Dietary Sphingomyelin Metabolism and Roles in Gut Health and Cognitive Development

Sphingomyelin (SM) is a widely occurring sphingolipid that is a major plasma membrane constituent. Milk and dairy products are rich SM sources, and human milk has high SM content. Numerous studies have evaluated the roles of SM in maintaining cell membrane structure and cellular signal transduction. There has been a growing interest in exploring the role of dietary SM, especially from human milk, in imparting health benefits. This review focuses on recent publications regarding SM content in several dietary sources and dietary SM metabolism. SM digestion and absorption are slow and incomplete and mainly occur in the middle sections of the small intestine. This review also evaluates the effect of dietary SM on gut health and cognitive development. Studies indicate that SM may promote gut health by reducing intestinal cholesterol absorption in adults. However, there has been a lack of data supporting clinical trials. An association between milk SM and neural development is evident before childhood. Hence, additional studies and well-designed randomized controlled trials that incorporate dietary SM evaluation, SM metabolism, and its long-term functions on infants and children are required.

Uncovering long-term existence of a silent short-term memory trace

Active recall of short-term memory (STM) is known to last for a few hours, but whether STM has long-term functions is unknown. Here we show that, STM can be optogenetically retrieved at a time point during which natural recall is not possible, uncovering the long-term existence of a silent STM engram. Moreover, re-training within 3 days led to natural long-term recall, indicating facilitated consolidation. Calcium imaging revealed hippocampal CA1 reactivations of the STM trace during post-learning sleep. Inhibiting offline CA1 activity, N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor activity, or protein synthesis after first exposure to the STM-forming event impaired the future re-exposure-facilitated consolidation, which highlights a role of protein synthesis and sleep in storing a silent STM trace. These results provide evidence that STM is not completely lost within hours and demonstrates a possible two-step STM consolidation, first storage as a silent engram, then transformation into an active state by recurrence within 3 days.

A New Citation Recommendation Strategy Based on Term Functions in Related Studies Section

Purpose Researchers frequently encounter the following problems when writing scientific articles: (1) Selecting appropriate citations to support the research idea is challenging. (2) The literature review is not conducted extensively, which leads to working on a research problem that others have well addressed. This study focuses on citation recommendation in the related studies section by applying the term function of a citation context, potentially improving the efficiency of writing a literature review. Design/methodology/approach We present nine term functions with three newly created and six identified from existing literature. Using these term functions as labels, we annotate 531 research papers in three topics to evaluate our proposed recommendation strategy. BM25 and Word2vec with VSM are implemented as the baseline models for the recommendation. Then the term function information is applied to enhance the performance. Findings The experiments show that the term function-based methods outperform the baseline methods regarding the recall, precision, and F1-score measurement, demonstrating that term functions are useful in identifying valuable citations. Research limitations The dataset is insufficient due to the complexity of annotating citation functions for paragraphs in the related studies section. More recent deep learning models should be performed to future validate the proposed approach. Practical implications The citation recommendation strategy can be helpful for valuable citation discovery, semantic scientific retrieval, and automatic literature review generation. Originality/value The proposed citation function-based citation recommendation can generate intuitive explanations of the results for users, improving the transparency, persuasiveness, and effectiveness of recommender systems.

On ring-like structures of lattice-Ordered numerical events

Let [Formula: see text] be a set of states of a physical system. The probabilities [Formula: see text] of the occurrence of an event when the system is in different states [Formula: see text] define a function from [Formula: see text] to [Formula: see text] called a numerical event or, more accurately, an [Formula: see text]-probability. Sets of [Formula: see text]-probabilities ordered by the partial order of functions give rise to so-called algebras of [Formula: see text]-probabilities, in particular, to the ones that are lattice-ordered. Among these, there are the [Formula: see text]-algebras known from probability theory and the Hilbert-space logics which are important in quantum-mechanics. Any algebra of [Formula: see text]-probabilities can serve as a quantum-logic, and it is of special interest when this logic turns out to be a Boolean algebra because then the observed physical system will be classical. Boolean algebras are in one-to-one correspondence to Boolean rings, and the question arises to find an analogue correspondence for lattice-ordered algebras of [Formula: see text]-probabilities generalizing the correspondence between Boolean algebras and Boolean rings. We answer this question by defining ring-like structures of events (RLSEs). First, the structure of RLSEs is revealed and Boolean rings among RLSEs are characterized. Then we establish how RLSEs correspond to lattice-ordered algebras of numerical events. Further, functions for associating lattice-ordered algebras of [Formula: see text]-probabilities to RLSEs are studied. It is shown that there are only two ways to assign lattice-ordered algebras of [Formula: see text]-probabilities to RLSEs if one restricts the corresponding mappings to term functions over the underlying orthomodular lattice. These term functions are the very functions by which also the Boolean algebras can be assigned to Boolean rings.

