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Everybody has their pros and cons with guitar brands but when it comes to a PRS everybody says the same thing: it's got something about it that players feel sets [...]

The refinement of brain morphology extends across childhood, and exposure to environmental toxins during this period may alter typical trends. Radon is a highly common radiologic toxin with a well-established role in cancer among adults. However, effects on developmental populations are understudied in comparison. This study investigated whether home radon exposure is associated with altered brain morphology in youths. Fifty-four participants (6–14 yrs, M=10.52 yrs, 48.15% male, 89% White) completed a T1-weighted MRI and home measures of radon. We observed a significant multivariate effect of home radon concentrations, which was driven by effects on GMV. Specifically, higher home radon was associated with smaller GMV (F=6.800, p=.012, ηp2=.13). Conversely, there was a trending radon-by-age interaction on WMV, which reached significance when accounting for the chronicity of radon exposure (F=4.12, p=.049, ηp2=.09). We found that youths with above-average radon exposure showed no change in WMV with age, whereas low radon was linked with normative, age-related WMV increases. These results suggest that everyday home radon exposure may alter sensitive structural brain development, impacting developmental trajectories in both gray and white matter.

Objective: Brain function is understood to be regulated by complex spatiotemporal dynamics, and can be characterized by a combination of observed brain response patterns in time and space. Magnetoencephalography (MEG), with its high temporal resolution, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), with its high spatial resolution, are complementary imaging techniques with great potential to reveal information about spatiotemporal brain dynamics. Hence, the complementary nature of these imaging techniques holds much promise to study brain function in time and space, especially when the two data types are allowed to fully interact. Methods: We employed coupled tensor/matrix factorization (CMTF) to extract joint latent components in the form of unique spatiotemporal brain patterns that can be used to study brain development and function on a millisecond scale. Results: Using the CMTF model, we extracted distinct brain patterns that revealed fine-grained spatiotemporal brain dynamics and typical sensory processing pathways informative of high-level cognitive functions in healthy adolescents. The components extracted from multimodal tensor fusion possessed better discriminative ability between high- and low-performance subjects than single-modality data-driven models. Conclusion: Multimodal tensor fusion successfully identified spatiotemporal brain dynamics of brain function and produced unique components with high discriminatory power. Significance: The CMTF model is a promising tool for high-order, multimodal data fusion that exploits the functional resolution of MEG and fMRI, and provides a comprehensive picture of the developing brain in time and space.

Graph convolutional deep learning has emerged as a promising method to explore the functional organization of the human brain in neuroscience research. This paper presents a novel framework that utilizes the gated graph transformer (GGT) model to predict individuals’ cognitive ability based on functional connectivity (FC) derived from fMRI. Our framework incorporates prior spatial knowledge and uses a random-walk diffusion strategy that captures the intricate structural and functional relationships between different brain regions. Specifically, our approach employs learnable structural and positional encodings (LSPE) in conjunction with a gating mechanism to efficiently disentangle the learning of positional encoding (PE) and graph embeddings. Additionally, we utilize the attention mechanism to derive multi-view node feature embeddings and dynamically distribute propagation weights between each node and its neighbors, which facilitates the identification of significant biomarkers from functional brain networks and thus enhances the interpretability of the findings. To evaluate our proposed model in cognitive ability prediction, we conduct experiments on two large-scale brain imaging datasets: the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) and the Human Connectome Project (HCP). The results show that our approach not only outperforms existing methods in prediction accuracy but also provides superior explainability, which can be used to identify important FCs underlying cognitive behaviors.

Age-related changes in the neurophysiology underlying motor control are well documented, but whether these changes are specific to motor function or more broadly reflect age-related alterations in fronto-parietal circuitry serving attention and other higher-level processes remains unknown. Herein, we collected high-density magnetoencephalography (MEG) in 72 healthy adults (age 28–63 years) as they completed an adapted version of the multi-source interference task that involved two subtypes of cognitive interference (i.e., flanker and Simon) and their integration (i.e., multi-source). All MEG data were examined for age-related changes in neural oscillatory activity using a whole-brain beamforming approach. Our primary findings indicated robust behavioral differences in task performance based on the type of interference, as well as stronger beta oscillations with increasing age in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (flanker and multi-source conditions), left parietal (flanker and Simon), and medial parietal regions (multi-source). Overall, these data indicate that healthy aging is associated with alterations in higher-order association cortices that are critical for attention and motor control in the context of cognitive interference.

