Permeation of Ethoxy- and Butoxy- Ethanols Through a Disposable Nitrile Glove

The purpose of this study was to investigate the permeation of the glycol ethers, 2-ethoxyethanol (2-EE) and 2-butoxyethanol (2-BE) through disposable, nitrile exam gloves using a modified ASTM closed-loop module. The purple unsupported, unlined, powderless nitrile glove from Kimberly-Clark was challenged by the two pure glycol ethers. Their permeation parameters were measured with the aid of a 2.54 cm ASTM F739 closed-loop permeation cell using water collection at 35.0±0.5 0C in a moving tray water bath, and capillary gas chromatography-mass spectrometry for quantification. Each set of experiments consisted of four standard permeation cells with water as the collection solvent. The steady state permeation rate for 2-EE of 4.83±0.45 µg/cm2/min was about 4 times that of 2-BE (1.27±0.11 µg/cm2/min). Permeation of the more nonpolar 2-BE was less than for 2-EE. Both solvents exceeded the ASTM threshold normalized breakthrough time in the closed-loop testing module. Glove samples failed to pass permeation criteria defined by Kimberly Clark and Ansell. Such gloves are not recommended as personal protective equipment for exposure to 2-butoxyethanol or 2-ethoxyethanol, even for very short period exposures. Glove manufacturers should reconsider existing permeation testing method for low volatile compounds and apply the closed-loop module due to higher sensitivity and accuracy

Luttinger Parameter g for Metallic Carbon Nanotubes and Related Systems

The random phase approximation (RPA) theory is used to derive the Luttinger parameter g for metallic carbon nanotubes. The results are consistent with the Tomonaga-Luttinger models. All metallic carbon nanotubes, regardless if they are armchair tubes, zigzag tubes, or chiral tubes, should have the same Luttinger parameter g. However, a (10,10) carbon peapod should have a smaller g value than a (10,10) carbon nanotube. Changing the Fermi level by applying a gate voltage has only a second order effect on the g value. RPA theory is a valid approach to calculate plasmon energy in carbon nanotube systems, regardless if the ground state is a Luttinger liquid or Fermi liquid. (This paper was published in PRB 66, 193405 (2002). However, Eqs. (6), (9), and (19) were misprinted there.)Comment: 2 figure

High-performance acceleration of 2-D and 3D CNNs on FPGAs using static block floating point

Over the past few years, 2-D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated their great success in a wide range of 2-D computer vision applications, such as image classification and object detection. At the same time, 3-D CNNs, as a variant of 2-D CNNs, have shown their excellent ability to analyze 3-D data, such as video and geometric data. However, the heavy algorithmic complexity of 2-D and 3-D CNNs imposes a substantial overhead over the speed of these networks, which limits their deployment in real-life applications. Although various domain-specific accelerators have been proposed to address this challenge, most of them only focus on accelerating 2-D CNNs, without considering their computational efficiency on 3-D CNNs. In this article, we propose a unified hardware architecture to accelerate both 2-D and 3-D CNNs with high hardware efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed accelerator can achieve up to 92.4% and 85.2% multiply-accumulate efficiency on 2-D and 3-D CNNs, respectively. To improve the hardware performance, we propose a hardware-friendly quantization approach called static block floating point (BFP), which eliminates the frequent representation conversions required in traditional dynamic BFP arithmetic. Comparing with the integer linear quantization using zero-point, the static BFP quantization can decrease the logic resource consumption of the convolutional kernel design by nearly 50% on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Without time-consuming retraining, the proposed static BFP quantization is able to quantize the precision to 8-bit mantissa with negligible accuracy loss. As different CNNs on our reconfigurable system require different hardware and software parameters to achieve optimal hardware performance and accuracy, we also propose an automatic tool for parameter optimization. Based on our hardware design and optimization, we demonstrate that the proposed accelerator can achieve 3.8-5.6 times higher energy efficiency than graphics processing unit (GPU) implementation. Comparing with the state-of-the-art FPGA-based accelerators, our design achieves higher generality and up to 1.4-2.2 times higher resource efficiency on both 2-D and 3-D CNNs

