Daily Archives: May 17, 2022

This is a portion of a Cassini radar mapper image obtained by the Cassini spacecraft on its December 21, 2008, flyby of Saturns moon Titan. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI.

The landscape of Saturns moon Titan, which features lakes,rivers, canyons, dissected plateaus, and sand dunes, can be strikingly likeEarths. The landforms reveal a world with active liquid transport cycles andsedimentary processes. On Titan, however, these processes are moderated byorganic hydrocarbon grains and liquid methane instead of silicate rock andliquid water as on Earth. This poses a problem: sand-sized organic grains aremore fragile than their silicate counterparts. And yet, Titans equatorial sanddunes have likely been active for tens to hundreds of thousands of years, a timescaleon which organic grains would have abraded or worn away into dust.

Mathieu Laptre (Stanford University) and coauthors put forward a new model to address this conflict. They hypothesize that growth due to sintering the process of neighboring organic grains being fused together when they are at rest could counterbalance the abrasion that grains experience when transported by winds or methane rivers. Comparing their calculations to existing data on Titans climate and atmospheric modeling, the authors also demonstrate how this balance could explain the latitudinal zoning of Titans geomorphology. The equatorial region is dominated by wind transport, which promotes abrasion over sintering and would produce the fine-grained sand necessary for the dune fields. The winds lull in the mid-latitudes, promoting sintering and the formation of coarse-grained sandstone, consistent with the observed plains. In the polar regions, more frequent rainstorms and river flow would carve plateaus made of this organic sandstone into observed dissected labyrinth terrain.

While well-reasoned, this model remains a hypothesis. When the planned Dragonfly octocopter spacecraft lands on Titan in the mid-2030s, it will help validate the model by measuring the composition, shapes, and sizes of grains within the dunes as well as the wind speeds, frequencies, and precipitation rates that shape them. READ MORE

See more here:

New Hypothesis on Titan Landscape Evolution | Planetary News - Planetary News

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: If you peel back the layers of Rapunzel's hair in "Tangled," you'll see just how complicated animating 3D hair can be. But back then, Disney had mainly focused on straight hair, building on its previous 2D looks.

With "Encanto," the studio figured out how to create coiled hair like Mirabel's with natural movement. But the animators didn't stop there. "Encanto" made history as the first Disney animated movie to represent the full range of hair textures, from 1A to 4C.

Getting from here to here required over a decade of innovation.

The story begins with a familiar storybook princess who in 2010 was seen for the first time in 3D.

Disney's first major foray into 3D hair animation came with "Tangled." Rapunzel's 70 feet of hair was basically its own character in the movie, pretty much breaking every real-life law of motion, and not just because it was magical.

Hook Hand: That's a lot of hair.

Flynn: She's growing it out.

Nadim: Every shot of every movie has a lot of bending the laws of physics. Otherwise, things would look very flat.

Narrator: This emphasizes a key tenet of Disney's animated hair. The goal isn't always to make it as realistic as possible, but rather believable within the fictional world of the story.

To make Rapunzel's CG-animated locks look as appealing as Disney's hand-drawn ones, the filmmakers started with a "hair bible" created by artist Glen Keane, who was behind some of the biggest hair hits of Disney's 2D past. The bible set rules, like how Rapunzel's hair could never fall in anything resembling a straight line. It had to have volume; rhythmic curves, twists, and turns; and a signature swoop in the front.

But that shampoo-commercial hair wouldn't be so easy to replicate in 3D.

Nadim: It's not hand-drawn, where you're focusing more on the shaping and you could cheat. You have to kind of take everything into account when you're doing CG hair, even stuff that's not on screen.

Narrator: Like wind or different sources of light or shadow.

And Rapunzel's strands interacted with the environment in ways never seen before. You had hair interacting with cloth, with skin, with other hair. The other characters were constantly touching, pulling, climbing, and rolling in it. Accounting for all these interactions would require simulation, a way of automating the movement of elements like hair, fur, and cloth.

Michelle Lee Robinson: The only movie before "Tangled" where I think we had really even attempted simulated hair was "Bolt" with Penny. We knew we had a huge task ahead of us to go from basically that to 70-foot-long flowing hair.

Narrator: Engineers then created a program called Dynamic Wires, which combined physically based simulation with laws for determining the hair's behavior that defied physics. This allowed the artists to make Rapunzel's hair twist and turn in exactly the ways they wanted.

In real life, this hair would weigh 60 to 80 pounds, so it'd clump into a mass or drag on the ground, like a heavy tail. But in the movie, you see it gliding smoothly along.

Meanwhile, to give the artists more power to sculpt the look of Rapunzel's hair, the team broke down her 140,000 strands into 147 different tubes.

Michelle: The idea was to sculpt tubes of hair that would represent the main blocks of hair. That process allowed us to kind of control the way the hair would break apart and interpolate.

Narrator: This tube-grooming tool was the predecessor to Tonic, the hair-grooming software that Disney still uses today.

Nadim: A lot of the technology from that movie pretty much still exists till this day or has evolved into a newer form.

Narrator: You can see that clearly in "Frozen," which had over 50 unique hairstyles. Believe it or not, Elsa was originally going to have black, spiky short hair. But as the characters evolved, Disney decided to give both Elsa and Anna light-colored braids, in line with the Norwegian cultural traditions that inspired the movie.

Michelle: We were pulling the hair from her head, weaving it through into a braid all the way to the end. And just trying to ensure that those braid pieces didn't crash into each other and would bend and move properly was a challenge for us.

Narrator: For "Bolt," Disney had developed a hair-brushing tool called iGroom, which worked well on short-haired characters. But that plus the tube tools from "Tangled" weren't enough for braided looks, so Disney's engineers built a new hair-grooming system called Tonic. Tonic is a volume-based tool, which lets artists group the hairs on a character's head and move and direct those sections of hair in the desired ways. This allowed look artists like Michelle to create the first versions of complex styles within a few days, a process that before would've taken several weeks.

The team was also able to use Tonic for the hair on the wolves and horses and the shaggy reindeer hair on Sven's neck. Elsa's hair had another environmental element to adapt to: snow.

Michelle: Particles of snow or sparkles on top of hair is like procedural geometry on top of procedural geometry. So that was hard to figure out.

Narrator: And then there were the gusts of wind.

Michelle: Very stylized bang shapes that, you know, these kind of pieces that formed that really distinctive silhouette. She really does, towards the end of the movie, get blown around quite a bit, and trying to balance maintaining that stylization and that kind of appealing shape language with real physical motion.

Narrator: Figuring out hair's interaction with the wintry elements in "Frozen" paid off in "Moana," where the focus was on hair's interaction with more forces, like water and character movements.

Things might have been more straightforward if the demigod Maui had been bald, like The Rock himself, which was the original plan. But Polynesian cultural advisors pointed out that Maui's long hair is a source of his spiritual energy, so both Maui and Moana ended up with long, curly-wavy hair. I've only been thinking of keeping this hair silky and being awesome again.

Narrator: The first task was sculpting their zigzag, or S-shaped, curls, a hair shape Disney hadn't created before. Michelle: Making those shapes on very, very long hair and then trying to figure out how to manage those individual curl locks so they don't poke through each other and catch on each other.

Narrator: This task required Disney to expand Tonic's tube-grooming tool, giving it the ability to curl the hair up. After sculpting the shape, the team figured out how the waves would move and hold their look.

