cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Determining the Concentration Dependent Transformations of Ag Nanoparticles in Complex Media: Using SP-ICP-MS and Au@Ag Core–Shell Nanoparticles as Tracers

The fate, behavior, and impact of engineered nanoparticles (NPs) in toxicological and environmental media are driven by complex processes which are difficult to quantify. A key limitation is the ability to perform measurements at low and environmentally relevant concentrations, since concentration may be a key factor determining fate and effects. Here, we use single particle inductively coupled mass spectroscopy (SP-ICP-MS) to measure directly NP diameter and particle number concentration of suspensions containing gold-silver core-shell (Au@Ag) NPs in EPA moderately hard water (MHW) and MHW containing 2.5 mg L-1 Suwannee River fulvic acid. The Au core of the Au@Ag NPs acts as an internal standard, and aids in the analysis of the complex Ag transformations. The high sensitivity of SP-ICP-MS, along with the Au@Ag NPs, enabled us to track the NP transformations in the range 0.01 and 50 μg L-1, without further sample preparation. On the basis of the analysis of both Au and Ag parameters (size, size distribution, and particle number), concentration was shown to be a key factor in NP behavior. At higher concentration, NPs were in an aggregation-dominated regime, while at the lower and environmentally representative concentrations, dissolution of Ag was dominant and aggregation was negligible. In addition, further formation of ionic silver as Ag NPs in the form of AgS or AgCl was shown to occur. Between 1 and 10 μg L-1, both aggregation and dissolution were important. The results suggest that, under realistic conditions, the role of NP homoaggregation may be minimal. In addition, the complexity of exposure and dose in dose-response relationships is highlighted.
Indexing epistemic authority/primacy in Mandarin conversation: aiyou -prefacing as an interactional resource

Abstract Drawing on 35 hours of spontaneous conversations collected in China, this study aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about how epistemic positions are asserted and contested in social interaction. Specifically, this article focuses on Mandarin aiyou-prefacing, and examines a hitherto unexplored interactional use of aiyou: when aiyou prefaces responsive actions in the context of disagreement or contestation. I show that in the context of disagreement, by prefacing a responding turn with aiyou, the speaker alerts the recipient to a heightened newsworthiness associated with the information that will follow, while simultaneously introducing speaker-side evidence that was previously inaccessible to the recipient. In the context in which aiyou prefaces a contesting counterinforming, the speaker, while not explicitly disagreeing with the recipient’s prior claim, counteracts the claim by providing a more nuanced understanding of the matter at issue; in this context, aiyou-prefacing often figures in competitive co-informing when the party who goes second has equal or even greater knowledge about the matter under discussion. I argue that together with the constellation of features that accompany its use, the aiyou-preface in both contexts indexes a claim of epistemic authority and/or primacy over the matter at hand.
Role Of Oestrogen Deficiency In Women With Syndrome X

The occurrence of anginal type chest pain in women is greater than that in men. This observation was first made by Sir William Osier at the turn of the century1, and confirmed more recently by a study of over 12,000 men and women in the United States2. However, the prognosis for women and men is different, especially prior to the menopause, with male cardiovascular mortality far exceeding that of the female. Many women with angina-type chest pain and ischaemic changes during exercise tolerance testing are less likely to undergo coronary angiography3,4 and, therefore, are automatically excluded from the syndrome X population for whom angiographic demonstration of absence of coronary artery obstruction is an inclusion criterion. Nevertheless, the majority of patients with syndrome X are women5,6.
Don’t Believe Everything You Read on Twitter -- The Federal Trade Commission’s Regulation of Celebrity Endorsements on Social Media

This paper will discuss the FTC’s Revised Endorsement Guides and specifically their impact on social media endorsements by compensated actors and celebrities. Because of this impact, it is imperative that entertainment lawyers, agents, and managers understand and heed these Guides to ensure that celebrity clients avoid these marketing mishaps. Additionally, the Guides are important to the entertainment industry due to the explosion of actors and celebrities having financial or management interests in online businesses who may decide to use social media endorsements to promote the business. Part one of this paper will introduce the FTC’s advertising authority and analyze the scope of the revised Guides, focusing primarily on the mandatory disclosure principle. Part two will discuss FTC enforcement based on the requirements in the Guides. Part three of this paper will offer recommendations for celebrities to avoid liability under these new Guides, followed by some concluding remarks.
Pigeons extract redundant, multiple features and attend to multiple contours when recognizing line drawings

In a go/no-go procedure, pigeons were trained to discriminate a square line figure (S+) from a circle (S−). Generalization decrements to altered versions of S+ were analyzed to determine which features the pigeons attended to. In Experiment 1, the square was broken at midsegments or vertices and expanded by varying amounts in order to determine which of these potential visual features pigeons weight more heavily. Greater generalization decrements to midsegment deleted probes than to vertex deleted probes provided evidence that pigeons weight midsegments more heavily than vertices. By deleting single vertices or midsegments, selected so as to include all contour elements, Experiments 2 and 3 provided evidence that, rather than attending to one or a few areas of contour, most pigeons tend to allocate attention over most or all contour elements. In addition, random deletions produced greater generalization decrements than deletions of line segments. The results suggest that, for simple line drawings, pigeons attend to multiple contours at different locations and may integrate these contours into a representation of an object.
Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems

