Alfred Mann Foundation

The unique intellectual and cultural attributes of Homo sapiens that arose during the Middle Stone Age are often ascribed to positive evolutionary development of novel physical or personality traits, but attempts to correlate cultural with genetic evolution have been unsuccessful. Humans are also unique, however, in their ability to ignore or override hormonal and pheromonal instincts that define the social structures and behaviors of other animals. Humans can rapidly invade new environments because they invent rather than inherit such behaviors, which cumulatively we call a culture. Downregulation of instincts makes the invention and learning of cultures necessary, which imposes both an opportunity and a burden on individuals and societies. Cultural evolution enables human societies to invent, promulgate, compete and evolve their social structures in a generation or two rather than the hundreds of generations required for significant genetic evolution. Nevertheless, residual instincts may conflict with and delimit novel cultures and their social structures.

Abstract Ultrasound is one of the most widely used non-invasive imaging modalities for internal organs, yet its application to the brain has been hindered for decades by the skull’s acoustic barrier. This same barrier has kept functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI)—an emerging technology capable of capturing brain-wide neural activity in real time at sub-100 μm resolution—from reaching its transformative potential in neuroscience and clinical medicine. Here, we present an acoustic transparency strategy by modulating skull acoustic properties, to render the brain visible to ultrasound. A brief topical application of an FDA-approved chelating agent matches the skull’s acoustic impedance and sound speed to those of soft tissue, enabling nearly complete ultrasound transmission (94.0 ± 4.4%) with minimal energy loss or distortion. Leveraging this discovery, we developed an acoustic-transparent fUSI platform that maps brain activation across the full brain depth at ∼20 μm spatial resolution without skull removal. This method enables safe, longitudinal brain imaging, is fully reversible, and is demonstrated to be applicable to the ex vivo human skull. This conceptually distinct paradigm—controlling acoustic wave propagation via acoustic property modulation—offers a practical and generalizable solution to one of the most persistent obstacles in transcranial ultrasound imaging, opening the door to broader clinical and research application of ultrasound neuroimaging.

This article will provide an overview of how speech and resonance can be impacted in children with cleft palate. The authors will outline evidence-based assessment and treatment approaches commonly used for children with cleft palate and provide information on current initiatives to provide speech therapy. The methods discussed will be the use of telehealth to provide access to speech therapy for patients in areas without speech-language pathologists and the use of speech therapy camps to offer intensive, limited-duration speech therapy for groups of children due to the lack of trained providers in certain geographical regions.

Objective: Concurrent anxiety and/or insomnia symptoms in women with postpartum depression (PPD) are common and associated with more severe PPD. The effects of zuranolone on concurrent anxiety and/or insomnia symptoms and on patient-perceived functional health in women with PPD in the ROBIN study are reported.Methods: The phase 3, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial (conducted January 2017-December 2018) included women aged 18-45 years, ≤ 6 months postpartum, with PPD (onset of DSM-5-defined major depressive episode in the third trimester or ≤ 4 weeks postpartum) and baseline 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS-17) total score ≥ 26. Women were randomized 1:1 to once-daily oral zuranolone 30 mg (n = 77) or placebo (n = 76) for 14 days with follow-up through day 45. Concurrent remission of depressive and anxiety symptoms (Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale total score ≤ 7 plus HDRS-17 total score ≤ 7 or Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale total score ≤ 10), improvement in insomnia symptoms, patient-perceived functional health, and treatment effect sizes described by number needed to treat (NNT) were assessed. Analyses were exploratory; P values are nominal.Results: Rates of concurrent remission of depressive and anxiety symptoms were higher with zuranolone versus placebo (P < .05) at days 3, 15, and 45; the rate of sustained concurrent remission (ie, at both days 15 and 45) was also higher with zuranolone (P < .05). Anxiety symptoms (assessed by HDRS-17 anxiety/somatization subscale and Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale anxiety subscale) improved with zuranolone versus placebo (P < .05) at days 3 through 45. Potential benefits on insomnia symptoms and patient-perceived functional health were observed. Day 15 NNTs were 5 for both HDRS-17 response and remission.Conclusions: Zuranolone was associated with concurrent improvements in depressive and anxiety symptoms, with beneficial effects on insomnia symptoms and patient-perceived functional health in adults with PPD.Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02978326.

