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The optimal assessment of systemic and lung decongestion during acute heart failure is not clearly defined. We evaluated whether inferior vena cava (IVC) and pulmonary ultrasound (CAVAL US) guided therapy is superior to standard care in reducing subclinical congestion at discharge in patients with AHF. CAVAL US-AHF was an investigator-initiated, single-center, single-blind, randomized controlled trial. A daily quantitative ultrasound protocol using the 8-zone method was used and treatment was adjusted according to an algorithm. The primary endpoint was the presence of more than 5 B-lines and/or an increase in IVC diameter and collapsibility at discharge. And secondary endpoint exploratory outcome was the composite of readmission for HF, unplanned visit for worsening HF or death at 90 days Sixty patients were randomized to CAVAL US (n = 30) or control (n = 30). The primary endpoint was achieved in 4 patients (13.3%) in the CAVAL US group and 20 patients (66.6%) in the control group (P < .001). A significant reduction in HF readmission, unplanned visit for worsening HF or death at 90 days was seen in the CAVAL US group (13.3% vs 36.7%; log rank P = .038). Other endpoints such as NT-proBNP reduction at discharge showed a nonstatistically significant reduction in the CAVAL US group (48% IQR 27-67 vs 37% -3-59; P = .09). Safety outcomes were similar in both groups. IVC and lung ultrasound-guided therapy in AHF patients significantly reduced subclinical congestion at discharge. CAVAL US-AHF provides preliminary evidence for the potential use of a simple technique to guide decongestive therapy during hospitalization for AHF, which may reduce the composite outcome at 90 days.

Although mice locate resources using turbulent airborne odor plumes, the stochasticity and intermittency of fluctuating plumes create challenges for interpreting odor cues in natural environments. Population activity within the olfactory bulb (OB) is thought to process this complex spatial and temporal information, but how plume dynamics impact odor representation in this early stage of the mouse olfactory system is unknown. Limitations in odor detection technology have made it difficult to measure plume fluctuations while simultaneously recording from the mouse's brain. Thus, previous studies have measured OB activity following controlled odor pulses of varying profiles or frequencies, but this approach only captures a subset of features found within olfactory plumes. Adequately sampling this feature space is difficult given a lack of knowledge regarding which features the brain extracts during exposure to natural olfactory scenes. Here we measured OB responses to naturally fluctuating odor plumes using a miniature, adapted odor sensor combined with wide-field GCaMP6f signaling from the dendrites of mitral and tufted (MT) cells imaged in olfactory glomeruli of head-fixed mice. We precisely tracked plume dynamics and imaged glomerular responses to this fluctuating input, while varying flow conditions across a range of ethologically-relevant values. We found that a consistent portion of MT activity in glomeruli follows odor concentration dynamics, and the strongest responding glomeruli are the best at following fluctuations within odor plumes. Further, the reliability and average response magnitude of glomerular populations of MT cells are affected by the flow condition in which the animal samples the plume, with the fidelity of plume following by MT cells increasing in conditions of higher flow velocity where odor dynamics result in intermittent whiffs of stronger concentration. Thus, the flow environment in which an animal encounters an odor has a large-scale impact on the temporal representation of an odor plume in the OB. Additionally, across flow conditions odor dynamics are a major driver of activity in many glomerular networks. Taken together, these data demonstrate that plume dynamics structure olfactory representations in the first stage of odor processing in the mouse olfactory system.

Predicting the response of rocky coasts to different erosional agents remains a great challenge at present. The episodic and discontinuous nature of the instability processes typical of hard bedrocks makes it difficult to make predictions based on observations over short research periods. This work aims to contribute to the understanding of the geomorphological evolution of rocky cliffs by means of a case study of a geologically complex cliff (developed on quartzite and slate) located on the Atlantic coast of Spain. The analysis of high-precision topographic models and orthophotographs, the use of geomatics techniques and geomorphological characterization have made it possible to define a model of the cliff behaviour. The results indicate that the structure of the bedrock determines the type of instability processes affecting the cliff and the morphology of the associated deposits. Lithology is the other main conditioning factor: while slate is easily eroded, quartzite offers greater strength and its detached blocks act as an effective natural defence element protecting the cliff and slowing down the coastal retreat. The evolution model established for this cliff explains the absence of retreat in the study period (2003–2022) and confirms the important role of local factors in cliff evolution.

In natural odor environments, odor travels in plumes. Odor concentration dynamics change in characteristic ways across the width and length of a plume. Thus, spatiotemporal dynamics of plumes have informative features for animals navigating to an odor source. Population activity in the olfactory bulb (OB) has been shown to follow odor concentration across plumes to a moderate degree (Lewis et al., 2021). However, it is unknown whether the ability to follow plume dynamics is driven by individual cells or whether it emerges at the population level. Previous research has explored the responses of individual OB cells to isolated features of plumes, but it is difficult to adequately sample the full feature space of plumes as it is still undetermined which features navigating mice employ during olfactory guided search. Here we released odor from an upwind odor source and simultaneously recorded both odor concentration dynamics and cellular response dynamics in awake, head-fixed mice. We found that longer timescale features of odor concentration dynamics were encoded at both the cellular and population level. At the cellular level, responses were elicited at the beginning of the plume for each trial, signaling plume onset. Plumes with high odor concentration elicited responses at the end of the plume, signaling plume offset. Although cellular level tracking of plume dynamics was observed to be weak, we found that at the population level, OB activity distinguished whiffs and blanks (accurately detected odor presence versus absence) throughout the duration of a plume. Even ~20 OB cells were enough to accurately discern odor presence throughout a plume. Our findings indicate that the full range of odor concentration dynamics and high frequency fluctuations are not encoded by OB spiking activity. Instead, relatively lower-frequency temporal features of plumes, such as plume onset, plume offset, whiffs, and blanks, are represented in the OB.

