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In this study, the authors engineer a cost-effective and bio-friendly water purification system using limestone, denitrifying bacteria, and sulfate-reducing bacteria. They evaluated its efficacy with samples from Eastern PA industrial sites.

In this study, the authors share their work on improving the frame rate of videos to reduce data sent to users with both 2D and 3D footage. This work helps improve the experience for both types of footage!

In this study, the authors survey middle and high school students in different states in the U.S. to evaluate stress levels, learning experiences, and activity levels during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this study, the authors use quantitative digit ratio measurements and a survey of personality traits to evaluate the potential relationship between sex and levels of conscientiousness.

Food spoilage leads to a significant loss in agricultural produce each year. Here, the authors investigate whether certain essential oils can protect against fungus-mediated spoilage of fruits and vegetables. Their results suggest that the compounds they tested might indeed inhibit fungal growth, at various temperatures, a promising result that could reduce food wasting.

Berberine, a natural product alkaloid, has been shown to exert biological activity via in situ production of singlet oxygen when photo irradiated. Berberine utilizes singlet oxygen in its putative mechanism of action, wherein it forms an activated complex with DNA and photosensitizes triplet oxygen to singlet oxygen to specifically oxidize guanine residues, thereby halting cell replication and leading to cell death. This has potential application in photodynamic therapy, alongside other such compounds which also act as photosensitizers and produce singlet oxygen in situ. The quantification of singlet oxygen in various photosensitizers, including berberine, is essential for determining their photosensitizer efficiencies. We postulated that the singlet oxygen produced by photoirradiation of berberine would be superior in terms of singlet oxygen production to the aforementioned photosensitizers when irradiated with UV light, but inferior under visible light conditions, due to its strong absorbance of UV wavelengths.

Machine learning and deep learning techniques can be used to predict the early onset of breast cancer. The main objective of this analysis was to determine whether machine learning algorithms can be used to predict the onset of breast cancer with more than 90% accuracy. Based on research with supervised machine learning algorithms, Gaussian Naïve Bayes, K Nearest Algorithm, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression were considered because they offer a wide variety of classification methods and also provide high accuracy and performance. We hypothesized that all these algorithms would provide accurate results, and Random Forest and Logistic Regression would provide better accuracy and performance than Naïve Bayes and K Nearest Neighbor.

This paper presents findings on Carcharhinus leucas (bull shark) and Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos (grey reef shark) aggression towards humans at Beqa Adventure Divers in Shark Reef Marine Reserve, Fiji. We hypothesized that grey reef sharks would receive more prods than bull sharks because grey reef sharks are typically more aggressive than bull sharks. The results supported our hypothesis, as an individual grey reef shark received 2.44 prods on average per feed, while a bull shark had an average of 0.61. These findings are meaningful not only to the world’s general understanding of shark aggression, but also to human protection against grey reef sharks as well as public education on bull sharks and the conservation of the species.

Cholesterol is a major component of neuronal cell membrane and myelin sheath. In this study, the authors either transfected Neuro 2A cells with CYP46A1 cDNA or treated the cells with 24SHC. Cells expressing CYP46A1 had significantly less viability compared to the negative control. Up to 55% reduction in cell viability was also observed in 24S-HC-treated cells. This work supports that CYP46A1 and 24S-HC could directly trigger cell death. The direct involvement of 24S-HC in cell death provides further evidence that 24S-HC can be a promising biomarker for diagnosing brain damage severity.

Microbial agents reposnsible for respiratory infections are often carried in spittle, which means they can be easily transmitted. Here, the authors investigate how likely certain activities are to spread microbes carried in spittle. They also investigate whether eating certain types of food might reduce the spread of spittle-borne bacteria too.