Antibiotics are used to treat dangerous diseases. Over time, however, bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics - which poses a threat to humans and animals alike. In this paper, the authors examine how E. coli gains resistance to the antibiotic amoxicillin.

Alcohol is known to cause various developmental diseases including Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Here the authors investigate the effect of ethanol on the development of zebrafish beta cells, the part of the pancreas associated with Type 1 Diabetes. They find that exposure to ethanol does adversely affect beta-cell development, suggesting that alcohol ingestion during pregnancy may be linked to diabetes in newborns.

Skin cancer is a common and potentially deadly form of cancer. This study’s purpose was to develop an automated approach for early detection for skin cancer. We hypothesized that convolutional neural network-based models using transfer learning could accurately differentiate between benign and malignant moles using natural images of human skin.

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.

With climate change and rising sea levels, south Brooklyn is exposed to massive flooding and intense precipitation. Previous research discovered that flooding shifts plant species distribution, decreases soil pH, and increases salt concentration, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium levels. The authors predicted a decreasing trend from Zone 1 to 6: high-pH, high-salt, and high-nutrients in more flood-prone areas to low-pH, low-salt, and low-nutrient in less flood-prone regions. They performed DNA barcoding to identify plant species inhabiting flood zones with expectations of decreasing salt tolerance and moisture uptake by plants' soil from Zones 1-6. Furthermore, they predicted an increase in invasive species, ultimately resulting in a decrease in biodiversity. After barcoding, they researched existing information regarding invasiveness, ideal soil, pH tolerance, and salt tolerance. They performed soil analyses to identify pH, nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) levels. For N and P levels, we discovered a general decreasing trend from Zone 1 to 6 with low and moderate statistical significance respectively. Previous studies found that soil moisture can increase N and P uptake, helping plants adopt efficient resource-use strategies and reduce water stress from flooding. Although characteristics of plants were distributed throughout all zones, demonstrating overall diversity, the soil analyses hinted at the possibility of a rising trend of plants adapting to the increase in flooding. Future expansive research is needed to comprehensively map these trends. Ultimately, investigating trends between flood zones and the prevalence of different species will assist in guiding solutions to weathering climate change and protecting biodiversity in Brooklyn.

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 looked at the effect of monetary vs. food incentives on math test performance. They found that financial incentives did increase student performance, but not necessarily food incentives.

The authors test the effect of caffeine on the behavior of the Siamese fighting fish Betta splendens.

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

The authors looked at the emissions from a small, carbureted engine that was being powered by a mix of ethanol and methanol compared to E10 gasoline. The found that across all four pollutants measured, the ethanol-methanol mixture resulted in less emissions compared to the E10 fuel.