The article in Guitarist magazine features several letters from readers. One reader shares their experience of playing guitar with their eyes closed, which led to them playing in new and different ways. The editor agrees that closing one sense can heighten others and suggests that closing our eyes can help us focus on sound and improve our playing. Another reader discusses their preference for certain guitar brands and how their perceptions have changed over time. The editor emphasizes the importance of finding guitars that work for individual needs and highlights the dedication of guitar designers in creating quality instruments. The article also includes a request for information about a specific guitar brand and a reader's invention to address neck dive in guitars. Lastly, a reader shares their discovery of an old Harmony guitar and seeks more information about its history and value. [Extracted from the article]

Objective: Multimodal-based methods show great potential for neuroscience studies by integrating complementary information. There has been less multimodal work focussed on brain developmental changes. Methods: We propose an explainable multimodal deep dictionary learning method to uncover both the commonality and specificity of different modalities, which learns the shared dictionary and the modality-specific sparse representations based on the multimodal data and their encodings of a sparse deep autoencoder. Results: By regarding three fMRI paradigms collected during two tasks and resting state as modalities, we apply the proposed method on multimodal data to identify the brain developmental differences. The results show that the proposed model can not only achieve better performance in reconstruction, but also yield age-related differences in reoccurring patterns. Specifically, both children and young adults prefer to switch among states during two tasks while staying within a particular state during rest, but the difference is that children possess more diffuse functional connectivity patterns while young adults have more focused functional connectivity patterns. Conclusion and Significance: To uncover the commonality and specificity of three fMRI paradigms to developmental differences, multimodal data and their encodings are used to train the shared dictionary and the modality-specific sparse representations. Identifying brain network differences helps to understand how the neural circuits and brain networks form and develop with age.

Objective: Endophenotypes such as brain age and fluid intelligence are important biomarkers of disease status. However, brain imaging studies to identify these biomarkers often encounter limited numbers of subjects but high dimensional imaging features, hindering reproducibility. Therefore, we develop an interpretable, multivariate classification/regression algorithm, called Latent Similarity (LatSim), suitable for small sample size but high feature dimension datasets. Methods: LatSim combines metric learning with a kernel similarity function and softmax aggregation to identify task-related similarities between subjects. Inter-subject similarity is utilized to improve performance on three prediction tasks using multi-paradigm fMRI data. A greedy selection algorithm, made possible by LatSim's computational efficiency, is developed as an interpretability method. Results: LatSim achieved significantly higher predictive accuracy at small sample sizes on the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) dataset. Connections identified by LatSim gave superior discriminative power compared to those identified by other methods. We identified 4 functional brain networks enriched in connections for predicting brain age, sex, and intelligence. Conclusion: We find that most information for a predictive task comes from only a few (1-5) connections. Additionally, we find that the default mode network is over-represented in the top connections of all predictive tasks. Significance: We propose a novel prediction algorithm for small sample, high feature dimension datasets and use it to identify connections in task fMRI data. Our work can lead to new insights in both algorithm design and neuroscience research.

Introduction:Motor control requires a reciprocal volley between somatosensory and motor systems, with somatosensory feedback being essential for the online updating of motor commands to achieve behavioral outcomes. However, this dynamic interplay among sensorimotor brain systems serving motor control remains poorly understood.Methods:To address this, we designed a novel somatosensory entrainment-movement task, which 25 adults completed during magnetoencephalography (MEG). Specifically, participants completed a quasi-paced finger-tapping paradigm while subthreshold electrical stimulation was applied to the right median nerve at a sensorimotor-relevant frequency (15 Hz) and during a second condition where no electrical stimulation was applied. The MEG data were transformed into the time-frequency domain and imaged by using a beamformer to evaluate the effect of somatosensory feedback (i.e., entrainment) on movement-related oscillations and motor performance at the single trial level.Results:Our results indicated spectrally specific reductions in movement-related oscillatory power (i.e., theta, gamma) during 15 Hz stimulation in the contralateral motor cortex during motor execution. In addition, we observed robust cross-frequency coupling within the motor cortex and further, stronger theta-gamma coupling was predictive of faster reaction times, irrespective of condition (i.e., stim vs. no stim). Finally, in the presence of electrical stimulation, cross-frequency coupling of movement-related oscillations was reduced, and the stronger the entrained neuronal populations (i.e., increased oscillatory power) were before movement onset, the weaker the inherent theta-gamma coupling became in the motor cortex.Discussion:This novel exogenous manipulation paradigm provides key insights on how the somatosensory system modulates the motor cortical oscillations required for volitional movement in the normative sensorimotor system.

