In this study, the authors characterized the trends of cigarette use amongst people who do and don't use electronic nicotine delivery systems (or ENDS). This was done to help determine if the use of ENDS is aiding in helping smokers quit, as the data on this has been controversial. They found that use of ENDS among people either with or without previous cigarette usage were more likely to continue using cigarettes in the future. This is important information contributing to our understanding of ways to effectively (and not effectively) reduce cigarette use.

Fossil fuels are a limited resource; thus, it is important to explore new sources of energy. The authors examine the ability of switchgrass to produce ethanol and test the effects of pretreatment and grinding on ethanol yield.

Middle school math forms the basis for advanced mathematical courses leading up to the university level. Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to power next-generation educational technologies, acting as digital tutors to students. The main objective of this study was to determine whether LLMs like ChatGPT, Bard, and Llama 2 can serve as reliable middle school math tutoring assistants on three tutoring tasks: hint generation, comprehensive solution, and exercise creation.

The authors test electrocardiography biofeedback as a treatment for individuals with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome.

Although the 5-year survival rate for colorectal cancer is below 10%, it increases to greater than 90% if it is diagnosed early. We hypothesized from our research that analyzing non-synonymous single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in a patient's exome sequence would be an indicator for high genetic risk of developing colorectal cancer.

Superabsorbent beads are remarkable, used throughout our daily lives for various practical applications. These beads, as suggested by their name, possess a unique ability to absorb and retain large quantities of liquids. This characteristic of absorbency makes them essential throughout the medical field, agriculture, and other critical industries as well as in everyday products. To create these beads, the process of photopolymerization is fast growing in favor with distinct advantages of cost efficiency, speed, energy efficiency, and mindfulness towards the environment. In this article, researchers explore the pairing of cheap monomers with accessible equipment for creation of superabsorbent beads via the photopolymerization process. This research substantially demonstrates the successful application of photopolymerization in producing highly absorbent beads in a low-cost context, thereby expanding the accessibility of this process for creating superabsorbent beads in both research and practical applications.

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a software that uses neural network techniques to translate text from one language to another. However, one of the most famous NMT models—Google Translate—failed to give an accurate English translation of a famous Korean nursery rhyme, "Airplane" (비행기). The authors fine-tuned a pre-trained model first with a dataset from the lyrics domain, and then with a smaller dataset containing the rhythmical properties, to teach the model to translate rhythmically accurate lyrics. This stacked fine-tuning method resulted in an NMT model that could maintain the rhythmical characteristics of lyrics during translation while single fine-tuned models failed to do so.

Here, recognizing that the immune response to cancer results in biomarkers that can be used to assess the immune status of cancer patients, the authors investigated the concentrations of key cytokines (TH1 and TH2 cytokines) in healthy controls and cancer patients. They identified significant changes in resting and activated cytokine profiles, suggesting that data of biomarkers such as these could serve as a starting point for further treatment with regard to a patient's specific immune profile.

The Wnt signaling pathway, known to coordinate important aspects of cellular homeostasis ranging from differentiation, proliferation, migration, and much more, is dysregulated in many human diseases. This study demonstrates that aminomethylphosphonic acid, which is the main metabolite found in the common herbicide Glyphosate, is toxic to planaria and capable of binding to canonical Wnt proteins.

In this study, the authors analyze gene expression datasets to determine if there is a core set of genes dysregulated during nonalcoholic steatohepatitis.