Although the nose, as a gateway for organism–environment interactions, may have a key role in asthmatic exacerbation, the rhinobiome of exacerbated children with asthma was widely neglected to date. The aim of this study is to understand the microbiome, the microbial immunology, and the proteome of exacerbated children and adolescents with wheeze and asthma. Considering that a certain proportion of wheezers may show a progression to asthma, the comparison of both groups provides important information regarding clinical and phenotype stratification. Thus, deep nasopharyngeal swab specimens, nasal epithelial spheroid (NAEsp) cultures, and blood samples of acute exacerbated wheezers (WH), asthmatics (AB), and healthy controls (HC) were used for culture (n = 146), 16 S-rRNA gene amplicon sequencing (n = 64), and proteomic and cytokine analyses. Interestingly, Proteobacteria were over-represented in WH, whereas Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes were associated with AB. In contrast, Actinobacteria commonly colonized HCs. Moreover, Staphylococcaceae, Enterobacteriaceae, Burkholderiaceae, Xanthobacteraceae, and Sphingomonadaceae were significantly more abundant in AB compared to WH and HC. The α-diversity analyses demonstrated an increase of bacterial abundance levels in atopic AB and a decrease in WH samples. Microbiome profiles of atopic WH differed significantly from atopic AB, whereby atopic samples of WH were more homogeneous than those of non-atopic subjects. The NAEsp bacterial exposure experiments provided a disrupted epithelial cell integrity, a cytokine release, and cohort-specific proteomic differences especially for Moraxella catarrhalis cultures. This comprehensive dataset contributes to a deeper insight into the poorly understood plasticity of the nasal microbiota, and, in particular, may enforce our understanding in the pathogenesis of asthma exacerbation in childhood.

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Predicting the trend of stock prices is a central topic in financial engineering. Given the complexity and nonlinearity of the underlying processes we consider the use of neural networks in general and sentiment analysis in particular for the analysis of financial time series. As one of the biggest social media platforms with a user base across the world, Twitter offers a huge potential for such sentiment analysis. In fact, stocks themselves are a popular topic in Twitter discussions. Due to the real-time nature of the collective information quasi contemporaneous information can be harvested for the prediction of financial trends. In this study, we give an introduction in financial feature engineering as well as in the architecture of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to tackle the highly nonlinear problem of forecasting stock prices. This paper presents a guide for collecting past tweets, processing for sentiment analysis and combining them with technical financial indicatorsto forecast the stock prices of Apple 30m and 60m ahead. A LSTM with lagged close price is used as a baseline model. We are able to show that a combination of financial and Twitter features can outperform the baseline in all settings. The code to fully replicate our forecasting approach is available in the Appendix.

A.1. Radial Basis Kernel FunctionSuppose we use the radial basis function (rbf) as a kernel:We show for one-and two-dimensional x that the kernel can be expressed as an inner product of a (infinite dimensional) function Φ, i.e. k(x i , x j ) = Φ(x i ), Φ(x j ) .Example in one dimension: Assume x i , x j ∈ R and γ > 0. From the rbf kernel function follows:

The long road to effective catgut sterilization began with the work of Lord Joseph Lister (1867) and did not end until 40 years later. At the end of the nineteenth century dozens of different techniques were used to "sterilize" catgut, by immersing the cord in a cold chemical solution, by exposing it to steam, or by a combination of the two techniques, yet none of these approaches offered the ultimate solution. One of the many physicians working on the catgut problem at that time was the German surgeon Franz Kuhn (1866-1929), best known as a pioneer of intubation anesthesia. This review offers a brief biographical sketch of Kuhn's life and career on the occasion of the centenary of Sterile Catgut Kuhn. The goal of the present study is to describe several landmarks in the development of the catgut sterilization method. To explain this process, two approaches are taken: first, an analysis to see whether the character traits of the typical surgeon at that time provided the soil in which innovation could thrive, and second, an epistemological examination of the conceptual models for the attainment of knowledge current at that time. Perspectives for the future are explored in light of the "imperative of responsibility" of Hans Jonas.