I am very excited to welcome you to the second annual ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. The objective of this conference is to serve as the premier forum for research on system issues in the area of embedded, networked sensors. Last year's conference, the first ever for this conference, was excellent and provided a great start to achieving the main objective. This year the program is also excellent. We have an extremely high quality technical program with regular papers, posters, demos, invited speakers, and a mini-tutorial. Special thanks go to Anish Arora and Ramesh Govindan, the Program Co-Chairs, and all of the members of the program committee for putting together such a great technical program. This is a very time consuming undertaking and they performed at the highest professional levels. Wendi Heinzelman and Sandeep Kulkarni put together a very interesting poster session. The demo sessions were very ably handled and organized by Akos Ledeczi and Mark Yarvis. The posters and demos add a significant value to the technical program and I'm sure that you will enjoy them. Again, I thank all those involved with the technical program, including the authors of the papers to be presented. In addition to the technical program, many other aspects must be addressed before such a conference can occur. I was fortunate to have great help in all the requisite areas. I want to especially thank Sang Son for doing a great job as the Finance Chair. Publicity was handled in a timely and professional manner by Chenyang Lu and Phillippe Bonnet. Anupam Joshi did a great job in local arrangements. John Regehr handled the student travel awards very well, and Badri Nath excelled at obtaining financial support from various sponsors. Prasun Sinha did a great job at supporting the submission process and Dong Xuan was terrific serving as the web master for our web site. I would also like to acknowledge great help from the ACM, in particular, Erin Dolan and Julia Codrington. I thank all the people mentioned above for making my job a lot easier than expected.
CHAPTER 15 – Update on the Use of Genetically Modified Hematopoietic Stem Cells for Cancer Therapy

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are rare cells found within the bone marrow (BM), peripheral blood (PB), and cord blood, which are self-renewing and capable of differentiating into progeny that multiply to become the erythroid, lymphoid, and myeloid components of the blood. These primitive progenitor cells are attractive targets for gene therapy because of their potential to self-renew and generate a large population of progeny cells with new genetic material. Gene transfer to HSCs has rapidly become a focus of research into the mechanisms and/or therapeutic options for a variety of inherited, infectious, and neoplastic diseases. This chapter illustrates how this new technology can be applied to the potential treatment of a neoplasm. The potential use of gene-modified HSCs has branched out into several directions. The introduction of gene-modified HSC into bone marrow transplants (BMTs) and/or peripheral blood stem cell transplants (PBSCTs) is being developed as a means to investigate the source of long-term hematopoietic reconstitution in the patient receiving marrow-ablative chemotherapy.
The Evaluation of Student Fitness Levels in Exercise Science and Physical Education Teacher Education Programs

The debate on whether kinesiology students should undergo fitness testing is controversial. Some are strong proponents of fitness testing, while others are in strong opposition. As advocates for fi...
Intrinsic Programming of Alveolar Macrophages for Protective Antifungal Innate Immunity Against Pneumocystis Infection

Invasive fungal infections, including Pneumocystis Pneumonia (PcP), remain frequent life-threatening conditions of patients with adaptive immune defects. While innate immunity helps control pathogen growth early during infection, it is typically not sufficient for complete protection against Pneumocystis and other human fungal pathogens. Alveolar macrophages (AM) possess pattern recognition molecules capable of recognizing antigenic and structural determinants of Pneumocystis. However, this pathogen effectively evades innate immunity to infect both immunocompetent and immunosuppressed hosts, albeit with differing outcomes. During our studies of mouse models of PcP, the FVB/N strain was identified as unique because of its ability to mount a protective innate immune response against Pneumocystis infection. In contrast to other immunocompetent strains, which become transiently infected prior to the onset of adaptive immunity, FVB/N mice rapidly eradicated Pneumocystis before an adaptive immune response was triggered. Furthermore, FVB/N mice remained highly resistant to infection even in the absence of functional T cells. The effector mechanism of innate protection required the action of functional alveolar macrophages, and the adoptive transfer of resistant FVB/N AMs, but not susceptible CB.17 AMs, conferred protection to immunodeficient mice. Macrophage IFNγ receptor signaling was not required for innate resistance, and FVB/N macrophages were found to display markers of alternative activation. IFNγ reprogrammed resistant FVB/N macrophages to a permissive M1 biased phenotype through a mechanism that required direct activation of the macrophage IFNγR. These results demonstrate that appropriately programmed macrophages provide protective innate immunity against this opportunistic fungal pathogen, and suggest that modulating macrophage function may represent a feasible therapeutic strategy to enhance antifungal host defense. The identification of resistant and susceptible macrophages provides a novel platform to study not only the mechanisms of macrophage-mediated antifungal defense, but also the mechanisms by which Pneumocystis evades innate immunity.
When Cars Crash: The Automobile's Tort Law Legacy

