Reducing neuropathies between the 2020 and 2021 Covid-19 surges in a large UK intensive care unit: A quality improvement project.

Background: Peripheral nerve injuries (PNIs) can be acquired by patients in intensive care unit (ICU) who are critically unwell with Covid pneumonitis. Prone position ventilation has been linked to this life-changing complication.

Aim: To reduce the occurrence and severity of PNIs for patients with Covid pneumonitis requiring prone positioning whilst sedated and ventilated in ICU.

Automated High-Throughput Fatigue Testing of Freestanding Thin Films.

Mechanical testing at small length scales has traditionally been resource-intensive due to difficulties with meticulous sample preparation, exacting load alignments, and precision measurements. Microscale fatigue testing can be particularly challenging due to the time-intensive, tedious repetition of single fatigue experiments. To mitigate these challenges, this work presents a new methodology for the high-throughput fatigue testing of thin films at the microscale.

Quantitative in Situ SEM High Cycle Fatigue: The Critical Role of Oxygen on Nanoscale-Void-Controlled Nucleation and Propagation of Small Cracks in Ni Microbeams.

This Letter presents a quantitative in situ scanning electron microscope (SEM) nanoscale high and very high cycle fatigue (HCF/VHCF) investigation of Ni microbeams under bending, using a MEMS microresonator as an integrated testing machine. The novel technique highlights ultraslow fatigue crack growth (average values down to ∼10 m/cycle) that has heretofore not been reported and that indicates a discontinuous process; it also reveals strong environmental effects on fatigue lives that are 3 orders of magnitude longer in a vacuum than in air. This ultraslow fatigue regime does not follow the well documented fatigue mechanisms that rely on the common crack tip stress intensification, mediated by dislocation emission and associated with much larger crack growth rates.

The supramarginal and angular gyri underlie orthographic competence in Spanish language.

Orthographic competence allows automatic word recognition and reading fluency. To elucidate how the orthographic competence in Spanish-speaking adults might affect the neurofunctional mechanisms of visual word recognition, 32 young adults equally divided in two groups (HSS: High Spelling Skills, and LSS: Low Spelling Skills) were evaluated using fMRI methods, while they performed an orthographic recognition task involving pseudohomophones. HSS achieved significantly more correct responses and lower reaction times than LSS.

Near-infrared spectroscopy: an important monitoring tool during hybrid aortic arch replacement.

Near-infrared spectroscopy can be helpful for monitoring the adequacy of cerebral perfusion during cardiovascular surgery. We report changes seen in regional oxygen saturation due to intraoperative thrombosis of the left common carotid artery graft during hybrid aortic arch replacement for traumatic aortic injury.