Motivators and barriers to general surgery as a career among junior doctors and medical students in New Zealand.

Aim: Increasing diversity among surgeons is a priority of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS).1 This study aimed to identify motivators and barriers to general surgery among junior doctors (JD) and medical students (MS) to help guide the recruitment of under-represented minorities into surgical training.

Methods: An online survey was sent to 2,170 participants-1,327 JD in New Zealand and 843 MS at The University of Auckland (UA).

Optimizing the orbital occupation in the multiple minima problem of magnetic materials from the metaheuristic firefly algorithm.

We present the use and implementation of the firefly algorithm to help in scanning the multiple metastable minima of orbital occupations in density functional theory (DFT) plus Hubbard U correction and to identify the ground state occupations in strongly correlated materials. We show the application of this implementation with the Abinit code on KCoF3 and UO2 crystals, which are typical d and f electron systems with numerous occupation minima. We demonstrate the validity and performance of the method by comparing with previous methodologies.

Heat/Pressure Treatment with Detergents Significantly Increases Curcumin Solubility and Stability: Its Use as an Environment-Friendly Protein Gel Stain.

Curcumin, the principal curcuminoid in the food spice turmeric, is insoluble in water at room temperature. We have previously solubilized curcumin in water with the application of heat (100 °C) and found that this solubilized curcumin could be used as a gel protein stain. However, heat solubilization in water solubilized only a small fraction of the curcuminoid (1.

Firefly Algorithm Applied to Noncollinear Magnetic Phase Materials Prediction.

In most noncollinear crystal magnets, the number of metastable states is quite large and any calculation that tries to predict the ground state can fall into one of the possible metastable phases. In this work, we generalize the population based meta-heuristic firefly algorithm to the problem of the noncollinear magnetic phase ground state prediction within density functional theory (DFT). We extend the different steps in the firefly algorithm to this specific problem by using polarized constrained DFT calculations, whereby using Lagrange multipliers the directions of the atom magnetic moments remain fixed.

Significantly reduced lymphadenopathy, salivary gland infiltrates and proteinuria in MRL-lpr/lpr mice treated with ultrasoluble curcumin/turmeric: increased survival with curcumin treatment.

Objectives: Commercial curcumin (CU), derived from food spice turmeric (TU), has been widely studied as a potential therapeutic for a variety of oncological and inflammatory conditions. Lack of solubility/bioavailability has hindered curcumin's therapeutic efficacy in human diseases. We have solubilised curcumin in water applying heat/pressure, obtaining up to 35-fold increase in solubility (ultrasoluble curcumin (UsC)).

Filial cannibalism improves survival and development of beaugregory damselfish embryos.

Cannibalism of small numbers of offspring by a parent has been proposed as an adaptive parental strategy, by providing energy to support parental care. However, there are few empirical studies to support this hypothesis. We conducted field and laboratory experiments to investigate partial filial cannibalism in Stegastes leucostictus, a coral reef fish with paternal care.