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In this paper we examine the effect of uncertainty on readers’ predictions about meaning. In particular, we were interested in how uncertainty might influence the likelihood of committing to a specific sentence meaning. We conducted two event-related potential (ERP) experiments using particle verbs such as turn down and manipulated uncertainty by constraining the context such that readers could be either highly certain about the identity of a distant verb particle, such as turn the bed […] down, or less certain due to competing particles, such as turn the music […] up/down. The study was conducted in German, where verb particles appear clause-finally and may be separated from the verb by a large amount of material. We hypothesised that this separation would encourage readers to predict the particle, and that high certainty would make prediction of a specific particle more likely than lower certainty. If a specific particle was predicted, this would reflect a strong commitment to sentence meaning that should incur a higher processing cost if the prediction is wrong. If a specific particle was less likely to be predicted, commitment should be weaker and the processing cost of a wrong prediction lower. If true, this could suggest that uncertainty discourages predictions via an unacceptable cost-benefit ratio. However, given the clear predictions made by the literature, it was surprisingly unclear whether the uncertainty manipulation affected the two ERP components studied, the N400 and the PNP. Bayes factor analyses showed that evidence for our a priori hypothesised effect sizes was inconclusive, although there was decisive evidence against a priori hypothesised effect sizes larger than 1μV for the N400 and larger than 3μV for the PNP. We attribute the inconclusive finding to the properties of verb-particle dependencies that differ from the verb-noun dependencies in which the N400 and PNP are often studied.
Injuries in professional soccer are a significant concern for teams, and they are caused amongst others by high training load. This cohort study describes the relationship between workload parameters and the occurrence of non-contact injuries, during weeks with high and low workload in professional soccer players throughout the season. Twenty-one professional soccer players aged 28.3 ± 3.9 yrs. who competed in the Iranian Persian Gulf Pro League participated in this 48-week study. The external load was monitored using global positioning system (GPS, GPSPORTS Systems Pty Ltd) and the type of injury was documented daily by the team's medical staff. Odds ratio (OR) and relative risk (RR) were calculated for non-contact injuries for high- and low-load weeks according to acute (AW), chronic (CW), acute to chronic workload ratio (ACWR), and AW variation (Δ-Acute) values. By using Poisson distribution, the interval between previous and new injuries were estimated. Overall, 12 non-contact injuries occurred during high load and 9 during low load weeks. Based on the variables ACWR and Δ-AW, there was a significantly increased risk of sustaining non-contact injuries (p < 0.05) during high-load weeks for ACWR (OR: 4.67), and Δ-AW (OR: 4.07). Finally, the expected time between injuries was significantly shorter in high load weeks for ACWR [1.25 vs. 3.33, rate ratio time (RRT)] and Δ-AW (1.33 vs. 3.45, RRT) respectively, compared to low load weeks. The risk of sustaining injuries was significantly larger during high workload weeks for ACWR, and Δ-AW compared with low workload weeks. The observed high OR in high load weeks indicate that there is a significant relationship between workload and occurrence of non-contact injuries. The predicted time to new injuries is shorter in high load weeks compared to low load weeks. Therefore, the frequency of injuries is higher during high load weeks for ACWR and Δ-AW. ACWR and Δ-AW appear to be good indicators for estimating the injury risk, and the time interval between injuries.
In order to improve a recently established cell-based assay to assess the potency of botulinum neurotoxin, neuroblastoma-derived SiMa cells and induced pluripotent stem-cells (iPSC) were modified to incorporate the coding sequence of a reporter luciferase into a genetic safe harbor utilizing CRISPR/Cas9. A novel method, the double-control quantitative copy number PCR (dc-qcnPCR), was developed to detect off-target integrations of donor DNA. The donor DNA insertion success rate and targeted insertion success rate were analyzed in clones of each cell type. The dc-qcnPCR reliably quantified the copy number in both cell lines. The probability of incorrect donor DNA integration was significantly increased in SiMa cells in comparison to the iPSCs. This can possibly be explained by the lower bundled relative gene expression of a number of double-strand repair genes (BRCA1, DNA2, EXO1, MCPH1, MRE11, and RAD51) in SiMa clones than in iPSC clones. The dc-qcnPCR offers an efficient and cost-effective method to detect off-target CRISPR/Cas9-induced donor DNA integrations.
The role of the GMP nucleotides of the bis-molybdopterin guanine dinucleotide (bis-MGD) cofactor of the DMSO reductase family has long been a subject of discussion. The recent characterization of the bis-molybdopterin (bis-Mo-MPT) cofactor present in the E. coli YdhV protein, which differs from bis-MGD solely by the absence of the nucleotides, now enables studying the role of the nucleotides of bis-MGD and bis-MPT cofactors in Moco insertion and the activity of molybdoenzymes in direct comparison. Using the well-known E. coli TMAO reductase TorA as a model enzyme for cofactor insertion, we were able to show that the GMP nucleotides of bis-MGD are crucial for the insertion of the bis-MGD cofactor into apo-TorA.
The intake of high-fat diets (HFDs) containing large amounts of saturated long-chain fatty acids leads to obesity, oxidative stress, inflammation, and insulin resistance. The trace element selenium, as a crucial part of antioxidative selenoproteins, can protect against the development of diet-induced insulin resistance in white adipose tissue (WAT) by increasing glutathione peroxidase 3 (GPx3) and insulin receptor (IR) expression. Whether selenite (Se) can attenuate insulin resistance in established lipotoxic and obese conditions is unclear. We confirm that GPX3 mRNA expression in adipose tissue correlates with BMI in humans. Cultivating 3T3-L1 pre-adipocytes in palmitate-containing medium followed by Se treatment attenuates insulin resistance with enhanced GPx3 and IR expression and adipocyte differentiation. However, feeding obese mice a selenium-enriched high-fat diet (SRHFD) only resulted in a modest increase in overall selenoprotein gene expression in WAT in mice with unaltered body weight development, glucose tolerance, and insulin resistance. While Se supplementation improved adipocyte morphology, it did not alter WAT insulin sensitivity. However, mice fed a SRHFD exhibited increased insulin content in the pancreas. Overall, while selenite protects against palmitate-induced insulin resistance in vitro, obesity impedes the effect of selenite on insulin action and adipose tissue metabolism in vivo.