Nadim: Part of the trick with something like wavy hair or curly hair is retaining the volume of the hair. Because if you just sim it as is, it'll just collapse and fall flat on her head. So how do you retain the flowiness of it?

Narrator: The team developed what they called an elastic rod model, which determined the degree to which the hair would retain its twists and springiness under different forces, like wind or water.

Nadim: If, let's say, Moana is falling through the sky and her hair's really stretched, well, how much of her hair is going to be a full straight line versus how much curl is going to be there? Or if she compresses, how much is it going to bunch up?

Narrator: But Disney also wanted to give its animators an ability to guide the simulation of the hair. So the engineers built a new hair program, Quicksilver, that combined rigging and grooming controls. Instead of animating the characters with static hair, now, the animators could put the hair into starting poses, and Quicksilver's engine would use those poses to determine the resulting movement.

By allowing artists to shape the posing of the hair, Disney was able to recover some of the expressiveness of hand-drawn animation that could often get lost in CG.

Michelle: It's particularly useful for the interaction moments, where the character is doing something with their hair specifically, and the animator wants to guide what that's going to be.

Narrator: They wanted Moana in particular to be able to constantly play with her hair, since that habit is typical of teenagers, as they observed it in actor Auli'i Cravalho as she performed Moana's lines in the studio.

The characters' darker hair also broke new ground for Disney.

Nadim: If you look at kind of previous movies, "Tangled," "Frozen," we haven't really done any black, darkish hair colors. So that reacts fairly differently to light than other hair colors, and how do you kind of still show its richness? You kind of have to have a movie that needs a hair color to then be able to see how far your technology goes and then tune to that. And now we're at a pretty good spot with actually the shader being able to handle a wide range of hair colors.

Narrator: All of these technologies and more came into play in "Encanto."

The shading advancements from "Moana" made it possible to get the rich shades of hair in the Madrigal family, and the S-shaped curls seen on Moana and Maui appeared on some characters in "Encanto."

Jose: We had the software to be able to do type 1 hair, type 2 hair very easily, but we hadn't really figured out how to do coils that are actually helical and that actually look like springs. Specifically for Mirabel, she had kind of a type 3 curly hair, like, loose ringlets that get kind of tighter in certain places.

Narrator: The team added this tighter type of coil into Tonic.

Jose: So there was a lot of collaboration with the technology team trying to figure out what is hair actually doing when it starts to coil versus when it's wavy and then figuring out how we can get our tools to actually do that.

Narrator: Emphasizing the unique attributes of each hair type was a big part of Jose's job as a character look development artist.

Jose: We're trying to figure out, what naturally is beautiful about this type of hair and how can we emphasize that?

Narrator: And the diversity goes all the way down to the individual hairs on a character's head.

Jose: Curl direction is very important. Because you don't want two curls to look exactly the same, because then it feels very artificial. In everybody's hair, there's a lot of variation. Things like variety in size of the curls, hair color. We try to make sure that nothing is symmetrical.

Narrator: Every strand of hair also figured in to the dance sequences of "Encanto," building on the movement work in "Moana." The artists started by looking at a lot of reference material, including footage of the choreography.

Michelle: We knew that Mirabel and Luisa and a lot of the characters were going to be really active and jumping around and in a musical fantasy sequence that they could be hanging upside down. Sometimes in those tests, you find out that, like, one piece of hair is quite a bit longer than the other. And so you have to go back in and adjust it.

Narrator: The team would have to look at whether all the strands of hair reacted naturally to the character's movements and to each other. It was important as ever to honor differences in textures for every character.

Previously, Disney princesses had mostly straight hair that moved in big, sweeping paths. To make more tightly curled hair move naturally in "Encanto," the team had to adjust this approach.

Edna: We used to talk about how, when they were dancing, how the hair would have to move, how the hair would have to perform. For example, we have the idea that Afro hair, or African hair, has not movement. And we have the perception that that's something bad, but that's not bad. It's just our hair. Our hair doesn't have a lot of movement. It's OK that it stay like that, you know? So it doesn't have to be a ponytail with straight hair to be beautiful.

Narrator: What set "Encanto" apart from previous movies was also the sheer scale of its hair diversity, not just for the Madrigal family but for the entire town.

Edna: We have the 12 hair textures in the 12 chapters of the family, but also we have different styles in the whole town in "Encanto." You can see turbans. You can see other type of braids. More indigenous population, for example, in Colombia. There's a little girl in the town, she has an Afro not like this with turban, but all free. And also you can find women with braids, very Colombian and African style.

Narrator: Every single head of hair had to be styled meticulously by the artists, picking up where they left off with "Frozen."

Nadim: So if you watch kind of the evolution of having straight-hair characters, and then suddenly "Encanto" has all these crowd characters with braids, and we could barely do two-braid characters on "Frozen." So the advancements are really there, and they trickle down.

Narrator: But at the start of production, braiding hair was still a very manual process.

Jose: So, like, how you would actually braid actual hair in real life, we have to do that with essentially 3D tubes that we use in our computer. By the end of the movie, we had a more automatic process for making braids where you just draw or you create a curve, a line along the head where you want your braid to come out, and then it'll do a little computer-made braid for you.

Narrator: That doesn't mean all the work is finished.

Jose: There's so much diversity, even within braid types, that then there's more complex braids that we're looking at to try to figure out how to make those look really good.

Narrator: Ultimately, "Encanto" made history as the first Disney animated movie to represent the full range of hair textures, from 1A to 4C; a milestone reached by building a foundation of tools and then adapting them.

Nadim: What's also great about these tools is we're able to repurpose them in areas that you might not expect. The system that we use to do hair is the same system that we use to do plenty of other things, like Mirabel's dress. Her skirt has tons and tons of embroidery on it. We were able to use iGroom to be able to do some of the embroidery.

Narrator: The technological progress is impressive on its own, but it's always done in service of telling bigger stories.

Michelle: I think now at this point we have a really complete set of tools, and we should be able to make and represent the panoply of humanity, which is a really good place to be.

Continued here:

The evolution of Disney's 3D-animated hair from 'Tangled' to 'Encanto' - Insider

As recently as two years ago, banks and credit unions really didnt lend to true Main Street. They were focused on larger businesses who needed cash infusions of $1M+, had good credit, plenty of collateral, pristine cash flow and really didnt need a loan. Why? Because there wasnt a lot of (any?) technology used in the process, which meant it cost the same to process a loan for $1M as it did a loan for $10,000, so banks simply serviced larger loans and relied on relationships to keep business flowing.

Then the pandemic hit. And changed everything. While lockdowns and mandates dealt a heavy blow to the 70 percent of small businesses that shut down, the knock-out punch came when lendersevery single lenderturned off the spigot of cash, which effectively froze Main Street.

When the Paycheck Protection Program started, the closed banks needed to find a way to accept PPP applications on-line. For the most part, fintechs, Lendio included, became the bridge for lenders technology gap. Banks had a pretty steep learning curve in terms of technology, but the experience forced them to take a serious look at APIs, workflows, and digitization. They liked what they saw and many of them arent turning back.

This includes Texas National Bank (TNB), one of the over 300 traditional banks Lendio helped during the pandemic. TNBs President, Joe Quiroga, was kind enough to sit down with me to talk about the PPP experience, and how its changing the way his bank approaches small business lending going forward.

BROCK: The pandemic youve said that it helped you see a better approach to systems and processes that your bank used before the pandemic. Can you explain?

