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Med Sci Sports Exerc 2021 Jul 30. Epub 2021 Jul 30.

Center for Health Promotion Disease Prevention, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Diabetes, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO Anschutz Health and Wellness Center, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO Division of Epidemiology and Genetics, Metabolic Epidemiology Branch, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD Department of Kinesiology and Public Health, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC Nutritional Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI Risk Factor Assessment Branch, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD.

Purpose: To examine the shape of the relationship between physical activity (PA) and total energy expenditure (TEE) and to explore the role of energy balance status (negative, stable, positive) in influencing this association.

Methods: Cross-sectional. Participants were 584 older adults (50-74 yrs. Read More

Am J Hum Genet 2021 Jul;108(7):1251-1269

Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. Electronic address:

With the increasing availability of large-scale GWAS summary data on various complex traits and diseases, there have been tremendous interests in applications of Mendelian randomization (MR) to investigate causal relationships between pairs of traits using SNPs as instrumental variables (IVs) based on observational data. In spite of the potential significance of such applications, the validity of their causal conclusions critically depends on some strong modeling assumptions required by MR, which may be violated due to the widespread (horizontal) pleiotropy. Although many MR methods have been proposed recently to relax the assumptions by mainly dealing with uncorrelated pleiotropy, only a few can handle correlated pleiotropy, in which some SNPs/IVs may be associated with hidden confounders, such as some heritable factors shared by both traits. Read More

Behav Res Methods 2021 Apr 14. Epub 2021 Apr 14.

Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany.

Ongoing goal-directed movements can be rapidly adjusted following new environmental information, e.g., when chasing pray or foraging. Read More

J Neurophysiol 2021 May 17;125(5):1580-1597. Epub 2021 Mar 17.

Department of Neurophysiology, National Institute of Neuroscience, Kodaira, Tokyo, Japan.

The central nervous system (CNS) may produce coordinated motor outputs via the combination of motor modules representable as muscle synergies. Identification of muscle synergies has hitherto relied on applying factorization algorithms to multimuscle electromyographic data (EMGs) recorded during motor behaviors. Recent studies have attempted to validate the neural basis of the muscle synergies identified by independently retrieving the muscle synergies through CNS manipulations and analytic techniques such as spike-triggered averaging of EMGs. Read More

Atten Percept Psychophys 2021 Apr 3;83(3):956-969. Epub 2021 Jan 3.

Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel.

Recent research has established that humans can extract the average perceptual feature over briefly presented arrays of visual elements or the average of a rapid temporal sequence of numbers. Here we compared the extraction of the average over briefly presented arrays, for a perceptual feature (orientations) and for numerical values (1-9 digits), using an identical experimental design for the two tasks. We hypothesized that the averaging of numbers, more than of orientations, would be constrained by capacity limitations. Read More