Everyone understands that the invention of the automobile has had a profound effect on daily life in America. It has transformed our workplaces, altered our neighborhoods, and radically changed our environment. But cars have never been perfectly safe, and, as the years have passed, injuries and fatalities have mounted. This Article contends that, just as motor vehicles have remade our culture, these injuries and deaths — some 3.5 million fatalities and counting — have catalyzed fundamental changes in the contours, purposes, and limits of our law.
Power, Relationships, and Trust in Sociological Research on Homes, Schools, and Communities

This chapter offers a critical perspective on sociological research exploring the interactions among students’ homes, schools and communities. We conceptualize each of these spaces as a unique context that influences students and, as such, must be attended to both on its own terms but also especially where each context meets, conflicts with, or exerts power over the others. We highlight three major areas of promising research in this field: first, research that attends to the tensions inherent to the struggle for power among and between these contexts; second, research that explores the foundations and practice of creating equal, communicative relationships between stakeholders from each context; and third, research that can account for the presence, absence, or impact of trust in these relationships.
GLAD: GLycan Array Dashboard, a visual analytics tool for glycan microarrays.

MOTIVATION Traditional glycan microarray data is typically presented as excel files with limited visualization and interactivity. Thus, comparisons and analysis of glycan array data have been difficult, and there is need for a tool to facilitate data mining of glycan array data. RESULTS GLAD (GLycan Array Dashboard) is a web-based tool to visualize, analyze, present and mine glycan microarray data. GLAD allows users to input multiple data files to create comparisons. GLAD extends the capability of the microarray data to produce more comparative visualizations in the form of grouped bar charts, heatmaps, calendar heatmaps, force graphs and correlation maps in order to analyze broad sets of samples. Additionally, it allows users to filter, sort and normalize the data and view glycan structures in an interactive manner, to facilitate faster visual data mining. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION GLAD is freely available for use on the Web at https://glycotoolkit.com/Tools/GLAD/ with all major modern browsers (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Full documentation and video tutorials for GLAD can be found on https://glycotoolkit.com/GLAD.
CRISPR–Cas9 System for Genome Engineering of Photosynthetic Microalgae

Targeted genome editing using RNA-guided endonucleases is an emerging tool in algal biotechnology. Recently, CRISPR–Cas systems have been widely used to manipulate the genome of some freshwater and marine microalgae. Among two different classes, and six distinct types of CRISPR systems, Cas9-driven type II system has been widely used in most of the studies for targeted knock-in, knock-out and knock-down of desired genes in algae. CRISPR technology has been demonstrated in microalgae including diatoms to manifest the function of the particular gene (s) and developing industrial traits, such as improving lipid content and biomass productivity. Instead of these, there are a lot of gears to be defined about improving efficiency and specificity of targeted genome engineering of microalgae using CRISPR–Cas system. Optimization of tools and methods of CRISPR technology can undoubtedly transform the research toward the industrial-scale production of commodity chemicals, food and biofuels using photosynthetic cell factories. This review has been focused on the efforts made so far to targeted genome engineering of microalgae, identified scopes about the hurdles related to construction and delivery of CRISPR–Cas components, algae transformation toolbox, and outlined the future prospect toward developing the CRISPR platform for high-throughput genome-editing of microalgae.
Automated Recycling Separation Enabled by Soft Robotic Material Classification

Single-stream recycling is currently an extremely labor intensive process due to the need for manual object sorting. Soft robotics offers a natural solution as compliant robots require less computation to plan paths and grasp objects in a cluttered environment. However, most soft robots are not robust enough to handle the many sharp objects present in a recycling facility. In this work, we present a soft sensorized robotic gripper which is fully electrically driven and can detect the difference between paper, metal and plastic. By combining handed shearing auxetics with high deformation capacitive pressure and strain sensors, we present a new puncture resistant soft robotic gripper. Our materials classifier has 85% accuracy with a stationary gripper and 63% accuracy in a simulated recycling pipeline. This classifier works over a variety of objects, including those that would fool a purely vision-based system.
Miller's monkey updated: Communicative efficiency and the statistics of words in natural language

