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From trash to treasure: A sustainable approach to oil spill clean-up

Kathir et al. | Aug 02, 2023

From trash to treasure: A sustainable approach to oil spill clean-up

In this study the authors looked at sustainable ways to clean up oil spills that harm marine life. Using water spangle leaves and milk week the authors looked at the ability to recovery oil from both fresh and salt water and the ability to reuse the organic material to clean up spills. Their results show promise to help find a sustainable, eco-friendly way to clean up oil spills and protect marine life and habitats.

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Use of yogurt bacteria as a model surrogate to compare household cleaning solutions

Shukla et al. | May 07, 2023

Use of yogurt bacteria as a model surrogate to compare household cleaning solutions
Image credit: CDC

While resources on the safety of household cleaning products are plentiful, measures of efficacy of these cleaning chemicals against bacteria and viruses remain without standardization in the consumer market. The COVID pandemic has exasperated this knowledge gap, stoking the growth of misinformation and misuse surrounding household cleaning chemicals. Arriving at a time dire for sanitization standardization, the authors of this paper have created a quantifying framework for consumers by comparing a wide range of household cleaning products in their efficacy against bacteria generated by a safe and easily replicable yogurt model.

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Examination of the underlying chemical physics of the Mpemba effect in water and other liquids

Khan et al. | Apr 20, 2023

Examination of the underlying chemical physics of the Mpemba effect in water and other liquids
Image credit: D koi

Counterintuitive in nature, the Mpemba effect asserts that hot liquid freezes faster than cold liquid. While noted throughout history by scientific minds like Aristotle, the phenomenon remains in contention with varying hypotheses for the effect proposed alongside the effect’s rise in popularity. Contributing to the research efforts surrounding the Mpemba effect, the authors in this article explore the effect in different liquids ranging in physical properties and intermolecular forces to determine potential parameters attributable to producing the Mpemba effect.

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Racial and gender disparities in the portrayal of lawyers and physicians on television

Asadi et al. | Nov 18, 2022

Racial and gender disparities in the portrayal of lawyers and physicians on television

Powered by the sociological framework that exposure to television bleeds into social biases, limiting media representation of women and minority groups may lead to real-world implications and manifestations of racial and gender disparities. To address this phenomenon, the researchers in this article take a look at primetime fictional representation of minorities and women as lawyers and physicians and compare television representation to census data of the same groups within real-world legal and medical occupations. The authors maintain the hypothesis that representation of female and minority groups as television lawyers and doctors is lower than that of their white male counterparts relative to population demographics - a trend that they expect to also be reflected in actual practice. With fictional racial and gender inequalities and corresponding real-world trends highlighted within this article, the researchers call for address towards representation biases that reinforce each other in both fictional and non-fictional spheres.

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Risk assessment modeling for childhood stunting using automated machine learning and demographic analysis

Sirohi et al. | Sep 25, 2022

Risk assessment modeling for childhood stunting using automated machine learning and demographic analysis

Over the last few decades, childhood stunting has persisted as a major global challenge. This study hypothesized that TPTO (Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool), an AutoML (automated machine learning) tool, would outperform all pre-existing machine learning models and reveal the positive impact of economic prosperity, strong familial traits, and resource attainability on reducing stunting risk. Feature correlation plots revealed that maternal height, wealth indicators, and parental education were universally important features for determining stunting outcomes approximately two years after birth. These results help inform future research by highlighting how demographic, familial, and socio-economic conditions influence stunting and providing medical professionals with a deployable risk assessment tool for predicting childhood stunting.

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Buttermilk and baking soda increase pancake fluffiness by liberating carbon dioxide

Rojas et al. | Sep 18, 2022

Buttermilk and baking soda increase pancake fluffiness by liberating carbon dioxide

Here, seeking a better understanding of what determines the fluffiness of a pancake, the authors began by considering a chemical reaction that results in the production of carbon dioxide gas from recipe ingredients, specifically sodium bicarbonate or baking soda. The substitution of homemade buttermilk for milk and adding more baking soda was found to result in significantly fluffier pancakes.

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Characterizing the association between hippocampal reactive astrogliosis, anhedonia-like behaviors, and neurogenesis in a monkey model of stress and antidepressant treatment

Kim et al. | Aug 25, 2022

Characterizing the association between hippocampal reactive astrogliosis, anhedonia-like behaviors, and neurogenesis in a monkey model of stress and antidepressant treatment

This study examined the effects of stress and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on a measure of astrocyte reactivity in nonhuman primate (NHP) models of stress. Results showed that chronic separation stress in NHPs leads to increased signs of astrogliosis in the NHP hippocampus. The findings were consistent with the hypotheses that hippocampal astrogliosis is an important mechanism in stress-induced cognitive and behavioral deficits.

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Herbal formulation, HF1 diminishes tumorigenesis: a cytokine study between MCF-7 and BM-MSCs.

Guru et al. | Apr 11, 2022

Herbal formulation, HF1 diminishes tumorigenesis: a cytokine study between MCF-7 and BM-MSCs.

The authors use HF-1, an herbal formation, on bone marrow derived cells as well as breast cancer cells to assess HF-1's ability to prevent tumorigenesis. As metastasis requires coordination of multiple cells in the tumor microenvironment, their findings that HF-1 augments cytokine expression such as VEGF & TGF-B show that HF-1 has potential application to therapeutics.

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