JOE: We had a day where we needed to book 300 loans on our system we had never had to book 300 loans in a month prior to the pandemic much less in one day and I just saw this escalating. I knew that maybe we could book 300 loans manually today, but tomorrow, if we had 500 or 1,000, there would be no way we could do that manually typing all of this into our system.

BROCK: So you made changes?

JOE: Yes. Thats when the importance of automating, integrating, and sharing data hit us. Eventually, we were at the point where we were booking 1,000 loans a day on an automated basis. It was just happening. We had no human physically typing these loans into our core system. We knew it was a better way of doing things now and going forward.

BROCK: How long would this evolution have taken without the pandemic?

JOE: Were a smaller institution. Were dynamic and were younger, so we were headed down that path already but I think what the pandemic forced it accelerated a 5-year project into a 1-year turnaround.

BROCK: How did these changes impact your bank?

JOE: When you compare us to the traditional bank in Texas or even in our region, we processed 5 to 10 times as many PPP loan applications relative to our size. It really paid off for us and we will now deploy that strategy toward small business lending. Ive called small business lending the last frontier of community bankingthese are the only types of loans that were hanging on to.

It works to have a partnership because we have something fintechs dont havewe have capital and fintechs have the right process and technology. Thats how this marriage comes together to say Hey, we can coexist. Quite frankly, we can now fund loan transactions that previously we didnt even see in our backyard. That, to a community banker, is the real evolution.

A new kind of borrower

What Joe didnt mention, however, was how much the market needs this evolution. More than 4.4 million new businesses were created in 2020 (source: U.S. Census Bureau). Last year, that jumped up to 5.4 million. Compare that to 3.5 million started in 2019 on the eve of the pandemic. BTW, 52 percent of these new businesses launched with less than 10K in funding and nearly half of that group had less than $5,000 when they opened their doors.

The majority of these new businesses rely on existing cash, savings, and family/friends for capital to start. But some are also realizing that there are new lending options available that simply werent there prior to the pandemic.

Were seeing a rise in lenders embracing the gig economy and underwriting loans that straddle the fence between a personal loan and a sole-proprietor loan. And, like Joe said, banks didnt really see these super-small businesses in the past. While there isnt a lot of good that you can say about a global pandemic, PPP loans pushed this evolution since so many of the people who received PPP loans were in fact sole proprietors. And for those who started business during the pandemic, theres never been a better time to get access to capital. Optimism on Main Street is strong and growing.

How lending is improving for the small business, too

We worked with thousands of business owners on PPP loans. For many, it was their first time ever applying for a loan outside of a traditional bank or credit union. For some, it was their first attempt applying for a business loan.

Regardless of whether they were successful in securing funds, much of the feedback we received from the applicants centered on how easy and how quickly we were able to process their paperwork. Clearly the PPP process had its share of snags, but it also introduced small business owners to a world of lending that they either didnt know about or perhaps never felt comfortable using before.

Today, that leaves us with business owners with more confidence and a better understanding of how to access capital. Theyre leveraging their access to cash in ways that have never been seen before in our industry. While uncertainties exist, including high inflation, supply chain slowdowns, and the global effects from the war in Ukraine, small businesses have a renewed focus and are better equipped to handle whatever lies ahead.

Weve got a long way to go to get back to where we were before the pandemic, but theres no doubt that Main Street and the financial institutions that support it are both more efficient and more resilient than ever before.

See the rest here:

Faster, Leaner, Better SMB Loans: How The Pandemic Triggered An Evolution On Main Street - Forbes

PORTSMOUTH, United Kingdom Science has finally uncovered the evolutionary reason why we tend to bite our nails, touch our face, or fidget when under stress. To evoke support! Scientists from the University of Portsmouth and Nottingham Trent University report that showing signs of stress may make people more likable and subtly encourage others to act more positively towards them.

Monkeys and apes display similar restless behavior when stressed out as well. So, the research team set out to investigate this instinctive paradox. According to the study, actions like scratching, nail-biting, fidgeting, and touching ones face or hair all tell onlookers that you are in a weakened state. Advertising vulnerability isnt exactly conducive to surviving out in the wild.

We wanted to find out what advantages there might be in signaling stress to others, to help explain why stress behaviors have evolved in humans, says Dr. Jamie Whitehouse, a research fellow at NTUs School of Social Sciences, in a university release.

If producing these behaviors leads to positive social interactions from others who want to help, rather than negative social interactions from those who want to compete with you, then these behaviors are likely to be selected in the evolutionary process. We are a highly cooperative species compared to many other animals, and this could be why behaviors which communicate weakness were able to evolve, he continues.

The investigation found that people are indeed quite capable of accurately noticing when someone around them is experiencing stress. Additionally, those noticing that something was off reacted more positively towards the anxious individuals.

The team recorded each person in their experiment while they participated in a mock presentation and interview session. Importantly, they told each person to prepare these presentations on very short notice. Researchers then showed the interviews to a different group of people they called raters. These raters had to assess the stress level of the people in the recordings.

Sure enough, participants who admitted to feeling stress during the presentation were perceived as being more stressed out by the raters. Those who displayed more stressful behaviors like nail-biting were also rated as being more stressed.

Critically, participants who were perceived as more stressed were also considered more likable by other people. Study authors theorize this may partially explain why primates evolved to outwardly display signs of stress.

If the individuals are inducing an empathetic-like response in the raters, they may appear more likable because of this, or it could be that an honest signal of weakness may represent an example of benign intent and/or a willingness to engage in a cooperative rather than competitive interaction, something which could be a likable or preferred trait in a social partner, explains study co-author Professor Bridget Waller.

This fits with current understanding of expressivity, which tends to suggest that people who are more emotionally expressive are more well-liked by others and have more positive social interactions, she adds.

All in all, these results strongly suggest the average person can accurately detect when someone else is feeling anxious based on their physical behaviors.

Our team is currently investigating whether young children also show this sensitivity to stress states. By looking at childhood we can understand how difficult it is to detect stress, as well as identifying how exposure to adults stress might impact young children, concludes study co-author Dr. Sophie Milward from the University of Portsmouth.

The study is published the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Read the rest here:

Evolution of anxiety: Humans may show signs of stress to gather support - Study Finds

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, employees proved they could work effectively and productively from home and many are planning to continue doing so despite the widespread return to offices.

According to a recent study by CCS Insight, although pandemic restrictions are easing in many regions, employees are determined that remote working will continue to play a vital role. This will have a profound effect on the way IT departments reconfigure telephony, unified communications (UC) services and Wi-Fi networks to support post-pandemic working methods.

The survey of 660 employees in European and US organisations reports that 90% of those who are able to work remotely want to retain the option to do so, with just over a quarter (27%) wanting to work remotely all the time. The appetite for full-time remote working varies slightly by region, at 38% in Germany, 36% in the US and 33% in the UK.

A much higher proportion of respondents, at 62%, favour a hybrid model, whereby they would work from home three days per week.

Analysts at Gartner forecast that the number of remote workers will have doubled to over two-thirds of digital workers by 2023, shifting buyer requirements towards work-from-anywhere capabilities.

The nature of remote and hybrid working means people are continuing to hold meetings online, even with the easing of pandemic restrictions and offices reopening. According to CCS Insight, this continued reliance on virtual meetings is triggering disruption across the employee productivity technology market.

Its survey found that use of the two leading platforms Microsoft Teams and Zoom jumped by over 50% in 2021, with the products being used by 47% and 41% of employees respectively. This is having a dramatic impact on the use of traditional voice technologies in organisations, with phone calls down 20% compared with pre-pandemic levels.

