Proactive rounding: Perspectives and experiences of nurses and midwives working in a large metropolitan hospital.

Background: Rounding by the Rapid Response team (RRT) is an integral part of safety and quality care of the deteriorating patient. Rounding enables Intensive Care Units (ICU) liaison nurses to proactively identify deteriorating patients in the general wards and minimize the time spent by general nursing staff to call for assistance.

Objective: The study examined nurses' and midwives' experiences of proactive rounding by a RRT/ICU Liaison service, including the impact on workflow and patient care as well as enablers and barriers to utilization of the service.

Personal breathing zone exposures among hot-mix asphalt paving workers; preliminary analysis for trends and analysis of work practices that resulted in the highest exposure concentrations.

An exposure assessment of hot-mix asphalt (HMA) paving workers was conducted to determine which of four exposure scenarios impacted worker exposure and dose. Goals of this report are to present the personal-breathing zone (PBZ) data, discuss the impact of substituting the releasing/cleaning agent, and discuss work practices that resulted in the highest exposure concentration for each analyte. One-hundred-seven PBZ samples were collected from HMA paving workers on days when diesel oil was used as a releasing/cleaning agent.

Advances in bionanomaterials for bone tissue engineering.

Bone is a specialized form of connective tissue that forms the skeleton of the body and is built at the nano and microscale levels as a multi-component composite material consisting of a hard inorganic phase (minerals) in an elastic, dense organic network. Mimicking bone structure and its properties present an important frontier in the fields of nanotechnology, materials science and bone tissue engineering, given the complex morphology of this tissue. There has been a growing interest in developing artificial bone-mimetic nanomaterials with controllable mineral content, nanostructure, chemistry for bone, cartilage tissue engineering and substitutes.

Bionanomaterials for bone tumor engineering and tumor destruction.

Recent advances have led to the development of multifunctional bionanomaterials that can target a bone tumor and deliver therapeutic drugs or genes. Bionanomaterial-based bone cancer treatment offers hope for treating bone cancer and provides many exciting possibilities to enable important new therapeutic outcomes. Physicists, chemists, engineers, biologists, and clinicians will continue to address research questions at the level of fundamental biology and science to develop novel biomaterials and systems, particularly enabling cost-effective and large-scale production of multifunctional nanomaterial systems.

Effect of oxidation and extent of oxidation on biologically active PACs in asphalt products.

Recent studies have reported divergent results in rodent cancer assays using fume condensates from a variety of asphalt products. This paper presents results of a study investigating the role of oxidation, or extent of oxidation, on these findings. Five straight run asphalts, made from widely used crude oils, were used as inputs to both production scale and laboratory oxidation units and processed to a range of softening points used in common roofing products.

Spectroscopic and redox properties of amine-functionalized K2[OsII(bpy)(CN)4] complexes.

We report the first examples of amine-functionalized K(2)[Os(II)(bpy)(CN)(4)] (bpy = 2,2'-bipyridine) complexes. The tetracyanoosmate complexes were prepared by UV irradiation (λ = 254 nm) of K(4)[Os(II)(CN)(6)] and primary amine-functionalized bpy ligands in acidic aqueous media. The aqueous solution pH dependences of the spectroscopic and redox properties of 4,4'- and 5,5'-substituted complexes have been investigated.

Ferrocene and maleimide-functionalized disulfide scaffolds for self-assembled monolayers on gold.

A series of ferrocene-based electroactive molecules (EAMs) containing maleimide and disulfide groups in different asymmetric and branched architectures were designed and synthesized. Stable monolayers of each EAM on gold electrodes were confirmed by cyclic voltammetry. Importantly, these EAMs expand the repertoire of monolayer building blocks amenable to modular biofunctionalization for applications in electrochemical biosensor fabrication.

Electroactive self-assembled monolayers on gold via bipodal dithiazepane anchoring groups.

Novel dithiazepane-functionalized ferrocenyl-phenylethynyl oligomers 1 and 2 have been synthesized. Self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of these ferrocene derivatives have been studied by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, ellipsometry, and cyclic voltammetry. It has been shown by XPS that monolayers of the dithiazepane-anchored molecules on gold electrodes contain gold-thiolate species.

Evaluation of a new enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for detection of Chagas antibody in US blood donors.

Background: Chagas disease, caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, represents a serious blood safety problem due to increasing immigration from Latin America. The Food and Drug Administration recently recommended implementation of Chagas antibody screening for US donors as soon as a suitable assay is licensed. An anonymized preclinical study of a prototype T.

Bioelectronic DNA detection of human papillomaviruses using eSensor: a model system for detection of multiple pathogens.

Background: We used human papillomaviruses (HPV) as a model system to evaluate the utility of a nucleic acid, hybridization-based bioelectronic DNA detection platform (eSensor) in identifying multiple pathogens.

Methods: Two chips were spotted with capture probes consisting of DNA oligonucleotide sequences specific for HPV types. Electrically conductive signal probes were synthesized to be complementary to a distinct region of the amplified HPV target DNA.

Evaluation of worker exposure to asphalt paving fumes using traditional and nontraditional techniques.

Forty-five workers at 11 paving sites across the United States were evaluated for exposure to paving asphalt (bitumen) fumes. Traditional measures of exposure such as total particulate matter (TPM) and benzene soluble matter (BSM) were monitored. In addition, total organic matter (TOM), which includes both the BSM residue and the more volatile components that pass through the filter and are collected on sorption material, was quantified and further characterized using a gas chromatography technique and a recently developed fluorescence test.