#PredictThings

[amaranthnymph]

My Cookie Run OC, Ortolan Cookie and his pet, the Monstrous Mirror! The rich smell of Armagnac and herbs leads you to veiled fortune teller who can predictthe exact time of your doom... But that’s because he’ll be the one doing the crumbling! His motives are unclear and his victims chosen seemingly at random, but ne thing is certain: if you smell Armagnac when you’re all alone, do what Cookies do best... RUN.

[liesandtruthaboutmartialart-blog]

Ignorant "masters" in martial arts

Topic of the week - Why education is so important in martial arts and in life in general?

Why is education so important in martial arts? We've started to discuss each problem in martial arts in details. The rubric “Topic of the week” will show, reveals, speak about different themes in martial arts. Each of you can follow us by subscribing to our channel.

[eveningnetwork]

Forecasting the Future of Election Prediction Markets

Forecasting the Future of Election Prediction Markets

i used prediction market For many years as an interesting accompaniment, not for trading, but rather as a source of information poll, economical When Political model, and traditional reportespecially with the election approaching. But the American prediction market, which allows people to place legitimate bets on American elections, faces regulatory challenges. PredictThe larger of the two…

[avaduvernayfans]

Emmy history in the making: Ava DuVernay (’13th’) would be first black woman to win for directing

Ava DuVernay earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature for “13th,” and now she’s up for an Emmy for that film — several, actually. Among its eight nominations are bids for DuVernay as a writer, director, and producer. And she actually has the potential to make history is she claims the directing prize: she would be the first black woman ever to win an Emmy for directing.

“13th” streams on Netflix and traces the history of mass incarceration in the United States back to the 19th century, when the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ostensibly outlawed slavery, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That abolished the formal institution of slavery as it had existed for centuries, but opened the door for a carceral system that disproportionately targets black Americans.

DuVernay and Ezra Edelman (“O.J.: Made in America”) are the first black nominees of any gender for Best Nonfiction Directing, but while a few black men including Paris Barclay (“NYPD Blue”) and Charles S. Dutton (“The Corner”) have gone home with the gold, no black women have yet. DuVernay follows Debbie Allen (Variety Directing, “The Debbie Allen Special,” 1989), Millicent Shelton (Comedy Directing, “30 Rock,” 2009), Dee Rees (Movie/Mini Directing, “Bessie,” 2015), and Beyonce (Variety Special Directing, “Lemonade,” 2016) on the relatively short list of black female directors who have contended in the past.

In addition to recent Oscar champ Edelman, DuVernay is nominated in the directing contest alongside Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens (“Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds”) and a pair of filmmakers for “Planet Earth II”: Fredi Devas (episode “Cities”) and Elizabeth White (episode “Islands”).

PREDICTthe Creative Arts Emmy winners now; change them until September 9 How do you think “13th” will do at the Emmys overall? Now for the first time ever, Gold Derby is now offering you the chance to predict the Creative Arts Emmys as a separate event, including Best Short Form Animated Program! The two ceremonies for 2017 will be held in downtown Los Angeles on September 9 and 10. You can pick the winners for 24 categories now in our predictions center.

If you had already chosen such categories as guest acting, variety special, special class program, and reality host in the Primetime predictions event, those are no longer there. Simply jump into our new predictions event titled Creative Arts Emmys 2017 and make your picks there.

Daniel Montgomery dan_something TV Aug 11, 2017 4:00 pm

[drangsaldrangsal]

Tau Protein Tangles May Predict Sites of Brain Degeneration in Alzheimer’s

Brain imaging of tau-protein “tangles” predicts the location of future brain atrophy in Alzheimer’s patients a year or more in advance, according to a new study.

In contrast, the location of amyloid “plaques,” which have been the focus of Alzheimer’s research and drug development for decades, was found to be of little use in predicting how damage would unfold as the disease progressed, according to scientists at the University of California San Francisco Memory and Aging Center.

The results support the growing recognition that tau drives brain degeneration in Alzheimer’s disease more directly than amyloid protein, according to the researchers.

It also demonstrates the potential of recently developed tau-based positron emission tomography (PET) brain imaging technology to accelerate Alzheimer’s clinical trials and improve individualized patient care, they say.

“The match between the spread of tau and what happened to the brain in the following year was really striking,” said neurologist Gil Rabinovici, M.D., the Edward Fein and Pearl Landrith Distinguished Professor in Memory and Aging, leader of the PET imaging program at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, and senior author of the paper.

“Tau PET imaging predicted not only how much atrophy we would see, but also where it would happen. These predictions were much more powerful than anything we’ve been able to do with other imaging tools, and add to evidence that tau is a major driver of the disease.”

