Antibiotics are one of the most common treatments for bacterial infections, but the emergence of antibiotic resistance is a major threat to the control of infectious diseases. Many factors contribute to the development of antibiotic resistance. One is bacterial conjugation from Gram-positive to Gram-negative bacteria where there is a transfer of resistance genes from Gram-positive to Gram-negative bacteria that could increase antibiotic resistance in the latter. In light of these observations, we decided to test whether Gram-negative bacteria that came into contact with Gram-positive bacteria had a higher resistance to the antimicrobial properties of spices than Gram-negative bacteria that did not come into contact with Gram-positive bacteria.

The authors propose a method to help first responders find the location of a person within a high-rise building in densely populated areas.

The authors designed a system that runs off of body heat to track body temperature that could help prevent injuries that result from elevated body temperature.

Here, the authors sought to evaluate the efforts of fast fashion clothing companies towards sustainability, specifically in regards to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The authors used natural language processing to investigate the sustainability reports of fast fashion companies focusing on terms established by the UN. They found that the most consistently addressed areas were related to sustainable consumption/production, with a focus on health and well-being emerging during the recent pandemic.

Regenerative medicine has become a mainstay in recent times, and employing stem cells to treat several degenerative, inflammatory conditions has resulted in very promising outcomes. These forms of cell-based therapies are novel approaches to existing treatment modalities. In this study, the authors compared the concentrations of the cytokines PDGF, IL-8, and VEGF between conditioned and spent media of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to evaluate their potential therapeutic properties for wound healing in inflammatory conditions. They hypothesized that conditioned media contains higher concentrations of wound healing cytokines compared to spent media. The authors found that while IL-8 and VEGF were present in highest concentrations in conditioned media, PDGF was present in maximal amounts in spent media.

The authors test the effects of the pesticide captan on the growth of gut microbiome bacteria including Bacillus coagulan and Escherichia coli.

In this paper, we measured the privacy budgets and utilities of different differentially private mechanisms combined with different machine learning models that forecast traffic congestion at future timestamps. We expected the ANNs combined with the Staircase mechanism to perform the best with every value in the privacy budget range, especially with the medium high values of the privacy budget. In this study, we used the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and neural network models to forecast and then added differentially private Laplacian, Gaussian, and Staircase noise to our datasets. We tested two real traffic congestion datasets, experimented with the different models, and examined their utility for different privacy budgets. We found that a favorable combination for this application was neural networks with the Staircase mechanism. Our findings identify the optimal models when dealing with tricky time series forecasting and can be used in non-traffic applications like disease tracking and population growth.

We hypothesize that berberine has broad-spectrum antibacterial properties, along with potency that is comparable to current broad-spectrum antibiotics that are commercially available. Here, we screened berberine against four strains of bacteria and evaluated its antimicrobial activity against five broad-spectrum antibiotics from different classes to better quantify berberine’s antibacterial activity and compare its efficacy as an antibacterial agent to the broad-spectrum antibiotics. Our results indicated that berberine had strain-selective cytotoxic effects and was significantly less potent than most of the broad-spectrum antibiotics

People react to music by moving and dancing. This study examined if different types of music were correlated with higher heart rates and if this was at all affected by music preferences.

As the world struggled to grapple with the emerging COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many countries instated policies to help minimize the spread of the virus among residents. This inadvertently led to a decrease in travel, and in some cases, industrial output, two major sources of pollutants in today's world. Here, the authors investigate whether California's shelter-in-place policy was associated with a measurable decrease in water and air pollution in that state between June and July of 2020, compared to the preceeding five years. Their findings suggest that, by some metrics, air quality improved within certain areas while water quality was relatively unchanged. Overall, these findings suggest that changing human behavior can, indeed, help reduce the level of air pollutants that compromise air quality.