Persistent Seroconversion after Accidental Eye Exposure to Calcifying Nanoparticles

Biosafety of nanomaterials has attracted much attention recently. We report here a case where accidental human eye exposure to biogenic nanosized calcium phosphate in the form of calcifying nanoparticles (CNP) raised a strong IgG immune response against proteins carried by CNP. The antibody titer has persisted over ten years at the high level. The IgG was detected by ELISA using CNPs propagated in media containing bovine and human serum as antigen. The exposure incident occurred to a woman scientist (WS) at a research laboratory in Finland at 1993. CNP, also termed "nanobacteria", is a unique self-replicating agent that has not been fully characterized and no data on biohazards were available at that time. Before the accident, her serum samples were negative for both CNP antigen and anti-CNP antibody using specific ELISA tests (Nanobac Oy, Kuopio, Finland). The accident occurred while WS was harvesting CNP cultures. Due to a high pressure in pipetting, CNP pellet splashed into her right eye. Both eyes were immediately washed with water and saline. The following days there was irritation and redness in the right eye. These symptoms disappeared within two weeks without any treatment. Three months after the accident, blood and urine samples of WS were tested for CNP cultures (2), CNP-specific ELISA tests, and blood cell counts. Blood cell counts were normal, CNP antigen and culture tests were negative. A high IgG anti-CNP antibody titer was detected (see Figure). The antibodies of this person have been used thereafter as positive control and standard in ELISA manufacturing (Nano-Sero IgG ELISA, Nanobac Oy, Kuopio, Finland)

Association between Randall's Plaque and Calcifying Nanoparticles

Randall's plaques, first described by Alexander Randall in the 1930s, are small subepithelial calcifications in the renal papillae (RP) that also extend deeply into the renal medulla. Despite the strong correlation between the presence of these plaques and the formation of renal stones, the precise origin and pathogenesis of Randall s plaque formation remain elusive. The discovery of calcifying nanoparticles (CNP) and their detection in many calcifying processes of human tissues has raised hypotheses about their possible involvement in renal stone formation. We collected RP and blood samples from 17 human patients who had undergone laparoscopic nephrectomy due to neoplasia. Homogenized RP tissues and serum samples were cultured for CNP. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) analysis were performed on fixed RP samples. Immunohistochemical staining (IHS) was applied on the tissue samples using CNP-specific monoclonal antibody (mAb). Randall s plaques were visible on gross inspection in 11 out of 17 collected samples. Cultures of all serum samples and 13 tissue homogenates had CNP growth within 4 weeks. SEM revealed spherical apatite formations in 14 samples, with calcium and phosphate peaks detected by EDS analysis. IHS was positive in 9 out of 17 samples. A strong link was found between the presence of Randall s plaques and the detection of CNP, also referred to as nanobacteria. These results suggest new insights into the etiology of Randall's plaque formation, and will help us understand the pathogenesis of stone formation. Further studies on this topic may lead us to new approaches on early diagnosis and novel medical therapies of kidney stone formation

Understanding customers across national cultures

Funding Information: This work is supported by CSC (Chinese Scholarship Council), the ‘Future Makers’ grant of the Technology Industries of Finland Centennial Foundation and Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation. We also wish to thank Professor Kari Tammi, Xiaoqi Feng, and all the participants for their help. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.For engineering design to be successful, it is essential to understand customer experience and identify customer needs. However, it is challenging to understand customers, especially those from different national cultures. The empathy literature suggests that having similar experiences to another person can help understand them better. This study adopts an empathy measure from psychology for use in a project where designers attempt to understand customers’ driving experiences in different countries and identify their needs for detecting road hazards. We quantify designers’ empathic accuracy and the correctness of their rating of customers’ emotional tone. The results show that national cultural differences significantly affect the accuracy of designers’ empathic understanding but do not impact their understanding of customers’ emotional tone.Peer reviewe

Under the umbrella : components of empathy in psychology and design

Empathy is argued to be a key factor for a successful design discussion. However, such causality cannot be empirically proven based on how empathy is currently defined in design community. Empathy is used as an umbrella construct, broad and encompassing of diverse phenomena, making it difficult to quantify. We suggest improving such a situation by introducing a definition of empathy based on psychology literature, which provides structure and guidance for studying the role of empathy in design. We first break empathy to components. Then, we review empathy as used in design. Finally, we synthetize the reviewed material. From this synthesis, we conclude that empathy in design shares several key components of empathy in psychology; particularly with state influences, top-down control process and emotional stimuli. These are present in design methods although they have not been studied using such terms. Incorporating psychological components of empathy into design can help conceptualising empathy from a differentangle, thus opening interesting new avenues for future research. We hope that our treatment provides present and future designers with some useful guidance.Peer reviewe

