With the increased growth of IoT devices, the supply of power to low-power devices, such as sensors and communication modules, has become problematic. This study develops a rectifier circuit that generates a large DC output voltage from the received high-frequency signal, targeting the frequency band of 470 to 710 MHz used in terrestrial digital broadcasting towers. The size of our proposed rectifier is 35 × 57 mm. Next, we connect devices, such as a temperature and humidity sensor and Bluetooth low energy module to the developed rectifier circuit, and transmit data without a power supply. We validate a sustained operation of the sensor system at a distance of 7.5 km from a TV broadcasting tower.

Authors: Anju Murayama1*; Hiroaki Saito, MD, PhD2,3; Sae Kamamoto4; Akihiko Ozaki, MD, PhD2,5

The analysis of variations in growth, relative water content, proline and soluble sugars were analyzed to study the behavior of Cupressus dupreziana under salt stress stability at the level of relative water content, proline content and soluble sugars during the treatment of plants with 50 mmol (mM) of NaCl indicates that this level of salinity does not disturb the physiology of the plant whereas decreases in relative water content and growth rate suggest that high salt concentrations (200, 350, 500 mM) cause disturbances in plant physiology, while increases in compatible solutes improve salt tolerance Our results contribute to the preliminary knowledge of salt acclimation in Cupressus dupreziana.

Background: IgE-mediated cow’s milk allergy (IgE-CMA) is one of the first allergies to arise in early childhood and may result from exposure to various milk allergens, of which β-lactoglobulin (BLG) and casein are the most important. Understanding the underlying mechanisms behind IgE-CMA is imperative for the discovery of novel biomarkers and the design of innovative treatment and prevention strategies. Methods: We report a longitudinal in vivo murine model, in which 2 mice strains (BALB/c and C57Bl/6) were sensitized to BLG using either cholera toxin or an oil emulsion (n=6 per group). After sensitization, mice were challenged orally, their clinical signs monitored, antibody (IgE and IgG1) and cytokine levels (IL-4 and IFN-γ) measured, and fecal samples subjected to metabolomics. The results of the murine models were further supported by fecal microbiome-metabolome data from our population of IgE-CMA (n=24) and healthy (n=23) children (Trial: NCT04249973), on which polar metabolomics, lipidomics and 16S rRNA metasequencing were performed. In vitro gastrointestinal digestions and multi-omics corroborated the microbial origin of proposed metabolic changes. Results: During sensitization, we observed multiple microbially derived metabolic alterations, most importantly bile acid, energy and tryptophan metabolites, that preceded allergic inflammation. The latter was reflected in a disturbed sphingolipid metabolism. We confirmed microbial dysbiosis, and its causal effect on metabolic alterations in our patient cohort, which was accompanied by metabolic signatures of low-grade inflammation. Conclusion: Our results indicate that gut dysbiosis precedes allergic inflammation and nurtures a chronic low-grade inflammation in children on elimination diets, opening important new opportunities for future prevention and treatment strategies.

A document by Sarosh Alvi . Click on the document to view its contents.

Atrial Fibrillation to Atrio-Ventricular Nodal Reentrant Tachycardia: Shocking!Short Title- Shock inducing AVNRTAnindya Ghosh, MD1 │Deep Chandh Raja, MD, DM2 │ Chenni S. Sriram, MD31Department of Cardiac Electrophysiology and Pacing, Arrhythmia Heart Failure Academy, The Madras Medical Mission, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India2Department of Cardiac Electrophysiology and Pacing, Kauvery Hospital, Chennai, India3Division of Cardiology, Sub-section of Electrophysiology, Children’s Hospital of Michigan and Detroit Medical Center, Detroit, MI, USA

