Elevated cell-free hemoglobin: A novel early biomarker following traumatic injury.

Background: Cell-free hemoglobin (CFH) and free heme are potent mediators of endotheliopathy and organ injury in sepsis, but their roles in other hemolytic pathologies are not well-defined. A prime example is trauma where early hemolysis may initiate damage and predict outcome. Here, we investigated the presence of plasma CFH, heme, and their major scavengers after traumatic injury.

Trauma in the courtroom: The role of prior trauma exposure and mental health on stress and emotional responses in jurors.

Objectives: Prior research indicates that jury duty can be distressing for some jurors. This study examined: (1) the influence of prior trauma characteristics (type, exposure, time since trauma), medical fear and mental health difficulties on stress and emotional responses during a mock trial and 1 week later; and (2) associations between early stress reactions during a trial on subsequent stress and emotional reactivity after exposure to skeletal evidence and 1 week later.

Methods: Mock jurors (n = 180) completed baseline self-report mental health measures, read a summary of a murder case and were then exposed to graphic skeletal evidence.

Uncertainty-aware automatic TNM staging classification for [F] Fluorodeoxyglucose PET-CT reports for lung cancer utilising transformer-based language models and multi-task learning.

Background: [F] Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET-CT is a clinical imaging modality widely used in diagnosing and staging lung cancer. The clinical findings of PET-CT studies are contained within free text reports, which can currently only be categorised by experts manually reading them. Pre-trained transformer-based language models (PLMs) have shown success in extracting complex linguistic features from text.

Earth's Climate History Explains Life's Temperature Optima.

Why does the growth of most life forms exhibit a narrow range of optimal temperatures below 40°C? We hypothesize that the recently identified stable range of oceanic temperatures of ~5 to 37°C for more than two billion years of Earth history tightly constrained the evolution of prokaryotic thermal performance curves to optimal temperatures for growth to less than 40°C. We tested whether competitive mechanisms reproduced the observed upper limits of life's temperature optima using simple Lotka-Volterra models of interspecific competition between organisms with different temperature optima. Model results supported our proposition whereby organisms with temperature optima up to 37°C were most competitive.

Dose by design: How limits on nicotine flux and puff duration affect the abuse liability of electronic nicotine delivery systems.

Introduction: Electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS) product standards for nicotine flux (nicotine emitted/second), combined with limiting puff duration, could control nicotine dose and support ENDS regulations. We assessed behavioral and subjective abuse liability indices for ENDS varying in nicotine flux with fixed puff duration among people who smoke.

Methods: This within-subjects study included 32 adults who smoked cigarettes.