Background: Employment and personal income loss after traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major source of post-injury stress and barrier to societal reintegration for affected patients. We sought to quantify the labor market implications for tax-filing adult TBI survivors. Methods: We performed a matched difference-in-difference analysis using a national retrospective cohort of working adult TBI survivors injured between 2007-2017. Linear and logistic mixed effects regressions were used to estimate the magnitude of personal income loss and proportion of patients displaced from the workforce in the three post-injury years (Y+1 to Y+3). Results: Among 18,050 patients identified with TBI, the adjusted average loss of personal annual income was $-7,635 dollars in Y+1 and $-5,000 in Y+3. An additional -7.8% individuals were newly unemployed compared to the pre-injury baseline. For mild, moderate, and severe TBI subgroups, income loss was $-3354, $-6750, and $-17375 respectively in Y+3; the proportion of newly unemployed individuals in Y+3 was 5.8%, 9.2%, and 20% lower than baseline. We estimated 500 million dollars of incurred labor markets losses related to TBI in Canada. Conclusions: This work represents the first national cohort data quantifying the labor market implications of TBI. These results may be used to inform post-injury care pathways and vocational rehabilitation.

Hill (Twin Research and Human Genetics, Vol. 21, 2018, 84–88) presented a critique of our recently published paper in Cell Reports entitled ‘Large-Scale Cognitive GWAS Meta-Analysis Reveals Tissue-Specific Neural Expression and Potential Nootropic Drug Targets’ (Lam et al., Cell Reports, Vol. 21, 2017, 2597–2613). Specifically, Hill offered several interrelated comments suggesting potential problems with our use of a new analytic method called Multi-Trait Analysis of GWAS (MTAG) (Turley et al., Nature Genetics, Vol. 50, 2018, 229–237). In this brief article, we respond to each of these concerns. Using empirical data, we conclude that our MTAG results do not suffer from ‘inflation in the FDR [false discovery rate]’, as suggested by Hill (Twin Research and Human Genetics, Vol. 21, 2018, 84–88), and are not ‘more relevant to the genetic contributions to education than they are to the genetic contributions to intelligence’.

The imposition of swirl on co-axial jets exhausting into confined space, akin to a combustor model, has far reaching effects on their mixing and flow development. In the present paper, the influence of swirl on both the jets has been determined in terms of velocity and pressure distributions in the confined space. It has been shown that swirl in the central jet leads to faster mixing whereas higher swirl in the annular jet improves both mixing and development.

Cognitive deficits are core to the disability associated with many psychiatric disorders. Both variation in cognition and psychiatric risk show substantial heritability, with overlapping genetic variants contributing to both. Unsurprisingly, therefore, these fields have been mutually beneficial: just as cognitive studies of psychiatric risk variants may identify genes involved in cognition, so too can genome-wide studies based on cognitive phenotypes lead to genes relevant to psychiatric aetiology. The purpose of this review is to consider the main issues involved in the phenotypic characterization of cognition, and to describe the challenges associated with the transition to genome-wide approaches. We conclude by describing the approaches currently being taken by the international consortia involving many investigators in the field internationally (e.g. Cognitive Genomics Consortium; COGENT) to overcome these challenges.

Incidence of colourblindness among 3325 males belonging to 21 endogamous Dhangar castes (shepherds) of Maharashtra, India, has been reported. Of the 21 castes studied 5 lacked the gene for colourblindness, while in other groups it varied from 1% to 55%, with a series average of 2·65%. The low incidence of observed colourblindness has been discussed in the light of the nomadic way of the life of some of the Dhangar castes. The results have been compared with other nomadic populations of Maharashtra. The results, in general, are compatible with the Post and Pickford's hypothesis of differential selection for colourblindness.

In view of the increase in micronutrient deficiencies in crop plants, ans attempt is made to group 57 Benchmark Indian soils into different micronutrient availability classes (clusters) vis-à-vis some soil characteristics. Since most of the soil characters are expressed in proportions or percentages (a usual practice in soil studies), the data matrix was transformed into log10 values to bring it nearer to normality. The transformed data matrix was used for cluster analysis and subsequently also for discriminant analysis. By following the method of Euclidean cluster analysis, the 57 Benchmark soils could be subdivided into three clusters. The distinctness of clusters was proven by distance-matrix as well as discriminant analysis. All the soils of cluster I and II originated from arid and semi-arid climates and these were alkaline in reaction, low in organic carbon (OC) and high in total lime. On the contrary, cluster III comprised all but a few soils from humid-subhumid regions. These soils were acidic in reaction and relatively high in OC and total lime. The soils of cluster I and II were poorer in diethylene triamine penta-acetic acid (DTPA) extractable micronutrient cations than those of cluster III. This study thus reveals that it is possible to classify diverse soils by statistical means into distinct clusters based upon micronutrient availability and associated soil properties. Furthermore, it suggests that soils of arid and semi-arid climates as a group, because of their low micronutrient availability, are expected to be more prone to deficiencies than those of humid and subhumid zones.

