Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrasound Guided Pectoral Nerve Block Versus Ultrasound Guided Thoracic Paravertebral Block to Supplement General Anesthesia in Simple Mastectomy

Background: Breast surgery, can be associated with significant postoperative pain. Objectives: This study was conducted to compare pectoral nerve block (PECS) and thoracic paravertebral block (TPVB) as supplements to general anesthesia for alleviation of patients’ postoperative pain after breast surgery. Patients and Methods: This prospective cohort study included 60 female patients with ASA I-III, and body mass index< 30 kg/m2 undergoing mastectomy. Patients were allocated into two equal groups (PECS and TPVB groups). Both types of nerve block were ultrasound-guided. After 30 minutes, general anesthesia was induced. When the mean arterial pressure (MAP) or heart rate (HR) exceeded 20% of the preoperative value, increments of fentanyl 25 µg were given intravenously at 5 minutes intervals. Paracetamol and ketorolac were used for postoperative analgesia. Postoperative pain intensity was measured using visual analogue scale (VAS). The measured parameters included time to the first call for analgesia, intraoperative and postoperative MAP and HR, intraoperative fentanyl consumption, the amount of analgesics used in the first 24 postoperative hours and patients’ satisfaction and complications. Results: The PECS Group showed significantly lower intraoperative fentanyl consumption, longer duration before the first postoperative call for analgesia, lower VAS till 18 hours postoperatively, lower postoperative consumption of both paracetamol and ketorolac, and higher satisfaction score as compared to TPVB group. There were no complications in both groups. Conclusions: Pectoral nerve block was superior to thoracic paravertebral block in terms of intraoperative analgesic consumption, duration of analgesia, postoperative pain score, postoperative analgesic consumption, and patients’ satisfaction.
Increased X-ray Attenuation Efficiency of Graphene-Based Nanocomposite

We report an enhanced X-ray shielding effect related to graphene. The mass attenuation coefficients measured for nanocomposites made of poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) filled with 1.88 wt % functionalized graphene oxides (GO), pyrolytic graphite (PG), multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT), and amorphous carbon (soot) have been compared. For 6.9 keV photons, the value measured for graphene-based nanocomposite was found to be four times higher than that encountered for the other graphitic-based nanocomposites. The mass attenuation coefficients were measured for X-ray photons with 6.9, 8.1, 17.5, and 22.1 keV, respectively. Fourier transform infrared data revealed that all graphitic composites casted from solution are in the ferroelectric β-phase of PVDF. It is demonstrated that thin films of ferroelectric PVDF/1.88 wt % GO nanocomposite, with thickness of only 0.1 mm, can attenuate 82.9% and 48.5% of X-ray beams with energies of 6.9 and 8.1 keV, respectively. Thus, lightweight, very thin, and lead-free PVDF.
Scalable MoS2/graphene hetero-structures grown epitaxially on sapphire substrates for phototransistor applications

Bi-layer graphene is grown directly on sapphire substrates by using ethane as the precursor without the assistance of a metal catalyst. A growth model of graphene flake formation in the furnace, followed by a complete film growth is also proposed. Using the graphene/sapphire sample as the new substrate, scalable MoS2 films with good layer number controllability can be grown directly on the substrate. After fabricating the MoS2/graphene hetero-structures into bottom-gate photo-transistors, a Dirac point shift is observed for the device under the light irradiation condition, which is attributed to the extraction of photo-excited electrons in the MoS2 layer to the graphene channel. The photo-voltaic response observed for the photo-transistors may provide a potential application of the 2D material hetero-structure in thin-film solar cells.
B5T®. Big-Five-Persönlichkeitstest

Bei dem Testverfahren handelt es sich um ein Forschungsinstrument, das der Forschung, Lehre und Praxis dient. Es wird vom Testarchiv online und kostenlos zur Verfügung gestellt und ist urheberrechtlich geschützt, d. h. das Urheberrecht liegt weiterhin bei dem/den Autor/en. Mit der Nutzung des Verfahrens verpflichte ich mich, die Bedingungen der Creative Commons Lizenz CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 zu beachten. Ich werde nach Abschluss meiner mit dem Verfahren zusammenhängenden Arbeiten mittels des Rückmeldeformulars die TestautorInnen über den Einsatz des Verfahrens und den damit erzielten Ergebnissen informieren.
Recent Development of Quinoxaline Based Polymers/Small Molecules for Organic Photovoltaics