Audience responses to television are at the heart of sense-making in the public sphere. Research on viewers' readings of economic, political and social events in news programs, invariably constructed around the activities of `significant' individuals, is of particular consequence for understanding the functioning of a democracy. This paper is a cross-cultural reception study of how audiences come to interpret the program genre of television news. In a process of comprehension characterised by fusing/feuding horizons of understanding the world, viewers playfully accommodate the meaning of programs in their everyday lives. Analysis of television's reception should be tested against audience activity. Theory must be corroborated. Drawing from a significant literature discussing the phenomenology of ludic experience, the article theorises trans-cultural reception of Western (British) television by Asian (Malaysian) viewers as seriously `playful'. Academic assertions are assessed as illuminating audience response.

Have you checked the cost of custom bolt handles lately? The cost is out of sight. So, how about making your own? Now, the choice of weld on bolt handles [...]

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (RCCL) will launch the first cruise ship commissioned under its Project Vision fleet expansion program on May 16, 1995. Christened the Legend of the Seas, the new cruise ship has a total displacement of 70,950 gross tons and can carry 2060 passengers and 740 crew members. It was build by Chantiers de l'Atlantique and features five Wartsila Vasa 12V46 diesel-electric engines and state-of-the-art navigation and communications equipment.

Finland's shipbuilding industry has been as financially healthy as ever despite the appreciation of its currency, the markka, leading to higher prices for its products. The country's competitive edge is carried on by its many shipyards among which are Kvaerner Masa-Yards, Finnyards and Kotka Shipyard Inc. The number of orders and contracts from foreign clients have generally increased from 1993-1994.

Danyard A S decided to diversify into handymax bulk carriers in an effort to generate more business and cope with the weak newbuilding market. A company used to building more complex vessels, Danyard's typical products include reefers and chemical tankers. Two Danyard-built bulk carriers, Nordpol and Nordkap, have already been delivered and another two are still under construction. A brief overview of the design and technical specifications of Danyard's handymax bulk carriers is presented.

Shipping company Finnhansa ordered the redesign of several freight roros which were to ply the route between Helsinki, Finland and Lubeck, Germany. The vessels were converted into 90-passenger ships. This decision was made without sacrificing cargo handling efficiency. FG-Shipping tooks charge of the planning and technical development phase of the project. The conversion process, machinery, dynamic positioning procedure and emergency equipment are discussed.

International Cableship Proprietary Ltd.'s 'Asean Restorer' cable ship is the first vessel of its kind where the cable is worked over the stern. The ship, which was designed for the laying and repairing of submarine cables, was assembled at Kvaerner Masa Yards of Finland. Its on-board cable handling equipment include two stern sheaves, two cable drums, a 50-tonne A-frame and two 10-tonne SWL offshore rated cranes.

Saudi Aramco's Karan 8 research vessel, which is scheduled for delivery on Aug. 1994, will perform site surveys for drilling rigs and new platforms, route surveys for new pipelines, and inspect pipelines and pollution problems in existing oilfields. The 2,086 gt hydrographic research vessel is the latest addition to Saudi Aramco's fleet of around 150 support vessels and 21 tankers. The vessel was built by Norway's Mjellem and Karlsen Verft.

Astilleros Espanoles (AESA) has completed the first container ship in the four to be built for Transportacion Maritima Mexicana. The Nuevo Leon is also the first container ship to be built in AESA's Bilbao shipyard. The ship has a length of 202 meters and a breadth of 32.2 meters with a deadwieght of 36,887 tons. It has a container capacity of 2,394 twenty-foot equivalent units in five holds. It is also powered by a Manises-MAN B&W 7S70MC engine and has a speed of 20 knots.

Spanish shipyards registered 600, 000gt orderbook for 1993, representing an 8% decrease from 1992 demand. Thus, financial losses were incurred during the period as orders from Dec. 1992 were filed and access to credit for financing by owners was practically absent. Although 1993 orders increased by 16%, the national trend was negative compared with international levels for shipbuilding. New regulations have been established to allow competitive pricing by owners and to halt the declining demand.

The Finnish marine industry's international competitiveness continues to benefit from the devaluation of the markka. Kvaerner Masa-Yards and Finnyards, two of the country's shipbuilding groups, have secured firm newbuilding orders for 1993 and continue to invest in facilities and techniques. The country's equipment supply industry is also boosting its international presence by packaging products and services.

Tenfjord Managing Dir Oluf Holm noted a growing trend towards developing safer and more long-lasting ship steering systems. Headded that the emphasis on safety seems to be towards the development of more alarms rather than toward mechanical or hydraulic safety systems. In light of these trends, Tenfjord has developed several new steering systemsincorporating such added demands. A discussion of several of Tenfjord's new products, particularly its SR series spherical rotary steering gear system, is presented.