Affective

In the more than 2 years since its emergence, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has prompted important changes in healthcare systems and their organization. The aim of this study is to determine the implications in specialized thoracic surgery training as well as the repercussions on thoracic surgery residents. With this objective, the Spanish Society of Thoracic Surgery has conducted a survey among all its trainees and those who had finished their residency during the last 3 years. It consisted of 24 multiple-answer closed questions about the impact of the pandemic on their services, their training, and their personal experience...

The world economy, and SMEs in particular, have been hit hard by the COVID-19 epidemic. SME finance issues are becoming a significant focus of policymakers and academics. This research uses private companies as a sample to analyze how COVID-19 affected SME finance. We examine critical factors such as business size, leverage, profitability, liquidity, and the influence of COVID-19. Our research shows that the pandemic has had a significant, detrimental impact on funding for small and medium-sized businesses...

Urban environments contribute substantially to the rising burden of cardiometabolic diseases worldwide. Cities are complex adaptive systems that continually exchange resources, shaping exposures relevant to human health such as air pollution, noise, and chemical exposures. In addition, urban infrastructure and provisioning systems influence multiple domains of health risk, including behaviors, psychological stress, pollution, and nutrition through various pathways (eg, physical inactivity, air pollution, noise, heat stress, food systems, the availability of green space, and contaminant exposures)...

Recently, gender-ambiguous (nonbinary) voices have been added to voice assistants to combat gender stereotypes and foster inclusion. However, if people react negatively to such voices, these laudable efforts may be counterproductive. In five preregistered studies ( N = 3,684 adult participants) we found that people do react negatively, rating products described by narrators with gender-ambiguous voices less favorably than when they are described by clearly male or female narrators. The voices create a feeling of unease, or social disfluency , that affects evaluations of the products being described...

Post-transcriptional regulation by small RNAs and post-translational modifications (PTM) such as lysine acetylation play fundamental roles in physiological circuits, offering rapid responses to environmental signals with low energy consumption. Yet, the interplay between these regulatory systems remains underexplored. Here, we unveil the cross-talk between sRNAs and lysine acetylation in Streptococcus mutans, a primary cariogenic pathogen known for its potent acidogenic virulence. Through systematic overexpression of sRNAs in S...

African swine fever (ASF) is an acute, hemorrhagic, and severe infectious disease caused by the ASF virus (ASFV). ASFV has evolved multiple strategies to escape host antiviral immune responses. Here, we reported that ASFV pB318L, a trans-geranylgeranyl-diphosphate synthase, reduced the expression of type I interferon (IFN-I) and IFN-stimulated genes (ISGs). Mechanically, pB318L not only interacted with STING to reduce the translocation of STING from the endoplasmic reticulum to the Golgi apparatus but also interacted with IFN receptors to reduce the interaction of IFNAR1/TYK2 and IFNAR2/JAK1...

LGBTQ+ undergraduates have higher attrition from science and engineering (S&E) than straight and cisgender undergraduates and perceive that having LGBTQ+ instructors would benefit them. However, it is unknown how many S&E instructors are LGBTQ+, the extent to which they disclose this information to students, and how disclosure affects all students, both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+. In study I, we surveyed 108 LGBTQ+ S&E instructors across the U.S. to explore the extent to which they reveal their LGBTQ+ identities across professional contexts and why they reveal or conceal their identities to undergraduates...

INTRODUCTION: Central nervous system excitability depends on the task performed, muscle group solicited, and contraction type. However, little is known on corticospinal and motoneuronal excitability measured during locomotor exercise. This study aimed at determining the reliability of motor-evoked potentials (MEP) and thoracic motor-evoked potentials (TMEP) in dynamic mode during unfatiguing and fatiguing cycling exercise. METHODS: Twenty-two participants completed four visits...

Affective brain-computer interfaces (aBCIs) have garnered widespread applications, with remarkable advancements in utilizing electroencephalogram (EEG) technology for emotion recognition. However, the time-consuming process of annotating EEG data, inherent individual differences, non-stationary characteristics of EEG data, and noise artifacts in EEG data collection pose formidable challenges in developing subject-specific cross-session emotion recognition models. To simultaneously address these challenges, we propose a unified pre-training framework based on multi-scale masked autoencoders (MSMAE), which utilizes large-scale unlabeled EEG signals from multiple subjects and sessions to extract noise-robust, subject-invariant, and temporal-invariant features...