Alzheimer’s researchers have long debated the relative importance of amyloid plaques and tau tangles — two kinds of misfolded protein clusters seen in postmortem studies of patients’ brains, first identified by the German researcher Dr. Alois Alzheimer in the early 20th century. For decades, the “amyloid camp” has dominated, leading to multiple high-profile efforts to slow Alzheimer’s with amyloid-targeting drugs, all with disappointing or mixed results.

Many researchers are now taking a second look at tau protein, once dismissed as simply a “tombstone” marking dying cells, and investigating whether tau may, in fact, be an important biological driver of the disease.

In contrast to amyloid, which accumulates widely across the brain, sometimes even in people with no symptoms, autopsies of Alzheimer’s patients have revealed that tau is concentrated precisely where brain atrophy is most severe, and in locations that help explain differences in patients’ symptoms, such as in language-related areas vs. memory-related regions.

“No one doubts that amyloid plays a role in Alzheimer’s disease, but more and more tau findings are beginning to shift how people think about what is actually driving the disease,” explained Renaud La Joie, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in Rabinovici’s In Vivo Molecular Neuroimaging Lab, and lead author of the new study. “Still, just looking at postmortem brain tissue, it has been hard to prove that tau tangles cause brain degeneration and not the other way around.

“One of our group’s key goals has been to develop non-invasive brain imaging tools that would let us see whether the location of tau buildup early in the disease predicts later brain degeneration.”

Despite early misgivings that tau might be impossible to measure in the living brain, scientists recently developed an injectable molecule called flortaucipir — currently under review by the FDA — that binds to misfolded tau in the brain and emits a mild radioactive signal that can be picked up by PET scans.

For the study, La Joie recruited 32 participants with early clinical stage Alzheimer’s disease through the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, all of whom received PET scans using two different tracers to measure levels of amyloid protein and tau protein in their brains. The participants also received MRI scans to measure their brain’s structural integrity, both at the start of the study, and again in follow-up visits one to two years later.

The researchers found that overall tau levels in participants’ brains at the start of the study predicted how much degeneration would occur by the time of their follow up visit, on average 15 months later. Patterns of tau buildup predicted subsequent atrophy in the same locations with more than 40 percent accuracy, according to the study’s findings. In contrast, baseline amyloid-PET scans correctly predicted only 3 percent of future brain degeneration, the researchers discovered.

“Seeing that tau buildup predicts where degeneration will occur supports our hypothesis that tau is a key driver of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease,” La Joie said.

PET scans revealed that younger study participants had higher overall levels of tau in their brains, as well as a stronger link between baseline tau and subsequent brain atrophy, compared to older participants. This suggests that other factors — likely other abnormal proteins or vascular injuries — may play a larger role in late-onset Alzheimer’s, the researchers say.

The results add to hopes that tau-targeting drugs currently under study could provide clinical benefits to patients by blocking this key driver of neurodegeneration in the disease. At the same time, the ability to use tau PET to predict later brain degeneration could enable more personalized dementia care and speed ongoing clinical trials, according to the researchers.

“One of the first things people want to know when they hear a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is simply what the future holds for themselves or their loved ones. Will it be a long fading of memory, or a quick decline into dementia? How long will the patient be able to live independently? Will they lose the ability to speak or get around on their own? These are questions we can’t currently answer, except in the most general terms,” Rabinovici said. “Now, for the first time, this tool could let us give patients a sense of what to expect by revealing the biological process underlying their disease.”

The researchers said they also anticipate that the ability to predict future brain atrophy based on tau PET imaging will allow Alzheimer’s clinical trials to quickly assess whether an experimental treatment can alter the specific trajectory predicted for an individual patient, which is currently impossible due to the wide variability in how the disease progresses from individual to individual. Such insights could make it possible to adjust dosages or switch to a different experimental compound if the first treatment is not affecting tau levels or altering a patient’s predicted trajectory of brain atrophy, they explain.

“Tau PET could be an extremely valuable precision medicine tool for future clinical trials,” Rabinovici said. “The ability to sensitively track tau accumulation in living patients would for the first time let clinical researchers seek out treatments that can slow down or even prevent the specific pattern of brain atrophy predicted for each patient.”

The study was published in Science Translational Medicine.

Source: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

  Photo: Tau PET brain scans (green) in early clinical-stage Alzheimer’s patients accurately predict the location ofbrain atrophy measured by MRI 1–2 years later (magenta). Amyloid PET imaging (blue) does not predictthe location of either tau or future brain atrophy. Credit: Rabinovici lab/UCSF.

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