Objective: The optimal range of gestational weight gain (GWG) was recently raised in Japan. Considering that the effect of GWG on birth weight varies by quantile, this study performed hypothetical experiments to determine effective GWG advice to reduce small-for-gestational-age (SGA) infants while limiting the increase in large-for-gestational-age (LGA) infants. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: The Japanese Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology nationwide perinatal database, 2013–2017. Population: A cohort of 354,401 primiparous singleton pregnancies. Methods: The association between GWG and birth weight for gestational age was analyzed using a quantile regression model. Based on the results, we estimated how hypothetical strategies targeting women of inadequate or excessive GWG might influence the proportions of SGA and LGA compared with a body mass index (BMI)-based uniform strategy. Main outcome measure: Birth weight for gestational age. Results: The estimated proportions of SGA and LGA in the study population were 9.33 and 11.13, respectively, whereas those in the BMI-based uniform strategy, which assumed a 3-kg increase in GWG for women with BMI < 25 kg/m 2, were 7.26 (95% confidence interval: 7.15–7.36) and 14.51 (14.37–14.66). By contrast, assuming a 3-kg increase and a 3-kg decrease in women with inadequate and excessive GWG, the estimated proportions of SGA and LGA were 8.42 (8.31–8.54) and 11.50 (11.37–11.62), respectively. Conclusions: When providing GWG advice, not only increasing GWG according to prepregnancy BMI, but also determining GWG adequacy and decreasing it when excessive GWG is observed, may be effective for optimizing birth outcomes.

Short-term wind speed prediction is essential for economical wind power utilization. The real-world wind speed data is typically intermittent and fluctuating, presenting great challenges to existing shallow models. In this paper, we present a novel deep hybrid model for multi-step wind speed prediction, namely LR-FFT-RP-MLP/LSTM (Linear Fast Fourier Transformation Rank Pooling Multiple-Layer Perception/Long Short-Term Memory). Our hybrid model processes the local and global input features simultaneously. We leverage Rank Pooling (RP) for the local feature extraction to capture the temporal structure while maintaining the temporal order. Besides, to understand the wind periodic patterns, we exploit Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) to extract global features and relevant frequency components in the wind speed data. The resulting local and global features are respectively integrated with the original data and are fed into an MLP/LSTM layer for the initial wind speed predictions. Finally, we leverage a linear regression layer to collaborate these initial predictions to produce the final wind speed prediction. The proposed hybrid model is evaluated using real wind speed data collected from 2010 to 2020, demonstrating superior forecasting capabilities when compared to state-of-the-art single and hybrid models. Overall, this study presents a promising approach for improving the accuracy of wind speed forecasting.

This article presents enriched Kannan and enriched Bianchini mappings in the framework of unique geodesic spaces. For such mappings, we establish the existence and uniqueness of fixed point in the setting of CAT(0) spaces, and show that an appropriate Krasnoselskii scheme converges with certain rate to the fixed point. We proved some inclusion relations between enriched Kannan mapping and some applicable mappings such as strongly demicontractive mapping. Finally, we give an example in a nonlinear CAT(0) space and perform numerical experiments to support the theoretical results.

We present the results for CAPRI Round 54, the 5th joint CASP-CAPRI protein assembly prediction challenge. The Round offered 37 targets, including 14 homo-dimers, 3 homo-trimers, 13 hetero-dimers including 3 antibody-antigen complexes, and 7 large assemblies. On average ~70 CASP and CAPRI predictor groups, including more than 20 automatics servers, submitted models for each target. A total of 21941 models submitted by these groups and by 15 CAPRI scorer groups were evaluated using the CAPRI model quality measures and the DockQ score consolidating these measures. The prediction performance was quantified by a weighted score based on the number of models of acceptable quality or higher submitted by each group among their 5 best models. Results show substantial progress achieved across a significant fraction of the 60+ participating groups. High-quality models were produced for about 40% for the targets compared to 8% two years earlier, a remarkable improvement resulting from the wide use of the AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold-Multimer software. Creative use was made of the deep learning inference engines affording the sampling of a much larger number of models and enriching the multiple sequence alignments with sequences from various sources. Wide use was also made of the AlphaFold confidence metrics to rank models, permitting top performing groups to exceed the results of the public AlphaFold-Multimer version used as a yard stick. This notwithstanding, performance remained poor for complexes with antibodies and nanobodies, where evolutionary relationships between the binding partners are lacking, and for complexes featuring conformational flexibility, clearly indicating that the prediction of protein complexes remains a challenging problem.