This is not just about using video conferencing, says CCS Insight principal analyst Angela Ashenden. The lines between the different forms of work-related communications are blurring, with a shift from voice to telephony apps, she adds.

CCS Insights research found that almost a quarter of employees expect their use of desk phones to further decrease over the next 12 months, with voice-only and video calls on meeting apps expected to grow strongly.

Popular apps combine enterprise messaging, telephony and video conferencing as cloud-based UC services with relatively straightforward subscription plans. In fact, the unified communications as a service (UCaaS) market has reached a point of maturity where the services available are superior to on-premise systems.

Gartners Magic Quadrant for UCaaS report, published in October 2021, identifies Cisco, Microsoft, Zoom, 8x8 and RingCentral as market leaders.

According to the report, for Gartner clients that subscribe to Microsoft 365, messaging is almost always awarded to Microsoft. In the most challenging telephony environments, however, such as hospitals, manufacturing, field services and retail, its clients select providers with the most extensive capabilities and a longer track record, such as RingCentral, Cisco and 8x8.

However, while senior IT leaders understand infrastructure spending and will err towards economies of scale to reduce communications costs, CCS Insights Ashenden says employees prefer to use the tools they are accustomed to, which means they may organise and host conference calls on their favourite video conferencing app, even though the organisation may have a company-wide contract with another provider.

With 80 million monthly telephony users, Microsoft Teams has experienced the largest UCaaS adoption rate among the top providers.

Gartners Magic Quadrant for UCaaS highlights Microsofts expansion of Calling Plans from 11 to 28 countries, along with its introduction of an Operator Connect programme and a Voice-Enabled Channels feature, which Gartner says offers lightweight call centre-like capabilities.

Teams also offers location-based routing and live captions for calls. There are 1,000+ apps available in the Teams App store.

Regarding enhancements to Zoom, Gartner says the company has introduced Power Pack, a desktop experience for reception console users, and an enhanced dashboard for real-time and historic call queue analytics.

It is now offering a hardware-as-a-service option for IP phones in 18 countries, and Zoom United, a bundled phone, meeting and chat offering for less complexity and commercial effectiveness. It also offers the Phone Appliance, which allows a Zoom app experience for desk phones.

In July 2021, Zoom put in a $14.9bn bid to acquire contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider Five9. But the two companies failed to reach an agreement and the acquisition was abandoned in September 2021.

Gartner notes that Cisco has expanded the telephony feature set in its Webex service to support large organisations. Telephony is now available in 85 countries in 21 languages and Cisco now offers an e-commerce site for web-based purchasing.

Like many of the products featured in the Gartner report, Webex uses AI-based noise removal, which offers hybrid workers a better conferencing experience.

While it is known for its telephony service, RingCentral has been expanding into the online video conferencing market.

Gartner points out that the company has formed strategic partnerships with Verizon and Vodafone, made e-commerce investments for direct sales, and put a massive investment in RingCentral Video meetings, adding virtual backgrounds and closed captioning.

Other changes listed in the Gartner report include redesigned mobile and desktop clients to keep pace with rival offerings, and expanded developer support via RingCentral Engage application programming interfaces (APIs).

UCaaS is often discussed alongside communications platforms as a service (CPaaS), where services are more tailored to organisations wishing to develop functionality that fits closely with internal enterprise systems. CPaaS is generally seen as a way to help organisations develop and improve their end-to-end customer experience.

A study from Forrester, commissioned by Vonage, reported in October 2021 that seven in 10 firms feel they are able to provide information to customers when, where and how they want it. The online survey of 1,037 global customer and digital experience decision-makers and influencers found that 98% of CPaaS users are very or extremely effective at getting their customers the information they need, compared with just 37% of organisations that dont use a CPaaS.

According to Gartner, a capability that has seen increasing market demand is the integration of universal communications capabilities with business applications that make workflows more efficient. For instance, 8x8, one of the leaders in Gartners Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, develops software for the entire UCaaS and CCaaS stack.

There is clearly plenty of choice when it comes to selecting a unified communications service. The majority of products provide off-the-shelf video conferencing, telephony and messaging. Businesses looking to streamline workflows may need to consider how these systems integrate with their customer experience platform, customer relationship management (CRM) and other enterprise systems.

What is clear from the industry experts Computer Weekly has spoken to is that these systems need to be able to support hybrid working patterns and hence office wireless networks require a rethink.

Originally posted here:

Evolution of unified comms services - ComputerWeekly.com

ExchangeWires ATS Madrid made a welcome return to the Spanish capital after a two-year hiatus. At a bustling Teatro Amaya in Madrids Chamberi district, guests were treated to a packed agenda discussing the latest issues across the media industry.

From measurement in a privacy first context and how publishers in Spain are structuring their business models around first party data, to the convergence of tech and creativity, our speakers had a lot to say. So what were the key talking points from the day? We take a look at the hot topics that industry experts discussed in Madrid.

With third-party cookies set to finally crumble at some point in the near future, many panels were interested in discussing whats going to come next.

During our Transacting Media in a Post-Cookie World panel, Tania Perez Gacho, digital business director, PHD discussed the need to avoid falling into the same traps by rehashing and repackaging old ideas: If were only developing cookies with another name, well just go back to the start. We need to find the best solutions, not just the easiest.

The conversation around cookieless continued with our Maximising Your Most Valuable Currency: First-Party Data panel. Cristina Lera, marketing solutions director, IPG Mediabrands thinks its time for a change: We need to be over cookieless now, so a new standard can rise Innovation comes from necessity. Maybe its that simple.

On the Where the Action is: Harnessing the Power of Retail Media panel, Rafael Martinez, director, business development, addressability Spain, LiveRamp, discussed data as an enabler and facilitator: Its the engine that launched retail media. The panel touched on the possibilities in the emerging sector, with Martinez discussing the strong growth already seen: The evolution is unparalleled - brands are really betting on retail media.

The first-party data discussion also turned to the subject of user-centricity. Lera discussed the need for better harnessing of first-party data in providing a better experience : First-party data really shows the relationship between the user and the brand. Cristina Villaroya, digital and media strategy director, BBVA also sees the cookieless future as an opportunity to improve the user experience: We cant prioritise business over user experience anymore.

Back on the retail media panel, Jesus Sancho Cubino, head of Carrefour Links Spain, Carrefour Spain discussed how data analysis of user needs allows for a better retail media offering, and the need for better knowledge of this nascent offering: We need to organise ourselves as an industry to improve visibility.

On the Evolution of the Publishers Business Model panel, we heard from Maylis Chevalier, director of innovation and digital product at Vocento, who discussed the importance of the user as a catalyst for collaboration: We need to focus on the user. Its the users that make publishers and tech companies speak the same language.

One of the most prominent themes throughout ATS Madrid was the need for collaboration. Whether in the form of interoperability, a multi-disciplinary approach or cross-industry standards, most panels touch on a more cooperative way of working.

This collaboration took a romantic turn during our Creative Transformation: Combining Data, Technology & Creativity panel. When discussing the need to remove silos and encourage technology to become part of the creative process, Roberto Fara, CCO, Ogilvy Spain, discussed wanting to see a polyamorous approach. Miguel Olivares, founder, La Despensa, agreed, running with the metaphor to demand an orgy of specialities.