This thesis investigates the effect of fly ash and silica fume on cement paste hydration. Percentages of each additive will replace the cement by volume to be studied at five ages. These percentages will be compared alongside a controlled cement paste without additives. Testing will be carried out on 350 samples. The testing methods used are a Forney Universal Testing Machine and MTS Landmark Servohydraulic Testing System (MTS) for compressive strength on cylinders and cubes, respectively. Fourier Transfer Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) monitored the hydration with spectra, and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) generated images for regional analysis. Compressive strength testing demonstrated that silica fume replacement had the highest overall stress under water curing. Replacement of fly ash exhibited the highest overall stress under vacuum curing. Fly ash and silica fume both have the best MTS stress-strain curves in later ages. FTIR and SEM testing showed an increase in the change of CSH area with age. SEM testing revealed the formation of pores, CSH, and CH in images at all ages. The area of CSH grows most in early ages and diminishes over time. It is clear that the method of curing makes a difference in hydration. Further research is needed on the method of vacuum sealing hardened cement paste.

When sensory information is incomplete or ambiguous, the brain relies on prior expectations to infer perceptual objects. Despite the centrality of this process to perception, the neural mechanism of sensory inference is not known. Illusory contours (ICs) are key tools to study sensory inference because they contain edges or objects that are implied only by their spatial context. Using cellular resolution, mesoscale two-photon calcium imaging and multi-Neuropixels recordings in the mouse visual cortex, we identified a sparse subset of neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) and higher visual areas that respond emergently to ICs. We found that these highly selective 'IC-encoders' mediate the neural representation of IC inference. Strikingly, selective activation of these neurons using two-photon holographic optogenetics was sufficient to recreate IC representation in the rest of the V1 network, in the absence of any visual stimulus. This outlines a model in which primary sensory cortex facilitates sensory inference by selectively strengthening input patterns that match prior expectations through local, recurrent circuitry. Our data thus suggest a clear computational purpose for recurrence in the generation of holistic percepts under sensory ambiguity. More generally, selective reinforcement of top-down predictions by pattern-completing recurrent circuits in lower sensory cortices may constitute a key step in sensory inference.

In recent years, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has used Machine Learning techniques to represent text fragments. The introduction of the architecture of the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) and later of BERT (Devlin, Chang, Lee, & Toutanova, 2018) together with its smaller version ALBERT (Lan et al., 2019) revolutionized the state of the art in NLP, establishing itself as a standard for solving tasks that involve the computational language modeling. One of these tasks corresponds to extractive summarization, where the goal is to create a summary of a given text by selecting and extracting key phrases and sentences from the original document. One of the limitations that appear with the use of BERT in this type of task corresponds to the maximum size that the transformers have to process the input text, which makes it difficult to work with long documents.In this work we use BERT and other similar language models to build a system that allows us to obtain the jurisprudence of a legal sentence of the Supreme Court. For this, an architecture capable of encapsulating the information in two levels is proposed: a text block level and a document level, to then carry out a binary classification of each one of the blocks. To validate that the proposed model is capable of solving the task, tests were carried out on the legal documents dataset BillSum (Kornilova & Eidelman, 2019), reaching comparable results with state-of-the-art models in terms of ROUGE.

To understand the neural basis of behavior, it is essential to measure spiking dynamics across many interacting brain regions. While new technology, such as Neuropixels probes, facilitates multi-regional recordings, significant surgical and procedural hurdles remain for these experiments to achieve their full potential. Here, we describe a novel 3D-printed cranial implant for electrophysiological recordings from distributed areas of the mouse brain. The skull-shaped implant is designed with customizable insertion holes, allowing targeting of dozens of cortical and subcortical structures in single mice. We demonstrate the procedure's high success rate, implant biocompatibility, lack of adverse effects on behavior training, compatibility with optical imaging and optogenetics, and repeated high-quality Neuropixels recordings over multiple days. To showcase the scientific utility of this new methodology, we use multi-probe recordings to reveal how alpha rhythms organize spiking activity across visual and sensorimotor networks. Overall, this methodology enables powerful large-scale electrophysiological measurements for the study of distributed computation in the mouse brain.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.

The solvent effect on the position of the carbonyl vibrational stretching ofacetylferrocene in aprotic media was studied in this work. The solvent-induced shifts in thisorganometallic compound were interpreted in terms of the alternative reaction field model(SCRF-MO) proposed by Kolling. In contrast to the established trends for carbonyl groupsin organic systems, the results suggest that the continuum models for the reaction field arenot adequate and that the influence of dipolarity-polarizability described by aninhomogeneous coupling function θ (ε ) L(n 2 ) that assumes optical dielectric saturation isresponsible for the carbonyl band shift and, there is empirical evidence that the effect offield-induced intermolecular interaction on band shift, interpreted in terms of the van derWaals forces from the solvent, have a important contribution to this phenomena.