STEM materials: a new frontier for an intelligent sustainable world

Materials are addressed as possible enablers for solutions to many global societal challenges. A foresight exercise has been conducted to identify research paths to design, with a new approach, a generation of materials which can provide multi-functionalities. These material systems have been named ???stem???, in analogy to living cells where a base of primitive units can be designed and assembled for self-reacting to external inputs. These materials will embed a concept of ???internet in things???, where their processing capacity will enable the systems to interact with the environment and express diverse functionalities. Stem materials do not exist yet, but many clues from diferent theoretical and experimental results suggest they can be developed, and because living organisms exist. This article aims at launching this new approach and promoting the structuring of a multi-disciplinary community to fll the research gaps

Towards the development of an EIT-based stretchable sensor for multi-touch industrial human-computer interaction systems

In human-computer interaction studies, an interaction is often considered as a kind of information or discrete internal states of an individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner from people to computing interfaces (or robotic interfaces) and vice-versa. This project aims to investigate processes capable of communicating and cooperating by adjusting their schedules to match the evolving execution circumstances, in a way that maximise the quality of their joint activities. By enabling human-computer interactions, the process will emerge as a framework based on the concept of expectancy, demand, and need of the human and computer together, for understanding the interplay between people and computers. The idea of this work is to utilise touch feedback from humans as a channel for communication thanks to an artificial sensitive skin made of a thin, flexible, and stretchable material acting as transducer. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that the first prototype of our artificial sensitive skin can detect surface contacts and show their locations with an image reconstructing the internal electrical conductivity of the sensor

Can screening and brief intervention lead to population-level reductions in alcohol-related harm?

A distinction is made between the clinical and public health justifications for screening and brief intervention (SBI) against hazardous and harmful alcohol consumption. Early claims for a public health benefit of SBI derived from research on general medical practitioners' (GPs') advice on smoking cessation, but these claims have not been realized, mainly because GPs have not incorporated SBI into their routine practice. A recent modeling exercise estimated that, if all GPs in England screened every patient at their next consultation, 96% of the general population would be screened over 10 years, with 70-79% of excessive drinkers receiving brief interventions (BI); assuming a 10% success rate, this would probably amount to a population-level effect of SBI. Thus, a public health benefit for SBI presupposes widespread screening; but recent government policy in England favors targeted versus universal screening, and in Scotland screening is based on new registrations and clinical presentation. A recent proposal for a national screening program was rejected by the UK National Health Service's National Screening Committee because 1) there was no good evidence that SBI led to reductions in mortality or morbidity, and 2) a safe, simple, precise, and validated screening test was not available. Even in countries like Sweden and Finland, where expensive national programs to disseminate SBI have been implemented, only a minority of the population has been asked about drinking during health-care visits, and a minority of excessive drinkers has been advised to cut down. Although there has been research on the relationship between treatment for alcohol problems and population-level effects, there has been no such research for SBI, nor have there been experimental investigations of its relationship with population-level measures of alcohol-related harm. These are strongly recommended. In this article, conditions that would allow a population-level effect of SBI to occur are reviewed, including their political acceptability. It is tentatively concluded that widespread dissemination of SBI, without the implementation of alcohol control measures, might have indirect influences on levels of consumption and harm but would be unlikely on its own to result in public health benefits. However, if and when alcohol control measures were introduced, SBI would still have an important role in the battle against alcohol-related harm

STK295900, a Dual Inhibitor of Topoisomerase 1 and 2, Induces G<inf>2</inf> Arrest in the Absence of DNA Damage

STK295900, a small synthetic molecule belonging to a class of symmetric bibenzimidazoles, exhibits antiproliferative activity against various human cancer cell lines from different origins. Examining the effect of STK295900 in HeLa cells indicates that it induces G2 phase arrest without invoking DNA damage. Further analysis shows that STK295900 inhibits DNA relaxation that is mediated by topoisomerase 1 (Top 1) and topoisomerase 2 (Top 2) in vitro. In addition, STK295900 also exhibits protective effect against DNA damage induced by camptothecin. However, STK295900 does not affect etoposide-induced DNA damage. Moreover, STK295900 preferentially exerts cytotoxic effect on cancer cell lines while camptothecin, etoposide, and Hoechst 33342 affected both cancer and normal cells. Therefore, STK295900 has a potential to be developed as an anticancer chemotherapeutic agent. © 2013 Kim et al

Systemic mastocytosis associated with t(8;21)(q22;q22) acute myeloid leukemia

Although KIT mutations are present in 20–25% of cases of t(8;21)(q22;q22) acute myeloid leukemia (AML), concurrent development of systemic mastocytosis (SM) is exceedingly rare. We examined the clinicopathologic features of SM associated with t(8;21)(q22;q22) AML in ten patients (six from our institutions and four from published literature) with t(8;21) AML and SM. In the majority of these cases, a definitive diagnosis of SM was made after chemotherapy, when the mast cell infiltrates were prominent. Deletion 9q was an additional cytogenetic abnormality in four cases. Four of the ten patients failed to achieve remission after standard chemotherapy and seven of the ten patients have died of AML. In the two patients who achieved durable remission after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant, recipient-derived neoplastic bone marrow mast cells persisted despite leukemic remission. SM associated with t(8;21) AML carries a dismal prognosis; therefore, detection of concurrent SM at diagnosis of t(8;21) AML has important prognostic implications

Convergence and stability theorems for the Picard-Mann hybrid iterative scheme for a general class of contractive-like operators

In this paper we use the general class of contractive-like operators introduced by Bosede and Rhoades (J. Adv. Math. Stud. 3(2):1-3, 2010) to prove strong convergence and stability results for Picard-Mann hybrid iterative schemes considered in a real normed linear space. We establish the strong convergence and stability of the Picard iterative scheme as a corollary. Our results generalize and improve a multitude of results in the literature, including the recent results of Chidume (Fixed Point Theory Appl. 2014:233, 2014)