On the same panel, David Pueyo, head of content and transmedia strategy at Bridges, chose to move the metaphor from the romantic to the theatrical, likening a successful creative and technological partnership as functioning like a performance: All the parts make the play - everyone works together to make a performance.

The future of TV was a hot topic around ATS Madrid, and our The Next Episode: Data-driven TV's Identity Opportunity discussed the need for collaboration. Enrique Diaz, digital and innovation director of Equmedia described the rise of CTV as a paradigm shift: Its a totally new way of working together. Gadea Rodriguez, associate director, advertiser solutions, Southern Europe, Pubmatic, spoke of how different TV platforms are starting to mix their models: Traditional TV is adding digital, digital natives are looking at linear audiences.

Jorge Suerias, chief data officer at A3Media asked: Are we able to make CTV address specific strategic goals? and highlighted the importance of measurement, with the panel agreeing that a set of industry standards is an important step. Juan Jesus Tova, head of data strategy for digital marketing, Mediaset agreed that we need efficient models to be adopted to increase interoperability.

As a fitting final thought for the day, Fernando Siles, head of online marketing, Worten described the three pressing challenges for retail media, defining them as measurement, inventory and communication. While he was specifically addressing retail media, these three issues had featured prominently across the day, highlighting some of the common challenges the industry will face over the coming year.

All discussions took place in Spanish. Quotes reported via translation.

Next stop for the ATS series is London, on June 14th - 15th 2022. Tickets are available now, with limited availability.

Read the rest here:

Context, cooperation and evolution: what we learned at ATS Madrid 2022 - ExchangeWire

Study area

With an area of about 2.33105 km2, the Western Sichuan Plateau (27.1134.31N and 97.36104.62E) is located in the transition zone between the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the Sichuan Basin, including all of Garze Prefecture and Aba Prefecture, and parts of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture28 (Fig.1). With an altitude of 7807556m, this area is dominated by mountain and ravine areas and high mountain and plateau areas, and the terrain is high in the west and low in the east. The climate belongs to the subtropical plateau monsoon climate, with large temperature difference between day and night and abundant sunshine. The annual average temperature is about 9.0110.5C, and the precipitation is about 556.8730 mm28. The study area is rich in water resources, including the Yalong River, Minjiang River and other important river systems in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, and the Baihe River, Heihe river and other river systems of the Yellow River. The main types of soil are plateau meadow soil dark brown soil, brown soil, cold frozen soil and cinnamon soil, and the main vegetation types are alpine meadow and scrub. With rich and diverse soil vegetation types and distinctive vertical zonal distribution characteristics, it is one of the global biodiversity conservation hotspots29.

Location of the study area. The map is created in the support of ArcGIS 10.2 (ESRI). The China map and Western Sichuan Plateau boundary data were collected from Resources and Environmental Science and Data Center (http://www.resdc.cn/). The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau boundary data were collected from the Global Change Research Data Publishing & Repository (http://www.geodoi.ac.cn/WebCn/Default.aspx).

Multisource archival data were used in this study (Table 1). The land use remote sensing monitoring data, administrative boundary data and geological disaster vector data were obtained from Resources and Environmental Science and Data Center. The spatial resolution of land use remote sensing monitoring data is 3030m, including 6 first-level classification and 26s-level classification. The first-level classification includes cropland, woodland, grassland, water body, built-up land, and unused land. The accuracy of remote sensing classification is not less than 95% for cropland and built-up land, not less than 90% for grassland, woodland, and water body, and not less than 85% for unused land, which meets the need of the research. Landsat remote sensing monitoring data is used as the main information resources, among which Landsat-TM/ETM remote sensing monitoring data is used in 2000, 2005, 2010 and Landsat 8 remote sensing monitoring data is used in 2015 and 2020. In light of actual conditions and the implementation of policies and philosophies including the natural forest protection project, return of farmland to forest, land remediation, ecological civilization, the period from 2000 to 2020 is selected as the study period, and the land use data of each period is cropped using ArcGIS 10.2 to reclassify the 26 secondary classifications into cropland, woodland, grassland, water body, built-up land and unused land.

The DEM data were obtained from SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) of Resources and Environmental Science and Data Center, the spatial resolution of 3030m, absolute horizontal accuracy20m, absolute elevation accuracy16m, elevation and slope are extracted from the downloaded DEM. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau boundary data were collected from the Global Change Research Data Publishing & Repository. Data of carbon density of different land types were obtained from Chinese Ecosystem Research Network Data Center (http://www.nesdc.org.cn/).

A total of 29,284 evaluation units were collected for spatial grid processing of the Western Sichuan Plateau according to 3km3km by ArcGIS 10.2. The impact factors obtained in this study include grid data per kilometer of GDP spatial distribution, grid data per kilometer of population spatial distribution, annual mean temperature spatial interpolation data, annual mean rainfall spatial interpolation data, long-term normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) comes from Resources and Environmental Science and Data Center with a resolution of 1km1km. The Human Active Index (HAI), with a resolution of 30m30m, can be calculated by formula30,31, and the factors are discretized into the data type required for the geodetector by the natural breakpoint method.

The InVEST model was developed by Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Nature Conservancy and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The model's terrestrial ecosystem services assessment includes four modules: soil conservation, water retention, carbon storage and biodiversity assessment, and provides an overall measurement of regional ecosystem services32. The carbon storage model of the InVEST model divides the carbon storage of the ecosystem into 4 basic carbon pools, namely above-ground carbon, underground carbon, soil carbon, dead organic matter carbon7.

The calculation formula of total carbon storage in the Western Sichuan Plateau is as follows7:

$$C_{total} = C_{above} + C_{below} + C_{soil} + C_{dead}$$

(1)

In formula (1), Ctotal is the total carbon storage; Cabove is the above-ground carbon storage; Cbelow is the underground carbon storage; Csoil is the soil carbon storage, and Cdead is the dead organic matter carbon storage.

Based on the carbon density and land use data of different land use type, the carbon storage of each land use type in the Western Sichuan Plateau is calculated by the formula7:

$$C_{{text{total}}i} = (C_{{text{above}}i} + C_{{text{below}}i} + C_{{text{soil}}i} + C_{{text{dead}}i}) times A_{i}$$

(2)

In formula (2), i is the average carbon density of each land use, and Ai is the area of this land used.

The carbon density data of different land use types in this study were obtained from the shared date of the National Ecological Science Data Center and some documents33,34,35,36,37. Since the carbon density data were collected from the results of studies in different parts of China, the selected documents should be close to or similar to the study area as far as possible to avoid excessive data gap. At the same time, the carbon density varies with climate, soil properties and land use38, so the carbon density should be modified according to the climate characteristics and land use types of the Western Sichuan Plateau. Existing research results show that the carbon density is positively correlated with annual precipitation and weakly correlated with annual average temperature. The quantitative expression of the relationship between carbon density and temperature and precipitation is as follows39,40,41,42:

$$C_{SP} = 3.3968 times P + 3996.1;;left( {{text{R}}^{{2}} = 0.{11}} right)$$

(3)

$$C_{BP} = 6.7981e^{0.00541p};;;left( {{text{R}}^{{2}} = 0.{7}0} right)$$

(4)

$$C_{BT} = 28 times {text{T}} + 398;;left( {{text{R}}^{{2}} = 0.{47,};{text{P}} < 0.0{1}} right)$$

(5)

In these formula, CSP is the soil carbon density (kgm2) based on the annual precipitation; CBP is the biomass carbon density (kgm2) based on the annual precipitation; CBT is the biomass carbon density (kgm2) based on annual average temperature; P is the average annual precipitation (mm), and T is the annual average temperature (C). According to the data of China Meteorological Data Service Centre (http://data.cma.cn/), in the past 20years, the average annual temperature of China and the Western Sichuan Plateau was 9.0C and 6.3C, and the average annual precipitation was 643.50mm and 812.65mm respectively.

