Orthopaedic injuries from deer stands and their functional outcomes.

Hunters who fall from deer stands can sustain a variety of injuries. A retrospective review was conducted at a single institution to gauge the experience in treating patients injured in falls from deer stands from 2002 to 2008. Medical records were analyzed for patient demographics, tree stand characteristics, and injury details. Patients were contacted to complete a SF-12 health survey to assess their functional outcome following their injuries. Of the 30 patients who sustained a fracture, an average of 2.08 fractures were sustained per patient. Sixteen patients sustained a spinal column fracture, and four of these sustained a spinal cord injury. Twenty-one patients underwent at least one surgical procedure by the trauma surgery (two), neurosurgery (four), or orthopaedic surgery (15) teams. The importance of understanding deer stand instructions should be emphasized during hunting education classes, and all hunters should follow safe hunting recommendations pertaining to firearms and tree stands.

What Drives Successful Administrative Performance during Crises? Lessons from Refugee Migration and the Covid-19 Pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic affects societies worldwide, challenging not only health sectors but also public administration systems in general. Understanding why public administrations perform well in the current situation-and in times of crisis more generally-is theoretically of great importance, and identifying concrete factors driving successful administrative performance under today's extraordinary circumstances could still improve current crisis responses. This article studies patterns of sound administrative performance with a focus on networks and knowledge management within and between crises. Subsequently, it draws on empirical evidence from two recent public administration surveys conducted in Germany in order to test derived hypotheses. The results of tests for group differences and regression analyses demonstrate that administrations that were structurally prepared, learned during preceding crises, and displayed a high quality in their network cooperation with other administrations and with the civil society, on average, performed significantly better in the respective crises. Evidence for Practice: While practitioners often prefer centralized and hierarchical solutions in times of crisis, this study highlights the potential of reflexive and adaptive use of multiactor networks to cope with the extraordinary.Administrations that are prepared and that display a high quality in their network cooperation with other administrations and with civil society, on average, performed significantly better in their respective crises.Knowledge management and resource sharing-both among administrative units and with civil society-increase organizational ability to perform well in crisis situations.Administrations do best when lessons learned in crises are accessibly stored and when previously successful crisis networks can be quickly revitalized, thus allowing for intercrisis learning-documentation of best practices during crises-via smart or traditional forms of data storing and organizational memory keeping-further boost the performance of administrations during succeeding crises.In the early stages of a crisis, decision makers need to invest in organizational self-awareness of how challenges are mastered and how insights about optimal coping are best passed on.

Singularity: Scientific containers for mobility of compute.

Here we present Singularity, software developed to bring containers and reproducibility to scientific computing. Using Singularity containers, developers can work in reproducible environments of their choosing and design, and these complete environments can easily be copied and executed on other platforms. Singularity is an open source initiative that harnesses the expertise of system and software engineers and researchers alike, and integrates seamlessly into common workflows for both of these groups. As its primary use case, Singularity brings mobility of computing to both users and HPC centers, providing a secure means to capture and distribute software and compute environments. This ability to create and deploy reproducible environments across these centers, a previously unmet need, makes Singularity a game changing development for computational science.

Growth of hyperthermophilic archaeon Pyrococcus furiosus on chitin involves two family 18 chitinases.

Pyrococcus furiosus was found to grow on chitin, adding this polysacharide to the inventory of carbohydrates utilized by this hyperthermophilic archaeon. Accordingly, two open reading frames (chiA [Pf1234] and chiB [Pf1233]) were identified in the genome of P. furiosus, which encodes chitinases with sequence similarity to proteins from the glycosyl hydrolase family 18 in less-thermophilic organisms. Both enzymes contain multiple domains that consist of at least one binding domain and one catalytic domain. ChiA (ca. 39 kDa) contains a putative signal peptide, as well as a binding domain (ChiA(BD)), that is related to binding domains associated with several previously studied bacterial chitinases. chiB, separated by 37 nucleotides from chiA and in the same orientation, encodes a polypeptide with two different proline-threonine-rich linker regions (6 and 3 kDa) flanking a chitin-binding domain (ChiB(BD) [11 kDa]), followed by a catalytic domain (ChiB(cat) [35 kDa]). No apparent signal peptide is encoded within chiB. The two chitinases share little sequence homology to each other, except in the catalytic region, where both have the catalytic glutamic acid residue that is conserved in all family 18 bacterial chitinases. The genes encoding ChiA, without its signal peptide, and ChiB were cloned and expressed in Escherichia coli. ChiA exhibited no detectable activity toward chitooligomers smaller than chitotetraose, indicating that the enzyme is an endochitinase. Kinetic studies showed that ChiB followed Michaelis-Menten kinetics toward chitotriose, although substrate inhibition was observed for larger chitooligomers. Hydrolysis patterns on chitooligosaccharides indicated that ChiB is a chitobiosidase, processively cleaving off chitobiose from the nonreducing end of chitin or other chitooligomers. Synergistic activity was noted for the two chitinases on colloidal chitin, indicating that these two enzymes work together to recruit chitin-based substrates for P. furiosus growth. This was supported by the observed growth on chitin as the sole carbohydrate source in sulfur-free media.