One disadvantage of antibiotic therapy is the potential for unpleasant gastrointestinal side effects. Here, the authors test whether some common antibiotics directly interfere with the digestion of protein, fat, or sugars. This study provides motivation to more carefully investigate the interactions between antibiotics and gut enzymes in order to inform treatment decisions and improve patient outcomes.

Caenorhabditis elegans xpa-1 and him-1 are orthologs of human XPA and human SMC1A, respectively. Mutations in the XPA are correlated with Xeroderma pigmentosum, a condition that induces hypersensitivity to ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Alternatively, SMC1A mutations may lead to Cornelia de Lange Syndrome, a multi-organ disorder that makes patients more sensitive to UVinduced DNA damage. Both C. elegans genes have been found to be involved in protection against UV radiation, but their combined effects have not been tested when they are both knocked down. The authors hypothesized that because these genes are involved in separate pathways, the simultaneous knockdown of both of these genes using RNA interference (RNAi) in C. elegans will cause them to become more sensitive to UV radiation than either of them knocked down individually. UV protection was measured via the percent survival of C. elegans post 365 nm and 5.4x10-19 joules of UV radiation. The double xpa-1/him-1 RNAi knockdown showed a significantly reduced percent survival after 15 and 30 minutes of UV radiation relative to wild-type and xpa-1 and him-1 single knockdowns. These measurements were consistent with their hypothesis and demonstrated that xpa-1 and him-1 genes play distinct roles in resistance against UV stress in C. elegans. This result raises the possibility that the xpa-1/him-1 double knockdown could be useful as an animal model for studying the human disease Xeroderma pigmentosum and Cornelia de Lange Syndrome.

In this study, the authors survey students and adults about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted their sleep patterns, eating habits, mood, physical activity, and screen time.

Voice pitch affects perceived authoritativeness, competency, and leadership capacity. In this study, the authors suggest that examining certain measures of brain activity collected using an affordable EEG could predict advertising effectiveness, which may be invaluable in future neuromarketing research. Understanding voice pitch and other factors that cause implicit bias may allow significant advances in marketing, facilitating business success.

Recently, e-cigarette usage has been increasing rapidly. Previous research has found that adverse
childhood experiences (ACEs) are correlated to cigarette usage. However, there is limited data exploring if ACEs affect vaping. Therefore, in this work, we investigated the effects of ACEs on e-cigarette usage and hypothesize that witnessing vaping in the house and facing ACEs would increase e-cigarette usage while education on the dangers of vaping would decrease e-cigarette usage. We found that different types of ACEs had different correlations with e-cigarette usage and that education on the dangers of vaping had no effect on e-cigarette usage.

The authors test the usefulness of zinc oxide microparticles relative to zinc oxide nanoparticles as antibacterial agents.

Diabetes is a growing health concern in the developing world. This study aimed to develop a questionnaire that uses factors including age, blood pressure, BMI, and family history to predict whether Filipino participants are at risk for diabetes.

In this experiment, the authors used C. elegans as a simple model organism to observe the impact of probiotics on the human digestive system. The results of the experiments showed that the C. elegans were, on average, most present in Chobani cultures over other tested yogurts. While not statistically significant, these results still demonstrated that C. elegans might prefer Chobani cultures over other probiotic yogurts, which may also indicate greater gut benefits from Chobani over the other yogurt brands tested.

The authors compare RNA expression profiles across three human cell types following infection with MERS-CoV

In this article, the authors investigate whether coolant temperature affects soil cooling curves of soil with otherwise identical properties. The coolant temperature is representative of environmental temperature, and the authors hypothesized that differences in this temperature would not affect the freezing temperature of soil. Their findings validated their hypothesis providing helpful information relevant to understanding how frost heaves happen and how to predict their occurrence more accurately.