Immersive virtual reality (VR) has been identified as a potentially revolutionary tool for psychological interventions. This study reviews current advances in immersive VR-based therapies for mental disorders. VR has the potential to make psychiatric treatments better and more cost-effective and to make them available to a larger group of patients. However, this may require a new generation of VR

Background: Patients with generalized social anxiety disorder (SAD) avoid various social situations and can be reluctant to engage in in vivo exposure therapy. Highly personalized practising can be required before patients are ready to perform in vivo exposure. Virtual reality-based therapy could be beneficial for this group.Aims: To assess the feasibility and potential effect of virtual reality-b

Background: Antipsychotic medication is effective for symptomatic treatment in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. After symptom remission, continuation of antipsychotic treatment is associated with lower relapse rates and lower symptom severity compared to dose reduction/discontinuation. Therefore, most guidelines recommend continuation of treatment with antipsychotic medication for at least 1 year

Over the last two decades, there has been a huge increase in our understanding of microbial diversity, structure and composition enabled by high-throughput sequencing technologies. Yet, it is unclear how the number of sequences translates to the number of cells or species within the community. In some cases, additional observational data may be required to ensure relative abundance patterns from s

Today, social media offers new possible tools for organizing and spreading political messages than in the past, changing the way activism can take shape and thereby producing new forms of records. These records make up an important part of today’s history and therefore should be preserved for the future. However, despite the possibilities that social media offers, commercial social media platforms

Preconcentration of methane (CH4) from air is a critical sampling step in the measurement of singly and doubly substituted isotopologue ratios. We demonstrate the potential for isotope fractionation during preconcentration onto and elution from the common trapping material HayeSep-D and investigate its significance in laser spectroscopy measurements. By altering the trapping temperature for adsorp

Recently, a newly developed family of decoders named as Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoder (GRAND) has been gaining attention. The key idea of the decoder is to look for the most probable error vectors that interacted with the transmitted message, producing the received block. Among the different variations of the algorithm, the soft-input soft-output (SISO) decoder, known as SO-GRAND, emerges

This thesis focuses on the development of an image stabilization system for body-worn cameras. Body-worn cameras are frequently used in dynamic situations, exposing them to intense movements. Capturing sharp, high-quality footage in these conditions requires effective image stabilization systems. This investigation involved mapping the nature of the disturbances experienced by the body-worn camera

Froth flotation is a common unit operation used in mineral processing. It serves to separate valuable mineral particles from worthless gangue particles in finely ground ores. The valuable mineral particles are hydrophobic and attach to bubbles of air injected into the pulp. This creates bubble-particle aggregates that rise to the top of the flotation column where they accumulate to a froth or foam

For initial value problems associated with operator-valued Riccati differential equations posed in the space of Hilbert–Schmidt operators existence of solutions is studied. An existence result known for algebraic Riccati equations is generalized and used to obtain the existence of a solution to the approximation of the problem via a backward Euler scheme. Weak and strong convergence of the sequenc

Intra-islet crosstalk has become a focus area to fully understand the regulation of insulin secretion and impaired β-cell function in type 2 diabetes (T2D). Here, we put forward evidence for insulin-like growth factor binding protein 7 (IGFBP7) as a potential protein involved in autocrine and paracrine β-cell regulation. We showed presence of IGFBP7 in granules of both human α- and β-cells and mea

Metabolism plays a crucial role in an animal’s life as it determines the amount of energy that can be allocated to growth, reproduction, and survival. The strategies an individual adopts to manage its energy budget have direct consequences to its fitness. How an animal allocates its energy will determine whether it can ensure its own survival while having a high reproductive success or neglect one

According to the nearly-neutral theory of evolution, the relative strengths of selection and drift shift in favour of drift at small population sizes. Numerous studies have analysed the effect of bottlenecks and small population sizes on genetic diversity in the MHC, which plays a central role in pathogen recognition and immune defense and is thus considered a model example for the study of adapti