Carbanion-based ionic liquids are proposed and utilized as the key components for the construction of five super-nucleophilic deep eutectic solvents (SNDESs) in the paper. The super-nucleophilic nature of carbanion-based ILs is found to enable the capture of CO2 with large absorption capacity. However, the absorption is very slow in the IL due to high viscosity. The synergy of carbanion siting and hydrogen bonding is found to enable high and fast absorption of CO2 in [N2222][CH(CN)2]-ethylimidazole (Eim), and a synergistic absorption mechanism is proposed and validated from spectroscopic analyses and quantum calculations. The enthalpy change of CO2 absorption in [N2222][CH(CN)2]-Eim is calculated to be -39.6 kJ/mol according to the thermodynamic model, and the moderate value implies that both absorption and desorption of CO2 in the DES are favored and well balanced. The synergism of carbanion and hydrogen bond mediated by SNDESs provides a novel insight into the efficient CO2 capture.

In this work, we demonstrate plasma-catalytic synthesis of hydrogen and acrylonitrile (AN) from CH4 and N2. The process involves two steps: 1) plasma synthesis of C2H2 and HCN in a nominally 1:1 stoichiometric ratio with high yield up to 90% and high methane conversion > 90%; and 2) downstream thermocatalytic reaction of these intermediates to make AN. The effect of process parameters on product distributions and specific energy requirements are reported. If the catalytic conversion of C2H2 and HCN in the downstream thermocatalytic step to AN were perfect, which will require further improvements in the thermocatalytic reactor, then at the maximum output of our 1 kW radiofrequency 13.56 MHz transformer, a specific energy requirement of 73 kWh kgAN-1was determined. The expectation is that scaling up the process to higher throughputs would result in decreases in specific energy requirement into the predicted economically viable range less than 10 kWh kgAN-1.

Inspired by the stable interactions between metal ions and proteins, high external surface iron-nickel double hydroxides (Fe-Ni LDH) derived from metal-organic framework (MOFs) was selected as carriers to develop high performance surface bovine serum albumin (BSA) imprinted iron-nickel double hydroxides nanorods (Fe-Ni LDH@MIP). A hexagonal hollow structure Fe-Ni LDH was synthesized with nanosheets stacked on the surface by etching MIL-88A with Ni2+. The etching of Ni2+ increased the surface roughness of MIL-88A and the rough surface of the carrier was conducive to improving the anchorage amount of BSA, thus providing more effective imprinting sites. Controlled coating of the imprinted polymer layer on the surface of Fe-Ni LDH was obtained by aqueous phase precipitation polymerization. The protein adsorption amount reached to 329.8 ± 7.8 mg/g in 60 min with an imprinting factor of 2.86. The experimental showed that Fe-Ni LDH@MIP had good selectivity and stability, which enriched the protein imprinting materials.

Introduction: Head and neck surgeons at high risk for strain and subsequent complications related to poor posture. We aim to evaluate current ergonomic practices among otolaryngology head and neck surgeons and report cervicothoracic spine posture data from the operating room (OR). Methods: A validated questionnaire evaluating current ergonomic practices was given to participants. A wearable posture device, was calibrated and worn around the neck with the sensor positioned at the mid-scapular region of the upper back. After a full day in the OR, percentage of upright time for the day was recorded. Results: 8 head and neck surgeons, 12 residents, and 4 fellows in training participated in our survey of current ergonomic practices. Over a 2-month period, posture data from the OR was acquired from 5 attendings, 3 fellows and 5 residents on the head and neck service. Changing body position, ignoring discomfort, and specialized footwear were most used to relieve musculoskeletal discomfort while operating. 83.3% of surgeons reported not receiving any formal ergonomics training and were unaware of related guidelines. After morning preparation, posture significantly declined during intraoperative time (p <0.001). There were no significant posture differences by level of training (p= 0.19), or hours spent in the OR (p=0.92). Conclusion: Surgical ergonomics is rarely considered as a point of intervention, but its lack thereof can have serious consequences leading to injury and unresolved day-to-day discomfort. There is a role for ergonomics in case planning, as it has potential to vastly improve surgeon quality of life and career longevity.

