bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
CuO Nanozymes Catalyze Cysteine and Glutathione Depletion Induced Ferroptosis and Cuproptosis for Synergistic Tumor Therapy
Authors: Bai Jinwei , Zhang Xuan , Zhao Zhiwen , Sun Shihao , Cheng Wenyuan , Yu Hongxiang , Chang Xinyue , Wang Baodui 
Published: May 2024

AbstractThe latest research identifies that cysteine (Cys) is one of the key factors in tumor proliferation, metastasis, and recurrence. The direct depletion of intracellular Cys shows a profound antitumor effect. However, using nanozymes to efficiently deplete Cys for tumor therapy has not yet attracted widespread attention. Here, a (3‐carboxypropyl) triphenylphosphonium bromide‐derived hyaluronic acid‐modified copper oxide nanorods (denoted as MitCuOHA) are designed with cysteine oxidase‐like, glutathione oxidase‐like and peroxidase‐like activities to realize Cys depletion and further induce cellular ferroptosis and cuproptosis for synergistic tumor therapy. MitCuOHA nanozymes can efficiently catalyze the depletion of Cys and glutathione (GSH), accompanied by the generation of H2O2 and the subsequent conversion into highly active hydroxyl radicals, thereby successfully inducing ferroptosis in cancer cells. Meanwhile, copper ions released by MitCuOHA under tumor microenvironment stimulation directly bind to lipoylated proteins of the tricarboxylic acid cycle, leading to the abnormal aggregation of lipoylated proteins and subsequent loss of iron–sulfur cluster proteins, which ultimately triggers proteotoxic stress and cell cuproptosis. Both in vitro and in vivo results show the drastically enhanced anticancer efficacy of Cys oxidation catalyzed by the MitCuOHA nanozymes, demonstrating the high feasibility of such catalytic Cys depletion‐induced synergistic ferroptosis and cuproptosis therapeutic concept.
Anaerobic membrane bioreactor to remove pesticides and pharmaceuticals from wastewater: A bibliometric review
Authors: Ribeiro Marcos Henrique Gomes , Silva Maria Cristina de Almeida , Benetti Antônio Domingues 
Published: May 2024

AbstractWith the development of state‐of‐the‐art analytical methods, new compounds have been detected in water and sewage. Due to their diverse and complex nature, these compounds have been classified as contaminants of emerging concern (CEC). Among the CEC, there are products of pharmaceutical origin and pesticides. Due to the damage caused by these contaminants to human health and the environment, there is a need to develop technologies for their removal in wastewater treatment. An anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) is a technology that can potentially remove emerging compounds by combining biological treatment associated with membrane filtration. Thus, this article mapped literature describing the use of AnMBR for removing drugs and pesticides through a bibliometric review. A relatively low number of publications related to this subject was observed in the last 10 years. Most of the research has been done in the Middle East, South, and Southeast Asia. The main themes addressed by the articles were the treatment of drugs, bacteria, and antibiotic‐resistant genes. In particular, research on the removal of pesticides by AnMBR was scarce.
A novel global safe surgery mentorship program using a multidisciplinary team approach
Authors: Negash Samuel , Starr Nichole , Mesfin Samuel , G. Weiser Thomas , Negussie Tihitena Mammo 
Published: May 2024

