Echocardiographic Evaluation of Left Atrial Mechanics: Function, History, Novel Techniques, Advantages, and Pitfalls

Left atrial (LA) functional analysis has an established role in ass essing left ventricular diastolic function. The current standard echocardiographic parameters used to study left ventricular diastolic function include pulsed-wave Doppler mitral inflow analysis, tissue Doppler imaging measurements, and LA dimension estimation. However, the above-mentioned parameters do not directly quantify LA performance. Deformation studies using strain and strain-rate imaging to assess LA function were validated in previous research, but this technique is not currently used in routine clinical practice. This review discusses the history, importance, and pitfalls of strain technology for the analysis of LA mechanics

A Tapestry Of Educational Technology Women Leaders In Higher Education: A Qualitative Study

A qualitative study was used to understand the experiences of 12 women, leaders in Education Technology in higher education. Through interviews, women leaders described their environment as well as personal and behavioral aspects of their work. Findings revealed four threads of descriptive concepts including relationships, leadership, persistence, and advice. Relationships were from workplaces and professional networks. Leadership was defined by vision and teamwork. Persistence was addressed as either values-based or relationship-based. The fourth thread in the findings, advice, was divided into three sub-threads: education, family (both personal and work), and managing emotions. A qualitative approach was used to highlight interview responses to demonstrate the experiences of women leaders in Education Technology in Higher Education

Pharmaceutical pollution of the world's rivers

Environmental exposure to active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) can have negative effects on the health of ecosystems and humans. While numerous studies have monitored APIs in rivers, these employ different analytical methods, measure different APIs, and have ignored many of the countries of the world. This makes it difficult to quantify the scale of the problem from a global perspective. Furthermore, comparison of the existing data, generated for different studies/regions/continents, is challenging due to the vast differences between the analytical methodologies employed. Here, we present a global-scale study of API pollution in 258 of the world's rivers, representing the environmental influence of 471.4 million people across 137 geographic regions. Samples were obtained from 1,052 locations in 104 countries (representing all continents and 36 countries not previously studied for API contamination) and analyzed for 61 APIs. Highest cumulative API concentrations were observed in sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and South America. The most contaminated sites were in low- to middle-income countries and were associated with areas with poor wastewater and waste management infrastructure and pharmaceutical manufacturing. The most frequently detected APIs were carbamazepine, metformin, and caffeine (a compound also arising from lifestyle use), which were detected at over half of the sites monitored. Concentrations of at least one API at 25.7% of the sampling sites were greater than concentrations considered safe for aquatic organisms, or which are of concern in terms of selection for antimicrobial resistance. Therefore, pharmaceutical pollution poses a global threat to environmental and human health, as well as to delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Die Berechnung der Wasserstoffdiffusion durch Metallmembranen bei quadratischen Randbedingungen dritter Art mit Hilfe einer Randintegralmethode

Motivated by the experimental observation that hydrogen is released from metallic surfaces with a rate which is proportional to the square of the surface near volume concentration, the computer program "PERM" has been developed. It calculates the solution of the one-dimensional diffusion equation with quadratic boundary conditions : The knowledge of this function is of importance for the estimation of the hydrogen of present and future fusion devices. /1/. For the numerical treatment the diffusion equation has been transformed into the dimensionless from u$_{t}$ = u$_{xx}$. The transformed wall thickness L which is identical with the permeation number W occurs as the only physical parameter of the problem. The common difference methods fail at the beginning of the computation because of the large range of L (10$^{-5}$ to 10$^{9}$) and of the incompatibility of the boundary conditions with the initial condition. /12/. A new variant of the boundary integral method has been derived by the Laplace transform. By this method the solution of the diffusion equation can be calculated with choosable accuracy in the whole range of the parameter L. The main difficulties in implementing this method are due to the discretization of certain convolution integrals over space and time containing Jacobi's Theta function $\Theta_{3}$ (x,t)