Efficient thin film composite polyamide (PA) membranes require optimization of interfacial polymerization (IP) process. However, it is challengeable because of its ultrafast reaction rate coupling with mass and heat transfer, resulting in PA membranes with low performance. Here, we propose a non-isothermal-controlled IP strategy to fabricate highly permeable and selective PA membrane by engineering the IP process at cryogenic aqueous phase (CAP). In this strategy, CAP allows the phase transition of aqueous solution from liquid to solid state, which not only achieves synchronous control of heat and mass transfer in interfacial region but also enriches understanding of the mechanisms involved different phase state on IP process. Our PA membrane exhibits excellent separation performance with ultrahigh water permeance (42.9 L m-2 h-1 bar-1) and antibiotic desalination efficiency (antibiotic/NaCl selectivity of 159.3). Our study provides a new dimension for deep understanding of exact mechanism linking the IP to the targeting membrane performance.

Motivated by applications in fluid dynamics involving the harmonic Bergman projection, we aim to extend the theory of single and double layer potentials (well documented for functions with H ℓoc 1 regularity) to locally square integrable functions. Having in mind numerical simulations for which functions are usually defined on a polygonal mesh, we wish this theory to cover the cases of non-smooth domains (i.e.with Lipschitz continuous or polygonal boundaries).

Alien species can have massive impacts on native biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Assessing which species from currently cultivated alien floras may escape into the wild and naturalize is hence essential for ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. Climate change has promoted the naturalization of many alien plants in temperate regions, but whether outcomes are similar in (sub)tropical areas is insufficiently known. In this study, we used species distribution models to evaluate the current naturalization risk of 1,527 cultivated alien plants in 10 countries of Southern Africa and how their invasion risk might change due to climate change. We assessed changes in climatic suitability across the different biomes of Southern Africa. Moreover, we assessed whether climatic suitability for cultivated alien plants varied with their naturalization status and native origin. The results of our study indicate that a significant proportion (53.9%) of the species are projected to lack suitable climatic conditions in Southern Africa, both currently and in the future. Based on the current climate conditions, 10.0% of Southern Africa is identified as an invasion hotspot (here defined as the top 10% of grid cells that provide suitable climatic conditions to the highest numbers of species). This percentage is expected to decrease slightly to 7.1% under moderate future climate change and shrink considerably to 2.0% under the worst-case scenario. This decline in climatic suitability is observed across most native origins, particularly under the worst-case climate change scenario. Our findings indicate that climate change is likely to have an opposing effect on the naturalization of currently cultivated average plants in (sub)tropical Southern Africa compared to colder regions. Specifically, the risk of these plants’ naturalizing is expected to decrease due to the region’s increasingly hot and dry climate, which will be challenging for the persistence of both native and alien plant species.

The diagnosis of clinically significant prostate cancer is often challenging. The 4K® score test may assist in evaluating the risk of significant malignancy and avoid biopsies in non-significant disease. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a remarkable disruption in managing patients with suspected prostate cancer. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on 4K ®score test results by comparing tests performed in Israel between April to July 2020 to a control group of the same period in 2019. During the COVID-19 era there were few quarantine periods in which citizens were allowed to leave their homes for specific reasons only (eg, medical consultations). Meanwhile, medical clinics were operating in limited schedule with intention to treat emergent cases only. We assumed that focusing on coping with the pandemic and its implications will decrease prostate MRI tests and prostate biopsies and as a result, there will an increase in the 4K score blood tests as well as a change in the pre-biopsies prostate risk stratification.

