Notes

Important Skin oils via Piper caldense H. Electricity. and also Piper xylosteoides (Kunth) Steud.: Periodic Alternative in the Substance Arrangement and also Antimicrobial Action.
Although benzene and borazine are isoelectronic and isostructural, they have very different electronic structures, mainly due to the polar nature of the B-N bond. Herein, we present an experimental study of the charge density distribution obtained from the multipole model formalism and Hirshfeld atom refinement (HAR) based on high-resolution X-ray diffraction data of borazine B3N3H6 (1) and B,B',B″-trichloroborazine (2) crystals. These data are compared to those obtained from HAR for benzene (4) and 1,3,5-trichlorobenzene (5) and further compared with values obtained from density functional theory calculations in the gas phase, where N,N',N″-trichloroborazine (3) was also included. The results confirm that, unlike benzene, borazines are only weakly aromatic with an island-like electronic delocalization within the B3N3 ring involving only the nitrogen atoms. Furthermore, delocalization indices and interacting quantum atom energy for bonded and non-bonded atoms were found to be highly suitable indicators capable of describing the origin of the discrepancies observed when the degree of aromaticity in 2 and 3 is evaluated using common aromaticity indices. Additionally, analysis of intermolecular interactions in the crystals brings further evidence of a weakly aromatic character of the borazines as it reveals surprising similarities between the crystal packing of borazine and benzene and also between B,B',B″-trichloroborazine and 1,3,5-trichlorobenzene.Na-ion layered oxide cathodes (NaxTMO2, TM = transition metal ion(s)), as an analogue of lithium layered oxide cathodes (such as LiCoO2, LiNixCoyMn1-x-yO2), have received growing attention with the development of Na-ion batteries. However, due to the larger Na+ radius and stronger Na+-Na+ electrostatic repulsion in NaO2 slabs, some undesired phase transitions are observed in NaxTMO2. Herein, we report a high-entropy configuration strategy for NaxTMO2 cathode materials, in which multicomponent TMO2 slabs with enlarged interlayer spacing help strengthen the whole skeleton structure of layered oxides through mitigating Jahn-Teller distortion, Na+/vacancy ordering, and lattice parameter changes. The strengthened skeleton structure with a modulated particle morphology dramatically improves the Na+ transport kinetics and suppresses intragranular fatigue cracks and TM dissolution, thus leading to highly improved performances. Furthermore, the elaborate high-entropy TMO2 slabs enhance the TM-O bonding energy to restrain oxygen release and thermal runaway, benefiting for the improvement of thermal safety.Understanding of nanoplastic prevalence and toxicology is limited by imaging challenges resulting from their small size. Fluorescence microscopy is widely applied to track and identify microplastics in laboratory studies and environmental samples. However, conventional fluorescence microscopy, due to diffraction, lacks the resolution to precisely localize nanoplastics in tissues, distinguish them from free dye, or quantify them in environmental samples. To address these limitations, we developed techniques to label nanoplastics for imaging with stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy to achieve resolution at an order of magnitude superior to conventional fluorescence microscopy. These techniques include (1) passive sorption; (2) swell incorporation; and (3) covalent coupling of STED-compatible fluorescence dyes to nanoplastics. We demonstrate that our labeling techniques, combined with STED microscopy, can be used to resolve nanoplastics of different shapes and compositions as small as 50 nm. The longevity of dye labeling is demonstrated in different media and conditions of biological and environmental relevance. We also test STED imaging of nanoplastics in exposure experiments with the model worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Our work shows the value of the method for detection and localization of nanoplastics as small as 50 nm in a whole animal without disruption of the tissue. These techniques will allow more precise localization and quantification of nanoplastics in complex matrices such as biological tissues in exposure studies.The microscopic description of the local structure of water remains an open challenge. Here, we adopt an agnostic approach to understanding water's hydrogen bond network using data harvested from molecular dynamics simulations of an empirical water model. selleck inhibitor A battery of state-of-the-art unsupervised data-science techniques are used to characterize the free-energy landscape of water starting from encoding the water environment using local atomic descriptors, through dimensionality reduction and finally the use of advanced clustering techniques. Analysis of the free energy under ambient conditions was found to be consistent with a rough single basin and independent of the choice of the water model. We find that the fluctuations of the water network occur in a high-dimensional space, which we characterize using a combination of both atomic descriptors and chemical-intuition-based coordinates. We demonstrate that a combination of both types of variables is needed in order to adequately capture the complexity of the fluctuations in the hydrogen bond network at different length scales both at room temperature and also close to the critical point of water. Our results provide a general framework for examining fluctuations in water under different conditions.Search requires balancing exploring for more options and exploiting the ones previously found. Individuals foraging in a group face another trade-off whether to engage in social learning to exploit the solutions found by others or to