The Antibacterial Drug Candidate SBC3 is a Potent Inhibitor of Bacterial Thioredoxin Reductase

Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem for public health and associated with increasing economic costs and mortality rates. Silver and silver-related compounds have been used for centuries due to their antimicrobial properties. In this work, we show that 1,3-dibenzyl-4,5-diphenyl-imidazol-2-ylidene silver(I) acetate/NHC*-Ag-OAc (SBC3) is a reversible, high affinity inhibitor of E. coli thioredoxin reductase (TrxR; K_i=10.8±1.2 nM). Minimal inhibition concentration (MIC) tests with different E. coli and P. aeruginosa strains demonstrated that SBC3 can efficiently inhibit bacterial cell growth, especially in combination with established antibiotics like gentamicin. Our results show that SBC3 is a promising antibiotic drug candidate targeting bacterial TrxR.     

Read-react-respond: An integrative model for understanding sexual revictimization.

Females who have been sexually abused in childhood are at significantly higher risk to be revictimized in adolescence and adulthood. Revictimization is associated with a raft of adverse mental and physical health outcomes, and so understanding why victims of childhood sexual abuse are more vulnerable to later sexual assaults has critical implications for their development. It has been hypothesized that sexual abuse in childhood results in reduced ability to recognize and/or respond effectively to sexual threats later in life, but studies examining these ideas have produced inconsistent results. Further, this research has failed to incorporate the powerful physiological reaction elicited by threats of imminent harm to the self, which has the potential to disrupt cognitive processing and coping behavior. In the present paper, we propose a model of revictimization that integrates contemporary theory and research on the biological stress response with cognitive, affective, and behavioral factors believed to be involved in adaptive responding to sexual threats. The model provides a conceptual guide for understanding why females with a history of sexual abuse are more vulnerable to revictimization and offers ideas for improving prevention programs designed to strengthen females' ability to resist sexual coercion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generating a multiplicity of policies for agent steering in crowd simulation

Pedestrian steering algorithms range from completely procedural to entirely data‐driven, but the former grossly generalize across possible human behaviors and suffer computationally, whereas the latter are limited by the burden of ever‐increasing data samples. Our approach seeks the balanced middle ground by deriving a collection of machine‐learned policies based on the behavior of a procedural steering algorithm through the decomposition of the space of possible steering scenarios into steering contexts. The resulting algorithm scales well in the number of contexts, the use of new data sets to create new policies, and in the number of controlled agents as the policies become a simple evaluation of the rules asserted by the machine‐learning process. We also explore the use of synthetic data from an “oracle algorithm” that serves as an as‐needed source of samples, which can be stochastically polled for effective coverage. We observe that our approach produces pedestrian steering similar to that of the oracle steering algorithm, but with a significant performance boost. Runtime was reduced from hours under the oracle algorithm with 10 agents to on the order of 10 frames per second (FPS) with 3000 agents. We also analyze the nature of collisions in such a framework with no explicit collision avoidance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does green tea affect postprandial glucose,insulin and satiety in healthy subjects: a randomized controlled trial

Background  

Results of epidemiological studies have suggested that consumption of green tea could lower the risk of type 2 diabetes. Intervention studies show that green tea may decrease blood glucose levels, and also increase satiety. This study was conducted to examine the postprandial effects of green tea on glucose levels, glycemic index, insulin levels and satiety in healthy individuals after the consumption of a meal including green tea.     

Correction to Erbes, Curry, and Leskela (2009).

Reports an error in Treatment presentation and adherence of Iraq/Afghanistan era veterans in outpatient care for posttraumatic stress disorder by Christopher R. Erbes, Kyle T. Curry and Jennie Leskela (Psychological Services, 2009[Aug], Vol 6[3], 175-183). The copyright for the article was listed incorrectly. This article is in the Public Domain. The online version has been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2009-12007-001.) The ongoing wars in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom or OEF) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom or OIF) make the development and application of effective postdeployment mental health treatment programs a high priority. There has been some concern that existing treatment programs for combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may not fit well with OEF/OIF veterans confronted with acute mental health difficulties while reestablishing community, familial, and occupational connections after their deployment. This study utilized data gathered from a large outpatient Veterans Affairs Medical Center PTSD treatment clinic to examine differences in initial treatment presentation and treatment adherence (attendance and dropout) between a group of Vietnam era veterans (n = 54) and a group of OEF/OIF veterans (n = 106). OEF/OIF veterans reported lower levels of symptom distress on questionnaires assessing posttraumatic reexperiencing, avoidance, dissociation, and arousal symptoms but similar levels of anger and acting out behaviors and higher levels of alcohol problems. OEF/OIF veterans had significantly lower rates of session attendance and higher rates of treatment dropout than Vietnam veterans, and this difference was not accounted for by differences in treatment presentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Global learning on carbon capture and storage: A call for strong international cooperation on CCS demonstration

Closing the gap between carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) rhetoric and technical progress is critically important to global climate mitigation efforts. Developing strong international cooperation on CCS demonstration with global coordination, transparency, cost-sharing and communication as guiding principles would facilitate efficient and cost-effective collaborative global learning on CCS, would allow for improved understanding of the global capacity and applicability of CCS, and would strengthen global trust, awareness and public confidence in the technology.     

In search of the comfortable indoor environment: A comparison of the utility of objective and subjective indicators of indoor comfort

Today, many procedures for assessing the indoor environment rely on both subjective and objective indicators (e.g. ANSI/ASHRAE 55-2004; ISO 10551). It is however unclear how these two types of measurements are related to perceived comfort. This article aims at assessing the relative utility of subjective (rating scale measures) and objective indicators of perceived comfort of indoor environments. In a hospital setting, physical environmental variables (e.g. temperature, relative humidity and noise level) were simultaneously measured as respondents (both patients and staff) rated their perception of the indoor environment. Regression analyses indicated that the subjective sensory ratings were significantly better than objective indicators at predicting overall rated indoor comfort. These results are discussed in relation to existing measurement procedures and standards.