Coordinates: 44°40′58″N 63°36′43″W / 44.68278°N 63.61194°W / 44.68278; -63.61194The Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO) is a major Government of Canada ocean research facility located in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. BIO is the largest ocean research station in Canada. Established in 1962 as Canada's first, and currently largest, federal centre for oceanographic research, BIO derives its name from the Bedford Basin, an inland bay comprising the northern part of Halifax Harbour, upon which it is located.Spread out over 40 acres (160,000 m2) of a former Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) property near Shannon Park in Dartmouth, BIO consists of a series of interconnected buildings housing research labs and offices, as well as docks for Canadian Coast Guard and RCN research vessels.As the federal government seeks to concentrate its operations in the Halifax Regional Municipality, BIO is being considered for additional office buildings to house other non-oceanographic and non-research organizations and their employees. As such, new buildings have been built for the Canadian Coast Guard as well as Environment Canada in recent years.
There may be differences in marine migratory patterns between Gaspereau River (GR), Nova Scotia, Canada, Atlantic salmon and salmon originating from other rivers in the inner Bay of Fundy (iBoF) Designatable Unit (DU). Marine migratory patterns are one of several metrics used by managers to determine if the GR Atlantic salmon should remain in the Species At Risk Act protected iBoF DU or if it should be included within the outer Bay of Fundy (oBoF) DU. In this study, 25 female Atlantic salmon kelts of GR genetic strain were obtained from the Coldbrook Biodiversity Facility. The kelts were tagged with acoustic tags and released at the mouth of the GR in May 2019. Of the 25 kelts, 10 were recorded at acoustic receivers on the Scotian Shelf. Five kelts returned to the GR and were recaptured, found to be ripe, and deemed to be consecutive spawners. This included a kelt that logged onto receivers on the Scotian Shelf during June and July, before returning to the GR in October. Depth and migration speed indicated that three kelts may have suffered predation in the oBoF or on the Scotian Shelf, with the tags ingested by a predator. Four kelts moved rapidly out of the Bay of Fundy (BoF) and past the Halifax Line of acoustic receivers in early June 2019. This group migrating early and at characteristic oceanic migratory speeds may represent kelts moving to distant feeding grounds. If so, GR Atlantic salmon may be the only river population in the iBoF inclined to escape high coastal mortality regions for distant oceanic feeding grounds.
This study evaluates the wave energy potential along the Vancouver–Washington–Oregon coastline under different climate change scenarios. Wind and bathymetric data obtained from ECMWF and GEBCO databases were used for the 2000–2015 baseline period, and wave simulations were performed using the MIKE 21 SW model. An unstructured mesh was employed, and model sensitivity to key parameters, including bed roughness, depth-induced wave breaking, and white capping dissipation, was assessed through nine simulation runs. The results indicate that variations in bed roughness and wave breaking exert limited influence on model performance, whereas the inclusion of white capping improves simulation accuracy. Future wave conditions were projected for the 2006–2100 period under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. The analysis suggests that under the RCP8.5 scenario, increased wind intensity is associated with higher wave power levels compared with present conditions and the RCP4.5 scenario. Furthermore, site-specific analysis at three representative locations along the Vancouver coast indicates that wave energy availability tends to peak during autumn. The findings provide a detailed assessment of wave energy variability under changing climate conditions and offer insights for long-term coastal renewable energy planning.