Cryptic species are likely an important source of undescribed diversity, of which algae are prime examples with convergent morphologies and complex life cycles. Novel methods are needed to better characterize their diversity, one avenue being the exploration of their relationships with other organisms, such as the herbivores that feed upon them. However, even when assessing generalist diets, it is unclear how representative this diversity is of the algal community at large. In this study, we applied a metabarcoding approach to marine, epilithic algal communities across the Main Hawaiian Islands (MHI) to catalog siphonous algal diversity. This approach recovered 92 OTUs of siphonous green algae, 39 of which are statistically supported as putative undescribed species. Comparison of this community inventory with that recovered from the “stolen chloroplasts”, or kleptoplasts, of the sea slug Plakobranchus cf. ianthobapsus, which is known to target cryptic and diminutive siphonous green algae as kleptoplast sources, revealed that P. cf. ianthobapsus only utilizes 25% of the available diversity and that there is high phylogenetic affinity of kleptoplast diversity: the sacoglossan almost exclusively sequesters chloroplasts from species in the suborder Halimedineae. The community inventory of siphonous algal diversity detected well-established and new populations of the highly invasive alga Avrainvillea lacerata on the islands of O‘ahu and Maui, respectively, but was unable to confirm previous records from Kaua‘i. Comparison of diversity data generated from multiple sources, in this case epilithic algal communities and algivore associations, provides a multifaceted view into these relationships, algal diversity, and their ecology.

Untangling the responses of protistan communities associated with soil and plant compartments and their associations with bacterial and fungal communities to pathogen invasion are critical for understanding the ecological processes governing plant microbiome assembly. Here we examined the protistan communities across the soil–plant continuum of healthy chili peppers and those with Fusarium wilt disease (FWD) and integrated the bacterial and fungal microbiome data from our previous investigation in China. We found that FWD was associated with a significant enrichment of phagotrophic protists in roots and an increase in the proportion and connectivity of these phagotrophic protists in intra- and interkingdom networks. Specifically, FWD increased the negative correlations between phagotrophic protists (especially Cercozoa and Ciliophora) and several members of Actinobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria, and Gammaproteobacteria in the interkingdom networks. Furthermore, the microbiomes of diseased plants not only exhibit a higher relative abundance of functional genes related to bacterial anti-predator responses compared to healthy plants, but also contained a greater abundance of metagenome-assembled genomes possessing functional traits involved in this response. The increased microbial interkingdom correlations among bacteria, fungi, and protists, coupled with the enhanced effects of protists on bacteria and fungi, as well as the notable bacterial anti-predator feedback in the diseased plant microbiome, all suggest that FWD catalyzes the associations between different groups of microbiomes. These findings highlight the role of predatory protists in shaping microbial assembly and functionality through top-down forces during pathogenic stress, potentially contributing to co-evolution within these soil and plant microbiomes.

Introduction We describe the progressive increase in the QRS durations (QRSd) and the subsequent decrease in the left ventricular ejection fractions (LVEF) of two patients post pacemaker implantation. We aim to highlight the need for contemporary cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIEDs) to include QRSd monitoring in the standard device data capture. This would ultimately allow for early interventions to be made to prevent chronic heart failure (CHF) hospitalizations. Methods The echocardiographic studies of two patients (pre and post pacemaker implantation) were analyzed, in order to determine changes in QRSd and LVEF data leading up to CHF hospitalization events. Results Patient 1 had a QRSd of 66 msec in June of 2018, one month before pacemaker implantation. Six months after implantation, Patient 1 had an increased QRSd of 156 msec. This was accompanied with a stark decrease in LVEF, from 55% at the time of implantation to below 35% in October of 2020. Patient 2 had a QRSd of 160 msec and a LVEF of 43% prior to the implantation of a pacemaker in 2016. Patient 2 similarly showed a progressive increase in their QRSd and was found to have a significantly decreased LVEF of 17% when hospitalized for decompensated heart failure around 5 years after pacemaker insertion. Conclusion Chronic RV apical pacing can be associated with adverse effects, leading to compromised cardiac function and resulting in pacing-induced cardiomyopathy (PICM). Progressive paced QRS widening can be indicative of CHF development and correlates with a decline in ejection fraction. The addition of device based QRS width monitoring to the current trend toolkit in implantable devices could alert electrophysiologists and patients of the potential for PICM, in the absence of serial 12 lead comparisons. This pre-emptive alert is essential in an era where remedy in the form of cardiac resynchronization and physiological pacing therapy is readily available.

