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Phenotypic plasticity being a result in as well as results of populace character.
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is responsible for COVID-19 pneumonia, a pandemic that precipitates huge pressures on the world's social and economic systems. Disease severity varies among individuals. SARS-CoV-2 infection can be associated with e.g. flu-like symptoms, dyspnoea, severe interstitial pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome, multiorgan dysfunction, and generalized coagulopathy. Nitric oxide (NO), is a small signal molecule that impacts pleiotropic functions in human physiology, which can be involved in the significant effects of COVID-19 infection. NO is a neurotransmitter involved in the neural olfactory processes in the central nervous system, and some infected patients have reported anosmia as a symptom. Additionally, NO is a well-known vasodilator, important coagulation mediator, anti-microbial effector and inhibitor of SARS-CoV replication. Exhaled NO is strongly related to the type-2 inflammatory response found in asthma, which has been suggested to be protective against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Several reports indicate that the use of inhaled NO has been an effective therapy during this pandemic since the ventilation-perfusion ratio in COVID-19 patients improved afterwards and they did not require mechanical ventilation. The aim of this mini-review is to summarize relevant actions of NO that could be beneficial in the treatment of COVID-19.Radioactive ion beams combined with in-beam positron emission tomography (PET) enable accurate in situ beam range verification in heavy ion therapy. However, the energy spread of the radioactive beams generated as secondary beams is wider than that of conventional stable heavy ion beams which causes Bragg peak region and distal falloff region broadening. Therefore, the energy spread of the radioactive ion beams should be measured carefully for their quality control. Here, we proposed an optical imaging technique for the energy spread estimation of radioactive oxygen ion beams. A polymethyl methacrylate phantom (10.0 × 10.0 × 9.9 cm3) was irradiated with an 15O beam (mean energy = 247.7 MeV/u, sigma = 6.8 MeV/u) in the Heavy Ion Medical Accelerator in Chiba. Three different momentum acceptances of 1%, 2% and 4% were used to get energy spreads of 1.9 MeV/u, 3.4 MeV/u and 5.5 MeV/u, respectively. The in-beam luminescence light and offline beam Cerenkov light images were acquired with an optical system consisting of a lens and a cooled CCD camera. To estimate energy spread of the 15O ion beams, we proposed three optical parameters 1) distal-50% falloff length of the prompt luminescence signals; 2) full-width at half maximum of the Cerenkov light signals in the beam direction; and 3) positional difference between the peaks of the Cerenkov light and the luminescence signals. Microbiology inhibitor These parameters estimated the energy spread with the respective mean squared errors of 2.52×10-3 MeV/u , 5.91×10-3 MeV/u, and 0.182 MeV/u. The distal-50% falloff length of the luminescence signals provided the lowest mean squared error among the optical parameters. From the findings, we concluded optical imaging using luminescence and Cerenkov light signals offers an accurate energy spread estimation of 15O ion beams. In the future, the proposed optical parameters will be used for energy spread estimation of other radioactive ion beams as well as stable ion beams.All inorganic layer-by-layer (LbL) thin films composed by TiO2 nanoparticles and [Al(OH)4]- anions (TiO2/AlOx) as well as Al2O3 and Nb2O5 nanoparticles (Al2O3/Nb2O5) have been deposited to FTO surfaces and applied as blocking layers in DSCs. Structural and morphological characterization of the LbL films by different techniques reveal that in TiO2/AlOx assembly, aluminate anions undergo condensation reactions on the TiO2 surface leading to the formation of highly homogeneous films with unique optical properties. After 25 depositions transmittance losses below 10% in relation to the bare FTO substrate are observed. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy shows that TiO2/AlOx layers impose an effective barrier for the charge recombination at FTO/electrolyte interface with an electron exchange time constant 50-fold higher than that for bare FTO. As a result, an improvement of 85% in the overall conversion efficiency of DSCs was observed with the employment of TiO2/AlOx blocking layers. Al2O3/Nb2O5 LbL films can also work as blocking layers in DSCs but not as efficient, which is associated with the poor homogeneity of the film and its capacitive behavior. The production of cost-effective blocking layers with a low light scattering in the visible region is an important feature towards the application of DSC in other Building-integrated photovoltaic applications.Nearly 80% of human chronic infections are caused due to bacterial biofilm formation. The increased resistance against the conventional antimicrobial agents makes it difficult to treat the biofilm-related infections. The antibiotics resistance developed by planktonic cells has also become a major threat for human. Therefore, we have attempted here to develop an effective alternative strategy to overcome the issues of antibiotics resistance of bacteria. Upon synthesis, biogenic C-dots were combined with lysozymes which were further encapsulated into chitosan nanocarrier to form C-dots carrier (CDC). The as-synthesized C-dots were found irregular shaped and the average size of C-dots and CDC were 8 ± 2 nm and 450 ± 50 nm, respectively. To ensure secure and targeted delivery of C-dots and lysozyme we have employed chitosan, a biodegradable and natural biopolymer, as a delivery system. The study of time-dependent bacterial growth and flow cytometry analysis demonstrated that CDC can exhibit a synergistic bactericidal activity against the antibiotics resistant recombinant E. coli cells. Further, we have shown that the CDC could be a potent agent for both prevention of biofilm formation and eradication of preformed biofilm. In addition, we have observed that our drug delivery system is hemocompatible in nature making it suitable for in vivo applications. Therefore, we believe that the combination