The Development of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccines and Current Barriers to Implementation.

The identification of the human papillomavirus (HPV) as the causative agent of multiple cancers allowed for the development of vaccines and immunization strategies to prevent cancers caused by HPV infection. The public health ramifications of reduction of HPV disease burden are momentous in scope. Vaccine hesitancy has impacted widespread vaccination, but strategies have been identified to combat vaccine safety and efficacy misinformation and promote immunization.

Common skin and bleeding disorders that can potentially masquerade as child abuse.

Child abuse and neglect remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality among children worldwide. Over the last few decades, there has been growing research in the field of Child Abuse Pediatrics with greater recognition and research into potential diagnostic mimics of inflicted injury. This paper reviews some common skin findings and bleeding disorders that have features in common with child abuse.

Director field model of the primary visual cortex for contour detection.

We aim to build the simplest possible model capable of detecting long, noisy contours in a cluttered visual scene. For this, we model the neural dynamics in the primate primary visual cortex in terms of a continuous director field that describes the average rate and the average orientational preference of active neurons at a particular point in the cortex. We then use a linear-nonlinear dynamical model with long range connectivity patterns to enforce long-range statistical context present in the analyzed images. The resulting model has substantially fewer degrees of freedom than traditional models, and yet it can distinguish large contiguous objects from the background clutter by suppressing the clutter and by filling-in occluded elements of object contours. This results in high-precision, high-recall detection of large objects in cluttered scenes. Parenthetically, our model has a direct correspondence with the Landau-de Gennes theory of nematic liquid crystal in two dimensions.

Phenotypic assortment mediates the effect of social selection in a wild beetle population.

Social interactions often have major fitness consequences, but little is known about how specific interacting phenotypes affect the strength of natural selection. Social influences on the evolutionary process can be assessed using a multilevel selection approach that partitions the effects of social partner phenotypes on fitness (referred to as social or group selection) from those of the traits of a focal individual (nonsocial or individual selection). To quantify the contribution of social selection to total selection affecting a trait, the patterns of phenotypic association among interactants must also be considered. We estimated selection gradients on male body size in a wild population of forked fungus beetles (Bolitotherus cornutus). We detected positive nonsocial selection and negative social selection on body size operating through differences in copulation success, indicating that large males with small social partners had highest fitness. In addition, we found that, in low-density demes, the phenotypes of focal individuals were negatively correlated with those of their social partners. This pattern reversed the negative effect of group selection on body size and led to stronger positive selection for body size. Our results demonstrate multilevel selection in nature and stress the importance of considering social selection whenever conspecific interactions occur nonrandomly.