Reading the User’s Mind: Designers Show High Accuracy in Inferring Design-Related Thoughts and Feelings

© 2020 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). All rights reserved. The success of design needfinding is largely dependent on how well designers understand their users. It is further claimed that user understanding and designers' capacity to adopt users' perspective, i.e. designers' ability to understand others, are key skills that should lead to successful design outcomes. The general ability to understand someone else's mental contents, such as what they else think, feel, wish, and believe, is called theory of mind. In this study, we connect concepts of humancentered design and theory of mind through empathic accuracy, a performance-based method for measuring empathy. We state two hypotheses. First, that designers are equally accurate at inferring thoughts as they are at inferring feelings. Second, that designers are more accurate in inferring design-related mental contents than those that are not related to design. We answer these hypotheses by analyzing results of altogether 24 designers watching recorded needfinding interviews of 6 users and inferring their mental contents. We observed that feelings were more accurately inferred than thoughts, although the data showed some inconsistencies. A stronger case can be made for designers' accuracy of design-related entries, where designers were consistently more accurate at inferring design-related entries than non-design-related ones. These results provide concrete insight into how designers understand users and how empathy could be quantified in the design context

Empathic accuracy in design

Empathic design highlights the relevance of understanding users and their circumstances in order to obtain good design outcomes. However, theory-based quantitative methods, which can be used to test user understanding, are hard to find in the design science literature. Here, we introduce a validated method used in social psychological research - the empathic accuracy method - into design to explore how well two designers perform in a design task and whether the designers' empathic accuracy performance and the physiological synchrony between the two designers and a group of users can predict the designers' success in two design tasks. The designers could correctly identify approximately 50% of the users' reported mental content. We did not find a significant correlation between the designers' empathic accuracy and their (1) performance in design tasks and (2) physiological synchrony with users. Nevertheless, the empathic accuracy method is promising in its attempts to quantify the effect of empathy in design.Peer reviewe

A combined risk score enhances prediction of type 1 diabetes among susceptible children

Type 1 diabetes (T1D)—an autoimmune disease that destroys the pancreatic islets, resulting in insulin deficiency—often begins early in life when islet autoantibody appearance signals high risk1. However, clinical diabetes can follow in weeks or only after decades, and is very difficult to predict. Ketoacidosis at onset remains common2,3 and is most severe in the very young4,5, in whom it can be life threatening and difficult to treat6–9. Autoantibody surveillance programs effectively prevent most ketoacidosis10–12 but require frequent evaluations whose expense limits public health adoption13. Prevention therapies applied before onset, when greater islet mass remains, have rarely been feasible14 because individuals at greatest risk of impending T1D are difficult to identify. To remedy this, we sought accurate, cost-effective estimation of future T1D risk by developing a combined risk score incorporating both fixed and variable factors (genetic, clinical and immunological) in 7,798 high-risk children followed closely from birth for 9.3 years. Compared with autoantibodies alone, the combined model dramatically improves T1D prediction at ≥2 years of age over horizons up to 8 years of age (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve ≥ 0.9), doubles the estimated efficiency of population-based newborn screening to prevent ketoacidosis, and enables individualized risk estimates for better prevention trial selection.Peer reviewe

Early probiotic supplementation and the risk of celiac disease in children at genetic risk

Abstract Probiotics are linked to positive regulatory effects on the immune system. The aim of the study was to examine the association between the exposure of probiotics via dietary supplements or via infant formula by the age of 1 year and the development of celiac disease autoimmunity (CDA) and celiac disease among a cohort of 6520 genetically susceptible children. Use of probiotics during the first year of life was reported by 1460 children. Time-to-event analysis was used to examine the associations. Overall exposure of probiotics during the first year of life was not associated with either CDA (n = 1212) (HR 1.15; 95%CI 0.99, 1.35; p = 0.07) or celiac disease (n = 455) (HR 1.11; 95%CI 0.86, 1.43; p = 0.43) when adjusting for known risk factors. Intake of probiotic dietary supplements, however, was associated with a slightly increased risk of CDA (HR 1.18; 95%CI 1.00, 1.40; p = 0.043) compared to children who did not get probiotics. It was concluded that the overall exposure of probiotics during the first year of life was not associated with CDA or celiac disease in children at genetic risk