Edukasi Penggunaan Obat Cacing Berbahan Dasar Lokal Oleh Kelompok Risiko Infeksi Soil Transmitted Helminths

Kasus Covid-19 memasuki babak endemis sejak tahun 2022 lalu, sejak itu pula kasus stunting mulai ramai diperbincangkan banyak orang, khususnya para ibu. WHO mendefinisikan stunting sebagai gangguan tumbuh kembang anak yang disebabkan kekurangan asupan gizi, terserang infeksi, maupun stimulasi yang tak memadai. Mereka dengan risiko penyakit infeksi oleh Soil Transmitted Helminths oleh karena penderita kecacingan berat cenderung anemia, dan malnutrisi (Salakory. 2010). Anemia dan malnutrisi yang panjang dan berat menjadi salah satu penyebab stunting di masyarakat. Pada situasi pandemic dan bahkan menjalani fase endemis Covid-19, ditingkahi pula merebaknya kasus dan isu isu balita stunting ini, edukasi perubahan perilaku sehat dengan pendekatan komunikasi risiko perlu diterapkan baik dalam pencegahan, pengobatan, maupun pada tahap rehabilitasi lingkungan risiko kecacingan di masyarakat dusun pulau Osi. Edukasi ini dengan tujuan dapat meningkatkan pengetahuan publik atas potensi risiko dan ancaman masalah Kesehatan. Dengan demikian mereka mampu menentukan langkah-langkah dan tindakan yang tepat dalam melindungi diri mereka agar terhindar dari masalah tersebut. Metode: Pelaksanaan edukasi dengan scenario Problem Base Learning (PBL) bervariasi. Langkah-langkah PBL-nya sebagai berikut: Persiapan (Menyusun Rencana Edukasi/ Pembelajaran), Action/ Pelaksanaan/Kegiatan, Penutup. Hasil: Kegiatan PKM sebagai berikut: 1. Pemutaran Video Sehat Tanpa Kecacingan (Waktu 15 menit), 2. Presentasi: dilakukan presentasi materi (-Perilaku Hidup Sehat, -Pengobatan Kecacingan dengan Rock oyster dan Paederia scandes) Waktu 15 menit, 3. Latihan membuat ekstrudat berbasis pangan lokal dengan bahan obat cacing Rock oyster dan Paederia scandes (Waktu 30 menit). 4.Diskusi, waktu 10 meni

Far-infrared absorption in parallel quantum wires with weak tunneling

We study collective and single-particle intersubband excitations in a system of quantum wires coupled via weak tunneling. For an isolated wire with parabolic confinement, the Kohn's theorem guarantees that the absorption spectrum represents a single sharp peak centered at the frequency given by the bare confining potential. We show that the effect of weak tunneling between two parabolic quantum wires is twofold: (i) additional peaks corresponding to single-particle excitations appear in the absorption spectrum, and (ii) the main absorption peak acquires a depolarization shift. We also show that the interplay between tunneling and weak perpendicular magnetic field drastically enhances the dispersion of single-particle excitations. The latter leads to a strong damping of the intersubband plasmon for magnetic fields exceeding a critical value.Comment: 18 pages + 6 postcript figure

Effect of different drying methods on the protein and product quality of hairtail fish meat gel

Three different methods, namely hot air drying (HA), microwave vacuum drying (MV), and vacuum freeze drying (FD), were employed to investigate the effect of drying method on the quality of hairtail fish meat gel. Compared with HA and MV, FD samples showed a better quality in terms of moisture content, water absorption index, and water solubility index, and had the highest overall acceptance in sensory evaluation. FD preserved the protein from degradation and formed an ordered porous microstructure. The nitrogen fraction assay revealed that protein was degraded into 40–100 kDa fragments during drying in HA, which was almost not affected by MV and FD. Overall, FD was the most suitable method for drying of meat gel made from hairtail, followed by MV and HA

