The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the depth and significance of healthcare inequality in the United States. Xiao, Xiao, and Gong examine healthcare disparities in the Richmond (Virginia) metropolitan area by analyzing whether people from disadvantaged populations must travel for longer to reach healthcare facilities.

Lipases are a common class of enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of lipids. Here the authors characterize the the activity of pancreatic lipase in different organic solvents using a choloremetric assay, as well as using molecular dynamic simulations. They report that the activity of pancreatic lipase in 5% methanol is more than 25% higher than in water, despite enzyme stability being comparable in both solvents. This suggests that, for industrial applications, using pancreatic lipase in 5% methanol solution might increase yield, compared to just water.

Here, through protein-ligand docking, the authors investigated the effect of the interaction of emodin with serine/threonine kinases, a subclass of kinases that is overexpressed in many cancers, which is implicated in phosphorylation cascades. Through molecular dynamics theyfound that emodin forms favorable interactions with chitosan and chitosan PEG (polyethylene glycol) copolymers, which could aid in loading drugs into nanoparticles (NPs) for targeted delivery to cancerous tissue. Both polymers demonstrated reasonable entrapment efficiencies, which encourages experimental exploration of emodin through targeted drug delivery vehicles and their anticancer activity.

In this study, with consideration for the increasing participation of high school students in indoor rowing, the authors analyzed World Indoor Rowing Championship data. Statistical analysis revealed two key features that can determine the performance of a rower as well as increasing competitiveness in nearly all categories considered. They conclude by offering a 2000-meter ergometer time distribution that can help junior rowers assess their current performance relative to the world competition.

Here the authors investigated the role of agricultural fertilizers as potential contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast to the typical investigations that consider microbiological processes, the authors considered purely chemical processes. Based on their results they found that as much as 20.41% of all CO₂ emission from land-based activities could be a result of mineral nitrogen fertilizers.

Cannabidiol (CBD) is a chemical extracted from cannabis and shown by some studies to alleviate the symptoms of many mental disorders, especially major depressive disorder. The authors hypothesized that chronic treatments with purified CBD through oral administration would relieve depression-associated behaviors in normal healthy rats under adverse conditions. A statistical analysis of the experimental data suggested that long-term consumption of CBD could elicit depression associated symptoms in normal rats without depression. The results imply that people should consume CBD-containing products with extreme caution and highlight the need to carefully monitor the use of CBD in health care products.

The authors test the antiproliferative and apoptosis-inducing properties of an extract created from a traditional Indian medicinal plant of the Amaranthus genus.

This study hypothesized that a machine learning model could accurately predict the severity of California wildfires and determine the most influential meteorological factors. It utilized a custom dataset with information from the World Weather Online API and a Kaggle dataset of wildfires in California from 2013-2020. The developed algorithms classified fires into seven categories with promising accuracy (around 55 percent). They found that higher temperatures, lower humidity, lower dew point, higher wind gusts, and higher wind speeds are the most significant contributors to the spread of a wildfire. This tool could vastly improve the efficiency and preparedness of firefighters as they deal with wildfires.

In this study, the authors surveyed a number of students in Singapore to determine how their experiences changed after the implementation of home-based learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cancer is often caused by improper function of a few proteins, and sometimes it takes only a few proteins to malfunction to cause drastic changes in cells. Here the authors look at the genes that were mutated in patients with a type of pancreatic cancer to identify proteins that are important in causing cancer. They also determined which proteins currently lack effective treatment, and suggest that certain proteins (named KRAS, CDKN2A, and RBBP8) are the most important candidates for developing drugs to treat pancreatic cancer.