AbstractBackgroundThe global surgery movement aims to provide equitable surgical care in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs) and attempts to address a wide range of issues around the lack of access and poor‐quality. In response, the Lifebox McCaskey Safe Surgery Fellowship was established in Ethiopia to train a multidisciplinary team of healthcare professionals. We conducted this study to evaluate the outcome of this training program.MethodsA qualitative study was conducted to evaluate the implementations and outcomes of the first three cohorts of the McCaskey Fellowship. Interviews with fellows, mentors, and program staff reveal valuable insights into the program's strengths and challenges.ResultsKey findings include positive feedback on the program's curriculum highlighting its multidisciplinary nature. Challenges were noted in maintaining schedules, communication with healthcare facilities, and budget constraints, suggesting the need for improved program management. The fellowship's impact was evident in altering participants' perceptions of teamwork and enhancing their research and leadership skills. Fellows initiated quality improvement projects impacting surgical practices positively. However, challenges, such as hospital resistance and the COVID‐19 pandemic, affected program implementation.ConclusionDespite various challenges, the program's unique approach combining multidisciplinary training and local mentorship proves promising. It fosters a culture of teamwork, equips participants with essential skills, and encourages fellows to become advocates for safe surgery. As surgical quality champions emerge from this fellowship, there is optimism for lasting positive impacts on surgical care in LMICs.
Onboarding for an Agile Software Development Company
Authors: Enberg Tomi , Alander Sari , Paasivaara Maria 
Published: May 2024

AbstractThe global shortage of highly skilled employees has created a need for a more efficient onboarding process in software development companies. The experienced onboarding efficiency affects the new employee’s willingness to stay within the company and the efficiency of their work. Our case company transferred to a team-based organization structure, where agile teams were given high autonomy. Supervisor responsibilities were divided among different roles, such as people coaches and a lead team. We studied the onboarding process through a survey that was answered by 39 persons, as well as 18 interviews to gather details from the onboarding process. To validate the findings, workshops, and presentations were organized in the case company. We found that mentoring was experienced as the most important form of onboarding in the case company. The biggest challenges were lack of transparency, insufficient material availability, and lack of documentation. As solutions were suggested: a shared repository of onboarding materials, checklists for teams and mentors for onboarding new employees efficiently, and collecting team-specific materials to a single location.
Slack Use in Large-Scale Agile Organizations: ESN Tools as Catalysts for Alignment?
Authors: Stray Viktoria , Barbala Astri 
Published: May 2024

AbstractThis paper examines the role of the enterprise social networking (ESN) tool Slack in the daily work of software practitioners within NAV, a large-scale agile public sector organization. Based on 13 interviews with NAV developers, our case study explores how Slack is employed for knowledge sharing and daily communication across the organization. We used a newly developed framework for communication in agile teams as a theoretical lens. Through our analysis, we found that Slack use had become deeply integrated into the organizational culture and fostered alignment in three main ways: Promotingcommunication transparencythrough open discussions visible for developers organization-wide, enhancingcommunication qualitywith prompt responses and constant communication, and encouragingcommunication disciplinethrough structured channels and threads. This study also unveiled some challenges, such as information overload and hindered focus. However, our findings suggest that if common hurdles are overcome, modern ESN tools can reshape how cross-organizational communication plays out in large-scale agile, reinforcing the agile principles of collaboration and motivated individuals.
Coordination in Agile Product Areas: A Case Study from a Large FinTech Organization
Authors: Berntzen Marthe , Engdal Silje Alette , Gellein Maja , Moe Nils Brede 
Published: May 2024

AbstractProduct teams organized into product areas are becoming more and more prevalent in large-scale agile. While such arrangements are thought to improve the development process and overall product delivery, it is still not clear how this form of organizing alleviates the coordination challenges commonly associated with large-scale agile. In this paper, we report on a case study from a product area in a large FinTech organization. Through analyzing interviews, observations, and strategic documents, we describe how organizing into a product area with vertical and horizontal teams supported inter-team coordination. Further, we describe seventeen coordination mechanisms used in the product area. Our findings have three main contributions. First, we propose that the product area represent a distinct organizational level that can support coordination in large scale development settings. Second, we found that the team types used in the product area represent different team typologies. Third, pull requests and pair programming were used as inter-team coordination mechanisms, and our findings suggest that pair programming to some extent could replace the PR mechanism to further improve product area coordination.
Impact of the Kanban Maturity Model on a Team’s Agile Transformation: Tripling Throughput and Elevating Quality in Three Months
Authors: Trzesicki Jacek , Marek Krzysztof , Przybylek Adam 
Published: May 2024