Among the various molecular designs developed for the synthesis of conjugated polymers and small molecules for optoelectronic applications, the donor: acceptor (D–A) approach is the most widely explored method over the past decades. Through the covalent linkage of electron‐rich and electron‐deficient units, a plethora of medium‐low band gap materials has been developed and tested in organic photovoltaic devices. In particular, the quinoxaline aromatic structure and its derivatives are among the most studied electron deficient aromatic units used in D–A structures. Quinoxaline based materials are endowed with characteristics that are useful for large scale production in real world applications, such as easy synthetic procedures and excellent stability in air. Moreover, the use of quinoxaline based polymers/small molecules in bulk heterojunction (BHJ) devices led to power conversion efficiencies over 9%. Considering the potential of quinoxaline based materials, this review gathers together quinoxaline based polymers and small molecules reported in the literature during the last 5 years, summarizing and discussing the structure‐properties relationships for this class of organic semiconductors, aiming to serve as a background and to promote efforts for the further development of new quinoxaline derivatives with improved and advanced properties for future applications.
Spectroscopy and Dynamics of the Laser Induced Intracluster (Ba··FCH3)* → BaF* + CH3 AND Ba* + Fch3 Reaction

An overview of the spectroscopy and dynamics of the intracluster Ba··FCH3 + hv → BaF* (Ba*) + CH3 (CH3F) bimolecular reaction is presented. The Ba··FCH3 weakly bound complex is produced by laser vaporisation of a solid Ba sample followed by supersonic expansion of the Ba vapour with the solvent gas. Typical mass spectra obtained by the laser ionisation technique and time-of-flight mass spectrometry are presented. The Ba··FCH3+ ionisation potential was found to be 4·55 ± 0·03 eV. Laser induced photodepletion of the Ba··FCH3 complex was observed at distinct wavelengths of the excitation laser, together with two open channels for complex photofragmentation: a reactive channel, giving BaF as a product, and a non-reactive channel where Ba is formed. The photodepletion spectrum was measured in the 545–630 nm region, displaying two distinct regions that were interpreted as two different electronic states of the complex. The lifetime of the excited A-state was estimated by applying the inverse Fourier transform to the measured spectrum, giving a lifetime of about 250 fs. This result was confirmed in a pump and probe femtosecond experiment, where a lifetime of about 270 ± 30 fs was measured. In addition to the photodepletion spectrum, product action spectra were measured. This allowed the direct determination of the reaction probability as a function of excitation energy. In the A-state, the BaF action spectrum has been measured over the 16065–16340 cm-1 energy range. The reaction probability, P R (E), displays a peak structure with an energy spacing of 10·9 cm-1 that may be related to the internal motion of the transition state of the reaction. For the B-state, product action spectra for both the reactive and non-reactive channel are presented for the 17795–18250 cm-1 energy range. Here, the reaction probabilities show an oscillatory behaviour with opposite phase, which could be due to quantal interferences between the two photofragmentation channels. In addition, the energy spacing of the oscillations can be related to the internal motions of the transition state. All these features are discussed taking into account the interplay between the spectroscopy and dynamics associated with each electronically excited state of the complex that governs the photoinitiated harpooning reaction.
Automated Systems for Detection of COVID-19 Using Chest X-ray Images and Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks

Since December 2019, the appearance of an outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease namely COVID-19 and which is previously known as 2019-nCoV. COVID-19 is a type of coronavirus that leads to the general destruction of respiratory systems and a severe respiratory symptom which are associated with highly Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admissions and death. Like any disease, the early diagnosis of coronavirus leads to limit its wide-spreading and increases the recovery rates of patients. The gold standard of COVID-19 detection is the real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) which has been used by the clinician to discover the presence or absence of this type of virus. The clinicians report that this technique has a low positive rate in the early stage of this disease. Based on this, the clinicians were forced to use another way to help in the early diagnosis of COVID-2019. So, the clinician's attention moved towards the medical imaging modalities especially the computed Tomography (CT) and X-ray chest images. Both modalities show that there is a change in the lungs in the case of COVID-19 that is different from any other type of pneumonic disease. Therefore, this research targeted toward employing different Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to propose a system for early detection of COVID-19 using chest X-ray images. These images are classified using different AI algorithms and a combination of them, then their performance was evaluated to recognize the best of them. These algorithms include a convolutional neural network (CNN), Softmax, support vector machine (SVM), Random Forest, and K nearest neighbor (KNN). Here CNN is into two scenarios, the first one to classify the X-ray images using a softmax classifier, and the second one to extract automated features from the images and pass these features to other classifiers (SVM, RFF, and KNN). According to the results, the performance of all classifiers is good and most of them record accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision of more than 98%.
Gut microbiota regulates autism-like behavior by mediating vitamin B6 metabolism in EphB6-deficient mice

Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder with limited effective pharmacological treatments for the core autistic symptoms so far. Increasing evidences, especially the clinical studies in ASD patients, suggest a functional link between gut microbiota and development of ASD. However, the mechanisms linking gut microbiota and brain dysfunctions (gut-brain axis) in ASD are still not well-established. With genetic mutations and down-regulated expression in patients with ASD, EPHB6 , which is also important in homeostasis of gut, has been generally considered to be a candidate gene for ASD. Nonetheless, the role and mechanism of EPHB6 involved in regulating gut microbiota and development of ASD have been unclear. Results Here, we found deletion of EphB6 induced autism-like behavior and disturbed gut microbiota in mice. More importantly, transplanting fecal microbiota from EphB6-deficient mice resulted in autism-like behavior in antibiotics-treated C57BL/6J mice. Meanwhile, transplanting fecal microbiota from wild-type mice ameliorated autism-like behavior in EphB6-deficient mice. At the metabolic levels, disturbed gut microbiota led to vitamin B6 and dopamine defects in EphB6-deficient mice. At the cellular levels, excitation/inhibition (E/I) imbalance in medial prefrontal cortex was induced by gut microbiota-mediated defects of vitamin B6 metabolism in EphB6-deficient mice. Conclusions Our study uncovers a key role for gut microbiota in regulation of autism-like social behavior by mediating vitamin B6 metabolism, dopamine synthesis and E/I balance in EphB6-deficient mice, suggesting new strategies for understanding and treatment of ASD.
Face mask use among individuals who are not medically diagnosed with COVID-19: A lack of evidence for and against and implications around public health recommendations.

IntroductionSince the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, public health professionals have been constantly making decisions on face mask use among individuals who are not medically diagnosed with COVID-19 or “healthy individuals” to limit the spread of COVID-19. While some countries have strongly recommended face masks for “healthy individuals”, other countries have recommended against it. Public health recommendations that have been provided to this population since the beginning of the outbreak have been controversial, contradicting, and inconsistent around the world. The purpose of this paper is to understand available evidence around the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of face mask use in limiting the spread of COVID-19 among individuals who have not yet been diagnosed with COVID-19 and most importantly, to understand the state of knowledge that the public health recommendations that have been provided since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak are based on.MethodsA systematic review was conducted to identify studies that investigated the use of face masks to limit the spread of COVID-19 among “healthy individuals”. ResultsNo studies were found, demonstrating a lack of evidence for and against face mask use suggesting implications around public health recommendations provided to “healthy individuals” since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak.ConclusionsThree and a half months into the COVID-19 outbreak (December 2019 – 2nd week of April 2020), there are no peer-reviewed scientific studies that have investigated the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of face mask use among “healthy individuals”. Yet, very strong public health recommendations have been provided on whether they should or should not wear face masks to limit the spread of COVID-19. A lack of scientific evidence heavily questions the basis of these public health recommendations provided at a very early, yet a crucial stage of an outbreak. This finding and a further look at public health recommendations conclude that there is a clear need for more concentrated research around face mask use among healthy individuals as well as public health recommendations that are evidence-based; precautionary in the absence of evidence; based on benefit-risk assessment; transparent; and globally aligned in order to provide the most successful guidelines during an infectious disease outbreak.
Development of events detector for monitoring cryoseisms in upper soils

<p>In some problems of solid Earth geophysics analysis of the huge amount of continuous seismic data is necessary. One of such problems is an investigation of so-called frost quakes or cryoseisms in the Arctic caused by extreme weather events. Weather extremes such as rapid temperature decrease in combination with thin snow cover can result in cracking of water-saturated soil and rock when the water has suddenly frozen and expanded. As cryoseisms can be hazardous for industrial and civil objects located in the near-field zone, their monitoring and analysis of weather conditions during which they occur, is necessary to access hazard caused by extreme weather events. One of the important tasks in studying cryoseisms is the development of efficient data processing routine capable to separate cryoseisms from other seismic events and noise in continuous seismic data. In our study, we present an algorithm for identification of cryoseisms that is based on classical STA/LTA algorithm for seismic event detection and neural network for their classification using selected characteristics of the records. </p><p>To access characteristics of cryoseisms, we used 3-component recordings of a swarm of strong cryoseismic events with similar waveforms that were registered on 06.06. 2016 by seismic station OUL in northern Finland. The strongest event from the swarm produced a fracture on the road surface and damaged basements of buildings in the municipality of Oulu. Assuming that all events in the swarm were caused by the same mechanism (freezing of water-saturated soil), we used them as a learning sample for the neural network. Analysis of these events has shown that most of them have many similarities in selected records characteristics (central frequencies, duration etc.) with the strongest event and with each other. Application of this algorithm to the continuous seismic data recorded since the end of November 2015 to the end of February 2016, showed that the number of cryoseisms per day strongly correlates with variations of air temperature. </p>
Entwicklung und Qualifizierung autonomer Messsysteme für den pH-Wert und die Gesamtalkalinität von Meerwasser

In dieser Arbeit wird die Entwicklung hochgenauer autonomer Messsysteme fur den pH-Wert und die Gesamtalkalinitat zur vollstandigen Charakterisierung des Carbonatsystems in Meerwasser aufgezeigt. Es wurde die Carbonatchemie in der Nordsee vollstandig beschrieben und gezeigt, wie durch eine Uberstimmung des Carbonatsystems systematische Fehler der Messungen identifiziert und eliminiert werden konnen und somit eine Qualitatssicherung der gemessenen Daten erfolgen kann.
Clinical Outcomes of Upper Gastrointestinal Bleeding in Egyptian Patients with Decompensated Liver Cirrhosis, Does the Bleeding Source Matter?

