A 65-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease (PD) underwent spine surgery under general anesthesia, 13 hours after the last medication for PD. Postoperatively, negative pressure pulmonary edema developed following upper airway obstruction, a possible complication of PD. Oxygenation improved with high-flow nasal cannula therapy. Continued medication might have prevented such complications.

The on-chip extraction of dynamic information from a scene can be addressed with either frame-based CMOS vision, also called smart image sensors, or with dynamic vision sensors, also known as event cameras. When implemented with a pinned photodiode (PPD) as 4-transistor active pixel sensors (4T-APS) the former brings about the benefit of low temporal noise and dark current but without high dynamic range (HDR). The latter comes with the benefits of HDR and fast event detection rate at a low power consumption. The drawback is the background activity noise, which leads to additional hardware or algorithms to keep it low. In essence, the taxonomy of dynamic information extraction with image sensors is that of global shutter solutions and event cameras, each of which with their pros and cons. This paper digs in such differences and similarities focused on mismatch and noise through a global shutter 4T-APS implementation with local HDR incorporated in 180 nm CMOS technology vs conventional logarithmic event sensors found in the literature.

Abstract In this study, walnut butter was produced by mixing functinal lipids with defatted walnut meal. Three kinds of functional lipids（FL）, medium-chain triglycerides (MCT), diacylglyceroe (DG), and conjugated linoleic acid glycerides (CLA), were used to make functional lipids walnut butter(FLWB) and their physical properties as well as microscopic morphology were compared with commercial walnut butters. The FLWBs were prepared by grinding FL and defatted walnut meal through the ball milling technique. The mixing ratios of FL and defatted walnut meal were 6:4, 6.5:3.5, 7:3. It was found that the fluidity of FLWB was increased with the addition amount of FL, but the particle size of FLWB was decreased with the addition amount of DG or CLA. As the additions of DG and CLA increased from 60% to 70%, the D (4,3) of DG-WB and CLA-WB decreased by 36.23% and 20.88%; the flowability index increased by 15.74% and 168.91%. As the addition of MCT increased from 60% to 70%, there was no significant difference in D (4,3) of MCT-WB, but the flowability index increased by 717.34%. Microrheological properties indicated that both FLWB and commercial walnut butter exhibited viscoelastic characteristics. The rheology showed that the FLWB was non-Newtonian pseudoplastic fluids, which was similar to the commercial walnut butter. The DG-WB and CLA-WB were closer to the commercial walnut butter, compared with MCT walnut butter. The microstructure further indicated that the walnut butter with 65% CLA addition was closer to the commercial walnut butter.

In this paper we study the smoothness properties of solutions to a one-dimensional coupled nonlinear Schrödinger system equations that describes some physical phenomena such as propagation of polarized laser beams in birefringent Kerr medium in nonlinear optics. We show that the equations dispersive nature leads to a gain in regularity for the solution. In particular, if the initial data ( u 0 , v 0 ) possesses certain regularity and sufficient decay as | x|→∞ , then the solution ( u( t) , v( t)) will be smoother than ( u 0 , v 0 ) for 0 ≤ T where T is the existence time of the solution.

Here we describe a male infant with non-immune hydrops fetalis associated with congenital cardiomyopathy diagnosed prenatally. Whole-exome sequencing detected compound heterozygous c.1688+1G>A and p.(Asn759Ilefs*41) variants in the PKP2 gene inherited independently from his asymptomatic parents. Our present case supports the severe phenotype of biallelic inheritance of PKP2 gene pathogenic variants

Thermal adaptation of organisms is a property emerging from the complex interplay of biophysical constraints and selective forces. The shape of thermal performance curves has been well investigated but we lack knowledge of how they may evolve. Two extreme cases can be expected: i) under the hypothesis of local adaptation, species should shift their thermal performance curves and have an optimum at the temperature at which they evolve, or ii) under the hypothesis of thermodynamical constraints, universal biophysical rules dictate a fixed performance curve with an optimum at warm temperatures. We perform an evolutionary experiment to test these two hypotheses on the thermal response of bacteria growth rate, expecting a strong evolutionary response of the thermal performance curve. We use four wild bacterial strains and allow them to evolve at ten different temperatures (ranging from 8.5 to 40°C) to subsequently measure their growth rate at these ten temperatures. We investigate the difference in growth rate between evolved lines and their ancestors. We observe signs of adaptation, as growth rates of evolved and ancestral strains exhibit small but significant differences. Our analysis shows however that the shape of the thermal performance curves does not systematically vary between evolved and ancestral strains, and none of the evolved lines have an optimal growth rate at the evolution temperature. One strain grows significantly faster than its ancestor at the temperature of evolution, but we find that for other strains, evolution leads to faster as well as slower growth rates. These differences are repeated between evolutionary replicates, suggesting they are selected. Our study demonstrates that adaptation does not always overcome thermodynamical constraints on growth rates, and helps to better understand how microbes will respond to temperature changes.

