Novel monomers with N-methyl-D-glucamine segments and their application in structured porous materials for arsenic capture

The N-methyl-D-glucamine moieties exhibit high ability and selectivity toward arsenate ions in water by a complexation mechanism that involves their hydroxyl groups. In this work, the syntheses of two monomers containing N-methyl-D-glucamine, namely 4-vinylbenzyl-N-methyl-D-glucamine (VbNMDG), and N-methyl-D-glucamine methacrylamide (MNMDG) were studied. Different synthetic routes were considered in order to obtain liquid monomers able to polymerize and selectively capture arsenic. Furthermore, the incorporation of protective groups like trimethylsilyl moieties in the molecular structure was assessed to prevent transfer reactions during further polymerization. After polymerization, hydroxyl groups were deprotected using hydrofluoric acid. Following this methodology, structured microporous polymeric films based on colloidal crystal templates were prepared. NMR and FTIR techniques were used to follow the reactions and to determine the chemical structure of the obtained products. The morphology of materials was characterized by SEM. The performances of the developed polymeric films to selectively capture arsenic were determined. Films showed an improved and reproducible sensitivity to arsenic detection exhibiting high values of arsenic capturing capability (around 90%)

Fast saccadic eye-movements in humans suggest that numerosity perception is automatic and direct

Fast saccades are rapid automatic oculomotor responses to salient and ecologically important visual stimuli such as animals and faces. Discriminating the number of friends, foe, or prey may also have an evolutionary advantage. In this study, participants were asked to saccade rapidly towards the more numerous of two arrays. Participants could discriminate numerosities with high accuracy and great speed, as fast as 190 ms. Intermediate numerosities were more likely to elicit fast saccades than very low or very high numerosities. Reaction-times for vocal responses (collected in a separate experiment) were slower, did not depend on numerical range, and correlated only with the slow not the fast saccades, pointing to different systems. The short saccadic reaction-times we observe are surprising given that discrimination using numerosity estimation is thought to require a relatively complex neural circuit, with several relays of information through the parietal and prefrontal cortex. Our results suggest that fast numerosity-driven saccades may be generated on a single feed-forward pass of information recruiting a primitive system that cuts through the cortical hierarchy and rapidly transforms the numerosity information into a saccade command

“You’re almost in this place that doesn’t exist”: The Impact of College in Prison as Understood by Formerly Incarcerated Students from the Northeastern United States

This qualitative study examines the immediate and lasting impact of liberal arts higher education in prison from the perspective of former college-in-prison students from the Northeastern United States. Findings obtained through semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people are presented in the following three areas: self-confidence and agency, interpersonal relationships, and capacity for civic leadership. This study further examines former students’ reflections on the relationship between education and human transformation and begins to benchmark college programming with attention to the potential for such transformation. The authors identify four characteristics critical to a program’s success: academic rigor, the professor\u27s respect for students, discussion-based learning, and respectful relationships between college and prison personnel. This study contributes to the growing field of scholarship on the benefits of prison higher education beyond those captured by studies of high-level data, such as the rate of return to prison

Pupillary Responses Obey Emmert’s Law and Co-vary with Autistic Traits

We measured the pupil response to a light stimulus subject to a size illusion and found that stimuli perceived as larger evoke a stronger pupillary response. The size illusion depends on combining retinal signals with contextual 3D information; contextual processing is thought to vary across individuals, being weaker in individuals with stronger autistic traits. Consistent with this theory, autistic traits correlated negatively with the magnitude of pupil modulations in our sample of neurotypical adults; however, psychophysical measurements of the illusion did not correlate with autistic traits, or with the pupil modulations. This shows that pupillometry provides an accurate objective index of complex perceptual processes, particularly useful for quantifying interindividual differences, and potentially more informative than standard psychophysical measures

Spontaneous pupillary oscillations increase during mindfulness meditation

A significant body of literature has shown that pupil size varies with cognitive and perceptual states [1,2]. Furthermore, the pupil diameter oscillates spontaneously at low frequencies, sometimes referred to as pupillary hippus [3,4]. Oscillation amplitude varies with many neural factors, including arousal and cortical excitability. Here we show that pupillary oscillations are modulated by mindfulness meditation, increasing by 53% compared to pre- and post-meditation baselines. The effect occurs only in trained meditators and is specific for low frequencies (below 1 Hz), with delta frequencies (1–5 Hz) unchanged. The study suggests that pupil size may be a useful marker of the altered cortical state during meditation. Pomè et al. measured the diameter of the eye pupil in trained mindfulness meditators and found that slow spontaneous pupil oscillations are specifically enhanced during meditation, indicating that the pupils can betray the meditative state

Ultrafast Electrochemical Self-Doping of Anodic Titanium Dioxide Nanotubes for Enhanced Electroanalytical and Photocatalytic Performance

This study explores an ultrarapid electrochemical self-doping procedure applied to anodic titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanotube arrays in an alkaline solution to boost their performance for electroanalytical and photocatalytic applications. The electrochemical self-doping process (i.e., the creation of surface Ti3+ states by applying a negative potential) is recently emerging as a simpler and cleaner way to improve the electronic properties of TiO2 compared to traditional chemical and high-temperature doping strategies. Here, self-doping was carried out through varying voltages and treatment times to identify the most performing materials without compromising their structural stability. Interestingly, cyclic voltammetry characterization revealed that undoped TiO2 shows negligible activity, whereas all self-doped materials demonstrate their suitability as electrode materials: an outstandingly short 10 s self-doping treatment leads to the highest electrochemical activity. The electrochemical detection of hydrogen peroxide was assessed as well, demonstrating a good sensitivity and a linear detection range of 3–200 µM. Additionally, the self-doped TiO2 nanotubes exhibited an enhanced photocatalytic activity compared to the untreated substrate: the degradation potential of methylene blue under UV light exposure increased by 25% in comparison to undoped materials. Overall, this study highlights the potential of ultrafast electrochemical self-doping to unleash and improve TiO2 nanotubes performances for electroanalytical and photocatalytic applications