AbstractAgile transformations have been a significant challenge since the beginning of the agile movement, with numerous researchers and practitioners suggesting various structured approaches and guidelines. The Kanban Maturity Model (KMM) is a relatively new approach that focuses on assessing the current maturity level of an organisation, with an emphasis on a spectrum of Kanban practices. This paper presents the initial results of applying the KMM as a guide for subsequent steps in Kanban implementation and agile transformation. The exploratory case study describes the application of the KMM in the agile transformation of a software development team within a midsize organisation. Despite previous unsuccessful attempts to implement Scrum, the adoption of KMM facilitated a rapid and successful implementation of the Kanban Method. Within three months, the team’s throughput tripled, and the quality of the developed software improved significantly. The results suggest that the KMM can be successfully used as an effective guideline for agile transformation of software development teams.
Comparing Stability and Sustainability in Agile Systems
Authors: Healy Robert , Conboy Kieran , Dey Tapajit , Lewzey Edwin , Fitzgerald Brian 
Published: May 2024

AbstractThe World Health Organization (WHO) highlights the significant threat that unsustainably long working hours pose to our mental and physical well-being. Aligning with this concern, an Agile principle emphasizes that “Agile processes promote sustainable development.” However, previous work in 2023 debunked this notion of inherent stability in Agile systems, such as the Scrum and Kanban frameworks. In this study, we aim to analyse the relationship between system stability and the tendency of teams to work outside reasonable office hours. We inspect 295 historic Agile projects completed in intive, a software development company. We assess the percentage of late-night, early-morning, or weekend hours where a Product Backlog Item (PBI) was created or resolved and compare this percentage of Unsustainable Hours metric to the Stability Metric and the number of Inventory Days remaining. The analysis showed that almost no correlation exists between the Unsustainable Hours worked and either the system stability or outstanding inventory. These findings indicate that, while working unconventional and potentially excessive hours is a concern, it does not appear to be linked to the stability of Agile systems. This highlights the need for a deeper understanding of individual and team motivations to foster long-term sustainable work practices.
Development: Which Ideas Now?
Authors: Sato Jin 
Published: May 2024

AbstractThe practice of development and foreign aid inevitably involves numerous languages and thus requires translation to each the meaning of terms and concepts as all ideas and the words that convey them, are born in particular locations with contextual meanings attached to them. Yet terms are imported—often from West to East, and North to South —without consideration for these contexts. This introductory chapter argues for the need to recover how local actors reinterpret, frame, reconstruct, and reproduce, foreign concepts as they migrate. It also discusses why this is important, and why now. While shifts in thinking occur from time to time, we have been less imaginative in recognizing and overcoming the dominant sources of ideas and concepts that inform our development thinking. This is the reason we focus on the apparently “natural” concepts in Japan and how such concepts travel beyond their place of birth.
Yen Loans: Between Norms and Heterodoxy
Authors: Shiga Hiroaki 
Published: May 2024

AbstractYen loans are long-term, low-interest loans provided to developing countries as part of Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA), mainly for infrastructure development as a foundation for the economic growth of recipient countries. They have been a continuing object of criticism based on dominant norms, championed by the United States and European countries, that development assistance is a form of charity by rich countries for the sake of poor countries, and thus should take the form of grants and technical assistance. Yen loans have become symbolic of the heterodoxy that flows through the history of Japan’s ODA, and was adapted for assistance to less developed countries in Southeast Asia. This chapter questions the nature of this heterodoxy and examines how discord has been navigated between Japan as norm-taker and norm-makers—the United States and European countries—who generally lack flexibility with respect to different ways of providing development assistance.
Conclusion: Imagining Pluriversal Development Knowledge Production Via Japan as Method
Authors: Kim Soyeun , Wang Muyun 
Published: May 2024

