Browse Articles

Effect of agricultural digestate on antioxidative properties and antimicrobial activity of hemp (Cannabis sativa) leaves

Ultrasensitive in vivo infrared spectroscopic imaging via oblique photothermal microscopy

Comparative study of ultrasonic and laser assisted machining for sustainable leather cutting in greener industry practices

Effectiveness of tailored educational content on improving nurses’ clinical performance in cardiac surgery wards: a mixed-methods study

Abstract Cardiac surgery, a complex and high-risk medical procedure, requires specialized nursing expertise. The significance of nurses’ performance in this field is paramount due to the potential consequences of errors. Therefore, nurses in cardiac intensive care units (C-ICU) must consistently undergo essential training to minimize errors and enhance their skills. This study aimed to identify the essential educational topics for nurses working in the C-ICU, provide targeted training based on these topics, and ultimately compare the clinical performance of trained nurses with those who did not receive the training. This is a mixed method study conducted in three phases. In the first phase, the educational needs of nurses were identified through a literature review and interview with 360 nurses. Subsequently, the most important educational topics were selected using a two-round Delphi study. In the second phase, a checklist to evaluate clinical performance was designed. In the final phase, 95 nurses were randomly assigned in a 2:1 ratio to either the control group (n = 60) includes untrained nurses, and the case group (n = 35) includes nurses who have received 70 h of training. Thirty case group nurses scoring above 70 advanced to the next phase. Subsequently, both case and control groups spent 6 months in hospital activities before being assessed with a checklist designed in the second phase by eight nurses. In total, 21 educational topics were approved for teaching nurses. In all topics, the mean score of the trained group (case) was higher than that of the control group (p < 0.05). Furthermore, the trained group exhibited a mean total score of 883 (± 36.23), whereas the untrained group showed a mean score of 566.45 (± 39.95), indicating a statistically significant difference between the two groups (p < 0.001). The findings of this study indicate that the performance of trained nurses was superior to that of untrained nurses. To enhance the clinical and theoretical capabilities of nurses in critical wards, it is recommended that, in addition to general education, nurses receive specialized training tailored to the specific requirements of their respective wards.

Cognition-enhanced geospatial decision framework integrating fuzzy FCA, surprisingly popular method, and a large language model

Cross modality learning of cell painting and transcriptomics data improves mechanism of action clustering and bioactivity modelling

Abstract In drug discovery, different data modalities (chemical structure, cell biology, quantum mechanics, etc.) are abundant, and their integration can help with understanding aspects of chemistry, biology, and their interactions. Within cell biology, cell painting (CP) and transcriptomics RNA-Seq (TX) screens are powerful tools in early drug discovery, as they are complementary views of the biological effect of compounds on a population of cells post-treatment. While multimodal learning of chemical structure-cell painting, or different omics data has been experimented; a cell painting-bulk transcriptomics multimodal model is still unexplored. In this work, we benchmark two representation learning methods: contrastive learning and bimodal autoencoder. We use the setting of cross modality learning where representation learning is performed with two modalities (CP and TX), but only cell painting is available for new compounds embeddings generation and downstream task. This is because for new compounds, we would only have CP data and not TX, due to high data generation cost of the RNA-Seq screen. We show that in the absence of TX features for new compounds, using learned embeddings like those obtained from Constrastive Learning enhances performance of CP features on tasks where TX features excels but CP features does not. Additionally, we observed that learned representation improves cluster quality for clustering of CP replicates and different mechanisms of action (MoA), as well as improves performance on several subsets of bioactivity tasks grouped by protein target families.

Enhanced magnetic properties through tailoring of morphology of electrospun strontium hexaferrite nanofibers

Abstract This work reports a simple yet unique way of tailoring the morphology of M-type Strontium Hexaferrite, SrFe12O19 (SFO) particles inside the nanofibers. The reported materials were synthesized by the polymer-sol-assisted electrospinning technique followed by calcination. Calcination temperature and rate of heating play significant role in controlling the morphology of SFO nanofibers in terms of shapes, size and distribution thereby having a direct bearing on the resultant magnetic properties. The synthesized materials were investigated using X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM), High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HRTEM), Thermogravimetric-Differential Thermal Analysis (TG-DTA), and Magnetic Property Measurement System (MPMS). The XRD analysis shows formation of almost phase pure SFO with very minute quantities of secondary phase as hematite. The FESEM images show wide range of morphologies of SFO nanofibers and specifically the nanoparticles present within the nanofibers (from irregular to platelet-like shape) thereby demonstrating the tailoring of morphologies of not only of nanofibers but nanoparticles within the nanofibers simply through variations of two parameters viz. calcination temperature and rate of heating. The TG-DTA results show that complete decomposition of PVP and formation of the SFO crystallization takes place at a much lower temperature of 422 oC. The room temperature hysteresis measurement showed that the sample calcined at 800 oC at heating rate of 10 oC/min has shown enhanced magnetic properties (Ms, Mr, and Hc) than the samples calcined at 600 oC and 950 oC. The HRTEM studies show that the variation in heating rate also yields interesting variations in morphology of nanoparticles and their arrangement within nanofibers. This research work has resulted in a unique pathway of synthesizing nanofibers with controlled and variable morphology.