Is language designed for communicative and functional efficiency? G. K. Zipf famously argued that shorter words are more frequent because they are easier to use, thereby resulting in the statistical law that bears his name. Yet, G. A. Miller showed that even a monkey randomly typing at a keyboard, and intermittently striking the space bar, would generate "words" with similar statistical properties. Recent quantitative analyses of human language lexicons (Piantadosi et al., 2012) have revived Zipf's functionalist hypothesis. Ambiguous words tend to be short, frequent, and easy to articulate in language production. Such statistical findings are commonly interpreted as evidence for pressure for efficiency, as the context of language use often provides cues to overcome lexical ambiguity. In this study, we update Miller's monkey thought experiment to incorporate empirically motivated phonological and semantic constraints on the creation of words. We claim that the appearance of communicative efficiency is a spandrel (Gould & Lewontin, 1979), as lexicons formed without the context of language use or reference to communication or efficiency exhibit comparable statistical properties. Furthermore, the updated monkey model provides a good fit for the growth trajectory of English as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Focusing on the history of English words since 1900, we show that lexicons resulting from the monkey model provide a better embodiment of communicative efficiency than the actual lexicon of English. We conclude by arguing for the need to go beyond correlational statistics and to seek direct evidence for the mechanisms that underlie principles of language design.
Diaper Need Is Associated with Pediatric Care Use: An Analysis of a Nationally Representative Sample of Parents of Young Children.

Objective To examine the possible association between diaper need, difficulty affording an adequate amount of diapers, and pediatric care visits for urinary tract infections and diaper dermatitis. Study design This cross-sectional analysis using nationally representative survey data collected July-August 2017 using a web-based panel examined 981 parents of children between 0 and 3 years of age in the US (response rate, 94%). Survey weighting for differential probabilities of selection and nonresponse was used to estimate the prevalence of diaper need and to perform multivariable logistic regression of the association between parent reported diaper need and visits to the pediatrician for diaper rash or urinary tract infections within the past 12 months. Results An estimated 36% of parents endorsed diaper need. Both diaper need (aOR 2.37; 95% CI 1.69-3.31) and visiting organizations to receive diapers (aOR 2.14; 95% CI 1.43-3.21) were associated with diaper dermatitis visits. Similar associations were found for diaper need (aOR 2.63; 95% CI 1.54-4.49) and visiting organizations to receive diapers (aOR 4.50; 95% CI 2.63-7.70) for urinary tract infection visits. Conclusions Diaper need is common and associated with increased pediatric care visits. These findings suggest pediatric provider and policy interventions decreasing diaper need could improve child health and reduce associated healthcare use.
Biophysical properties of AKAP95 protein condensates regulate splicing and tumorigenesis

It remains unknown if biophysical or material properties of biomolecular condensates regulate cancer. Here we show that AKAP95, a nuclear protein that regulates transcription and RNA splicing, plays an important role in tumorigenesis by supporting cancer cell growth and suppressing oncogene-induced senescence. AKAP95 forms phase-separated and liquid-like condensates in vitro and in nucleus. Mutations of key residues to different amino acids perturb AKAP95 condensation in opposite directions. Importantly, the activity of AKAP95 in splice regulation is abolished by disruption of condensation, significantly impaired by hardening of condensates, and regained by substituting its condensation-mediating region with other condensation-mediating regions from irrelevant proteins. Moreover, the abilities of AKAP95 in regulating gene expression and supporting tumorigenesis require AKAP95 to form condensates with proper liquidity and dynamicity. These results link phase separation to tumorigenesis and uncover an important role of appropriate biophysical properties of protein condensates in gene regulation and cancer.
Quantification of light localization properties to study the effect of probiotic on chronic alcoholic brain cells via confocal imaging

Photonics localization due to light scattering is an important probe to understand the molecular specific structural changes in brain cells due to diseases or abnormalities. Chronic alcoholism is associated with medical, behavioral, and psychological problems including physical damage in brain cells/tissues. The effects of chronic alcoholism on brain cells/tissue structures at the nanoscale are not well understood. On the other hand, probiotic treatment has shown some reversing effect in curing the abnormalities in an alcoholic’s brain. In this work, we study the effect of probiotic, Lactobacillus Plantarum treatment on chronic alcoholic brain cells/tissues using a mouse model. We evaluate the light localization properties of molecular specific spatial mass density fluctuations based on mesoscopic physics-based inverse participation ratio via confocal imaging of cells, confocal-IPR technique. Using the technique, we probe overexpression of astrocyte and microglial cells, and chromatin structures of different brain cells, by probing molecular specific overexpression by staining the cells with appropriate dye/proteins and then calculating the degree of spatial molecular structural disorder (Ld). The confocal-IPR analysis of alcoholic astrocytes, microglia, and chromatin of the mice brain cells show an increase in the structural disorder indicating that alcohol has an adverse effect on different brain cells and nuclei. Whereas the normalcy in the structural disorder of these brain cells happens when probiotics were fed simultaneously with alcohol, confirms the improvement in chronic alcoholic brain health. The potential application of this novel approach to diagnosing the alcohol effect and probiotic treatment in the alcoholic brain is explored.
Task Design for Crowdsourcing Complex Cognitive Skills