We report a case of a 19-year-old woman,with complaints of neck and shoulder pain with numbness in her hands.The magnetic resonance imaging of the cervical spinal revealed a cystic lesion from C4 to C5 vertebral levels. Finally, after surgical resection, the case was diagnosed as a bronchogenic cys

Context/motivation: Design Thinking techniques have been widely used in software requirements elicitation to understand the necessities of stakeholders and end-users. However, there is a lack of evidence of their effectiveness when applied to vulnerable populations. Question/problem: What are the implications of using Design Thinking techniques to elicit requirements in a community of former inmates - and what would be the benefits of and challenges in this deployment? Principal ideas/results: In this paper, we report our experience of using Design Thinking for Requirements Elicitation of a mobile application, customized for the former inmates of the Brazilian Prison System and their families. Research methods: We applied techniques such as Brainstorming, Stakeholder Mapping, Personas Creation, Rapid Ethnography, and Interviews to obtain relevant data and create several prototypes. Contribution: These techniques contribute to the development of an uncommon application that aims to help the reintegration process of former inmates into society. Our results validate the initial hypothesis that such techniques, when applied to a sensitive context, assist product development that meets the end-users needs by creating a higher-quality product. Limitations: The main limitation of the research was the lack of access to low-literacy end-users and former inmates without previous experience using mobile devices.

Studying Arctic ice formation stays in the focus of research groups over the past decades in the context of ice cover changes, thermal budget and climate agenda in general. Nevertheless, the phenomenon’s underlying mechanisms are still not completely understood and described. The main reason for the lack in understanding is the limited experimental access to the field data, thus there is a need to build competent analogies between the natural (ocean water – ice) and laboratory (binary alloy) conditions of the experiment as a step of data preparation for the verification of the mathematical model. In the current paper the existing qualitative models describing the process of melting and crystallization were expanded and the experimental method was developed copying the layering of the natural ocean water – ice mixture. The experimental set-up for studying the solidification within the intermediate zone was designed for Al-Cu alloys and the corresponding experimental data was used for the development of a binary phase-field model for solidification considering moving boundaries. The model includes the description of the free energy of both phases and their respective diffusion coefficients. It allows modeling of the eutectic alloys and potentially corresponding natural ocean water — ice mixture at a mesoscopic spatial level by including the concentration-driven phase transition. The novel results will help the quantitative understanding of solidification phenomena and are highly-evaluated from interdisciplinary point of view, including glaciology and geosciences, ultimately significant for the understanding the global climate change landscape.

The objective of this research was to investigate the effect of temperature on the glycerolysis-interesterification reaction kinetics of immiscible and high viscous reactants at relatively low temperatures in a high shear reactor (HSR), and their physical product properties. The reaction was performed at various temperatures (80-120°C) and a mixing rate of 2000 rpm for 5 h. Results showed that the reaction rate constant increased and followed the Arrhenius equation as temperature increased. TAG conversion was 2.5 fold greater at 110 and 120°C compared to lower reaction temperatures. MAG and DAG increased by about 18.3% and 13.4%, respectively, as the reaction temperature increased from 80 to 120°C. The product’s melting point, hardness, and color were also improved by increasing temperature. In summary, structured lipids (SLs) synthesis containing high MAG and DAG could be produced at a relatively low temperature (110°C) using HSR, and followed the glycerolysis-interesterification kinetic and Arrhenius model.

JSON is a popular standard for data interchange on the Internet. Ingesting JSON documents can be a performance bottleneck. A popular parsing strategy consists in converting the input text into a tree-based data structure—sometimes called a Document Object Model or DOM. We designed and implemented a novel JSON parsing interface—called On-Demand—that appears to the programmer like a conventional DOM-based approach. However, the underlying implementation is a pointer iterating through the content, only materializing the results (objects, arrays, strings, numbers) lazily. On recent commodity processors, an implementation of our approach provides superior performance in multiple benchmarks. To ensure reproducibility, our work is freely available as open source software.

In the study of sentencing disparities, class related hypotheses have received considerably less attention than explanations based on offenders’ ethnicity. This is unfortunate since the two mechanisms are likely interrelated, at the very least as a result of their overlap in the population, with ethnic minorities being generally more deprived than the White majority. In this registered report we propose exploring the mediating and moderating effects between offenders’ area deprivation and their ethnic background using a novel administrative dataset capturing all offences processed through the England and Wales Crown Court. Specifically, we seek to test two key hypotheses: i) the reported ethnic disparities in sentencing are mediated and explained away by area deprivation; and ii) ethnic disparities are moderated by area deprivation, with ethnic disparities being narrower in the more deprived areas. Results from this empirical analysis will shed new light on the underlying causes of sentencing disparities, but crucially - if deprivation is shown to play a major role in the generation of ethnic disparities - they will also help inform the adequate policy responses to redress this problem.