therapy of C-dots and lysozyme may be used as an excellent antibacterial and antibiofilm strategy.Due to the inter- and intra- variation of respiratory motion, it is highly desired to provide real-time volumetric images during the treatment delivery of lung stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) for accurate and active motion management. In this proof-of-concept study, we propose a novel generative adversarial network integrated with perceptual supervision to derive instantaneous volumetric images from a single 2D projection. Our proposed network, named TransNet, consists of three modules, i.e. encoding, transformation and decoding modules. Rather than only using image distance loss between the generated 3D images and the ground truth 3D CT images to supervise the network, perceptual loss in feature space is integrated into loss function to force the TransNet to yield accurate lung boundary. Adversarial supervision is also used to improve the realism of generated 3D images. We conducted a simulation study on 20 patient cases, who had received lung SBRT treatments in our institution and undergone 4D-CTmotion amplitude and tumor shrinkage, and achieved acceptable results. Our experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of our 2D-to-3D method for lung cancer patients, which provides a potential solution for in-treatment real-time on-board volumetric imaging for tumor tracking and dose delivery verification to ensure the effectiveness of lung SBRT treatment.The exchange interaction is investigated theoretically for electrons confined to a 2D sample placed in a linearly varying magnetic field perpendicular to the plane. Unusual and interesting behavior is predicted starting from zero electrons, as one adds electrons to the system the maximum distance an electron can travel transverse to the B z = 0 line (i.e. the system's width) increases continuously but this width will subsequently begin shrinking at some critical number. However this collapse will be reversed as the number crosses another critical value, which we estimate here. For electron parameters typical for two dimensional electron gases, the instability could be observable at sufficiently low electron densities. A Hartree Fock equation is derived. We also show that in an appropriate asymptotic limit this leads to an approximately local potential. One key lesson is that the exchange interaction is large and cannot be reasonably excluded from any valid theoretical investigation.The biomass-derived materials emerged as novel, low-cost, green, and light-weight microwave absorbers. On the other hand, the sulfide nanostructures due to narrow band gap demonstrated significant dielectric features. In this research, the pure carbon microfibers were prepared using Erodium cicutarium harvest and they were functionalized by a sonochemistry method. The treated microfibers were coated by Bi2S3 nanoparticles, obtained by a novel modified solvothermal route. X-ray powder diffraction, Fourier transform infrared, diffuse reflection spectroscopy, field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), transmission electron microscopy, and vector network analyzer analyses were applied to characterize the features of the prepared structures. The obtained results manifest that the anchoring nanoparticles onto the functionalized microfibers narrowed band gap to 1.35 eV and reinforced polarizability of the nanocomposite, desirable for dielectric attenuation. In this study, the interfacial interactions were modulated using polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and polyvinylidene fluoride. Interestingly, FCMF blended in PAN demonstrated an eye-catching efficient bandwidth as wide as 8.13 GHz (RL > 10 dB) with only 2.00 mm in thickness, whereas it illustrated an outstanding reflection loss of 81.96 at 11.48 GHz with a thickness of 2.50 mm. More significantly, FCMF/Bi2S3/PAN nanocomposite promoted the efficient bandwidth to 3.07 GHz (RL > 20 dB). Noteworthy, all of the samples illustrated total electromagnetic interference shielding effectiveness (SET) more than 15 dB entire the x and ku-band frequency.The design and testing of a prototype Multi-X-ray-source Array (MXA) for digital breast tomosynthesis is reported. The MXA is comprised of an array of tungsten filament cathodes with focus cup grid-controlled modulation and a common rotating anode housed in a single vacuum envelope. Prototypes consisting of arrays of three-source elements and eleven-source-elements were fabricated and evaluated. The prototype sources demonstrated focal spot sizes of 0.3 mm at 45 kV with 50 mA. Measured x-ray spectra were consistent with the molybdenum anode employed, and the tube output (air kerma) was between 0.6 mGy/100 mAs at 20 kV and 17 mGy/100 mAs at 45 kV with a distance of 100 cm. HVL measurements ranged from 0.5 mm Al at 30 kV to 0.8 mm Al at 45 kV, and x-ray pulse widths were varied from 20 ms to 110 ms at operating frequencies ultimately to be limited by source turn-on/off times of ∼1 ms. Initial results of reconstructed tomographic data are presented.Currently, it is still unclear how and to what extent a change in temperature impacts the relative contributions of coherent and incoherent phonons to thermal transport in superlattices. Some seemingly conflicting computational and experimental observations of the temperature dependence of lattice thermal conductivity make the coherent-incoherent thermal transport behaviors in superlattices even more elusive. In this work, we demonstrate that incoherent phonon contribution to thermal transport in superlattices increases as the temperature increases due to elevated inelastic interfacial transmission. On the other hand, the coherent phonon contribution decreases at higher temperatures due to elevated anharmonic scattering. The competition between these two conflicting mechanisms can lead to different trends of lattice thermal conductivity as temperature increases, i.e. increasing, decreasing, or non-monotonic. Finally, we demonstrate that the neural network-based machine learning model can well capture the coherent-incoherent transition of lattice thermal transport in the superlattice, which can greatly aid the understanding and optimization of thermal transport properties of superlattices.
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