The modified formula of carbon density in the Western Sichuan Plateau is as follows7:

$$K_{BP} = frac{C^{prime}{_{BP}}}{{C^{primeprime}{_{BP}}}}$$

(6)

$$K_{BT} = frac{C^{prime}{_{BT}}}{{C^{primeprime}{_{BT}}}}$$

(7)

$$C_{BT} = 28 times T + 398;;left( {{text{R}}^{{2}} = 0.{47,};{text{P}} < 0.0{1}} right)$$

(8)

$$K_{S} = frac{C^{prime}{_{SP}}}{{C^{primeprime}{_{SP}}}}$$

(9)

In these formula, KBP is the modified indices of precipitation factor in biomass carbon density; KBT is the modified indices of temperature factor; C'BP and C''BP are the biomass carbon density obtained from annual precipitation in the Western Sichuan Plateau and the whole country respectively. C'BT and C''BT are the biomass carbon density obtained from annual average temperature; C'SP and C''SP are the soil carbon density data obtained from annual average temperature; KB and KS are the biomass carbon density modified indices and soil carbon density modified indices respectively. The carbon density values of each land use type after modified in the Western Sichuan Plateau are shown in Table 2.

Global Morans I was used to describe the spatial differentiation characteristics of carbon storage in the study area, and the expression formula is as follows43:

$$I = frac{{nsumnolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {sumnolimits_{j = 1}^{n} {w_{i,j} left( {x_{i} - overline{x} } right)left( {x_{j} - overline{x} } right)} } }}{{sumnolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {sumnolimits_{j = 1}^{n} {omega_{ij} } } sumnolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {left( {x_{i} - overline{x} } right)^{2} } }}$$

(10)

wij is the spatial weight; x is the attribute mean; xi and xj are the attribute values of elements i, j, respectively; n is the number of cells, and the correlation is considered significant when |Z|>1.96.

LISA reveals the local cluster characteristics of spatial unit attributes by analyzing the difference and significance between spatial units and surrounding units, and the expression formula is as follows42:

$$I_{i} (d) = frac{{n(x_{i} - overline{x} )sumnolimits_{j = 1}^{n} {w_{ij} (x_{j} - overline{x} )} }}{{sumnolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {(x_{j} - overline{x} )^{2} } }}$$

(11)

In order to evaluate the influence of natural factors and socioeconomic factors on carbon storage in the study area, the correlation coefficients of temperature, rainfall, NDVI, GDP, population density (PD), HAI and carbon storage were calculated according to the Pearson correlation coefficient method. The calculation formula is as follows44:

$$r_{xy} = frac{{sumnolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {(M_{i} - overline{x} )(y_{i} - overline{y} )} }}{{sqrt {sumnolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {(M_{i} - overline{x} )^{2} sumnolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {(y_{i} - overline{y} )} } } }}$$

(12)

rxy represents the correlation coefficient between x and y; Mi represents the carbon storage in the ith year; yi represents the value of the impact factor Y in the ith year, and ({overline{text{x}}}) and ({overline{text{y}}}) respectively represents the average value of carbon storage and impact factor in the research period over several years.

Land use is significantly spatially clustered in the study area31, and LUCC changes will have a certain impact on the structure and process of the ecosystem. HAI has the characteristics of spatial variability, which can reflect the impact of human activities on land use and landscape composition changes. In this study, Human Influence Index Analysis Method (HAI) index was used to analyze the correlation between carbon storage and human interference intensity in the Western Sichuan Plateau. The calculation formula is as follows30,

$$HAI = sumlimits_{i = 1}^{n} {left( {A_{i} P_{i} /TA} right)}$$

(13)

HAI is Human Active Index; Ai is the total area of the ith land use type; Pi The intensity parameter of human impact reflected by type i land use type; TA is the total final surface area of land use type in evaluation unit; n is the number of land use types. Combined with the land use type of this study, Pi is assigned by Delphi method, in which cropland is 0.67, woodland is 0.13, grassland is 0.12, water body is 0.10, built-up land is 0.96, and unused land is 0.0530,45.

Geodetector is an algorithm that uses spatial heterogeneity principle to detect driving factors of carbon storage, which can quantitatively detect the influence of impact factors on carbon storage and explore the interaction between driving factors. Geodetector includes factor detection, risk detection, interaction detection and ecological detection46.

Differentiation and factor detection: the influence factors were discretized, and then the significance test of the difference in the mean values of the impact factors was conducted to detect the relative importance among the factors. The statistical quantity q is used to measure the explanatory power of impact factors on the carbon storage spatial differentiation and the value range of q is between 0 and 1. The larger the value, the stronger the explanatory power of the factor47.

$$q = 1{ - }frac{{sumnolimits_{h = 1}^{L} {N_{h} sigma_{h}^{2} } }}{{Nsigma^{2} }}$$

(14)

In this formula, h=1, 2, L is the classification or partition of variable (Y) or factor (X); Nh and N are layer h and regional number units respectively; and (sigma_{h}^{2}) and (sigma_{{}}^{2}) are the variance of the layer h and regional value Y respectively.

The variance of the regional value Y is calculated as follows,

$$sigma^{2} = frac{{sumnolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {(Y_{i} - overline{Y} )^{2} } }}{N - 1}$$

(15)

where, Yi and (overline{Y}) are the mean value of sample j and the region Y, respectively.

$$sigma^{2} = frac{{sumnolimits_{i = 1}^{{n_{h} }} {(Y_{h,i} - overline{{Y_{h} }} )^{2} } }}{{N_{h} - 1}}$$

(16)

where, Y and (overline{Y}) are the value and mean value of sample i in layer h, respectively.

Interaction detection: it is used to identify the interaction between different impact factors Xs, that is, to evaluate whether the combined action of X1 and X2 will increase or weaken the explanatory power of vegetation coverage Y, or the influence of these factors on Y is independent of each other. The evaluation method is to first calculate the value q of the two factors X1 and X2 for Y respectively: q(X1) and q(X2), and calculate the value q of their interaction (the new polygon distribution formed by the tangent of the two layers of the superimposed variables X1 and X2) : q(X1X2) and compare q(X1) and q(X2) with q(X1X2)46.

See the article here:

Spatio-temporal evolution and driving factors of carbon storage in the Western Sichuan Plateau | Scientific Reports - Nature.com

Lyme disease has been a nationally recognized condition in the United States since 1991 and is the most common vector-borne illness in North America and Europe.1 Since 1991, the incidence of Lyme disease in the United States has nearly doubled and Lyme disease is now endemic to Northeastern States as well as Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that ~300,000 people get Lyme disease each year, however only about 35,000 cases are reported each year. This discrepancy is largely due to that fact that many cases do not get reported to the Nationally Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS).2 Additional limitations of surveillance data includes data are subject to each states abilities to capture and classify cases, and that data are captured by county of residence, not county of exposure.1 In the article below, we explore the current state of Lyme disease testing, and share perspectives on how improvements could be made in the future to improve time to diagnosis.

