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A new scalable and also highly immunogenic virus-like particle-based vaccine versus SARS-CoV-2.
Cellulose and lignocellulose nanofibrils were extracted from pistachio shells utilizing environmentally friendly pulping and totally chlorine-free bleaching. The extracted nanofibers were used to elaborate nanopaper, a continuous film made by gravimetric entanglement of the nanofibers and hot-pressed to enhance intramolecular bonding. The elaborated nanopapers were analyzed through their mechanical, optical, and surface properties to evaluate the influence of non-cellulosic macromolecules on the final properties of the nanopaper. Results have shown that the presence of lignin augmented the viscoelastic properties of the nanopapers by ≈25% compared with fully bleached nanopaper; moreover, the hydrophobicity of the lignocellulose nanopaper was achieved, as the surface free energy was diminished from 62.65 to 32.45 mNm-1 with an almost non-polar component and a water contact angle of 93.52°. On the other hand, the presence of lignin had an apparent visual effect on the color of the nanopapers, with a ΔE of 51.33 and a ΔL of -44.91, meaning a substantial darkening of the film. However, in terms of ultraviolet transmittance, the presence of lignin resulted in a practically nonexistent transmission in the UV spectra, with low transmittance in the visible wavelengths. see more In general, the presence of lignin resulted in the enhancement of selected properties which are desirable for packaging materials, which makes pistachio shell nano-lignocellulose an attractive option for this field.Emerging data demonstrate the important roles of altered gut microbiomes (dysbiosis) in many disease states in the peripheral tissues and the central nervous system. Gut dysbiosis with decreased ratios of Bacteroidetes/Firmicutes and other changes are reported to be caused by many disease states and various environmental factors, such as ethanol (e.g., alcohol drinking), Western-style high-fat diets, high fructose, etc. It is also caused by genetic factors, including genetic polymorphisms and epigenetic changes in different individuals. Gut dysbiosis, impaired intestinal barrier function, and elevated serum endotoxin levels can be observed in human patients and/or experimental rodent models exposed to these factors or with certain disease states. However, gut dysbiosis and leaky gut can be normalized through lifestyle alterations such as increased consumption of healthy diets with various fruits and vegetables containing many different kinds of antioxidant phytochemicals. In this review, we describe the mechanisms of gut dysbiosis, leaky gut, endotoxemia, and fatty liver disease with a specific focus on the alcohol-associated pathways. We also mention translational approaches by discussing the benefits of many antioxidant phytochemicals and/or their metabolites against alcohol-mediated oxidative stress, gut dysbiosis, intestinal barrier dysfunction, and fatty liver disease.Realizing autonomic management control loops is pivotal for achieving self-driving networks. Some studies have recently evidence the feasibility of using Automated Planning (AP) to carry out these loops. However, in practice, the use of AP is complicated since network administrators, who are non-experts in Artificial Intelligence, need to define network management policies as AP-goals and combine them with the network status and network management tasks to obtain AP-problems. AP planners use these problems to build up autonomic solutions formed by primitive tasks that modify the initial network state to achieve management goals. Although recent approaches have investigated transforming network management policies expressed in specific languages into low-level configuration rules, transforming these policies expressed in natural language into AP-goals and, subsequently, build up AP-based autonomic management loops remains unexplored. This paper introduces a novel approach, called NORA, to automatically generate AP-problems by translating Goal Policies expressed in natural language into AP-goals and combining them with both the network status and the network management tasks. NORA uses Natural Language Processing as the translation technique and templates as the combination technique to avoid network administrators to learn policy languages or AP-notations. We used a dataset containing Goal Policies to evaluate the NORA's prototype. The results show that NORA achieves high precision and spends a short-time on generating AP-problems, which evinces NORA aids to overcome barriers to using AP in autonomic network management scenarios.Harringtonolide (HO), a natural product isolated from Cephalotaxus harringtonia, exhibits potent antiproliferative activity. However, little information has been reported on the systematic structure-activity relationship (SAR) of HO derivatives. Modifications on tropone, lactone, and allyl positions of HO (1) were carried out to provide 17 derivatives (2-13, 11a-11f). The in vitro antiproliferative activity against four cancer cell lines (HCT-116, A375, A549, and Huh-7) and one normal cell line (L-02) was tested. Amongst these novel derivatives, compound 6 exhibited comparable cell growth inhibitory activity to HO and displayed better selectivity index (SI = 56.5) between Huh-7 and L-02 cells. The SAR results revealed that the tropone and lactone moieties are essential for the cytotoxic activities, which provided useful suggestions for further structural optimization of HO.Restrictions of free movement have been proven effective in tackling the spread of COVID-19 disease. However, sensitive populations submitted to longer periods of restrictions may experience detrimental effects in significant areas of their lifestyle, such as sexual activity. This study examines sexual activity during the COVID-19 confinement in Spain. A survey distributed through an institutional social media profile served to collect data, whereas chi-squared tests, t-tests, analyses of variance, and multiple logistic regression analysis were used to assess differences among sample subgroups. A total of 71.3% adults (N = 536) (72.8% female) reported engaging in sexual activity with a weekly average of 2.39 times (SD = 1.80), with significant differences favoring males, middle age, married/in a domestic relationship (p less then 0.001), employed (p less then 0.005), medium-high annual household income, living outside the Iberian Peninsula, and smoking and alcohol consumption. Analyses adjusted for the complete set of control variables showed significant odds for a lower prevalence of weekly sexual activity in women (OR = 0.
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