Aloe vera: A Multipurpose Healer and Bacterial Eradicator

The Aloe vera plant is a succulent known for its rich content in vitamins and minerals, thus gaining popularity over the years in healthcare products. With advancements in alternative medicine, it has been recently found useful in dentistry due to properties such as anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antimicrobial actions that contribute to wound healing. The purpose of this study was to examine and discover how Aloe vera can be used as an alternative therapy in the dental field. The PubMed, Google Scholar and Dentistry & Oral Sciences (DOSS) databases were utilized to find current scientific evidence on the effects of Aloe vera. Relevant articles were summarized to write a review of findings. In this study, 21 articles published from 2015 to present were reviewed. From the studies, there is strong evidence to support that Aloe vera exhibits beneficial effects in prevention of carious lesions, non-surgical scaling and root planing in patients with chronic periodontitis, and oral wounds. Furthermore, it is cost effective and easily accessible. This review’s findings indicate that dental health care providers could recommend Aloe vera as a preventive and an alternative treatment option to improve patients’ oral health status.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/denh_student/1005/thumbnail.jp

"It's just some numbers": Awareness of far-right tattoos

Whilst information and legislation around the practice of tattooing and associated health risks (PHE, 2013) is readily available, the ethics of tattooing, particularly the ethics of supporting customers to understand the meaning of their tattoos, is less so. Tattoos that convey a hidden meaning are prevalent among far-right groups (Birkett 2021) and identification of such symbols is widely utilised in combatting extremism (e.g. CTPHQ 2021, ADL 2022). Crusader imagery (Koch 2017), memes and meme culture (Bogerts and Felitz 2019 & De Crook 2018), Viking or Norse iconography (Miller-Idriss 2017) and punk aesthetic (Raposos and Bentley 2020) have all been associated with the far-right. However, none of these studies look at the process of being tattooed, determining the meaning of their proposed tattoo, or the role of the tattooist.    This paper reports preliminary findings of phase one of a project on seeking to address these questions. A sample of ~250 university students were surveyed about their own tattoos and meaning behind them, before asked to interpret the meaning behind different symbols, some overtly or covertly associated with extremist groups, and their suitability as tattoos, looking at the aesthetic appeal of the symbol as well as the meaning

Dimensions of Grace: Factor Analysis of Three Grace Scales

Measuring grace is challenging. Prior research found the Grace Scale (GS), Richmont Grace Scale (RGS), and The Amazing Grace Scale (TAGS) to be reliable, have promising convergent and divergent validity, and to inter-correlate strongly. However, they may tap different constructs, or grace may be multidimensional (Bufford, Blackburn, Sisemore, & Bassett, 2015). Here two exploratory factor analyses of the combined items showed five factors: experiencing God’s grace, costly grace, grace to self, grace from others, and grace to others, partially paralleling Watson, Chen and Sisemore (2011). Items from all three scales loaded on Factor 1, only items from the RGS loaded on Factor 2. The remaining factors were mostly GS items and a few RGS items. The three scales measure somewhat different constructs. Preliminary validity for the five factors is promising. Regressions showed that combinations of the other four proposed scales accounted for at most about one third of the variance on any given grace factor. The five factors showed different patterns of relationships to criterion variables. We propose a 36 item Dimensions of Grace Scale combining items from all three scales for further exploration

Habitat conversion and global avian biodiversity loss

The magnitude of the impacts of human activities on global biodiversity has been documented at several organizational levels. However, although there have been numerous studies of the effects of local-scale changes in land use (e.g. logging) on the abundance of groups of organisms, broader continental or global-scale analyses addressing the same basic issues remain largely wanting. None the less, changing patterns of land use, associated with the appropriation of increasing proportions of net primary productivity by the human population, seem likely not simply to have reduced the diversity of life, but also to have reduced the carrying capacity of the environment in terms of the numbers of other organisms that it can sustain. Here, we estimate the size of the existing global breeding bird population, and then make a first approximation as to how much this has been modified as a consequence of land-use changes wrought by human activities. Summing numbers across different land-use classes gives a best current estimate of a global population of less than 100 billion breeding bird individuals. Applying the same methodology to estimates of original land-use distributions suggests that conservatively this may represent a loss of between a fifth and a quarter of pre-agricultural bird numbers. This loss is shared across a range of temperate and tropical land-use types

Contribution of Non-native Galliforms to Annual Variation in Biomass of British Birds

Millions of individuals of two species of non-native galliform birds, the Common Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) and Red-legged Partridge (Alectoris rufa) are released into the British countryside annually in late summer, supplementing established breeding populations of these two species. The biomass of birds involved in these releases has been compared to the British breeding bird biomass. However, the validity of this comparison is compromised because the biomass of wild birds varies across the year due to reproduction, mortality and migration. How the biomass of Common Pheasants and Red-legged Partridges compares to that of other British bird species in late summer, or across the whole year, is currently unknown. Here, we produce estimates of how British bird biomass varies across the year, to assess the contribution of the two non-native galliforms to this variation. We show that overall British bird biomass is probably lowest around the start of the breeding season in April, and peaks in late summer and autumn. We estimate that around a quarter of British bird biomass annually is contributed by Common Pheasants and Red-legged Partridges, and that at their peak in August these two species represent about half of all wild bird biomass in Britain

Fearing the worst: the importance of uncertainty for inequality

We present an overlapping generations model in which aspirational agents face uncertainty about the returns to human capital investment. This uncertainty implies the prospect that aspirations will not be fulfilled, the probability of which is greater the lower is the human capital endowment of an agent. We show that agents with sufficiently low human capital endowments may experience such a strong influence of loss aversion that they abstain from human capital investment. We further show how this behaviour may be transmitted through successive generations to cause initial inequalities to persist. These results do not rely on any credit market imperfections, though they may appear as if they do

Singlet-Triplet Physics and Shell Filling in Carbon Nanotube Double Quantum Dots

An artifcial two-atomic molecule, also called a double quantum dot (DQD), is an ideal system for exploring few electron physics. Spin-entanglement between just two electrons can be explored in such systems where singlet and triplet states are accessible. These two spin-states can be regarded as the two states in a quantum two-state system, a so-called singlet-triplet qubit. A very attractive material for realizing spin based qubits is the carbon nanotube (CNT), because it is expected to have a very long spin coherence time. Here we show the existence of a gate-tunable singlet-triplet qubit in a CNT DQD. We show that the CNT DQD has clear shell structures of both four and eight electrons, with the singlet-triplet qubit present in the four-electron shells. We furthermore observe inelastic cotunneling via the singlet and triplet states, which we use to probe the splitting between singlet and triplet, in good agreement with theory.Comment: Supplement available at: http://www.fys.ku.dk/~hij/public/singlet-triple_supp.pd

Spin and Orbital Splitting in Ferromagnetic Contacted Single Wall Carbon Nanotube Devices

We observed the coulomb blockade phenomena in ferromagnetic contacting single wall semiconducting carbon nanotube devices. No obvious Coulomb peaks shift was observed with existing only the Zeeman splitting at 4K. Combining with other effects, the ferromagnetic leads prevent the orbital spin states splitting with magnetic field up to 2 Tesla at 4K. With increasing magnetic field further, both positive or negative coulomb peaks shift slopes are observed associating with clockwise and anticlockwise orbital state splitting. The strongly suppressed/enhanced of the conductance has been observed associating with the magnetic field induced orbital states splitting/converging