Although recent molecular techniques have greatly expanded our knowledge of microbial biogeography, the functional biogeography of soil microorganisms remains poorly understood. In this work, we explore geographic variation in Streptomyces phenotypes that are critical to species interactions. Specifically, we characterize Streptomyces from different locations from multiple continents for antibi...

Breast feeding results in long term health benefits in the prevention of communicable and non-communicable diseases at both individual and population levels. Geographical location directly impacts the composition of breast milk including microbiota and lipids. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of geographical location, i.e., Europe (Spain and Finland), Africa (South Africa)...

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has long been used to extract information from large bodies of text. NLP is often used to intelligently parse large volumes of data where the manual alternative may be infeasible. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is used to extract named entities such as people, places or organizations from text written in natural language. Using NER, NLP algorithms can be create...

We propos e an efficient Position-based Opportunistic Routing (POR) protocol which takes advantage of the stateless property of geographic routing and the broadcast nature of wireless medium. When a data packet is sent out, some of the neighbor nodes that have overheard the transmission will serve as forwarding candidates, and take turn to forward the packet if it is not relayed by the specific...

BACKGROUND An aging population, with its associated rise in cancer incidence and strain on the oncology workforce, will continue to motivate patients, healthcare providers and policy makers to better understand the existing and growing challenges of access to chemotherapy. Administrative data, and SEER-Medicare data in particular, have been used to assess patterns of healthcare utilization beca...

Geographic tongue is a chronic, inflammatory, and immune-mediated oral lesion of unknown etiology. It is characterized by serpiginous white areas around the atrophic mucosa, which alternation between activity, remission and reactivation at various locations gave the names benign migratory glossitis and wandering rash of the tongue. Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory disease with frequent cutan...

We investigated the associations of urinary concentrations of antimony, cadmium, tungsten and uranium with geographic locations and with ambient air pollution in 304 adults in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis from six US cities. After adjustment for sociodemographics, body mass index, and smoking status, urinary cadmium was the highest in Winston-Salem among all study sites (the geomet...

BACKGROUND Heterogeneity in the response to PM2.5 is hypothesized to be related to differences in particle composition across monitoring sites which reflect differences in source types as well as climatic and topographic conditions impacting different geographic locations. Identifying spatial patterns in particle composition is a multivariate problem that requires novel methodologies. OBJECTI...

BACKGROUND Geographic profiling is a statistical tool originally developed in criminology to prioritise large lists of suspects in cases of serial crime. Here, we use two data sets--one historical and one modern--to show how it can be used to locate the sources of infectious disease. RESULTS First, we re-analyse data from a classic epidemiological study, the 1854 London cholera outbreak. Usin...

Many environmental processes are heterogeneous in space (spatially non-stationary), due to factors such as topography, local pollutant emissions, and meteorology. Much of the commonly used spatial statistical methodology depends on simplifying assumptions such as spatial isotropy. Violations of these assumptions can cause problems, including incorrect error assessment of spatial estimates. This...