Growing populations of starlings have been causing increasing summer damage to grapes and figs in Tulare County, CA, since 1960. Losses in specific grape plantings range from “slight” to nearing 80% loss. Trials of various control methods have shown mixed results. Of the most successful are trapping, or trapping combined with toxic bait. Where statis populations occur, or where starlings stage or gather before going to roost, the modified Australian crow trap has shown success. Exposing bait (fresh grapes, or raisins dipped in a toxic solution of DRC-1339) in conjunction with the use of a trap as a decoy cage has proved promising. Where trapping or baiting are not feasible, some sites have been adequately protected using carbide or acetylene exploders or even shell crackers.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects approximately 5 million adults over age 65 in the U.S. Examining brain function in individuals at risk for AD, such as those with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), may improve identification of potential markers of AD prior to the onset of significant clinical symptoms, which will be important to prevention efforts and extending quality of life. Subtypes of MCI with primary memory (amnestic) or non-memory (non- amnestic) impairments may reflect different neuropathologic etiologies. However, evidence to support this notion is mixed, possibly due to a lack of comprehensive neuropsychological definitions of MCI or examination of cerebrovascular dysfunction that may contribute to cognitive decline. In the current study, functional cerebral blood flow (CBF) and blood-oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) responses were simultaneously acquired in an MRI scanner while older adults with amnestic MCI (aMCI; n = 14), non-amnestic MCI (naMCI; n = 13), and normal cognitive functioning (CN; n = 20) completed a face-name associative encoding paradigm. Region of interest analyses were conducted in the hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), precuneus, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). At rest, reduced CBF within medial temporal regions (MTL) was observed in aMCI, but there were no differences between the CN and naMCI group. During face-name encoding, the aMCI group exhibited greater percent change BOLD in the MTL, whereas the naMCI group exhibited significantly greater percent change CBF in the left precuneus. Relationships between MTL BOLD/CBF and memory performance (e.g., list learning, face-name recognition) were observed in the MCI groups only. There were no significant group differences in stroke risk, and the relationships among stroke risk, resting CBF, and CBF/ BOLD during encoding were not significant. Overall, the current findings support distinct patterns in CBF at rest and in BOLD/CBF during encoding between aMCI and naMCI groups, and suggest that these individuals - although all diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment - exhibit distinct alterations in neurovascular function that may underlie their varied cognitive deficits on neuropsychological tests and may be associated with a unique trajectory of cognitive decline. Further research using CBF/BOLD to predict disease progression in individuals with MCI may be indicated

Anti-CD3 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are potent immunosuppressive agents used in clinical transplantation. However, the activation-related adverse side effects associated with these mAbs have prompted the development of less toxic nonmitogenic anti-CD3 mAb therapies. At present, the functional and biochemical consequences of T cell exposure to nonmitogenic anti-CD3 is unclear. In this study, we have examined the early signaling events triggered by a nonmitogenic anti-CD3 mAb. Like the mitogenic anti-CD3 mAb, nonnmitogenic anti-CD3 triggered changes in the T cell receptor (TCR) complex, including zeta chain tyrosine phosphorylation and ZAP-70 association. However, unlike the mitogenic anti-CD3 stimulation, nonmitogenic anti-CD3 was ineffective at inducing the highly phosphorylated form of zeta (p23) and tyrosine phosphorylation of the associated ZAP-70 tyrosine kinase. This proximal signaling deficiency correlated with minimal phospholipase Cgamma-1 phosphorylation and failure to mobilize detectable Ca2+. Not only did biochemical signals delivered by nonmitogenic anti-CD3 resemble altered peptide ligand signaling, but exposure of Th1 clones to nonmitogenic anti-CD3 also resulted in functional anergy. Finally, a bispecific anti-CD3 X anti-CD4 F(ab)'2 reconstituted early signal transduction events and induced proliferation, suggesting that defective association of lck with the TCR complex may underlie the observed signaling differences between the mitogenic and nonmitogenic anti-CD3.

Bilinguals' ability to control which language they speak and to switch between languages may rely on neurocognitive mechanisms shared with non-linguistic task switching. However, recent studies also reveal some limitations on the extent control mechanisms are shared across domains, introducing the possibility that some control mechanisms are unique to language. We investigated this hypothesis by directly comparing the neural correlates of task switching and language switching. Nineteen Spanish-English bilingual university students underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study employing a hybrid (event-related and blocked) design involving both color-shape switching and language switching paradigms. We compared the two switching tasks using within-subject voxel-wise t-tests for each of three trial types (single trials in single blocks, and stay and switch trials in mixed blocks). Comparing trial types to baseline in each task revealed widespread activation for single, stay, and switch trials in both color-shape and language switching. Direct comparisons of each task for each trial type revealed few differences between tasks on single and switch trials, but large task differences during stay trials, with more widespread activation for the non-linguistic than for the language task. Our results confirm previous suggestions of shared mechanisms of switching across domains, but also reveal bilinguals have greater efficiency for sustaining the inhibition of the non-target language than the non-target task when two responses are available. This efficiency of language control might arise from bilinguals' need to control interference from the non-target language specifically when not switching languages, when speaking in single- or mixed-language contexts.