Consanguinity is studied in a large sample of marriages among Dhangars of Maharashtra, India. The 22 endogamous castes included in the study show great variation in incidence, about an overall frequency of 26.4%. Matrilateral first cross-cousin unions are more frequency than patrilateral, and maternal uncle-niece nuions least frequent. Geograbhical differences are conspicuous, and all three types of consanguineous union show characteristic patterns; matrilateral unions increase in frequncy northwards, patrilateral and uncle-niece decrease northwards. The inbreeding levels among the Dhangars are high compared to other Maharashtrian groups, but substantially lower than in southern Dravidian speaking groups.

The term colour blindness is generally used to describe the lack of sensitivity to colours. Although there are instances of total colour blindness, in most cases the people confuse red or green, and this defect is an X-linked trait. This colour vision anomaly is widely used as a genetic marker in the study of human variation, and is frequently cited as ‘relaxed selection’ according to the Post (1962) and Pickford (1963) hypothesis.

Background and objective: Auditory impairment is among the lesser known complications of spinal analgesia. The aim of the present study was to determine the degree of vestibulocochlear dysfunction in patients undergoing spinal analgesia for lower abdominal surgery.

Methods: Eighty patients who had received spinal analgesia for lower abdominal surgery were studied. Males were undergoing inguinal herniorraphy and the females tubectomy. Audiograms were performed before operation and on the second and seventh postoperative days. Hearing levels were measured from 250 Hz-8 kHz. In Group 1 (n = 40) a 22-gauge, cutting type of spinal needle (Howard Jones) was used. In Group 2 (n = 40) a 25-gauge, non-cutting spinal needle (Whitacre) was used.

Results: Hearing loss ' 10 dB was noticed in three patients in Group 1 and none in Group 2. The mean hearing level was more reduced in Group 1 patients.

Conclusions: Use of cutting type spinal needle is associated with a greater decrease in mean hearing levels compared to the non-cutting type.

Irradiation of vapor-deposited C60 films with a KeV ion beam (Ar+ or Ga+) transforms the surface layer of C60 into a non-volatile carbon film. During the subsequent annealing at 900°C, the modified C60 layer confines the underlying C60 on the silicon surface, allowing the formation of SiC. With this method, patterned SiC structures on silicon with the high lateral resolution possible with ion beams are fabricated

Sputtered Mo films with a thickness of 2μm or greater have been previously shown by xray and TEM studies to grow with strong in-plane and out-of-plane textures under dynamic deposition conditions. In this work, the geometric conditions and mechanisms causing preferential grain alignment in the plane of growth for sputtered Mo films, with a nominal thickness of 2μm, were explored. Four different deposition configurations, obtained by varying the parameters such as the deposition angle and the rotation speed of the substrates, were used in order to modify the texture as studied by x-ray and SEM techniques. While a [110] type out-of-plane texture was observed for all four deposition configurations, a (110) type in-plane texture, and the corresponding grain alignment in the plane of growth, was observed only when the flux of adatoms was hitting the substrates at an oblique angle. The texture characteristics and the microstructure of the Mo films, as analyzed using the pole figure x-ray and SEM techniques, were observed to be very similar for films deposited on three different substrates, namely the Si(100) and Ni3Al(321) single crystals, and laboratory grade glass slides. The in-plane texture development under oblique deposition conditions was proposed to be due to a combination of two mechanisms, namely the preferential resputtering of some of the grains normal to and in the plane of growth caused by the higher energy adatoms in the flux, followed by termination of the preferentially sputtered grains due to geometric shadowing.

We have developed a new cluster ion source that can generate intense beams of metal and semiconductor clusters of a very wide-size range. With the source, we have observed intense beams of carbon clusters with mean cluster sizes of up to 4000 atoms/clusters. However, we have found that for generating small fullerenes, such as C60 and C70, the recently discovered technique by Kraetschmer et al. is much more efficient. By improving the technique, we have generated gram quantities of C60 and C70 and systematically investigated their thermal desorption properties. During the heating process, we have discovered that at high temperatures the bulk fullerenes, fullerite, transformed to another form of carbon, which still evaporates at temperatures above 700 C, but does not dissolve in benzene.

Data on defective sex-linked colour vision has been reported on 1580 male subjects drawn from eight endogamous groups of Maharashtrian Brahmins. The range of variation of affected persons is between 0.00 to 8.58%, with an average of 3.97%. The ratio of deuton to proton genes is 2.54: 1.

A great deal of heterogeneity is observed in the groups investigated.