type 2 response and eventually perpetuating airway inflammation in asthma.Although nasal continuous positive airway pressure or non-invasive ventilation is used to manage some patients with acute lung injury due to COVID-19, such patients also demonstrate increased minute ventilation which makes it hard, if the device is used in line with the manufacturer's instructions, to achieve adequate oxygen delivery. In addition, if a hospital contains many such patients, then it is possible that the oxygen requirements will exceed infrastructure capacity. Here we describe a simple modification of two exemplar ventilators normally used for domiciliary ventilation, which substantially increased the fraction of inspired oxygen (FiO2) delivered.The Sentinel System is a national electronic postmarketing resource established by the US Food and Drug Administration to support assessment of the safety and effectiveness of marketed medical products. It has built a large, multi-institutional, distributed data network that contains comprehensive electronic health data, covering about 700 million person-years of longitudinal observation time nationwide. With its sophisticated infrastructure and a large selection of flexible analytic tools, the Sentinel System permits rapid and secure analyses, while preserving patient privacy and health-system autonomy. https://www.selleckchem.com/peptide/octreotide-acetate.html The Sentinel System also offers enhanced capabilities, including accessing full-text medical records, supporting randomized clinical trials embedded in healthcare delivery systems, and facilitating effective collection of patient-reported data using mobile devices, among many other research programs. The nephrology research community can use the infrastructure, tools, and data that this national resource offers for evidence generation. This review summarizes the Sentinel System and its ability to rapidly generate high-quality, real-world evidence; discusses the program's experience in, and potential for, addressing gaps in kidney care; and outlines avenues for conducting research, leveraging this national resource in collaboration with Sentinel investigators.The meiotic TopoVI B subunit (MTopVIB) plays an essential role in double-strand break formation in mouse (Mus musculus), Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), and rice (Oryza sativa), and recent work reveals that rice MTopVIB also plays an unexpected role in meiotic bipolar spindle assembly, highlighting multiple functions of MTopVIB during rice meiosis. In this work, we characterized the meiotic TopVIB in maize (Zea mays; ZmMTOPVIB). The ZmmtopVIB mutant plants exhibited normal vegetative growth but male and female sterility. Meiotic double-strand break formation was abolished in mutant meiocytes. Despite normal assembly of axial elements, mutants showed severely affected synapsis and disrupted homologous pairing. Importantly, we showed that bipolar spindle assembly was also affected in ZmmtopVIB, resulting in triad and polyad formation. Overall, our results demonstrate that ZmMTOPVIB plays critical roles in double-strand break formation and homologous recombination. In addition, our results suggest that the function of MTOPVIB in bipolar spindle assembly is likely conserved across different monocots.The US government maintains that local sanctuary policies prevent deportations of violent criminals and increase crime. This report tests those claims by combining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation data and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) crime data with data on the implementation dates of sanctuary policies between 2010 and 2015. Sanctuary policies reduced deportations of people who were fingerprinted by states or counties by about one-third. Those policies also changed the composition of deportations, reducing deportations of people with no criminal convictions by half-without affecting deportations of people with violent convictions. Sanctuary policies also had no detectable effect on crime rates. These findings suggest that sanctuary policies, although effective at reducing deportations, do not threaten public safety.Mating plugs are produced by many sexually reproducing animals and are hypothesized to promote male fertilization success under promiscuous mating. However, tests of this hypothesis have been constrained by an inability to discriminate ejaculates of different males in direct competition. Here, we use stable isotope labeling in vivo and proteomics to achieve this in a promiscuous rodent, Myodes glareolus We show that, although the first male's plug is usually dislodged, it can be retained throughout the second male's copulation. Retained plugs did not completely block rival sperm but did significantly limit their numbers. Differences in the number of each male's sperm progressing through the female reproductive tract were also explained by natural variation in the size of mating plugs and reproductive accessory glands from which major plug proteins originate. Relative sperm numbers in turn predicted the relative fertilization success of rival males. Our application of stable isotopes to label ejaculates resolves a longstanding debate by revealing how rodent mating plugs promote fertilization success under competitive conditions. This approach opens new opportunities to reveal cryptic mechanisms of postcopulatory sexual selection among diverse animal taxa.Historical records reveal the temporal patterns of a sequence of plague epidemics in London, United Kingdom, from the 14th to 17th centuries. Analysis of these records shows that later epidemics spread significantly faster ("accelerated"). Between the Black Death of 1348 and the later epidemics that culminated with the Great Plague of 1665, we estimate that the epidemic growth rate increased fourfold. Currently available data do not provide enough information to infer the mode of plague transmission in any given epidemic; nevertheless, order-of-magnitude estimates of epidemic parameters suggest that the observed slow growth rates in the 14th century are inconsistent with direct (pneumonic) transmission. We discuss the potential roles of demographic and ecological factors, such as climate change or human or rat population density, in driving the observed acceleration.