AbstractIn this conclusion, we consider the broader contribution of this edited volume to expand thinking via Japan as method towards more decentred and pluriversal approaches to knowledge production in Japanese international development studies (IDS). In order to highlight this broader contribution, we do two things. First, we synthesise findings from each chapter through the dimensions of time and space, in which the selected Japanese terms in the field of development cooperation were constructed, popularised, or spread. In doing so, we demonstrate how intricately the semantics of those terms change through the latter’s connection with many other—temporally and spatially different—worlds and their experiences, and highlight the risk of boasting Japan’s uniqueness in development knowledge production. Second, we then consider Japan as method to elucidate the case for engaging with decolonial and pluriversal approaches in Japanese IDS by exploring Japan’s ambiguous positionality and the post-war depoliticisation of Japanese IDS. Finally, we consider the potential of relativising Japan’s position in the (many) world(s) and to critically engage with the trend of instrumentalising ODA to serve geopolitical interests through active collaboration and co-creation of decolonial or pluriversal development knowledges that ‘leave no one behind’.
Genba-Shugi: Understanding Through a Hands-On Approach
Authors: Matsubara Naoki 
Published: May 2024

AbstractThis chapter discusses the concept of genba-shugi by focusing on two contexts in which the term has been used: as an aspect of Japanese-style business management, and in technical cooperation and organizational reform at JICA. This focus on people close to the genba (on the ground, in the field, or at the locality) emphasizes the superiority of their know-how and initiative above those of imaginary rivals: Western-style organizations and domestic bureaucratic government bodies. Each of these contexts share a focus on feelings and experiences, against abstract “models” from developed countries or strategic plans of central government, respectively. They are also leveraged to further specific agendas by arguing against their supposed antitheses—Western engineers and business management in the better-known cases; and Japan’s centralized bureaucracy in the case of JICA.
Moving interfaces and two-dimensional black holes
Authors: Biswas Parthajit , Das Suchetan , Dinda Anirban 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Conformal field theories can exchange energy through a boundary interface. Imposing conformal boundary conditions for static interfaces implies energy conservation at the interface. Recently, the reflective and transmittive properties of such static conformal interfaces have been studied in two dimensions by scattering matter at the interface impurity. In this note, we generalize this to the case of dynamic interfaces. Motivated by the connections between the moving mirror and the black hole, we choose a particular profile for the dynamical interface. We show that a part of the total energy of each side will be lost in the interface. In other words, a time-dependent interface can accumulate or absorb energy. While, in general, the interface follows a time-like trajectory, one can take a particular limit of a profile parameter(β), such that the interface approaches a null line asymptotically(β → 0). In this limit, we show that for a class of boundary conditions, the interface behaves like a semipermeable membrane - it behaves like a (partially) reflecting mirror from one side and is (partially) transparent from the other side. We also consider another set of conformal boundary conditions for which, in the null line limit, the interface mimics the properties expected of a horizon. In this case, we devise a scattering experiment, where (zero-point subtracted) energy from one CFT is fully transmitted to the other CFT, while from the other CFT, energy can neither be transmitted nor reflected, i.e., it gets lost in the interface. This boundary condition is also responsible for the thermal energy spectrum which mimics Hawking radiation. This is analogous to the black hole where the horizon plays the role of a one-sided ‘membrane’, which accumulates all the interior degrees of freedom and radiates thermally in the presence of quantum fluctuation. Stimulated by this observation, we comment on some plausible construction of wormhole analogues.
The bacterial DNA sliding clamp, β-clamp: structure, interactions, dynamics and drug discovery
Authors: Simonsen Signe , Søgaard Caroline K. , Olsen Johan G. , Otterlei Marit , Kragelund Birthe B. 
Published: May 2024