Task design for crowdsourcing is a key factor limiting the quality of crowd-sourced results. This case study presents our design process for a complex cognitive task: generating Dimension/Values for categorizing ideas. Conveying the task to workers was a formidable design challenge. We present five strategies and lessons learned from testing with workers. Decomposing the cognitive process and testing mastery of each cognitive subprocess enabled us to finally convey the task requirements and obtain useful results.
Understanding occupational heat exposure in the United States and proposing a quantifying stress index

Millions of workers exposed to the outdoor environment are extremely susceptible to extreme heat. Although several articles analyzed heat-related illnesses, injuries, fatalities at the country level, few investigated regional and state statistics especially for OSHA Region 4 and the state of Alabama, U.S, which we explored in this study. We studied the number of heat-days over 90 °F (32.2 °C) heat-index within our study area, analyzed heat-related injury and illnesses to calculate their incidence rate during 2015 to 2019, observed the nature of such incidents, their monthly occurrence, and incidence trend over average air temperature. We conducted a comparative analysis of heat-related fatalities between construction and all industries. The existing heat regulations by OSHA and some state agencies have also been summarized. We observed the highest mean, maximum heat-days and injury-illness rate in the south and southeast part of Region 4; increase in incidence rate from 0.03 in 2017 to 0.28 per 10,000 employees in 2018 for the contiguous U.S; highest injury-illness rate (HIR) in OSHA Region 1, 4 and 6; highest HIR in Lee, Montgomery, Mobile and Madison counties of Alabama; 34.7% (construction) and 31.3% (all industries) of all cases experiencing nonclassifiable heat-light effects; high fatalities in construction industry with a trend of 1 death/5 years; increased mortality in all occupations with 1 death/2.4 years. We also proposed a Heat-Stress Index (HSI) as a routine heat-stress measure on jobsite. The findings from this research and the proposed index can help in understanding heat-related risk at a regional level and implementing workplace interventions.
Flow-induced cross-flow vibrations of long flexible cylinder with an upstream wake interference

Flow-induced vibration (FIV) of a flexible cylinder with an upstream wake interference at a subcritical Reynolds number is numerically investigated in this study. Two cylinders are installed in a tandem arrangement with the tandem separation between the cylinder centers set at 5.0 diameters. The downstream cylinder is flexible and placed in the wake of the stationary rigid upstream cylinder. A quasi-three-dimensional fluid-structure interaction (FSI) numerical methodology that couples the strip theory-based Lagrangian discrete vortex method with the finite-element method (FEM) for structural dynamics is developed to simulate the FIV response of the flexible cylinder with the upstream wake interference. The vortex-induced vibration (VIV) of an identical isolated cylinder is also numerically simulated as a contrast. This numerical study characterizes the dynamic response of the cylinder FIV with the upstream wake interference and sheds light on the FSI mechanisms responsible for the structural dynamic response. With the upstream wake interference, the cylinder FIV response shows two features distinct from the isolated VIV response: the vibration of large amplitude during the modal resonance branch transition and the extension of the modal resonance branch. The hydrodynamic coefficients database is constructed by the rigid cylinder forced vibration experiment to help explain the FSI properties of the FIV dynamic response. The lower added mass coefficient for the FIV with the upstream wake interference than the VIV of the isolated cylinder guarantees the synchronization between the vortex shedding frequency and the “true” natural frequency of the structure persisting to higher reduced velocity in a certain modal resonance response branch. The excitation coefficient distribution indicates that the cylinder FIV with the upstream wake interference reaches higher amplitude at high reduced velocity, instead of ceasing resonance as the isolated cylinder. The numerical wake visualization is shown and used to explain the correlation between the distribution of hydrodynamic coefficients along the cylinder span and the wake vortex mode. It is found that the upstream wake interference effect is strongly correlated with the vortex–structure interaction pattern between the upstream wake vortices and the downstream motion. When the upstream vortex impinges on the downstream cylinder and splits into subvortices, the effect of the upstream wake interference acting on the downstream cylinder reduces. When the downstream cylinder enters the gap between the upstream vortices over the entire vibration process, the upstream wake has a stronger interference effect on the downstream FIV response.
Implementation of CCDC to produce the LCMAP Collection 1.0 annual land surface change product

Abstract. The increasing availability of high-quality remote sensing data and advanced technologies have spurred land cover mapping to characterize land change from local to global scales. However, most land change datasets either span multiple decades at a local scale or cover limited time over a larger geographic extent. Here, we present a new land cover and land surface change dataset created by the Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) program over the conterminous United States (CONUS). The LCMAP land cover change dataset consists of annual land cover and land cover change products over the period 1985–2017 at 30-meter resolution using Landsat and other ancillary data via the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm. In this paper, we describe our novel approach to implement the CCDC algorithm to produce the LCMAP product suite composed of five land cover and five land surface change related products. The LCMAP land cover products were validated using a collection of ~25,000 reference samples collected independently across CONUS. The overall agreement for all years of the LCMAP primary land cover product reached 82.5 %. The LCMAP products are produced through the LCMAP Information Warehouse and Data Store (IW+DS) and Shared Mesos Cluster systems that can process, store, and deliver all datasets for public access. To our knowledge, this is the first set of published 30 m annual land cover and land cover change datasets that span from the 1980s to the present for the United States. The LCMAP product suite provides useful information for land resource management and facilitates studies to improve the understanding of terrestrial ecosystems and the complex dynamics of the Earth system. The LCMAP system could be implemented to produce global land change products in the future.
CAN: A new program to streamline preparation of molecular coordinate files for molecular dynamics simulations

