Loneliness is a potent predictor of negative health outcomes, making it important to identify risk factors for loneliness. Though extant studies have identified characteristics associated with loneliness, less is known about the cumulative and relative importance of these factors, and how their interaction may impact loneliness. Here, 4,885 individuals ages 10-97 years from the US completed the three-item UCLA Loneliness Survey on TestMyBrain.org. Using census data, we calculated the population and community household income of participants’ census area, and the proportion of individuals in the participant’s census area that shared the participant’s demographic characteristics (i.e., sociodemographic density). We evaluated the relative importance of three classes of variables for loneliness risk those related to the person (e.g., age), place (e.g., community household income), and the interaction of person X place (sociodemographic density). We find that loneliness is highly prevalent and best explained by person (age) and place (community household income) characteristics. Of the variance in loneliness accounted for, the overwhelming majority was explained by age with loneliness peaking at 19 years and declining thereafter. The congruence between one’s sociodemographic characteristics and that of one’s neighborhood had no impact on loneliness. These data may have important implications for public health interventions.Trade-off between vision and olfaction, the fact that investment in one correlates with decreased investment in the other, has been demonstrated by a wealth of comparative studies. However, there is still no empirical evidence suggesting how these two sensory systems coevolve, i.e. simultaneously or alternatively. The “Dark-flies” (Drosophila melanogaster) constitute a unique model to investigate such relation since they have been reared in the dark since 1954, approximately 60 years (~1500 generations). To observe how vision and olfaction evolve, populations of Dark-flies were reared in normal lighting conditions for 1 (DF1G) and 65 (DF65G) generations. We measured the sizes of the visual (optic lobes, OLs) and olfactory (antennal lobes, ALs) primary centres, as well as the rest of the brain, and compared the results with the original and its genetically most similar strain (Oregon flies). see more We found that, whereas the ALs decreased in size, the OLs (together with the brain) increased in size in the Dark-flies returned back to the light, both in the DF1G and DF65G. These results experimentally show that trade-off between vision and olfaction occurs simultaneously, and suggests that there are possible genetic and epigenetic processes regulating the size of both optic and antennal lobes. Furthermore, although the Dark-flies were able to mate and survive in the dark with a reduced neural investment, individuals being returned to the light seem to have been selected with reinvestment in visual capabilities despite a potential higher energetic cost.PURPOSE To automate the estimation of swallowing motion from 2D MR cine images using deformable registration for future applications of personalized margin reduction in head and neck radiotherapy and outcome assessment of radiation-associated dysphagia. METHODS Twenty-one patients with serial 2D FSPGR-MR cine scans of the head and neck conducted through the course of definitive radiotherapy for oropharyngeal cancer. Included patients had at least one cine scan before, during, or after radiotherapy, with a total of 52 cine scans. Contours of 7 swallowing related regions-of-interest (ROIs), including pharyngeal constrictor, epiglottis, base of tongue, geniohyoid, hyoid, soft palate, and larynx, were manually delineated from consecutive frames of the cine scan covering at least one swallowing cycle. We applied a modified thin-plate-spline robust-point-matching algorithm to register the point sets of each ROI automatically over frames. The deformation vector fields from the registration were then used to estimate the motion during swallowing for each ROI. Registration errors were estimated by comparing the deformed contours with the manual contours. RESULTS On average 22 frames of each cine scan were contoured. The registration for one cine scan (7 ROIs over 22 frames) on average took roughly 22 minutes. A number of 8018 registrations were successfully batch processed without human interaction after the contours were drawn. The average registration error for all ROIs and all patients was 0.36 mm (range 0.06 mm- 2.06 mm). Larynx had the average largest motion in superior direction of all structures under consideration (range 0.0 mm- 58.7 mm). Geniohyoid had the smallest overall motion of all ROIs under consideration and the superior-inferior motion was larger than the anterior-posterior motion for all ROIs. CONCLUSION We developed and validated a deformable registration framework to automate the estimation of swallowing motion from 2D MR cine scans.Few reports exist on QTL mapping of the important economic traits of hawthorn. We hybridized the cultivars ‘Shandongdamianqiu’ (female parent) and ‘Xinbinruanzi’ (male parent), and 130 F1 individuals and the two parents were used for RAD-seq, SNP development, and high-density linkage map construction. Three genetic maps were obtained, one for each of the parents and an integrated one. In these three maps, 17 linkage groups were constructed. The female and male parent maps contained 2657 and 4088 SNP markers, respectively, and had genetic distances of 2689.65 and 2558.41 cM, respectively, whereas the integrated map was 2470.02 cM, and contained 6,384 SNP markers. QTL mapping based on six agronomic traits, namely fruit transverse diameter, vertical diameter, single fruit weight, pericarp brittleness, pericarp puncture hardness, and average sarcocarp firmness were conducted, and 25 QTLs were detected in seven linkage groups. Explained phenotypic variation rate ranged from 17.7% to 35%. This genetic map contains the largest number of molecular markers ever obtained from hawthorn and will provide an important future reference for fine QTL mapping of economic traits and molecular assisted selection of hawthorn.