of polyphenols on it remains unclear. Here in vitro culture studies have been carried out on the metabolism of EGCG by A. muciniphila in the presence of either mucin or glucose. We found that A. muciniphila did not metabolize EGCG alone but could co-metabolize it together with both these substrates in the presence of mineral salts and amino acids for mucin and protein sources for glucose. Our metabolomic data show that A. muciniphila converts EGCG to gallic acid, epigallocatechin, and (-)-epicatechin through ester hydrolysis. The (-)-epicatechin formed is then further converted to hydroxyhydroquinone. Co-metabolism of A. muciniphila of EGCG together with either mucin or glucose promoted substantially its growth, which serves as a further demonstration of the growth-promoting effect of polyphenols on A. muciniphila and provides an important addition to the currently available proposed mechanisms of polyphenolic prebiotic effects on A. muciniphila.

A live attenuated influenza virus-vectored intranasal COVID-19 vaccine provides rapid, prolonged, and broad protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection

Remarkable progress has been made in developing intramuscular vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2); however, they are limited with respect to eliciting local immunity in the respiratory tract, which is the primary infection site for SARS-CoV-2. To overcome the limitations of intramuscular vaccines, we constructed a nasal vaccine candidate based on an influenza vector by inserting a gene encoding the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, named CA4-dNS1-nCoV-RBD (dNS1-RBD). A preclinical study showed that in hamsters challenged 1 day and 7 days after single-dose vaccination or 6 months after booster vaccination, dNS1-RBD largely mitigated lung pathology, with no loss of body weight, caused by either the prototype-like strain or beta variant of SARS-CoV-2. Lasted data showed that the animals could be well protected against beta variant challenge 9 months after vaccination. Notably, the weight loss and lung pathological changes of hamsters could still be significantly reduced when the hamster was vaccinated 24 h after challenge. Moreover, such cellular immunity is relatively unimpaired for the most concerning SARS-CoV-2 variants. The protective immune mechanism of dNS1-RBD could be attributed to the innate immune response in the nasal epithelium, local RBD-specific T cell response in the lung, and RBD-specific IgA and IgG response. Thus, this study demonstrates that the intranasally delivered dNS1-RBD vaccine candidate may offer an important addition to fight against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, compensating limitations of current intramuscular vaccines, particularly at the start of an outbreak.

Noise rejection through an improved quantum illumination protocol

Quantum illumination protocols can be implemented to improve imaging performance in the low photon flux regime even in the presence of both background light and sensor noise. However, the extent to which this noise can be rejected is limited by the rate of accidental correlations resulting from the detection of photon or noise events that are not quantum-correlated. Here we present an improved protocol that rejects up to $$\gtrsim 99.9\%$$ ≳ 99.9 % of background light and sensor noise in the low photon flux regime, improving upon our previous results by an order of magnitude. This improvement, which requires no information regarding the scene or noise statistics, will enable extremely low light quantum imaging techniques to be applied in environments previously thought difficult and be an important addition to the development of covert imaging, quantum microscopes, and quantum LIDAR.