Upcycling is a process in which used or waste products and materials are repaired, reused, repurposed, refurbished, upgraded and remanufactured in a creative way to add value to the compositional elements. It has been part of human life throughout history, and the past few years have seen its revival, driven by multiple factors including growing concern for the environment and resource scarcity. U

The intensification of agricultural practices throughout the twentieth century has had large detrimental effects on biodiversity and these are likely to increase as the human population rises, with consequent pressure on land. To offset these negative impacts, agri-environment schemes have been widely implemented, offering financial incentives for land-owners to create or maintain favourable habit

Charge transfer (CT) at avoided crossings of excited ionized states of argon dimers is observed using a two-color pump-probe experiment at the free-electron laser in Hamburg (FLASH). The process is initiated by the absorption of three 27-eV-photons from the pump pulse, which leads to the population of Ar2+*-Ar states. Due to nonadiabatic coupling between these one-site doubly ionized states and tw

Insulin release and the content of cAMP were studied in microdissected pancreatic islets of non inbred ob/ob (obese) mice. In the absence of 3 isobutyl 1 methylxanthine, a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, 20 mM glucose had no effect on cAMP save a very small initial rise detectable by a freeze stop perifusion technique only. However, combined with this methylxanthine, 20 mM glucose produced significan

Body acceleration due to heartbeat-induced reaction forces can be measured as mobile phone accelerometer (m-ACC) signals. Our aim was to test the feasibility of using m-ACC to detect changes induced by stress by ultra-short heart rate variability (USV) indices (standard deviation of normal-to-normal interval-SDNN and root mean square of successive differences-RMSSD). Sixteen healthy volunteers wer

Pancreatic islets rich in β cells and microdissected from noninbred ob/ob mice contained about 15 pmol sialic acid per μg dry weight as determined by a microversion of the Warren thiobarbituric acid method. Removal of half of the sialic acid by treatment with Clostridium perfringens neuraminidase had no effect on the islet content of insulin, moderately inhibited glucose oxidation, and resulted in

Chloromercuribenzene-p-sulphonic acid (0.1 mM) or 5,5′-dithiobis-(2-nitrobenzoic acid) (1 mM) alone had no effect on cyclic AMP in microdissected pancreatic islets of non-inbred ob/ob mice. In the presence of 1 mM 3-isobutyl-1-methylxanthine, the mercurial increased and the disulphide decreased the cyclic AMP content. Both sulphydryl reagents stimulated insulin release whether 3-isobutyl-1-methylx

Treatment of pancreatic islets from ob/ob-mice with bacterial neuraminidase (0.8 to 40 mU/ml) resulted in a significant decrease of the sialic acid content and of the secretory response to glucose. The inhibitory effect on the glucose stimulated insulin release was reproduced with different batches of neuraminidase from Clostridium perfringens and Vibrio cholera. Treatment with neuraminidase affec

4-Acetamido-4′-isothiocyanostilbene-2,2′-disulphonic acid (SITS), an amino-reacting probe of plasma membranes, stimulated the release of insulin from micro-dissected pancreatic islets of ob/ob-mice. This effect of SITS was inhibited by adrenaline or by calcium deficiency. SITS did not inhibit the insulin-releasing action of glucose or leucine but rather potentiated the effect of glucose. In contra

Objective: To summarize recently published key articles on the topics of biomedical engineering, biotechnology and new models in relation to otitis media (OM). Data sources: Electronic databases: PubMed, Ovid Medline, Cochrane Library and Clinical Evidence (BMJ Publishing). Review methods: Articles on biomedical engineering, biotechnology, material science, mechanical and animal models in OM publi

IntroductionNasopharyngeal cultures are commonly used to determine the causative bacteria in upper airway infections. However, several bacteria can occupy the nasopharynx simultaneously and most healthy children are asymptomatic carriers of presumptive pathogens. This makes the interpretation of nasopharyngeal cultures difficult. Knowledge about which bacteria reside in the nasopharynx can assist

To extend an available mono-objective optimization method to multi-objective/multi-disciplinary optimization, the construction of a suitable integral objective function (in gradient based deterministic method-DM) or fitness function (in genetic algorithm-GA) is important. An auto-adjusting weighted object optimization (AWO) method in DM is suggested to improve the available weighted sum method (li

An article about the reasons behind the gun violence in Sweden.

Polyvinyl alcohol/cellulose nanofibers hybrid aerogel was prepared under freeze drying method. To improve the aerogels' anti-combustion performance, 0.8 wt% microencapsulated ammonium polyphosphate (MCAPP) was loaded as the flame retardant. Aerogels with extremely low density (~0.06 g/cm3) and excellent mechanical performance (Young's modulus: 1.045 MPa) can be obtained. The resulted aerogel also

In this work, we perform large eddy simulations (LES) to study the influence of variable viscosity and thermal conductivity on forced convection in a non-isothermal channel flow. To prevent thermal dilatational effect, the gas density is assumed to be constant. The temperature ratio T2/T1 is varied from 1.01 to 2.2, where T2 and T1 are the temperatures of hot and cold walls, respectively. The mean