Impact of Stress and Decision Fatigue on Parenting Practices Related to Food and Physical Activity During COVID‐19

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in substantial disruptions to daily functioning and lifestyle behaviours, with negative health consequences for youth. Parents play a large role in their children\u27s health behaviour; yet changes to parenting behaviours during the pandemic related to food and physical activity remain relatively unexplored. The present study is the first to our knowledge to examine specific changes in American parents\u27 parenting behaviours related to food and physical activity during COVID-19, and potential correlates of such changes, including perceived stress and decision fatigue. Methods A total of 140 parents (88.57% female; 88.41% White; 87.59% married; with one to five children) from middle to upper income households completed an online survey assessing demographics, perceived stress (Perceived Stress Scale), decision fatigue (Decision Fatigue Scale) and food and activity parenting behaviour changes during COVID-19. Results Overall, a greater proportion of parents engaged primarily in positive (57.14%) than negative (22.86%) parenting practices related to food and physical activity during the pandemic. Moderation analyses showed that the negative relation between perceived stress and positive parental behaviour changes was stronger at higher perceived increases in decision fatigue during the pandemic. Conclusions In the face of a major public health crisis, adaptive parental responses may emerge, but perceived stress may inhibit such behaviour change. Perceived stress and decision fatigue may represent important explanatory factors in parental health promoting behaviours during times of uncertainty and change

Photocatalytic hydrogen production using ethanol as sacrificial agent from gas and liquid phases on reduced graphene oxide-TiO2- Pt nanocomposites

ABSTRACT: Various strategies such as heterostructuring, crystal/textural modifications and band gap engineering, have been applied to the improvement of the photocatalytic activity of Titania for hydrogen production from water splitting. In this work deposited Pt on TiO2 is used as electron trap to suppress charge recombination. To reinforce this effect, composites with graphene oxide (GO) have been prepared, exhibiting promising photocatalytic performance for both hydrogen generation and the degradation of ethanol added as hole scavenger. Photocatalytic reactions were conducted in gas and liquid phases.N/

Podoplanin expression in the development and progression of laryngeal squamous cell carcinomas

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Podoplanin expression is attracting interest as a marker for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. We therefore investigated the expression pattern and clinical significance of podoplanin during the development and progression of laryngeal carcinomas.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Podoplanin expression was determined by immunohistochemistry in paraffin-embedded tissue specimens from 84 patients with laryngeal premalignancies and 53 patients with laryngeal squamous cell carcinomas. We found podoplanin expression extending from the basal to the suprabasal layer of the epithelium in 37 (44%) of 84 dysplastic lesions, whereas normal epithelium showed negligible expression. Patients carrying podoplanin-positive lesions had a higher laryngeal cancer incidence than those with negative expression reaching borderline statistical significance (51% <it>versus </it>30%, <it>P </it>= 0.071). Podoplanin expression in laryngeal carcinomas exhibited two distinct patterns. 20 (38%) cases showed diffuse expression in most tumour cells and 33 (62%) focal expression at the proliferating periphery of tumour nests. High podoplanin expression was inversely correlated with T classification (<it>P </it>= 0.033), disease stage (<it>P </it>= 0.006), and pathological grade (<it>P </it>= 0.04). There was a trend, although not significant, towards reduced disease-specific survival for patients with low podoplanin levels (<it>P </it>= 0.31) and diffuse expression pattern (<it>P </it>= 0.08).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Podoplanin expression increases in the early stages of laryngeal tumourigenesis and it seems to be associated with a higher laryngeal cancer risk. Podoplanin expression in laryngeal squamous cell carcinomas, however, diminishes during tumour progression. Taken together, these data support a role for podoplanin expression in the initiation but not in the progression of laryngeal cancers.</p

Selective Inhibition of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor–mediated Angiogenesis by Cyclosporin A: Roles of the Nuclear Factor of Activated T Cells and Cyclooxygenase 2

Cyclosporin A (CsA) is an immunosuppressive drug that inhibits the activity of transcription factors of the nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT) family, interfering with the induction of cytokines and other inducible genes required for the immune response. Here we show that CsA inhibits migration of primary endothelial cells and angiogenesis induced by vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF); this effect appears to be mediated through the inhibition of cyclooxygenase (Cox)-2, the transcription of which is activated by VEGF in primary endothelial cells. Consistent with this, we show that the induction of Cox-2 gene expression by VEGF requires NFAT activation. Most important, the CsA-mediated inhibition of angiogenesis both in vitro and in vivo was comparable to the Cox-2 inhibitor NS-398, and reversed by prostaglandin E2. Furthermore, the in vivo corneal angiogenesis induced by VEGF, but not by basic fibroblast growth factor, was selectively inhibited in mice treated with CsA systemically. These findings involve NFAT in the regulation of Cox-2 in endothelial cells, point to a role for this transcription factor in angiogenesis, and may provide a novel mechanism underlying the beneficial effects of CsA in angiogenesis-related diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis.This work was supported by grant PM99-0116 from Ministerio de Educación y Cultura (MEC-DGES) of Spain (to J.M. Redondo) and grants FEDER 1FD97-0514-CO2-01 and FEDER FD97-0275 from MEC-DGES and the European Community to J.M. Redondo and M. Fresno, respectively. G.L. Hernández was supported by grants from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET) of Argentina and Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid grant 8.3/0024/2000, and M. Fresno by grant PM97-0130, O. Volpert by American Heart Association grant AHA SDG 0030023N, and S. Martínez-Martínez by grant 8.3/19/1998 from the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid. The Centro de Biología Molecular "Severo Ochoa" is supported by a grant from the Fundación Ramón ArecesPeer reviewe