Preparing molecular coordinate files for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations can be a very time-consuming process. Herein we present the development of a user-friendly program that drastically reduces the time required to prepare these molecular coordinate files for MD software packages such as AmberTools. Our program, known as charge atomtype naming (CAN), creates and uses a library of structures such as amino acid monomers to update the charge, atom type, and name of atoms in any molecular structure (mol2) file. We demonstrate the utility of this new program by rapidly preparing structural files for MD simulations for polypeptides ranging from small molecules to large protein structures. Both native and non-native amino acid residues are easily handled by this new program.
Evaluation of a Comprehensive Telemedicine Pathway for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: A Comparison of Virtual and In-Person Assessments.

Purpose We evaluated a comprehensive telemedicine pathway for carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). Our primary aim was to compare telemedicine and in-person administration of the six item CTS-6 instrument (CTS-6) in patients undergoing carpal tunnel release (CTR) and to determine whether surgical plans determined via telemedicine were altered by in-person assessments. We additionally aimed to assess agreement between telemedicine and in-person examinations. Methods In this prospective investigation, patients referred to a hand surgeon for evaluation of CTS were offered a telemedicine pathway. A modified, virtual CTS-6 was administered during the telemedicine consultation and a virtual exam was performed. Patients indicated for CTR were evaluated in person on the day of surgery. Agreement between the telemedicine and in-person CTS-6 and exam findings was determined. Patients were evaluated via telemedicine postoperatively to determine satisfaction with the program and assess surgical complications. Results A total of 32 cases were included. The mean CTS-6 score administered via telemedicine was 17.7, compared with 16.8 in person; this difference was not statistically significant. There were no cases indicated for CTR during the telemedicine visit that had a subsequent change in management based on the in-person evaluation. Agreement was lowest for the sensory assessment (63%). The Phalen and Durkan compression tests demonstrated high levels of agreement (97% and 94%, respectively). Satisfaction was high for patients in the telemedicine CTS pathway. Conclusions Overall agreement between telemedicine and in-person administration of the CTS-6 is high for patients with CTS. In patients indicated for CTR via telemedicine, an in-person examination does not appear to alter management. The telemedicine examination of hand sensation demonstrates lower levels of agreement with the in-person assessment. Telemedicine can serve as an alternative to conventional, in-person clinic visits for the diagnosis and postoperative management of uncomplicated, primary CTS. Type of study/level of evidence Diagnostic II.
Infectious Complications of Injection Drug Use.

The opioid overdose epidemic is one of the leading causes of death in adults. Its devastating effects have included not only a burgeoning overdose crisis but also multiple converging infectious diseases epidemics. The use of both opioids and other substances through intravenous (IV) administration places individuals at increased risks of infectious diseases ranging from invasive bacterial and fungal infections to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and viral hepatitis. In 2012, there were 530,000 opioid use disorder (OUD)-related hospitalizations in the United States (US), with $700 million in costs associated with OUD-related infections. The scale of the crisis has continued to increase since that time, with hospitalizations for injection drug use-related infective endocarditis (IDU-IE) increasing by as much as 12-fold from 2010 to 2015. Deaths from IDU-IE alone are estimated to result in over 7,260,000 years of potential life lost over the next 10 years. There have been high-profile injection-related HIV outbreaks, and injection drug use (IDU) is now the most common risk factor for hepatitis C virus (HCV). As this epidemic continues to grow, clinicians in all aspects of medical care are increasingly confronted with infectious complications of IDU. This review will describe the pathogenesis, clinical syndromes, epidemiology, and models of treatment for common infectious complications among persons who inject drugs (PWIDs).
Preimplantation Genetic Testing: Available and Emerging Technologies

Since the first successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle, there have been tremendous advancements in the technologies surrounding IVF. Specific genetic disorders such as parental chromosomal translocations or inversions and single gene mutations such as cystic fibrosis or fragile X, as well as abnormalities in the number of chromosomes, or aneuploidy, are major barriers to achieving a healthy live born infant. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for specific chromosomal or genetic disorders and preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) for determination of the number of chromosomes, are techniques that have been developed to prevent the uterine transfer of genetically abnormal embryos during IVF cycles. The purpose of preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), that is PGD or PGS, is to improve the likelihood of giving birth to a healthy baby.
Use of a compact-type strip specimen for fatigue crack growth rate testing in the high-rate regime