Functional Assessment of Eating Disorders and Their Maintenance

One shared feature between eating disorders and anxiety-based disorders is the functional relationship between fears and associated avoidance and safety behaviors. Patients with eating disorders are individuals; thus, they will experience different symptoms. The clinician’s task is to understand those symptoms and plan treatment accordingly. That understanding is much easier when clinicians’ focus their assessment on both the short- and long-term functions that eating disorder behaviors serve. Identifying those functions allows clinicians to engage their patients and their family in making changes, because patients and families will understand that their existing responses are not working and are worsening the ED symptoms.

Automatic Estimation of Soil Biochar Quantity via Hyperspectral Imaging

Biochar soil amendment is globally recognized as an emerging approach to mitigate CO2 emissions and increase crop yield. Because the durability and changes of biochar may affect its long term functions, it is important to quantify biochar in soil after application. In this chapter, an automatic soil biochar estimation method is proposed by analysis of hyperspectral images captured by cameras that cover both visible and infrared light wavelengths. The soil image is considered as a mixture of soil and biochar signals, and then hyperspectral unmixing methods are applied to estimate the biochar proportion at each pixel. The final percentage of biochar can be calculated by taking the mean of the proportion of hyperspectral pixels. Three different models of unmixing are described in this chapter. Their experimental results are evaluated by polynomial regression and root mean square errors against the ground truth data collected in the environmental labs. The results show that hyperspectral unmixing is a promising method to measure the percentage of biochar in the soil.

Resource acquisition and allocation traits in symbiotic rhizobia with implications for life-history outside of legume hosts

Resources that microbial symbionts obtain from hosts may enhance fitness during free-living stages when resources are comparatively scarce. For rhizobia in legume root nodules, diverting resources from nitrogen fixation to polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) has been discussed as a source of host–symbiont conflict. Yet, little is known about natural variation in PHB storage and its implications for rhizobial evolution. We therefore measured phenotypic variation in natural rhizobia populations and investigated how PHB might contribute to fitness in the free-living stage. We found that natural populations of rhizobia from Glycine max and Chamaecrista fasciculata had substantial, heritable variation in PHB acquisition during symbiosis. A model simulating temperature-dependent metabolic activity showed that the observed range of stored PHB per cell could support survival for a few days, for active cells, or over a century for sufficiently dormant cells. Experiments with field-isolated Bradyrhizobium in starvation culture suggest PHB is partitioned asymmetrically in dividing cells, consistent with individual-level bet-hedging previously demonstrated in E. meliloti . High-PHB isolates used more PHB over the first month, yet still retained more PHB for potential long-term survival in a dormant state. These results suggest that stored resources like PHB may support both short-term and long-term functions that contribute to fitness in the free-living stage.

Good, theories of the

‘Good’ is the most general term of positive evaluation, used to recommend or express approval in a wide range of contexts. It indicates that a thing is desirable or worthy of choice, so that normally, if you have reason to want a certain kind of thing, you also have reason to prefer a good thing of that kind. A theory of the good may consist in a general account of the good, which is meant to apply to all good things; or in a definition of ‘good’, an account of how the term functions in the language. Theories of the good have metaphysical implications about the relations of fact and value. Many ancient and medieval philosophers believed in the ultimate identity of the real and the good. Modern philosophers reject this identification, and have held a range of positions: realists, for example, hold that the good is part of reality, while certain moral sense theorists hold that when we call something good we are projecting human interests onto reality; and emotivists hold that we use the term ‘good’ only to signify subjective approval. Theorists of the good also categorize different kinds of goodness and explain how they are related. Good things are standardly classified as ends, which are valued for their own sakes, or means, valued for the sake of the ends they promote. Some philosophers also divide them into intrinsic goods, which have their value in themselves, and extrinsic goods, which get their value from their relation to something else. Various theories have been held about the relation between these two distinctions – about whether an end must be something with intrinsic value. Philosophers also distinguish subjective goods – things which are good for someone in particular – from objective goods, which are good from everyone’s point of view. Views about how these kinds of goodness are related have important implications for moral philosophy. Usually, a theory of the good is constructed in the hope of shedding light on more substantive questions, such as what makes a person, an action, or a human life good. These questions raise issues about the relation between ethical and other values. For example, we may ask whether moral virtue is a special sort of goodness, or just the ordinary sort applied to persons. Or, since actions are valued as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, we may ask how these values are related to the action’s goodness or badness. We may also pose the question of whether a life that is good in the sense of being happy must also be a morally good or virtuous life. This last question has occupied the attention of philosophers ever since Plato.