Chirality encoding in resonant metasurfaces governed by lattice symmetries

Securing IoMT data with Algorand blockchain, XChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption, and decentralized storage alternatives

Supraspan memory performance is impaired in subjective cognitive impairment compared to cognitively unimpaired individuals

Abstract The objective cognitive status is incompletely known in Subjective Cognitive Impairment (SCI) and similar constructs. To characterize subspan and supraspan memory performance in groups with SCI, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Cognitively Unimpaired individuals (CU) in relation to brain atrophy and CSF biomarkers. Performance on subspan (Digit Span Forward) and supraspan memory (trial 1 in the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning test) was investigated in patients diagnosed with SCI (n = 237) and MCI (n = 1038) from memory clinics in the Stockholm region and CU individuals from Stockholm university, Department of Psychology (n = 124). All participants had an extensive cognitive assessment. In addition, MCI and SCI patients had a comprehensive clinical examination, brain imaging scan (medial temporal lobe, cortical global atrophy, and white-matter-hyperintensities), and CSF biomarker analyses (Abeta, p-tau, and total-tau). Groups differed significantly in demographic characteristics, which were adjusted for in all analyses. The three groups differed significantly on supraspan, but not subspan, memory performance in line with the severity of cognitive impairment. The test-by-group interaction was also significant showing that SCI was characterized by selective supraspan impairment in conjunction with memory overload and in contrast to the previous conception of no objective impairment in SCI. CSF biomarkers and brain abnormality in MTA, GCA, and WMH did not provide additional predictive power over the diagnostic group on supraspan in SCI. Supraspan memory performance differed by diagnostic group in relation to the degree of cognitive impairment in memory clinic participants (CU > SCI > MCI) indicating objective memory impairment in SCI interpreted as due to supraspan overload.

Risk factors and reasons for romosozumab nonadherence in a case-control study

A novel LLM time series forecasting method based on integer-decimal decomposition

Prevalence and spatio-demographic variability of nutrition-related health issues in Kiribati

Immature Acta2R179C/+ smooth muscle cells cause moyamoya-like cerebrovascular lesions in mice prevented by boosting OXPHOS

Domain adaptation of a SMILES chemical transformer to SELFIES with limited computational resources

Using the ATP luminescence-based method to determine assimilable organic carbon in drinking water

Intelligence modeling of nanomedicine manufacture by supercritical processing in estimation of solubility of drug in supercritical CO2

Detection of caffeic acid in honey using carbon paste electrode modified by copper (II) oxide (CuO) nanoparticles

Metagenomic analysis to identify unique microbes in the rhizosphere of basmati rice (Oryza sativa L.) accessions

Brain–Behavior Differences in Premodern and Modern Lineages of Domestic Dogs

Although domestic dogs were the first domesticated species, the nature of dog domestication remains a topic of ongoing debate. In particular, brain and behavior changes associated with different stages of the domestication process have been difficult to disambiguate. Most modern Western breed dogs possess highly derived physical and behavioral traits because of intense artificial selection for appearance and function within the past 200 years. In contrast, premodern dogs, including primitive/ancient breeds, village dogs, and New Guinea Singing Dogs, have undergone less intensive artificial selection and retain more ancestral characteristics. Consequently, comparisons between modern and premodern dogs can shed light on brain and behavior changes that have occurred recently in the domestication process. Here, we addressed this question using a voxel-based morphometry analysis of structural MRI images from 72 modern breed dogs and 13 premodern dogs (32 females). Modern breed dogs show widespread expansions of neocortex and reductions in the amygdala and other subcortical regions. Furthermore, cortical measurements significantly predicted individual variation in trainability, while amygdala measurements significantly predicted fear scores. These results contrast with the long-standing view that domestication consistently involves reduction in brain size and cognitive capacity. Rather, our results suggest that recent artificial selection has targeted higher-order brain regions in modern breed dogs, perhaps to facilitate behavioral flexibility and close interaction and cooperation with humans.