Fatigue crack growth in chromium-molybdenum-vanadium steel was studied in the high-rate regime of 2.5 × 10 - 4 to 2.5 × 10 - 1 mm/cycle with a compact-type strip specimen. The specimen was found to give rise to constant growth rates over large increments of crack length when cycled under simple load control. Use of the crack opening load ranges and an approximate J-integral analysis showed that the growth was occurring under essentially constant ΔJ.
Formation Mechanism for Interstellar Molecules

The gas phase production of molecules in dust clouds in interstellar space may occur largely as H2 formation on the interstellar grains, with relatively minor formation in the gas phase. The formation of more complex molecules, however, may be augmented by gas phase processes including (1) negative ions formed by radiative attachment of electrons, (2) direct radiative association of molecules and atoms, and (3) reaction of atoms and molecules with H 3 + molecules.
The fate of subducted continental margins: Two-stage exhumation of the high-pressure to ultrahigh-pressure Western Gneiss Region, Norway

Thermobarometry suggests that ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) to high-pressure (HP) rocks across the Western Gneiss Region ponded at the Moho following as much as 100 km of exhumation through the mantle and before exhumation to the upper crust. Eclogite across the c. 22 000 km 2 study area records minimum pressures of c. 8-18 kbar and temperatures of c. 650-780 � C. One orthopyroxene eclogite yields an UHP of c. 28.5 kbar, and evidence of former coesite has been found c. 50 km farther east than previously known. Despite this widespread evidence of UHP to HP, thermobarometry of metapelite and garnet amphibolite samples reveals a surprisingly uniform supra-Barrovian amphibolite-facies overprint at c. 11 kbar and c. 650-750 � C across the entire area. Chemical zoning analysis suggests that garnet in these samples grew during heating and decompression, presumably during the amphibolite-facies event. These data indicate that the Norwegian UHP/HP province was exhumed from mantle depths of c. 150 km to lower crustal depths, where it stalled and underwent a profound high-temperature overprint. The ubiquity of late-stage supra-Barrovian metamorphic overprints suggests that large-scale, collisional UHP terranes routinely stall at the continental Moho where diminishing body forces are exceeded by boundary forces. Significant portions of the middle or lower crust worldwide may be formed from UHP terranes that were arrested at the Moho and never underwent their final stage of exhumation.
On the Impact of Execution Models: A Case Study in Computational Chemistry

Efficient utilization of high-performance computing (HPC) platforms is an important and complex problem. Execution models, abstract descriptions of the dynamic runtime behavior of the execution stack, have significant impact on the utilization of HPC systems. Using a computational chemistry kernel as a case study and a wide variety of execution models combined with load balancing techniques, we explore the impact of execution models on the utilization of an HPC system. We demonstrate a 50 percent improvement in performance by using work stealing relative to a more traditional static scheduling approach. We also use a novel semi-matching technique for load balancing that has comparable performance to a traditional hyper graph-based partitioning implementation, which is computationally expensive. Using this study, we found that execution model design choices and assumptions can limit critical optimizations such as global, dynamic load balancing and finding the correct balance between available work units and different system and runtime overheads. With the emergence of multi- and many-core architectures and the consequent growth in the complexity of HPC platforms, we believe that these lessons will be beneficial to researchers tuning diverse applications on modern HPC platforms, especially on emerging dynamic platforms with energy-induced performance variability.
OsMADS6 plays an essential role in endosperm nutrient accumulation and is subject to epigenetic regulation in rice (Oryza sativa)

MADS-box transcription factors are known for their roles in plant growth and development. The regulatory mechanisms of spatial and temporal specific expression of MADS-box genes and the function of MADS-box genes in other biological processes are still to be explored. Here, we report that OsMADS6 is highly expressed in flower and endosperm in Oryza sativa (rice). In addition to displaying a homeotic organ identity phenotype in all the four whorls of the flowers, the endosperm development is severely affected in its mutant. At least 32% of the seeds lacked starch filling and aborted. For seeds that have starch filling and develop to maturity, the starch content is reduced by at least 13%. In addition, the seed shape changes from elliptical to roundish, and the protein content increases from 12.1 to 15.0% (P < 0.05). Further investigation shows that ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase genes, encoding the rate-limiting step enzyme in the starch synthesis pathway, are subject to the regulation of OsMADS6. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP)-PCR analyses on the chromatin of the OsMADS6 gene find that H3K27 is trimethylated in tissues where OsMADS6 is silenced, and that H3K36 is trimethylated in tissues where OsMADS6 is highly activated. Point mutation analysis reveals that leucine at position 83 is critical to OsMADS6 function.
Alkylation of the Anion from Birch Reduction of o-Anisic Acid: 2-Heptyl-2-Cyclohexenone

Alkylation of the anion from birch reduction of o-anisic acid: 2-heptyl-2-cyclohexenone product: 2-heptyl-2-cyclohexenone Keywords: alkylation, C-alkylation; reduction, miscellaneous; tetrahydrofuran; ammonia
Integrated Substrate Technology