Pupillometry correlates of visual priming, and their dependency on autistic traits

In paradigms of visual search where the search feature (say color) can change from trial to trials, responses are faster for trials where the search color is repeated than when it changes. This is a clear example of "priming" of attention. Here we test whether the priming effects can be revealed by pupillometry, and also whether they are related to autistic-like personality traits, as measured by the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ). We repeated Maljkovic and Nakayama's (1994) classic priming experiment, asking subjects to identify rapidly the shape of a singleton target defined by color. As expected, reaction times were faster when target color repeated, and the effect accumulated over several trials; but the magnitude of the effect did not correlate with AQ. Reaction times were also faster when target position was repeated, again independent of AQ. Presentation of stimuli caused the pupil to dilate, and the magnitude of dilation was greater for switched than repeated trials. This effect did not accumulate over trials, and did not correlate with the reaction times difference, suggesting that the two indexes measure independent aspects of the priming phenomenon. Importantly, the amplitude of pupil modulation correlated negatively with AQ, and was significant only for those participants with low AQ. The results confirm that pupillometry can track perceptual and attentional processes, and furnish useful information unobtainable from standard psychophysics, including interesting dependencies on personality traits

Exploring the Adsorption of Pb on Microalgae-Derived Biochar: A Versatile Material for Environmental Remediation and Electroanalytical Applications

Biochar, a carbon material obtained by pyrolysis of biomasses, is increasingly applied in environmental remediation and sensing thanks to its functional properties, cost-effectiveness and eco-friendliness. The adsorption capacity of biochar, strictly dependent on its specific surface area, heteroatom doping and surface functional groups, is crucial for these applications. Here, biochar produced at low temperature (350◦ C) from a marine microalga (Nannochloropsis sp.) is proposed as an efficient adsorbent of lead (II) ions in aqueous solution; this production strategy promotes the natural self-doping of biochar without requiring harsh conditions. The kinetics and thermodynamics of the adsorption process, as well as the effect of pH, ionic strength and dissolved organic matter on the adsorption efficiency were systematically assessed. The microalgae-derived biochar shows superior adsorption performances compared to a nutshell-derived one (used as a reference of lignocellulosic feedstocks) under all the tested conditions. The microalgae-derived biochar was finally used to decorate screen-printed carbon electrodes to improve the electroanalytical performances towards the voltammetric detection of lead (II) ions. A two-fold increase in sensitivity was obtained compared to the unmodified electrode thanks to the enhanced electron transfer and adsorption properties provided by biochar. These results highlight the potentialities of microalgae-derived biochar for environmental and sensing applications

How to clean and safely remove HF from acid digestion solutions for ultra-trace analysis: a microwave-assisted vessel-inside-vessel protocol

The complete dissolution of silicate-containing materials, often necessary for elemental determination, is generally performed by microwave-assisted digestion involving the forced use of hydrofluoric acid (HF). Although highly efficient in dissolving silicates, this acid exhibits many detrimental effects (e.g., formation of precipitates, corrosiveness to glassware) that make its removal after digestion essential. The displacement of HF is normally achieved by evaporation in open-vessel systems: atmospheric contamination or loss of analytes can occur when fuming-off HF owing to the non-ultraclean conditions necessarily adopted for safety reasons. This aspect strongly hinders determination at the ultra-trace level. To overcome this issue, we propose a clean and safe microwaveassisted procedure to induce the evaporative migration of HF inside a sealed \u201cvessel-inside-vessel\u201d system: up to 99.9% of HF can be removed by performing two additional microwave cycles after sample dissolution. HF migrates from the digestion solution to a scavenger (ultrapure H2O) via a simple physical mechanism, and then, it can be safely dismissed/recycled. The procedure was validated by a soil reference material (NIST 2710), and no external or cross-contamination was observed for the 27 trace elements studied. The results demonstrate the suitability of this protocol for ultra-trace analysis when the utilization of HF is mandatory

Quality of dying in hospital general wards: a cross-sectional study about the end-of-life care

Abstract Background In the last decade, access to national palliative care programs have improved, however a large proportion of patients continued to die in hospital, particularly within internal medicine wards. Objectives To describe treatments, symptoms and clinical management of adult patients at the end of their life and explore whether these differ according to expectation of death. Methods Single-centre cross-sectional study performed in the medical and surgical wards of a large tertiary-level university teaching hospital in the north of Italy. Data on nursing interventions and diagnostic procedure in proximity of death were collected after interviewing the nurse and the physician responsible for the patient. Relationship between nursing treatments delivered and patients’ characteristics, quality of dying and nurses’ expectation about death was summarized by means of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). Results Few treatments were found statistically associated with expectation of death in the 187 patients included. In the last 48 h, routine (70.6%) and biomarkers (41.7%) blood tests were performed, at higher extent on patients whose death was not expected. Many symptoms classified as severe were reported when death was highly expected, except for agitation and respiratory fatigue which were reported when death was moderately expected. A high Norton score and absence of anti-bedsore mattress were associated with unexpected death and poor quality of dying, as summarized by MCA. Quality of dying was perceived as good by nurses when death was moderately and highly expected. Physicians rated more frequently than nurses the quality of dying as good or very good, respectively 78.6 and 57.8%, denoting a fair agreement between the two professionals (k = 0.24, P <  0.001). The palliative care consultant was requested for only two patients. Conclusion Staff in medical and surgical wards still deal inadequately with the needs of dying people. Presence of hospital-based specialist palliative care could lead to improvements in the patients’ quality of life