A light-isotope radioactive ion beam capability has been added to the 88-Inch Cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by coupling to the production cyclotron of the Berkeley Isotope Facility. The connection required the development and construction of a 350 m gas transport system between the two accelerators as well as automated cryogenic separation of the produced activity. The first beam developed, 11C, has been successfully accelerated with an on-target intensity of 1 x 10{to the eighth} ions/sec at energies of around 10 MeV/u.

While working on a dictionary of the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka or Aht) language in 1992, I spent some time in Port Albemi, B.C., consulting with an old man named Charlie Watts. He told me that he was born in 1917 and added, ”My father, Sayaachapas,worked with Dr. Sapir. I was here in the 1940s when Morris Swadesh came out with his two little girls and his wife Frances. They lived in that cabin right over there. Besides working with the Old People, he used to have sessions at the community hall in the evening when he would teach us how to write our language. Lots of people came. Swadesh was a good teacher.” Then he said, ”Oh, I have something you’d be interested in!” Rummaging under his bed, he pulled out a faded envelope that contained two typed pages, foxed with age. It was a letter protesting the nonrenewal of Morris Swadesh’s contract by the City College of New York in 1949, an outcome apparently related to Swadesh’s indictment by the McCarthy Commission earlier that year. This letter was signed by Captain Jack, a now long-dead chieftain of the Mowachat band, with a shaky X.

Few long-term multicenter investigations have evaluated the relationships between aggregate antimicrobial drug use in hospitals and bacterial resistance. We measured fluoroquinolone use from 1999 through 2003 in a network of US hospitals. The percentages of fluoroquinolone-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) were obtained from yearly antibiograms at each hospital. Univariate linear regression showed significant associations between a hospital's volume of fluoroquinolone use and percent resistance in most individual study years (1999-2001 for P. aeruginosa, 1999-2002 for S. aureus). When the method of generalized estimating equations was used, a population-averaged longitudinal model incorporating total fluoroquinolone use and the previous year's resistance (to account for autocorrelation) did not show a significant effect of fluoroquinolone use on percent resistance for most drug-organism combinations, except for the relationship between levofloxacin use and percent MRSA. The ecologic relationship between fluoroquinolone use and resistance is complex and requires further study.

Bees acquire carbohydrates from nectar and lipids; and amino acids from pollen, which also contains polysaccharides including cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectin. These potential energy sources could be degraded and fermented through microbial enzymatic activity, resulting in short chain fatty acids available to hosts. However, the contributions of individual microbiota members to polysaccharide digestion have remained unclear. Through analysis of bacterial isolate genomes and a metagenome of the honey bee gut microbiota, we identify that Bifidobacterium and Gilliamella are the principal degraders of hemicellulose and pectin. Both Bifidobacterium and Gilliamella show extensive strain-level diversity in gene repertoires linked to polysaccharide digestion. Strains from honey bees possess more such genes than strains from bumble bees. In Bifidobacterium, genes encoding carbohydrate-active enzymes are colocated within loci devoted to polysaccharide utilization, as in Bacteroides from the human gut. Carbohydrate-active enzyme-encoding gene expressions are up-regulated in response to particular hemicelluloses both in vitro and in vivo. Metabolomic analyses document that bees experimentally colonized by different strains generate distinctive gut metabolomic profiles, with enrichment for specific monosaccharides, corresponding to predictions from genomic data. The other 3 core gut species clusters (Snodgrassella and 2 Lactobacillus clusters) possess few or no genes for polysaccharide digestion. Together, these findings indicate that strain composition within individual hosts determines the metabolic capabilities and potentially affects host nutrition. Furthermore, the niche specialization revealed by our study may promote overall community stability in the gut microbiomes of bees.