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection transmitted to humans through the bite of infected blacklegged ticks. The causative agent of Lyme disease, bacteria of the genus Borrelia, are known as spirochetes for their unique corkscrew shape.3 Several Borrelia species (spp.) have been identified and are associated with different regions including North America (Borrelia burgdorferi), Europe and Asia (Borrelia afzelii and Borrelia garinii). In the United States, B. burgdorferi is spread by deer ticks (Ixodes scapularis) in the northeastern, mid-Atlantic and north-central regions, while the western blacklegged tick (Ixodes pacificus) spread disease on the Pacific Coast.4 Recently, an additional species, B. mayonii, has been discovered in blacklegged ticks collected in northwestern Wisconsin and Minnesota and has been found to also cause Lyme disease.5

Ticks often attach to hard-to-see areas such as the groin, armpits and scalp, and are difficult to identify due to their small size (<2 mm nymph stage). For Lyme disease transmission, the tick must be attached for 36 to 48 hours.4 Early symptoms of Lyme disease may begin from 3 to 30 days after the tick bite and include fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle and joint aches and swollen lymph nodes.6 Approximately 7080% of people will experience the erythema migrans (EM) rash which expands gradually over time sometimes forming the classic bulls-eye appearance. Later symptoms, days to months after the tick bite, include headaches, facial palsy, arthritis (Lyme arthritis), joint and nerve pain, dizziness, and irregular heartbeat (Lyme carditis).6

Lyme disease can also feature neurological involvement. Neurological Lyme disease (neuroborreliosis) occurs as a secondary symptom of Lyme disease involving the peripheral or central nervous system and occurs in about 1015% of patients with untreated Lyme disease.7 The attack on the nervous system typically appears as radiculitis (Bannwarths syndrome), which features cranial neuritis, facial paralysis and sensory disorders.8Less frequently, meningitis, myelitis, encephalitis and cerebral vasculitis occur.

Fortunately, patients with Lyme disease treated early with appropriate antibiotics typically experience a full recovery.9 The exact dosage and duration of treatment for Lyme disease is specific for the type of clinical manifestation. For people with EM rash, oral antibiotic treatment with either doxycycline, amoxicillin or cefuroxime is recommended.9 For patients with Lyme carditis, Lyme arthritis or neurological Lyme disease, oral or intravenous antibiotics are given.

Lyme disease diagnosis can be difficult based on symptoms alone in people who do not have an EM rash. In such cases, laboratory testing is essential.10,11 During the acute phase of the infection, molecular testing is not recommended because the DNA concentration in blood is low and may not be detectable. Later in infection, molecular testing has high sensitivity for the diagnosis of Lyme arthritis when using joint fluid as a sample (Table 1).12

Detection of antibodies in the blood is the gold standard for Lyme disease diagnosis (Table 1).12,13 The CDC established a two-tier testing algorithm in 1995, known as Standard Two-Tier Testing Algorithm (STTT). STTT consists of a first-line enzyme immunoassay (EIA) or immunofluorescence assay (IFA) screen for anti-Borrelia burgdorferi antibodies. Positive or equivocal samples are subsequently tested by B. burgdorferi-specific IgM and IgG immunoblots.13,14 Depending on the symptoms onset, both IgG and IgM immunoblot testing or only IgG testing have to be performed. A positive result is indicated by the presence of at least 2 out of a possible 3 bands for IgM immunoblot testing, or 5 out of a possible 10 bands for IgG immunoblot testing.15

The STTT presents some limitations: (a) In the early stage of Lyme disease, the sensitivity is low because of the low antibody concentration. As a result, false-negatives can happen. (b) Interpretation of immunoblot results can be challenging and subjective, leading to false-positive results.11,16,17 Due to these limitations, studies were performed to improve the accuracy of Lyme disease testing, and alternate testing to STTT has been additionally suggested.11,17,18 After 24 years, in July 2019, the FDA cleared a variation of STTT known as modified two-tier testing (MTTT) replacing the second tier immunoblot testing with a second EIA (either ELISA or chemiluminescence assay) that can detect IgM and IgG simultaneously or separately.19 Furthermore, the CDC and the guidelines for Lyme disease from Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA)updated the testing algorithm with the addition of the MTTT. 12-14

For neuroborreliosis diagnosis, either the STTT or MTTT algorithm is recommended by CDC.13 Additional testing can be performed to confirm positive results or exclude other neurological diseases (Table 1). For example, testing cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) for intrathecal antibodies or CXCL13.12,20,21

MTTT's high performance has been demonstrated in various studies in the United States, Canada and Europe following FDA approval.22,23 In the United States, clinical testing labs have implemented the MTTT, and more manufacturers are offering solutions that are aligned with the MTTT. Some labs, on the other hand, continue to utilize STTT or both (MTTT and STTT) because some clinicians want to know what bands (antigens) are positive in the immunoblots to gain more information about the disease, such as those antigens that are relevant to the detection of Lyme arthritis.12 Therefore, both CDC testing algorithms are projected to be used in the coming years.

If laboratories intend to perform alternative testing in addition to, or instead of, the testing established by the CDC, they must validate the new test with the relevant assay as a lab-developed test (LDT) according to state and local guidelines. An example of alternate testing would be the use of immunoblots, as a second-tier test, containing extra and/or different antigens than those required by the CDC. A good example is the VlsE antigen, which stands for variable major protein-like sequence expressed. According to studies, adding the VlsE antigen, in an immunoblot to detect IgG, improves the sensitivity of Lyme disease testing in the early and late stages while retaining a high level of specificity.16,24-26

Patients who have recently traveled to Europe or Asia may benefit from testing for European or Asian Borrelia species in addition to US species. Due to the similarity of antigenic epitopes of Borrelia species antibody cross-reactivity is observed within the Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato complex.27,28 As there may be species-specific antibodies in some circumstances, adding particular antigens for each species can improve the sensitivity of the tests.29

New assays are being investigated due to the limitations of serology during the early stages of Lyme disease. For example, new technologies with high sensitivity are being developed in the field of molecular biology.30,31 In serology, the discovery of novel antigens is crucial. According to a recent study, detecting antiphospholipid antibodies can improve STTT sensitivity during the early stages of illness.32 Additionally, T-cell response detection against Borrelia spp. infection has been explored, implying that T-cell response testing could aid in the diagnosis of early Lyme disease.33-36

Further studies are required to support the inclusion of such testing alternatives in the CDC testing algorithm and to better understand the clinical utility of new antigens and markers for the early phase of the infection and their relevance to monitoring treatment and reinfection.

Table 1: Clinical symptoms and testing in early and convalescent phases of Lyme disease.

Lyme disease stage

Clinical symptoms/testing

Early stage of Lyme disease (3-30 days after tick bite)

Disseminated and chronic stages of Lyme disease

(>30 days after tick bite)

Clinical symptoms

EM rash: detectable in 70%80 % of patients

Unspecific: fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle, and joint aches, swollen lymph nodes

EM rash: not observed

Lyme arthritis: swollen knees, neck stiffness

Lyme carditis: light-headedness, fainting, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, or chest pain

Neuroborreliosis: meningitis/encephalitis

Molecular

PCR (limited utility in blood)

Lyme arthritis: PCR (highest sensitivity in joint fluid)

Serology

IgM

Antibodies against phospholipids*

IgM and/or IgG are detectable in the blood depending on the time of the infection

Neuroborreliosis (CSF testing):

Intrathecal IgM and/or IgG detectable depending on time of the infection

CXCL13 upregulation

Cellular response

T-cell response*

T-cell response*

* Further studies are required to support the clinical utility of this testing.