Advanced micro-systems for national security needs will require miniaturization and integration of RF, digital, and analog electronics, optics and MEMS on a single substrate. To meets these demands we have developed an integrated substrate technology using Benzocyclobutene (BCB)/copper (Cu) with embedded thin film passive components. We have developed processes to fabricate BCB/Cu multilayer stack on silicon (Si), alumina (Al/sub 2/O/sub 3/) and Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) wafers. A multi-layer stack of 6 metal layers and 5 BCB layers using 5-micron and 10-micron thick photodefinable BCB dielectric and 2 to 3-micron thick Cu conductor have been demonstrated. The design rules for minimum featured size used were 30-micron vias on 50-micron pitch and 25-micron wide line's on 40-micron pitch. We have also fabricated embedded inductors, in-plane and in 3-dimension, ranging in values from 750 pH to 42 nH, embedded TaN thin-film resistors with DC values ranging from 10 Ohms to 10 KOhms and embedded capacitors ranging in values from 48 pF to 110 nF measured at 1 MHz and 100 MHz. We have designed, fabricated, characterized and- simulated micro-strip lines in a RF module. The transmission losses range from 0.021 to 0.114 dB/mm. The return losses are 25.5 dB to 41 dB and VSWR range from 1.018 to 1.111. We are currently developing the next generation of miniaturized circuits called Integrated System-On-A-Chip. In this technology, Integrated Substrate Technology will be used to stack wafers in 3-D and to make electrical connections through the stacked wafers.
Heavy Metal Immobilization in Contaminated Soils using Phosphogypsum and Rice Straw Compost

The application of soil amendments to immobilize heavy metals is a promising technology to meet the requirements for environmentally sound and cost-effective remediation. The present study was carried out to evaluate the result of phosphogypsum (PG) used alone and in combination with compost (CP) at a mix ratio of 1:1 wet weight ratio (PG + CP) at 10 and 20 g dry weight kg−1 dry soil, on heavy metal immobilization in contaminated soil and on canola growth. The results revealed that the Pb, Cd and Zn uptake of canola plants was reduced by the application of PG alone and when it was mixed with CP as compared with untreated soil. At an application rate of 10 g dry weight kg−1 dry soil of (PG + CP) the dry weight of canola plants increased by 66·8% was increased in comparison with its weight in the untreated soil. The addition of PG alone resulted in more pronounced immobilization of heavy metal as compared with PG mixed with CP. Plant growth was improved with CP addition, but heavy metals immobilization was the greatest in PG alone treatments. Results suggest that PG may be useful for the immobilization of heavy metals in contaminated soils. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Understanding the development and evolution of novel floral form in Aquilegia

Flowers of the lower eudicot Aquilegia (columbine) possess morphological innovations, namely elaborate petal spurs and a fifth distinct organ identity, the staminodium, that are well suited to the investigation of key questions in developmental evolution. The recent evolution of these characteristics combined with a growing set of genetic and genomic resources has provided insight into how the traits arose and diversified. The petal spur appears to represent a key innovation that diversified largely via modification of specific aspects of cell expansion. In the case of the staminodium, gene duplication has played a role in allowing a novel organ identity to be carved out of the traditional ABC program.
PURIFICATION AND PROPERTIES OF A PROTEASE FROM PENICILLIUM CYANEO-FULVUM

A proteolytic enzyme present in culture filtrates of Penicillium cyaneo-fulvum was purified approximately 100-fold. In the ultracentrifuge the enzyme behaved as a homogeneous protein, but on electrophoresis some contamination was apparent. The molecular weight of the enzyme was estimated to be about 45,000.The protease hydrolyzed casein and denatured haemoglobin, gelatin, and native bovine plasma albumin but not native or denatured ovalbumin. It also coagulated milk. The optimum pH for caseolysis was 9.5 to 11.0. Metal chelating- and sulphydryl-reagents did not affect enzyme activity but zinc and mercurous ions inhibited the enzyme, the inhibition being reversed with ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA). Soybean trypsin inhibitor was without effect on the enzyme whereas ovomucoid inhibited the enzyme. Although it is similar in some respects to other alkaline proteases, the P. cyaneo-fulvum enzyme does not appear to be identical with any one of them.
Interpretation/analysis methods in hermeneutic interpretive phenomenology.

Background Although hermeneutical interpretive phenomenological methodology has been used in many nursing research studies, reports of findings are generally not specific regarding the analysis, or "interpretive process," of this methodology. Approach The purpose of this article is to assist researchers in analyzing interviews and observations, as part of hermeneutical interpretive phenomenology. In this article the interpretive process is explained, illustrated by examples from a recent research study. Results Other facets of the methodology including research question development, sampling issues, and interview and observation methods are briefly reviewed. Discussion Approaching the interpretive process as systematically as possible within a nonlinear methodology streamlines and clarifies interpretations of the interview data.