New Translational Trends in Personalized Medicine: Autologous Peripheral Blood Stem Cells and Plasma for COVID-19 Patient

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), still remains a severe threat. At the time of writing this paper, the second infectious wave has caused more than 280,000 deaths all over the world. Italy was one of the first countries involved, with more than 200,000 people reported as infected and 30,000 deaths. There are no specific treatments for COVID-19 and the vaccine still remains somehow inconclusive. The world health community is trying to define and share therapeutic protocols in early and advanced clinical stages. However, numbers remain critical with a serious disease rate of 14%, ending with sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), multiple organ failure (MOF) and vascular and thromboembolic findings. The mortality rate was estimated within 2–3%, and more than double that for individuals over 65 years old; almost one patient in three dies in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Efforts for effective solutions are underway with multiple lines of investigations, and health authorities have reported success treating infected patients with donated plasma from survivors of the illness, the proposed benefit being protective antibodies formed by the survivors. Plasma transfusion, blood and stem cells, either autologous or allograft transplantation, are not novel therapies, and in this short paper, we propose therapeutic autologous plasma and peripheral blood stem cells as a possible treatment for fulminant COVID-19 infection.

Pooled testing efficiency increases with test frequency

Pooled testing increases efficiency by grouping individual samples and testing the combined sample, such that many individuals can be cleared with one negative test. This short paper demonstrates that pooled testing is particularly advantageous in the setting of pandemics, given repeated testing, rapid spread, and uncertain risk. Repeated testing mechanically lowers the infection probability at the time of the next test by removing positives from the population. This effect alone means that increasing frequency by x times only increases expected tests by around x. However, this calculation omits a further benefit of frequent testing: Removing infections from the population lowers intragroup transmission, which lowers infection probability and generates further efficiency. For this reason, increasing testing frequency can paradoxically reduce total testing cost. Our calculations are based on the assumption that infection rates are known, but predicting these rates is challenging in a fast-moving pandemic. However, given that frequent testing naturally suppresses the mean and variance of infection rates, we show that our results are very robust to uncertainty and misprediction. Finally, we note that efficiency further increases given natural sampling pools (e.g., workplaces, classrooms) that induce correlated risk via local transmission. We conclude that frequent pooled testing using natural groupings is a cost-effective way to provide consistent testing of a population to suppress infection risk in a pandemic.

Monitoring Human-Wildlife Interactions in National Parks with Crowdsourced Data and Deep Learning

This short paper summarizes the first research stage for applying deep learning techniques to capture human-wildlife interactions in national parks from crowd-sourced data. The results from objection detection, image captioning, and distance calculation are reported. We were able to categorize animal types, summarize visitor behaviors in the pictures, and calculate distances between visitors and animals with different levels of accuracy. Future development will focus on getting more training data and field experiments to collect ground truth on animal types and distances to animals. More in-depth manual coding is needed to categorize visitor behavior into acceptable and unacceptable ones.

Unwanted taxpayers

While a relatively large amount of research is being conducted in prisons around the world, the number of searches allowed in penitentiary institutions in Hungary is very low. The problem is not only with the number of researches allowed, but also that in many cases the researcher is forced to make serious trade-offs to obtain a permit. And even if that wasn’t enough to get the researcher to refrain from doing his or her research, the penitentiary is constantly making it harder to complete it. In this short paper, I would like to show how my reintegration research has been hampered. It is as if the goal is to prevent convicts from receiving help for a successful reintegration.

The future of climate-smart dryland cereals and legumes in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa

This document is part of a series of short papers on “The Future of X”, produced as part of foresight-related research supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets, and edited by Keith Wiebe (IFPRI) and Steven Prager (Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT). This short paper is intended to provide a focused, forward-looking perspective on the future of grain legumes and dryland cereals in the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

School Professionals’ awareness of Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale (SPACES): Initial steps towards the development of new scale

This short paper describes the initial scale development of an instrument designed to measure school professionals' awareness of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), their impact and practices that can support children who have been affected by ACEs.

Modified forms of easyCLIP

The easyCLIP protocol describes a method for both normal CLIP library construction and the absolute quantification of RNA cross-linking rates, data which could be usefully combined to analyze RNA-protein interactions. Using these cross-linking metrics, significant interactions could be defined relative to a set of random non-RBPs. The original easyCLIP protocol did not use index reads, required custom sequencing primers, and did not have an easily reproducible analysis workflow. This short paper attempts to amend these deficiencies. It also includes some additional technical experiments and investigates the usage of alternative adapters. The results here are intended to allow more options to easily perform and analyze easyCLIP.

Peacocks and the Zeta distributions

We prove in this short paper that the stochastic process defined by: $$Y_{t} := \frac{X_{t+1}}{\mathbb{E}\left[ X_{t+1}\right]},\; t\geq a > 1,$$ is an increasing process for the convex order,where Χt a random variable taking values in N with probability P(Χt = n) = n-t/(𝛇(t)) and 𝛇(t) = +∞∑k=1(1/kt), ∀t > 1.

A screening checklist to minimize the adverse effects of cosmetic dermatological procedures; a short paper (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Cosmetic dermatological procedures which are aimed at enhancing the external appearance have troublesome yet preventable adverse effects. At present, there is a lack of a comprehensive screening guideline to detect patients with risk factors for such adverse effects. OBJECTIVE To introduce a comprehensive screening checklist to pick up the patients’ risk factors in advance, in order to prevent or minimize adverse effects from cosmetic dermatological procedures. METHODS The checklist was administered to 1150 patients attending an outpatient dermatology clinic for cosmetic dermatological procedures. Checklist composed of 30 ‘yes/no’ type questions and 7 other components in the pre-procedure workup. RESULTS Except for two risk factors (being pregnant and having a pacemaker inserted), all other assessed possible risk factors were present in one or more patients who attended for procedures. The most prevalent risk factor was the current use of medications in 226 (19.65%) patients. The other commonly found risk factors were: lack of full understanding of the procedure (14.52%) and phobia/fear of injections (9.30%). CONCLUSIONS The screening checklist that we used is a simple yet comprehensive tool for minimizing the possible adverse effects of cosmetic dermatological procedures. We were able to postpone, take remedial actions or alter the cosmetic dermatological procedures after going through the checklist and increase patient satisfaction and improve the safety of the doctor as well. CLINICALTRIAL Not applicable

Using Moodle Quiz to respond to emergency: a case study with a tertiary L2 French teacher

This short paper reports on the case of a tertiary level French language practitioner self-training in using Moodle Quiz during the Covid-19 pandemic online emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al., 2020). As no teacher training program included a topic such as ‘how to deal with the pandemic’, switching to online teaching was done under emergency conditions (MacIntyre, Gregersen, & Mercer, 2020). The practitioner had taken advantage of the situation and explored ways of self-training. She took advantage of Moodle Quiz (MQ) affordances. She experimented with different ways MQ could be used to construct a diverse number of quiz activities, embedded with audio and video, infused with elements of constructivism, and aiming at catering for the aims and expected outcomes of the specific students and course. Self-training helped the practitioner face the challenges of online emergency teaching as she developed knowledge, skills, and experiences necessary for creating online interactive activities.