PURPOSE: Healthcare providers are under pressure due to increasing and more complex demands for services. Increased pressure on budgets and human resources adds to an ever-growing problem set. Competent leaders are in demand to ensure effective and well-performing healthcare organisations that deliver balanced results and high-quality services. Researchers have made significant efforts to identify and define determining competencies for healthcare leadership. Broad terms such as competence are, however, inherently at risk of becoming too generic to add analytical value...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with a wide range of health problems and health-compromising behaviors, including drug use, but are understudied in sub-Saharan Africa. Further, some data suggest that some types of ACEs are more strongly associated with outcomes than others. We investigated associations between different types of ACEs and recent drug use among 2,011 women living in Katsina State, Nigeria. This community-based survey included questions on ACE exposure, modifiable individual-level risk and promotive factors, and past-year drug use...

Trimethylamine N -oxide (TMAO) as a representative natural osmolyte has received much attention because of its unique properties, including enhancement of hydrogen bonding networks in liquid water and stabilization of three-dimensional structures of proteins in living organisms. As a hydrogen bond maker and/or a protein stabilizer, its hydrated structures and orientation dynamics in aqueous solutions have been investigated by various spectroscopic methods. Particularly, distinct from other natural osmolytes, it has been found that TMAO molecules form complexes with water molecules even at low concentrations, showing extraordinarily long lifetimes and much larger effective dipole moments...

The area of drug delivery systems has witnessed significant advancements in recent years, with a particular focus on improving efficacy, stability, and patient compliance. Transdermal drug delivery offers numerous benefits compared to conventional methods of drug administration through the skin. It helps in avoiding gastric irritation, hepatic first-pass metabolism, and gastric degradation of the drug. It bypasses the gastrointestinal tract, eliminating the risk of first-pass metabolism and allowing drugs to be administered without being affected by pH, enzymes, or intestinal bacteria...

Bergamot essential oil shows anxiolytic-relaxant effects devoid of sedative action and motor impairment typical of benzodiazepines. Considering the potential for clinical of these effects, it is important to understand the underlying mechanisms of the phytocomplex. Modulation of glutamate group I and II metabotropic receptors is involved in stress and anxiety disorders, in cognition and emotions and increases locomotor activity and wakefulness. Interestingly, early data indicate that bergamot essential oil modulates glutamatergic transmission in specific manifestations of the central nervous system...

Glomerella leaf spot (GLS), a fungal disease caused by Colletotrichum fructicola, severely affects apple (Malus domestica) quality and yield. In this study, we found that the transcription factor MdWRKY71 was significantly induced by C. fructicola infection in the GLS-susceptible apple cultivar Royal Gala. The overexpression of MdWRKY71 in apple leaves resulted in increased susceptibility to C. fructicola, whereas RNA interference of MdWRKY71 in leaves showed the opposite phenotypes. These findings suggest that MdWRKY71 functions as a susceptibility factor for the apple-C...

Several inflammatory diseases are characterized by a disruption in the equilibrium between the host and its microbiome. Due to the increase in resistance, the use of antibiotics for the widespread, nonspecific killing of microorganisms is at risk. Pro-microbial approaches focused on stimulating or introducing beneficial species antagonistic toward pathobionts may be a viable alternative for restoring the host-microbiome equilibrium. Unfortunately, not all potential probiotic or synbiotic species and even subspecies (to strain level) are equally effective for the designated pathology, leading to conflicting accounts of their efficacy...

Genome-wide association studies have identified more than 290 single nucleotide variants (SNVs) associated with prostate cancer. These SNVs can be combined to generate a Polygenic Risk Score (PRS), which estimates an individual's risk to develop prostate cancer. Identifying individuals at higher risk for prostate cancer using PRS could allow for personalized screening recommendations, improve current screening tools, and potentially result in improved survival rates, but more research is needed before incorporating them into clinical use...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a multifactorial, pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder affecting 1 in 36 children in the United States. Given the rising prevalence and significant economic and social costs associated with ASD, it is critical that continued efforts be made towards better understanding the underlying etiology as well as management of the condition and its commonly associated comorbidities. It has been estimated that upwards of 70% of children with ASD have a positive history of gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms...

PURPOSE: In our study, considering the clinical parameters we aimed to determine the most appropriate treatment approach for symptomatic gestational hydronephrosis and conditions requiring DJS insertion. METHODS: Our study was a retrospective cross-sectional study and 137 patients were included. The patients were divided into two groups: those with conservative follow-up and those with DJS. Demographic and clinical data, the degree of HUN detected in urinary ultrasonography and the anteroposterior diameter of the renal pelvis were evaluated...

UNLABELLED: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is immune-mediated, inflammatory disease that affects synovial joints, and characterized by inflammatory changes in synovial tissue, cartilage, bone, and less commonly in extra-articular structures. Docetaxel (DTX) is a semi-synthetic anti-neoplastic medication. Peptidyl-arginine deiminase type 4 (PAD4) is expressed in macrophages and neutrophils in RA synovial membrane. Their effectiveness is in producing anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies (ACPA)-targeted citrullinated neoepitopes...