What's the best way to control circumcision pain in newborns?

Dorsal penile nerve block (DPNB), ring block (RB), and eutectic mixture of local anesthetics (EMLA) all control pain effectively during neonatal circumcision (strength of recommendation [SOR]: A, systematic review). An RB may provide superior pain relief toDPNB and EMLA (SOR: B, limited-quality evidence). Using a Mogen clamp reduces pain by shortening procedure time (SOR: A, randomized controlled trials [RCTs]). Effective adjuncts to pain relief include nonnutritive sucking (NNS; a pacifier without sucrose), a sucrose pacifier, and use of a padded chair (SOR: A, RCTs)

Catálogo Taxonômico da Fauna do Brasil: setting the baseline knowledge on the animal diversity in Brazil

The limited temporal completeness and taxonomic accuracy of species lists, made available in a traditional manner in scientific publications, has always represented a problem. These lists are invariably limited to a few taxonomic groups and do not represent up-to-date knowledge of all species and classifications. In this context, the Brazilian megadiverse fauna is no exception, and the Catálogo Taxonômico da Fauna do Brasil (CTFB) (http://fauna.jbrj.gov.br/), made public in 2015, represents a database on biodiversity anchored on a list of valid and expertly recognized scientific names of animals in Brazil. The CTFB is updated in near real time by a team of more than 800 specialists. By January 1, 2024, the CTFB compiled 133,691 nominal species, with 125,138 that were considered valid. Most of the valid species were arthropods (82.3%, with more than 102,000 species) and chordates (7.69%, with over 11,000 species). These taxa were followed by a cluster composed of Mollusca (3,567 species), Platyhelminthes (2,292 species), Annelida (1,833 species), and Nematoda (1,447 species). All remaining groups had less than 1,000 species reported in Brazil, with Cnidaria (831 species), Porifera (628 species), Rotifera (606 species), and Bryozoa (520 species) representing those with more than 500 species. Analysis of the CTFB database can facilitate and direct efforts towards the discovery of new species in Brazil, but it is also fundamental in providing the best available list of valid nominal species to users, including those in science, health, conservation efforts, and any initiative involving animals. The importance of the CTFB is evidenced by the elevated number of citations in the scientific literature in diverse areas of biology, law, anthropology, education, forensic science, and veterinary science, among others

Interpersonal Anticipatory Synchronization: The Facilitating Role of Short Visual-Motor Feedback Delays

Effective interpersonal coordination is fundamental to robust social interaction, and the ability to anticipate a co-actor’s behavior is essential for achieving this coordination. However, coordination research has focused on the behavioral synchrony that occurs between the simple periodic movements of co-actors and, thus, little is known about the anticipation that occurs during complex, everyday interaction. Research on the dynamics of coupled neurons, human motor control, electrical circuits, and laser semiconductors universally demonstrates that small temporal feedback delays are necessary for the anticipation of chaotic events. We therefore investigated whether similar feedback delays would promote anticipatory behavior during social interaction. Results revealed that co-actors were not only able to anticipate others’ chaotic movements when experiencing small perceptual-motor delays, but also exhibited movement patterns of equivalent complexity. This suggests that such delays, including those within the human nervous system, may enhance, rather than hinder, the anticipatory processes that underlie successful social interactio

Comparing Matched Polymer:Fullerene Solar Cells Made by Solution-Sequential Processing and Traditional Blend Casting: Nanoscale Structure and Device Performance

Polymer:fullerene bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cell active layers can be created by traditional blend casting (BC), where the components are mixed together in solution before deposition, or by sequential processing (SqP), where the pure polymer and fullerene materials are cast sequentially from different solutions. Presently, however, the relative merits of SqP as compared to BC are not fully understood because there has yet to be an equivalent (composition- and thickness-matched layer) comparison between the two processing techniques. The main reason why matched SqP and BC devices have not been compared is because the composition of SqP active layers has not been accurately known. In this paper, we present a novel technique for accurately measuring the polymer:fullerene film composition in SqP active layers, which allows us to make the first comparisons between rigorously composition- and thickness-matched BHJ organic solar cells made by SqP and traditional BC. We discover that, in optimal photovoltaic devices, SqP active layers have a very similar composition as their optimized BC counterparts (≈44-50 mass % PCBM). We then present a thorough investigation of the morphological and device properties of thickness- and composition-matched P3HT:PCBM SqP and BC active layers in order to better understand the advantages and drawbacks of both processing approaches. For our matched devices, we find that small-area SqP cells perform better than BC cells due to both superior film quality and enhanced optical absorption from more crystalline P3HT. The enhanced film quality of SqP active layers also results in higher performance and significantly better reproducibility in larger-area devices, indicating that SqP is more amenable to scaling than the traditional BC approach. X-ray diffraction, UV-vis absorption, and energy-filtered transmission electron tomography collectively show that annealed SqP active layers have a finer-scale blend morphology and more crystalline polymer and fullerene domains when compared to equivalently processed BC active layers. Charge extraction by linearly increasing voltage (CELIV) measurements, combined with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, also show that the top (nonsubstrate) interface for SqP films is slightly richer in PCBM compared to matched BC active layers. Despite these clear differences in bulk and vertical morphology, transient photovoltage, transient photocurrent, and subgap external quantum efficiency measurements all indicate that the interfacial electronic processes occurring at P3HT:PCBM heterojunctions are essentially identical in matched-annealed SqP and BC active layers, suggesting that device physics are surprisingly robust with respect to the details of the BHJ morphology. © 2014 American Chemical Society

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7