This paper tried to define the role of vegetation diversity as an environmental factor, which determines functions and services served by water reservoirs ecosystems originated as an effect of land subsidence in post-mining areas. The aim of this study was to conceptualise: i) whether the mining subsidence reservoirs, despite their similar origin, differ in the level of species diversity; ii) whether water and substrate quality and metric characteristics of subsidence pools affect the diversity of vegetation; iii) which functional groups of species contribute to ecosystem services provided by these objects. The study was conducted in Central Europe in the Czech-Polish coal basin. The species composition of vegetation, diversity (species richness ( S), Shannon-Wiener ( H’) and Simpson index ( λ)), participation of dominant species and belonging to functional groups ( FG) was assessed in 10 reservoirs formed in subsidence. The values of services provided by the ecosystems in mining subsidence reservoirs by the indicator method were used. The results showed that despite similar origins subsidence pools differ when it comes to the level of diversity S, H’ and λ. In contrast, there is no difference in terms of the average share of various FG. Vegetation diversity was substantially affected by the size and depth of reservoirs, humidity, C/N ratio, the concentration of P total in the soil, and water clarity. The importance and value of ecosystem services provided by the studied mining subsidence reservoirs and their vicinity were estimated at 647,486.90 [$⋅ ⋅rok -1].

Carcinoma arising in a thyroglossal duct cyst is rare and occurring with concomitant thyroid carcinoma even more so. We discuss a case of a man in his 50s with congenital blindness with papillary thyroid carcinoma of a thyroglossal duct cyst and the thyroid and the treatment considerations

Streamflow depletion is occurring globally, due to land use change, climate change, and increasing human water demand. Ecological effects of low flows are particularly significant for diadromous fish, which require connected stream networks to migrate between fresh and marine waters. In coastal California, USA, drying streams are known to limit rearing habitat for juvenile salmon, but effects on their seaward migration remain poorly understood. In this study, we evaluated the outmigration of endangered, juvenile coho salmon ( Oncorhynchus kisutch) during the late spring flow recession in four streams over 10 years. We monitored the outmigration of fish tagged with passive integrated transponders via detections at stationary antennas, and we measured stream water depths when movement was detected. We assessed depths at multiple riffle crest thalwegs (RCTs), the shallowest geomorphic feature that fish must navigate. Finally, we calculated population-level outmigration depth preferences by evaluating depths during fish movement, relative to depths available during the potential outmigration window. Juvenile fish moved over a wide range of depths (interquartile range 6.1–18.0 cm), which varied by year and stream. Fish ceased to move at shallow water depths, which limited late-season outmigration as stream drying occurred. Our findings suggest that management actions to increase streamflow during the spring would benefit salmon outmigration and could contribute to population recovery. Streamflow-RCT depth relationships, used to assess coho depth preferences during movement, is a relatively simple and effective method for assessing environmental flow needs, a priority for aquatic conservation in California and globally.

Reinforced concrete Structures are subjected to temperature changes daily and seasonal this is besides the live and dead loads applied to the building the changes in the temperature consequently produce temperature loads due to their interaction with the surrounding environment as well as the solar radiation exposure of the building. Such temperature loadings consequently lead to thermal stresses in most structural elements. These thermal loads will produce thermal stresses that can be considered comparable to or sometimes exceed the stresses of the dead and live loading due to insufficient thermal insulation which may lead to severe structural elements damage if it is not considered in the design phase. This paper presents a study of the effect of thermal loads on multi-story RC. buildings in Saudi Arabia with fixed and hinged support constraints with and without bracing system under seismic loads on sloped terrain. RC. buildings have a high vulnerability when designed on sloped terrains due to the mass and vertical irregularity that will increase the values of shear forces and torsional moments on the building. This work attempts to study the building's behavior on sloped terrain under the effect of thermal loads using ETABS V18.1. Etabs Models were analyzed to present the effect of thermal loads concentrating on the displacement, drift, deformations, and base shear.

The paper deals with the development of 2-link lower limb extremity manipulator for rehabilitation purposes in bio-medical engineering. The musculoskeletal modeling was performed on the collected human gait data to obtain the joint angles and driving force values for hip and knee movement. The results obtained from the proposed controller were verified using Matlab-Simulink. The robust adaptive RBF neural network and fuzzy sliding mode controller were developed to track the desired trajectory. The OpenSim software was utilized to perform inverse kinematics and inverse dynamics on the musculoskeletal model which is scaled according to the physical dimensions of the experimental subject. The simulation results stated that SMC-RBF network has better tracking rate, less chattering problems and handle unknown uncertainties well. Finally, the results obtained were compared with the existing method with the help of performance index parameters to prove their effectiveness.

Polycythemia vera (PV) associated pruritus is recognized as the most excruciating aspect of the disease. However, knowledge of pathophysiology, frequency, and precise character of PV-associated pruritus is limited. Ruxolitinib presented an encouraging and promising outcome in managing PV-related pruritus, especially in patients with symptoms refractory to other treatment modalities.