O presente artigo explora os problemas e alternativas decorrentes dos impactos da pandemia de COVID-19 sobre os contratos de concessão no Brasil. Depois de apresentar os marcos normativos sobre concessões e algumas cláusulas contratuais pertinentes à matéria, promove-se análise dos potenciais problemas e alternativas presentes e futuros que serão enfrentados no âmbito dos contratos de concessão por força dos efeitos provocados pela crise do SARS-CoV-2, sob o marco teórico da Análise Econômica do Direito, especificamente da Teoria dos Custos de Transação.

Em tempos de pandemia do Covid-19 houve um aumento no tempo livre para a maioria da população. Frente a isso, com escolas e universidades fechadas os estudantes tiveram mais tempo ocioso para executar suas atividades fora desses ambientes. Assim, sabendo da importância do uso adequado do tempo livre, foi desenvolvido o estudo em questão, buscando analisar o aproveitamento do tempo livre, focado no público de estudantes. O trabalho foi realizado através de uma pesquisa quali-quantitativa, com a aplicação de um questionário online confidencial, com o objetivo de verificar o uso do tempo livre de estudantes, através da relação entre o período antes e durante o atual cenário pandêmico. Os dados da pesquisa apontam que a maioria dos estudantes ficou confinada com suas famílias em algum momento da pandemia, colocando estes jovens diante de uma realidade diferente do que estavam acostumados, ficando mais tempo no interior de suas residências, os forçando a adaptação de novos hábitos de rotina para aproveitar seu tempo livre, que consequentemente, os levaram a aumentar a utilização de meios virtuais. Os resultados da pesquisa apontam que as atividades escolhidas pelos estudantes para desfrutar do tempo livre durante o confinamento, muitas vezes, não foram inteligentes e sadias, interferindo assim, negativamente na sua saúde mental. Essas atitudes contribuíram no surgimento de diferentes sinais psíquicos como estresse, alteração no sono, ansiedade, tédio, alteração de humor etc. Para amenizar os sintomas trazidos pela pandemia, muitos jovens aumentaram seu consumo de álcool como uma válvula de escape para atual situação pandêmica.

Patient compliance during drug trials and adherence to treatment regimens after a medical diagnosis are known pervasive problems in the practice of medicine. Any practical solution to this problem will require an easy method to identify and to verify the administration of orally-ingested drugs. Deep learning algorithms were applied to images of drugs in pill form. These images were taken using both a smart phone camera and using a hyperspectral imager based on a low-cost CMOS camera. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, 1, 7SS images were taken using a normal CMOS camera of four common pill types. The images of acetaminophen, acetylsalicylic acid and ibuprofen were taken using various backgrounds, image angles, and lighting conditions. The results show over 90% accuracy when the convolutional neural network is trained and tested using only normal camera images. The results improved to 100% when trained and tested using4 baseline “datacubes” taken with a low-cost hyperspectral camera solution; however, due to matrix dimensional differences, a ID CNN was used in this case, while a 2D CNN was used with the normal camera images. Each hyperspectral cube included information from effectively 31 wavebands. With more hyperspectral images to expand the drug training set, this approach would be promising for daily use to quickly identify similar pills in the clinical or home environment as well as in smart phone apps to remotely monitor patient compliance to a drug-based treatment regimen.

Parmi les historiens franais en lien avec leurs confrres sovitiques, Albert Soboul occupait une place de choix.Dans les annes 1950, il tablit des relations suivies avec Viatcheslav Volguine

An integrated feedback controlled class E coil driver for wirelessly powering biomedical implants was implemented in a high voltage 0.18 $\mu{\rm m}$ CMOS process. The coil driver was compensated using a discrete switched-capacitor controller for reducing the compensation capacitor area. A linearized discrete-time model was also developed for analyzing the stability of the proposed coil driver. Different methods to reduce the on-resistance of the coil driver switch had also been investigated. When compared to the previous design, the figure of merit for measuring the effectiveness of generating coil current was improved over 2.5 times. ASK modulation on the coil current was achieved by switching on or off an additional off-chip capacitor. Power increase during ASK modulation was reduced by 49.4% when compared to the previous design.