The Covid-19 pandemic imposed new constraints on empirical research and forced researchers to transfer from traditional laboratory research to the online environment. This study tested the validity of a web-based episodic memory paradigm by comparing participants’ memory performance for trustworthy and untrustworthy facial stimuli in a supervised laboratory setting and an unsupervised web setting. Consistent with previous results, we observed enhanced episodic memory for untrustworthy compared to trustworthy faces. Most importantly, this memory bias was comparable in the online and the laboratory experiment, suggesting that web-based procedures are a promising tool for memory research.
Cognitive resources contribute to balance control. There is evidence that mental fatigue reduces cognitive resources and impairs balance performance, particularly in older adults and when balance tasks are complex, for example when trying to walk or stand while concurrently performing a secondary cognitive task.
We conducted a systematic literature search in PubMed (MEDLINE), Web of Science and Google Scholar to identify eligible studies and performed a random effects meta-analysis to quantify the effects of experimentally induced mental fatigue on balance performance in healthy adults. Subgroup analyses were computed for age (healthy young vs. healthy older adults) and balance task complexity (balance tasks with high complexity vs. balance tasks with low complexity) to examine the moderating effects of these factors on fatigue-mediated balance performance.
We identified 7 eligible studies with 9 study groups and 206 participants. Analysis revealed that performing a prolonged cognitive task had a small but significant effect (SMDwm = −0.38) on subsequent balance performance in healthy young and older adults. However, age- and task-related differences in balance responses to fatigue could not be confirmed statistically.
Overall, aggregation of the available literature indicates that mental fatigue generally reduces balance in healthy adults. However, interactions between cognitive resource reduction, aging and balance task complexity remain elusive.
How do different reset protocols affect ergodicity of a diffusion process in single-particle-tracking experiments? We here address the problem of resetting of an arbitrary stochastic anomalous-diffusion process (ADP) from the general mathematical points of view and assess ergodicity of such reset ADPs for an arbitrary resetting protocol. The process of stochastic resetting describes the events of the instantaneous restart of a particle’s motion via randomly distributed returns to a preset initial position (or a set of those). The waiting times of such resetting events obey the Poissonian, Gamma, or more generic distributions with specified conditions regarding the existence of moments. Within these general approaches, we derive general analytical results and support them by computer simulations for the behavior of the reset mean-squared displacement (MSD), the new reset increment-MSD (iMSD), and the mean reset time-averaged MSD (TAMSD). For parental nonreset ADPs with the MSD(t)∝ tμ we find a generic behavior and a switch of the short-time growth of the reset iMSD and mean reset TAMSDs from ∝ _μ for subdiffusive to ∝ _1 for superdiffusive reset ADPs. The critical condition for a reset ADP that recovers its ergodicity is found to be more general than that for the nonequilibrium stationary state, where obviously the iMSD and the mean TAMSD are equal. The consideration of the new statistical quantifier, the iMSD—as compared to the standard MSD—restores the ergodicity of an arbitrary reset ADP in all situations when the μth moment of the waiting-time distribution of resetting events is finite. Potential applications of these new resetting results are, inter alia, in the area of biophysical and soft-matter systems.
There is a large variety of goals instructors have for laboratory courses, with different courses focusing on different subsets of goals. An often implicit, but crucial, goal is to develop students’ attitudes, views, and expectations about experimental physics to align with practicing experimental physicists. The assessment of laboratory courses upon this one dimension of learning has been intensively studied in U.S. institutions using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). However, there is no such an instrument available to use in Germany, and the influence of laboratory courses on students views about the nature of experimental physics is still unexplored at German-speaking institutions. Motivated by the lack of an assessment tool to investigate this goal in laboratory courses at German-speaking institutions, we present a translated version of the E-CLASS adapted to the context at German-speaking institutions. We call the German version of the E-CLASS, the GE-CLASS. We describe the translation process and the creation of an automated web-based system for instructors to assess their laboratory courses. We also present first results using GE-CLASS obtained at the University of Potsdam. A first comparison between E-CLASS and GE-CLASS results shows clear differences between University of Potsdam and U.S. students’ views and beliefs about experimental physics.
We introduce and study a Lévy walk (LW) model of particle spreading with a finite propagation speed combined with soft resets, stochastically occurring periods in which an harmonic external potential is switched on and forces the particle towards a specific position. Soft resets avoid instantaneous relocation of particles that in certain physical settings may be considered unphysical. Moreover, soft resets do not have a specific resetting point but lead the particle towards a resetting point by a restoring Hookean force. Depending on the exact choice for the LW waiting time density and the probability density of the periods when the harmonic potential is switched on, we demonstrate a rich emerging response behaviour including ballistic motion and superdiffusion. When the confinement periods of the soft-reset events are dominant, we observe a particle localisation with an associated non-equilibrium steady state. In this case the stationary particle probability density function turns out to acquire multimodal states. Our derivations are based on Markov chain ideas and LWs with multiple internal states, an approach that may be useful and flexible for the investigation of other generalised random walks with soft and hard resets. The spreading efficiency of soft-rest LWs is characterised by the first-passage time statistic.