Developing safe and effective pain medications is an ongoing challenge for human health. Agonists for the µ-opioid receptor (MOR) are essential pain medications, but their high intrinsic efficacy also induces adverse side effects, including respiratory depression, constipation, tolerance, dependence, withdrawal and addiction1-7. Strategies to limit adverse effects traditionally include developing MOR agonists that have low intrinsic efficacy or that preferentially activate G-protein signalling over β-arrestin signalling8. Here we identify a novel MOR agonist with supramaximal intrinsic efficacy and a unique pharmacological profile that produced effective analgesia in rodents with minimal adverse effects. N-desethyl-fluornitrazene (DFNZ) was derived from a class of synthetic benzimidazole opioids called nitazenes. DFNZ has impaired brain penetrance, a unique spatiotemporal MOR cellular signalling profile, and diminished efficacy at the MOR-galanin 1 receptor (GAL1) heteromer. DFNZ does not induce respiratory depression, tolerance or MOR downregulation after repeated exposure. Compared with other MOR agonists, DFNZ has limited effects on dopamine neurotransmission in nucleus accumbens and weaker reinforcing effects in the drug self-administration procedure. These results provide novel insights about MOR and nitazene pharmacology, have important implications for pain and addiction treatment, and challenge the prevailing dogma that high-efficacy MOR agonists cannot constitute safe and effective therapeutic agents.
Ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) provides a non-invasive, cost-effective modality for investigating speech articulation, speech motor control, and speech-related disorders. However, real-time tongue contour segmentation remains a significant challenge due to the inherently low signal-to-noise ratio, variability in imaging conditions, and computational demands of real-time performance. In this study, we proposed UltraUNet, a lightweight and efficient encoder-decoder architecture specifically optimized for real-time segmentation of tongue contours in ultrasound images. UltraUNet introduces several domain-informed innovations, including lightweight Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks for channel-wise feature recalibration in deeper layers, Group Normalization for enhanced stability in small-batch training, and summation-based skip connections to minimize memory and computational overhead. These architectural refinements enabled UltraUNet to achieve a high segmentation accuracy while maintaining an exceptional processing speed of 250 frames per second, making it suitable for real-time clinical workflows. UltraUNet integrates ultrasound-specific augmentation techniques, including denoising and blur simulation using point spread function. Additionally, we annotated UTI images from 8 different datasets with various imaging conditions. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrated the model's robustness and precision, with superior segmentation metrics on single-dataset testing (Dice = 0.855, MSD = 0.993px) compared to established architectures. Furthermore, cross-dataset testing on 7 unseen datasets with 1 train dataset revealed UltraUNet's generalization capabilities and high accuracy, achieving average Dice Scores of 0.734 and 0.761, respectively, in Experiments 1 and 2. The proposed framework offers a competitive solution for time-critical applications in speech research, speech motor disorder analysis, and clinical diagnostics, with real-time performance in tongue functional analysis in diverse medical and research settings.
Abstract Chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD) significantly contributes to late mortality after allogeneic stem cell transplantation, with bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS) being a particularly lethal and treatment-resistant complication despite available therapies. Bromodomain and extraterminal (BET) proteins are epigenetic readers driving inflammatory transcriptional programs across multiple cell types. We hypothesized that BET inhibition would suppress inflammatory T and B cells and decrease macrophage polarization to a profibrotic phenotype, alleviating disease. In an established BOS cGVHD model, BET inhibition reduced germinal center (GC) formation and responses through a reduction of the CXCL13:CXCR5 axis and inflammatory T follicular helper/GC B cells in the spleen, along with a reduction in plasma cell infiltration within the lung. Mice with cGVHD had elevated pathogenic immunoglobulin G1 (IgG1) and IgM levels, both in circulation and deposited on lung tissue, which were attenuated under BET inhibition. Single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis revealed distinct cell states in the BOS lung vs control. In cGVHD mice, gene set enrichment analysis revealed the upregulation of profibrotic Arginase1 and Tgfb1 expression in alveolar macrophages (AM) and interstitial macrophages (IM), which was significantly reduced with BET inhibition. Furthermore, BET inhibition targeted lung-infiltrating M2 macrophages through the selective depletion of CD206+FcγR+ IM and AM, ultimately resulting in reduced collagen deposition and improved lung function. Our findings reveal a previously unrecognized mechanistic axis of BET regulation during cGVHD fibrosis and highlight BET inhibition as a promising therapeutic strategy.