solitarily search for unexplored solutions. Social learning can better exploit learned information and decrease the costs of finding new resources, but excessive social learning can lead to over-exploitation and too little exploration for new solutions. We study how these two trade-offs interact to influence search efficiency in a model of collective foraging under conditions of varying resource abundance, resource density and group size. We modelled individual search strategies as Lévy walks, where a power-law exponent (μ) controlled the trade-off between exploitative and explorative movements in individual search. We modulated the trade-off between individual search and social learning using a selectivity parameter that determined how agents responded to social cues in terms of distance and likely opportunity costs. Our results show that social learning is favoured in rich and clustered environments, but also that the benefits of exploiting social information are maximized by engaging in high levels of individual exploration. We show that selective use of social information can modulate the disadvantages of excessive social learning, especially in larger groups and when individual exploration is limited. Finally, we found that the optimal combination of individual exploration and social learning gave rise to trajectories with μ ≈ 2 and provide support for the general optimality of such patterns in search. Our work sheds light on the interplay between individual search and social learning, and has broader implications for collective search and problem-solving.Boxfish (Ostraciidae) have peculiar body shapes, with conspicuous keels formed by their bony carapaces. Previous studies have proposed various hydrodynamic roles for these keels, including reducing drag during swimming, contributing to passive stabilization of the swimming course, or providing resistance against roll rotations. Here, we tested these hypotheses using computational fluid dynamics simulations of five species of Ostraciidae with a range of carapace shapes. The hydrodynamic performance of the original carapace surface models, obtained from laser scanning of museum specimens, was compared with models where the keels had been digitally reduced. The original carapaces showed no reduced drag or increased passive stability against pitch and yaw compared to the reduced-keel carapaces. However, consistently for all studied species, a strong increase in roll drag and roll-added mass was observed for the original carapaces compared to the reduced-keel carapaces, despite the relatively small differences in keel height. In particular, the damping of roll movement by resistive drag torques increased considerably by the presence of keels. Our results suggest that the shape of the boxfish carapace is important in enabling the observed roll-free forward swimming of boxfish and may facilitate the control of manoeuvres.In this work, we (i) review likelihood-based inference for parameter estimation and the construction of confidence regions; and (ii) explore the use of techniques from information geometry, including geodesic curves and Riemann scalar curvature, to supplement typical techniques for uncertainty quantification, such as Bayesian methods, profile likelihood, asymptotic analysis and bootstrapping. These techniques from information geometry provide data-independent insights into uncertainty and identifiability, and can be used to inform data collection decisions. All code used in this work to implement the inference and information geometry techniques is available on GitHub.Physarum polycephalum is a unicellular slime mould that has been intensely studied owing to its ability to solve mazes, find shortest paths, generate Steiner trees, share knowledge and remember past events and the implied applications to unconventional computing. The CELL model is a cellular automaton introduced in Gunji et al. (Gunji et al. 2008 J. Theor. Biol. 253, 659-667 (doi10.1016/j.jtbi.2008.04.017)) that models Physarum's amoeboid motion, tentacle formation, maze solving and network creation. In the present paper, we extend the CELL model by spawning multiple CELLs, allowing us to understand the interactions between multiple cells and, in particular, their mobility, merge speed and cytoplasm mixing. We conclude the paper with some notes about applications of our work to modelling the rise of present-day civilization from the early nomadic humans and the spread of trends and information around the world. Our study of the interactions of this unicellular organism should further the understanding of how P. polycephalum communicates and shares information.Major surgery and critical illness produce a potentially life-threatening systemic inflammatory response. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is one of the key physiological systems that counterbalances this systemic inflammation through changes in adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH) and cortisol. These hormones normally exhibit highly correlated ultradian pulsatility with an amplitude modulated by circadian processes. However, these dynamics are disrupted by major surgery and critical illness. In this work, we characterize the inflammatory, ACTH and cortisol responses of patients undergoing cardiac surgery and show that the HPA axis response can be classified into one of three phenotypes single-pulse, two-pulse and multiple-pulse dynamics. We develop a mathematical model of cortisol secretion and metabolism that predicts the physiological mechanisms responsible for these different phenotypes. We show that the effects of inflammatory mediators are important only in the single-pulse pattern in which normal pulsatility is lost-suggesting that this phenotype could be indicative of the greatest inflammatory response.
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