RNA interference of three up-regulated transcripts associated with insecticide resistance in an imidacloprid resistant population of Leptinotarsa decemlineata

AbstractThe Colorado potato beetle, Leptinotarsa decemlineata (Say), is a major agricultural pest of potatoes in the Central Sands production region of Wisconsin. Previous studies have shown that populations of L. decemlineata have become resistant to many classes of insecticides, including the neonicotinoid insecticide, imidacloprid. Furthermore, L. decemlineata has multiple mechanisms of resistance to deal with a pesticide insult, including enhanced metabolic detoxification by cytochrome p450s and glutathione S-transferases. With recent advances in the transcriptomic analysis of imidacloprid susceptible and resistant L. decemlineata populations, it is possible to investigate the role of candidate genes involved in imidacloprid resistance. A recently annotated transcriptome analysis of L. decemlineata was obtained from select populations of L. decemlineata collected in the Central Sands potato production region, which revealed a subset of mRNA transcripts constitutively up-regulated in resistant populations. We hypothesize that a portion of the up-regulated transcripts encoding for genes within the resistant populations also encode for pesticide resistance and can be suppressed to re-establish a susceptible phenotype. In this study, a discrete set of three up-regulated targets were selected for RNA interference experiments using a resistant L. decemlineata population. Following the successful suppression of transcripts encoding for a cytochrome p450, a cuticular protein, and a glutathione synthetase protein in a select L. decemlineata population, we observed reductions in measured resistance to imidacloprid that strongly suggest these genes control essential steps in imidacloprid metabolism in these field populations

CAR T-cell therapy and critical care : A survival guide for medical emergency teams.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T‑cells are genetically engineered to give T‑cells the ability to attack specific cancer cells, and to improve outcome of patients with refractory/relapsed aggressive B‑cell malignancies. To date, several CAR T‑cell products are approved and additional products with similar indication or extended to other malignancies are currently being evaluated. Side effects of CAR T‑cell treatment are potentially severe or even life-threatening immune-related toxicities, specifically cytokine release syndrome (CRS) and immune effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome (ICANS). Consequently, medical emergency teams (MET) are increasingly involved in the assessment and management of CAR T‑cell recipients. This article describes the principles of CAR T‑cell therapy and summarizes the main complications and subsequent therapeutic interventions aiming to provide a survival guide for METs with a proposed management algorithm

Synergistic Interaction Between Phage Therapy and Antibiotics Clears Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Infection in Endocarditis and Reduces Virulence.

Increasing antibiotic resistance warrants therapeutic alternatives. Here we investigated the efficacy of bacteriophage-therapy (phage) alone or combined with antibiotics against experimental endocarditis (EE) due to Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an archetype of difficult-to-treat infection. In vitro fibrin clots and rats with aortic EE were treated with an antipseudomonas phage cocktail alone or combined with ciprofloxacin. Phage pharmacology, therapeutic efficacy, and resistance were determined. In vitro, single-dose phage therapy killed 7 log colony-forming units (CFUs)/g of fibrin clots in 6 hours. Phage-resistant mutants regrew after 24 hours but were prevented by combination with ciprofloxacin (2.5 × minimum inhibitory concentration). In vivo, single-dose phage therapy killed 2.5 log CFUs/g of vegetations in 6 hours (P < .001 vs untreated controls) and was comparable with ciprofloxacin monotherapy. Moreover, phage/ciprofloxacin combinations were highly synergistic, killing >6 log CFUs/g of vegetations in 6 hours and successfully treating 64% (n = 7/11) of rats. Phage-resistant mutants emerged in vitro but not in vivo, most likely because resistant mutations affected bacterial surface determinants important for infectivity (eg, the pilT and galU genes involved in pilus motility and LPS formation). Single-dose phage therapy was active against P. aeruginosa EE and highly synergistic with ciprofloxacin. Phage-resistant mutants had impaired infectivity. Phage-therapy alone or combined with antibiotics merits further clinical consideration