The Inyo County population of California towhee, now recognized as Melozone crissalis, was officially listed as Threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1987. This isolated population in the Argus Mountains was then estimated to consist of less than 175 individuals. Its major threats were habitat destruction caused by grazing, mining, water exporting, and human recreational activities but stakeholders eventually developed a recovery plan to mitigate habitat damage. Due to the demographic success of the recovery plan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) proposed to remove the California towhee from their formal list of threatened and endangered species in 2013. Herein, we generated a high-quality reference genome assembly for a typical representative of the California towhee (N50 = 22 Mb among 627 contigs, max contig size 89.1Mb), then conducted whole genome resequencing on birds sampled from geographic sites across much of the species’ range. Our findings indicate that the California towhee gene pool is relatively deep (i.e., diverse; mean individual heterozygosity = 0.0021, range = 0.0013-0.0026) and that moderately low levels of autozygosity in isolated populations are due to a combination of historic and contemporary inbreeding. Our population, landscape, and phylogeographic analyses indicate that the shallower (less diverse) regions of the gene pool are likely due to a combination of natural geography, anthropogenic impacts, and demographic histories associated with isolated habitats. None of our findings are inconsistent with the 2013 USFWS proposal and we see no reason to protest the delisting petition based exclusively on genetic/genomic data.

Purpose: To propose the Entry-time Comparability Retention (ETCR) method- a novel methodology that uses propensity scores (PS) as a design tool to minimize immortal time bias- a bias that occurs when the determination of a patient’s treatment status involves a period prior to treatment initiation that is unaccounted for in the assessment of treatment effect. Methods: The treatment status of each member of a cohort is classified at cohort entry, based on whether or not the patient initiated treatment at any time during the study period- namely, as either ever-treated or never-treated. Two sets of propensity scores are derived on each patient: 1) at cohort entry to construct blocks of comparable patients by propensity scores matching each ever-treated patient to the never-treated patients who survived up to the ever-treated patient’s time of treatment initiation, which are then retained and assigned the same start of follow-up to address the immortal time bias, and 2) at treatment initiation, to derive the second set of propensity scores to address confounding. Using simulated data, the performance of a simplified form of the ETCR method, that is based on simple blocks of 1:n greedy matching, is compared with two of the leading approaches- the Landmark and time-dependent Cox methods. Results: The ETCR method consistently yielded the lowest mean percentage of residual bias across the different scenarios in our simulation. Conclusions: The ETCR results suggest the propensity scores as an effective design tool for creating and retaining comparable treatment groups to minimize immortal time bias.

Molecular imaging is a non-invasive imaging method that is widely used for visualization and detection of biological events at cellular or molecular levels. Stimuli-responsive linkers that can be selectively cleaved by specific biomarkers at desired sites to release or activate imaging agents are appealing tools to improve the specificity, sensitivity, and efficacy of molecular imaging. This review summarizes the recent advances of stimuli-responsive linkers and their application in molecular imaging, highlighting the potential of these linkers in the design of activatable molecular imaging probes. We hope that this review could inspire more research interests in the development of responsive linkers and associated imaging applications.