Using Fuzzy Logic to Leverage HTML Markup for Web Page Representation

The selection of a suitable document representation approach plays a crucial role in the performance of a document clustering task. Being able to pick out representative words within a document can lead to substantial improvements in document clustering. In the case of web documents, the HTML markup that defines the layout of the content provides additional structural information that can be further exploited to identify representative words. In this paper we introduce a fuzzy term weighing approach that makes the most of the HTML structure for document clustering. We set forth and build on the hypothesis that a good representation can take advantage of how humans skim through documents to extract the most representative words. The authors of web pages make use of HTML tags to convey the most important message of a web page through page elements that attract the readers’ attention, such as page titles or emphasized elements. We define a set of criteria to exploit the information provided by these page elements, and introduce a fuzzy combination of these criteria that we evaluate within the context of a web page clustering task. Our proposed approach, called Abstract Fuzzy Combination of Criteria (AFCC), can adapt to datasets whose features are distributed differently, achieving good results compared to other similar fuzzy logic based approaches and TF-IDF across different datasets

Selective Inhibition of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor–Mediated Angiogenesis by Cyclosporin a: Roles of the Nuclear Factor of Activated T Cells and Cyclooxygenase 2

Cyclosporin A (CsA) is an immunosuppressive drug that inhibits the activity of transcription factors of the nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT) family, interfering with the induction of cytokines and other inducible genes required for the immune response. Here we show that CsA inhibits migration of primary endothelial cells and angiogenesis induced by vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF); this effect appears to be mediated through the inhibition of cyclooxygenase (Cox)-2, the transcription of which is activated by VEGF in primary endothelial cells. Consistent with this, we show that the induction of Cox-2 gene expression by VEGF requires NFAT activation. Most important, the CsA-mediated inhibition of angiogenesis both in vitro and in vivo was comparable to the Cox-2 inhibitor NS-398, and reversed by prostaglandin E2. Furthermore, the in vivo corneal angiogenesis induced by VEGF, but not by basic fibroblast growth factor, was selectively inhibited in mice treated with CsA systemically. These findings involve NFAT in the regulation of Cox-2 in endothelial cells, point to a role for this transcription factor in angiogenesis, and may provide a novel mechanism underlying the beneficial effects of CsA in angiogenesis-related diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis

Improvement of a System for Catchment, Pretreatment and Treatment of Runoff Water Using PIV Tests and Numerical Simulation

This paper studies how to improve the efficiency of a new system for catchment, pretreatment, and treatment of runoff water (SCPT). This system is integrated into an urban sustainable gravity settler that can decrease diffusive pollution. This study provides important advantages for the ecosystem by improving new sustainable drainage to clean runoff water. In this paper, an investigation methodology known as hybrid engineering (HE) was used. HE combines experimental tests and numerical simulations, both of them conducted on a 1:4-scale prototype. In this study, numerical simulations by the finite-volume method (FVM) and experimental tests by particle image velocimetry (PIV) were compared. A strong correlation between the numerical and experimental analysis was found. Next, the efficiency of the SCPTwas optimized by design of experiments (DOE). Analysis of experimental and numerical results and their comparison are presented in this paper.The authors wish to express their gratitude to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for the research project BIA2009-08272 funding

Overview of the M-WePNaD Task: Multilingual web person name disambiguation at IberEval 2017

Multilingual Web Person Name Disambiguation is a new shared task proposed for the first time at the IberEval 2017 evaluation campaign. For a set of web search results associated with a person name, the task deals with the grouping of the results based on the particular individual they refer to. Different from previous works dealing with monolingual search results, this task has further considered the challenge posed by search results written in different languages. This task allows to evaluate the performance of participating systems in a multilingual scenario. This overview summarizes a total of 18 runs received from four participating teams. We present the datasets utilized and the method- ology defined for the task and the evaluation, along with an analysis of the results and the submitted systems

The role of the surface acidic/basic centers and redox sites on TiO2 in the photocatalytic CO2 reduction

The development of sustainable processes for CO reduction to fuels and chemicals is one of the most important challenges to provide clean energy solutions. The use of sunlight as renewable energy source is an interesting alternative to power the electron transfer required for artificial photosynthesis. Even if redox sites are mainly responsible for this process, other reactive acidic/basic centers also contribute to the overall reaction pathway. However, a full understanding of the CO photoreduction mechanism is still a scientific challenge. In fact, the lack of agreement on standardized comparison criteria leads to a wide distribution of reported productions, even using the same catalyst, which hinders a reliable interpretation. An additional difficulty is ascertaining the origin of carbon-containing products and effect of surface carbon residues, as well as the reaction intermediates and products under real dynamic conditions. To determine the elusive reaction mechanism, we report an interconnected strategy combining in-situ spectroscopies, theoretical studies and catalytic experiments. These studies show that CO photoreduction productions are influenced by the presence of carbon deposits (i.e. organic molecules, carbonates and bicarbonates) over the TiO surface. Most importantly, the acid/base character of the surface and the reaction medium play a key role in the selectivity and deactivation pathways. This TiO deactivation is mainly initiated by the formation of carbonates and peroxo- species, while activity can be partially recovered by a mild acid washing treatment. We anticipate that these findings and methodology enlighten the main shadows still covering the CO reduction mechanism, and, most importantly, provide essential clues for the design of emergent materials and reactions for photo(electro)catalytic energy conversion