Background: Upper gastrointestinal bleeding (UGIB) is a prevalent emergency and mortality cause in cirrhotic patients. It prolongs the hospital length of stay (LOS) and increases hospital readmission. Objectives: We investigated the clinical outcomes of acute variceal bleeding (AVB) and non-variceal bleeding (NVB) in patients with decompensated cirrhosis and the possible risk factors for prolonged hospital LOS. Patients and Methods: All patients with decompensated liver cirrhosis and UGIB (AVB & NVB) hospitalized from August 2018 to March 2019 were enrolled in this study. We assessed mortality rate, the hospital LOS and hospital readmission rate along with the probable risk factors associated with prolonged hospital LOS. Results: Our study included 582 patients with decompensated liver cirrhosis, 367 patients had AVB and 215 patients had NVB. There was no significant difference in mortality rate between both groups (11.4% vs. 9.3%, P= 0.43). The hospital LOS in AVB patients was longer than that in NVB group (5.8 ± 2.2 vs. 4.3 ± 1.8, p=0.001). Rate of hospital re-admission within 30 days was significantly higher in the AVB group (27%) compared to NVB group (18%). Inhospital re-bleeding and the need for repeated endoscopy were also higher in AVB patients (20%) than in NVB patients (12%). Risk factors for prolonged hospital LOS were development of hepatic encephalopathy, spontaneous bacterial peritonitis (SBP), in-hospital re-bleeding, Child C score and higher Model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score. Conclusion: Patients with decompensated cirrhosis and AVB have longer hospital LOS and re-hospitalization rate than those with NVB with no significant difference in mortality rate between both groups.
Teaching all students: A holistic and collaborative approach to increasing student success

All students who enroll have success as their main goal. However, most institutions focus their resources on programs for students on honor roll, D ean’s list and those progressing academically. Little resources remain for those students who stumble. In 2015, 36.2% of white students, 22.5% of black students, and 15.5% of Hispanic students had completed four years of college. This shows a 13.7% gap between black and white students and a 20.7% gap between Hispanic and white students (Wellman, 2017). How do we close this gap in educational completion? This study believes that all students can learn. Consequently, there needs to be educational equity and the development of a basis for instruction and assessment of all students’ learning outcomes. This paper represents an exploratory fundamental and qualitative research that aims to present a refocus on the role of faculty in teaching and learning to reach all students in classrooms. It examines a holistic and collaborative approach to increasing student success using evidence -based qualitative analysis of best practices. This approach has four component parts. Part 1 is the Holistic Component that involves engaging all students in the institution; communicating purposefully to them in a timely manner; and providing all-inclusive comprehensive support services (HC). This part develops and implements measurable benchmarks that motivate, encourage, and enable all students. Part 2 is the Collaborative Component which involves bringing six working teams together: faculty, industry, current majors, alumni, career services, and the community (CC). This part engages the team in maintaining a living curriculum that reflects the ever-changing global economy. Part 3 is Celebration of Student Success (CSS) which entails the collaborative team owning each milestone, reaffirming teamwork while building trust and persistence. Part 4 is the Assessment of Student Progress (ASP) using the holistic and collaborative approach. The paper concludes that holistic and collaborative teamwork that includes, respects, and empowers all students is the key to reducing the college completion gaps that exist among blacks and Hispanic students.
New trends in electric motors and selection for electric vehicle propulsion systems

SERB/NPDF/2017/000568 Abstract The increase in the numbers of electric vehicles (EVs) is seen as an upgrading of the existing vehicles for various reasons. This calls for an in‐depth analysis of the heart of these vehicles—the motor. A motor in an electric vehicle propulsion system is a crucial component that has the ability to affect the efficiency, weight, cost, reliability, power output and performance. Hence a detailed comparative study, that compares the existing types and topologies of various motors, is the need of the hour. The various motors that can be used in electric traction, namely DC, induction, switched reluctance, permanent magnet brushless AC motors and permanent magnet brushless DC motors, are reviewed in view of their capabilities with respect to EV propulsion. A detailed review is presented of existing motors and the application of power electronic techniques to EVs, and recommendations for some new designs of brushless DC motors. These include permanent magnet hybrid motors, permanent magnet spoke motors and permanent magnet inset motors.