About the authors:

Maite Sabalza, PhD, is the Scientific Affairs Manager at EUROIMMUN US, a PerkinElmer company.Her academic background is in infectious diseases and diagnostics.

Ilana Heckler, PhD, is the Scientific Affairs Associate at EUROIMMUN US, a PerkinElmer company.She holds a PhD in Chemical Biology for her studies on bacterial hemoprotein sensors of nitric oxide.

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25. Schulte-Spechtel U, Lehnert G, Liegl G, et al. Significant improvement of the recombinant Borrelia-specific immunoglobulin G immunoblot test by addition of VlsE and a DbpA homologue derived from Borrelia garinii for diagnosis of early neuroborreliosis. J Clin Microbiol. 2003;41(3):1299-1303. doi: 10.1128/JCM.41.3.1299-1303.2003

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Read more here:

Evolution of Lyme Disease Testing and Future Perspectives - Technology Networks

Photo: A former Tops Friendly Market, by Nicholas Eckhart, via Flickr (cropped).

Over the weekend, a teenage male shooter perpetrateda horrific mass murderin a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, where 13 people were shot, and 10 died. All but two of the victims were black.

Journalists and commentators have rushed to report that the shooter is a white supremacist who hates blacks, Jews, and immigrants and subscribes to the racist theory known as The Great Replacement. The description is true as far as it goes.

But it is also woefully inadequate. It doesnt tell us anything about the roots of the shooters twisted beliefs. Until we start paying attention to THAT question, we are unlikely to make progress in combatting these kinds of crimes in the future.

It certainly wasnt Christianity. In a manifesto posted online that has been attributed to the shooter, the author does make a bizarre claim that he believe[s] in and practice[s] many Christian values. (p. 7) Apparently thou shalt not murder and love thy neighbor as thyself arent among them. More importantly, this pro forma statement in the manifesto follows an unequivocal rejection of Christianity. Are you a Christian? the manifestos writer asks himself.No. I do not ask God for salvation by faith, nor do I confess my sins to Him. He goes on to suggest he is an out-and-out materialist: I personally believe there is no afterlife.

If not religion, what about politics? Perhaps the shooter was persuaded by the rhetoric of Republican Party politicians or conservative pundits like Tucker Carlson, as some have recklessly suggested online? Sorry, but those who want to score partisan points in this awful tragedy should look elsewhere.

Despite claims to the contrary, the shooter is hard to pigeonhole as someone who fits neatly either on the right or left. In his purported manifesto, this is how he describes his political beliefs: When I was 12 I was deep into communist ideology, talk to anyone from my old high school and ask about me and you will hear that. From age 15 to 18 however, I consistently moved farther to the right. On the political compassI fall in the mild-moderate authoritarian left category, and I would prefer to be called a populist. (p. 9, emphasis mine) He later reiterates: I would prefer to call myself a populist. Butyou can call me an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialistif you want, I wouldnt disagree with you. (p. 10, emphasis mine)

So if not religion or politics, what fueled his hatreds? Try evolutionary science.

In his purported manifesto, the shooter asserts that blacks are a different subspecies of human. Why? Because Whites and Blacksare separated by tens of thousands of years of evolution, and our genetic material is obviously very different. (emphasis mine, p. 14) Elsewhere he suggests that Europeans and Asians are more recently evolved than blacks (p. 17), which sounds eerily reminiscent of the view of countless racists of the past (includingCharles Darwin himself) that blacks are the lowest humans on the evolutionary ladder.

You wont find the shooter drawing on Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump in his manifesto. Youwillfind lots of citations to articles in mainstream peer-reviewed science journals, includingNature Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Molecular Psychiatry, Journal of Research in Personality, Personality and Individual Differences, andCurrent Directions in Psychological Science.You will also find citations to science articles published in media outlets liketheNew York Times. The shooter cites those sources to try to justify genetic reductionism and his abhorrent belief in black genetic inferiority.

Unfortunately, the Buffalo shooters evolutionary racism is not an outlier among recent mass killers. Arguments drawn from evolution have been prominent in the ideologies of many mass shooters in recent years, includingAnders Breivikin 2011, a Norwegian mass murderer cited as a role model by the Buffalo shooter. Other shooters smitten by Darwinian evolution have included theColumbine High School shooters in 1999, Finnish shooterPekka Eric Auvinenin 2007, theHolocaust Memorial Museum shooterin 2009, and theGilroy Garlic Festival shooterin 2019.

Obviously, believing in evolution doesnt compel one to be a racist, let alone predispose a personto be a killer. Nevertheless, if we want to counteract the influences that shape people like the Buffalo shooter, we need to face the way evolutionary science is being misused to support the new white supremacists.

To some degree, the past is coming back to haunt the scientific community. The historical connections between evolutionary biology and racism are undeniable. As historian Richard Weikart meticulously documents in his recent book, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism(2022), evolutionary arguments have been a staple among scientific racists over the past century right down to the present. You will find some of the same evidence in my documentaryHuman Zoos.

To their credit, most supporters of Darwinian evolution largely abandoned their scientific racism after the civil rights era, if not earlier. The problem is that they had little positive to replace it with. Think about it: If humans truly evolved through a blind and accidental process that did not have them in mind, its not much of a jump to believe that some human populations must have evolved in ways superior to other human populations. Thus, a tendency toward racism was sort of built-in to evolutionary theory from the get-go. While most scientists have turned their backs on such racism, the misanthropic foundations of Darwinism have not been replaced. Today the misanthropy usually shows itself not in the support of racism, but in the denial of value toallhumans. This is what one finds in the current animal/plant/nature rights movements as well the population control movement. (If you doubt this, see my colleague Wesley J. Smiths book and documentary,The War on Humans.)

And yet what happens when some now seek a return to the earlier days of Darwinian racism? The scientific communitys rejection of scientific racism after the civil rights movement was more sociological than scientific. So when white supremacists come along today and resurrect arguments for Darwinian racism from years gone by, modern evolutionary theory may not have the moral resources to persuade them otherwise.

By contrast, if you have a teleological view of the development of life, you have more resources to draw on. If you believe humans and their capabilities resulted from a transcendent plan rather than the happenstance of unguided evolution if you believe that science shows man is, to invoke biologist Michael Denton,a miracle rather than an accident, its a lot easier to believe that humans are fundamentally equal. All of us reflect the same underlying plan. Any differences that exist are variations on the same overarching theme.

A coda to the Buffalo shooter bears mentioning, because it is also connected to science.

In his manifesto, the shooter says he didnt always hold his current hateful views. So when did things change? He recalls: I started browsing 4chan in May 2020 after extreme boredom, remember this was during the outbreak of covid. (p. 13) Left to himself, he had endless time to lurk on the web, which means he had endless time to discover and then be persuaded by the arguments of the vile merchants of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and scientific racism.

Recall that most schools were closed for in-person interactions in 2020. So were churches. So were gyms and recreational facilities. So were many other institutions of normal socialization. The shutdowns were imposed in the name of science and with the support of leading scientific and medical authorities.

At the time, some people dared to raise questions about what the unintended consequences might be for young people if we shut them off from healthy in-person interactions. Now we have the answer for at least one person.

Only one data point, I know. But in coming months, I fear we may have more.

Go here to read the rest:

Science Fueled a White Supremacist Mass Murder - Discovery Institute