AbstractDNA replication is a tightly coordinated event carried out by a multiprotein replication complex. An essential factor in the bacterial replication complex is the ring-shaped DNA sliding clamp, β-clamp, ensuring processive DNA replication and DNA repair through tethering of polymerases and DNA repair proteins to DNA. β -clamp is a hub protein with multiple interaction partners all binding through a conserved clamp binding sequence motif. Due to its central role as a DNA scaffold protein, β-clamp is an interesting target for antimicrobial drugs, yet little effort has been put into understanding the functional interactions of β-clamp. In this review, we scrutinize the β-clamp structure and dynamics, examine how its interactions with a plethora of binding partners are regulated through short linear binding motifs and discuss how contexts play into selection. We describe the dynamic process of clamp loading onto DNA and cover the recent advances in drug development targeting β-clamp. Despite decades of research in β-clamps and recent landmark structural insight, much remains undisclosed fostering an increased focus on this very central protein.
Geophysical Investigation and 3D Modeling of Bedrock Morphology in an Urban Sediment-Filled Basin: The Case of Bolzano (Northern Italy)
Authors: Giulia Sgattoni , Corrado Morelli , Giovanni Lattanzi , Silvia Castellaro , Maurizio Cucato , Werner Chwatal , Volkmar Mair 
Published: May 2024

AbstractBedrock mapping is essential for understanding seismic amplification, particularly in sediment-filled valleys or basins. However, this can be hard in urban environments. We conducted a geophysical investigation of the sediment-filled Bolzano basin in Northern Italy, where three valleys converge. This study uses low-impact, single-station geophysical methods suitable for urban areas to address the challenges of mapping in such environments. A dataset of 574 microtremor and gravity measurements, along with three seismic reflection lines, allows for the inference of the basin’s deep bedrock morphology, even without direct stratigraphic data. The dataset facilitates a detailed analysis of the spatial patterns of resonance frequencies and amplitudes, revealing 1D and 2D characteristics of the resonances. Notably, 2D resonances predominate along the Adige valley, i.e., the deepest part of the basin with depths up to 900 m. These 2D resonances, which cannot be interpreted through simple 1D frequency-depth relationships, are better understood by integrating gravity data to develop a depth model. The study identifies resonance frequencies ranging from 0.27 to over 3 Hz in Bolzano, affecting different building types during earthquakes. Maximum resonance amplitudes occur at lower frequencies, specifically at 2D resonance sites, therefore primarily impacting high structures. The 2D resonances are directional, with the most significant amplification occurring longitudinally along the valley axes. The resulting 3D bedrock model aids in seismic site response modeling, hydrogeological studies, and geothermal exploration and provides insights into the geological history of the basin, highlighting the role of the Adige Valley as a major drainage pathway.
Loggerhead Sea Turtles as Hosts of Diverse Bacterial and Fungal Communities
Authors: Filek Klara , Vuković Borna Branimir , Žižek Marta , Kanjer Lucija , Trotta Adriana , Di Bello Antonio , Corrente Marialaura , Bosak Sunčica 
Published: May 2024

AbstractResearch on microbial communities associated with wild animals provides a valuable reservoir of knowledge that could be used for enhancing their rehabilitation and conservation. The loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) is a globally distributed species with its Mediterranean population categorized as least concern according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as a result of robust conservation efforts. In our study, we aimed to further understand their biology in relation to their associated microorganisms. We investigated epi- and endozoic bacterial and endozoic fungal communities of cloaca, oral mucosa, carapace biofilm. Samples obtained from 18 juvenile, subadult, and adult turtles as well as 8 respective enclosures, over a 3-year period, were analysed by amplicon sequencing of 16S rRNA gene and ITS2 region of nuclear ribosomal gene. Our results reveal a trend of decreasing diversity of distal gut bacterial communities with the age of turtles. Notably, Tenacibaculum species show higher relative abundance in juveniles than in adults. Differential abundances of taxa identified as Tenacibaculum, Moraxellaceae, Cardiobacteriaceae, and Campylobacter were observed in both cloacal and oral samples in addition to having distinct microbial compositions with Halioglobus taxa present only in oral samples. Fungal communities in loggerheads’ cloaca were diverse and varied significantly among individuals, differing from those of tank water. Our findings expand the known microbial diversity repertoire of loggerhead turtles, highlighting interesting taxa specific to individual body sites. This study provides a comprehensive view of the loggerhead sea turtle bacterial microbiota and marks the first report of distal gut fungal communities that contributes to establishing a baseline understanding of loggerhead sea turtle holobiont.