An Efficient Acoustic Camera Simulator for Robotic Applications: Design, Implementation, and Validation.

As forward-looking imaging sonar, also called an acoustic camera, has emerged as an important sensor for marine robotics applications, its simulators have attracted considerable research attention within the field. This paper presents an acoustic camera simulator that efficiently generates acoustic images using only the depth information of the scene. The simulator approximates the acoustic beam of a real acoustic camera as a set of acoustic rays originating from the center of the acoustic camera.

Educational needs of direct care workers in long-term care facilities providing mealtime assistance to older adults with dementia.

Background: Older adults with dementia in long-term care facilities often encounter challenges in self-feeding owing to cognitive and physical impairments. Although direct care workers play a crucial role in facilitating mealtime activities, they lack adequate and specific training. To develop an effective educational training program for this purpose, it is essential to understand the educational needs of direct care workers providing meal assistance.

An analytical model of spatial correlation between vector fields of surface generated noise in a stratified ocean.

Traditionally, hydrophone-based acoustic pressure information has been utilized for underwater detection, but the advent of vector sensors has enabled the utilization of particle velocity of sound waves. A vector sensor adds three-axis particle velocity vector components to the conventional acoustic pressure sensor, representing spatial correlation not as a scalar function but as a matrix of four vector components. While analytical solutions exist for vector sensor spatial correlation in the case of simple isotropic noise, such noise fails to reflect the medium properties of the ocean, such as sound speed or density.

The Need for Status, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, and Overall Evaluation: Focusing on the Moderating Effects of Political Skill and Task Visibility.

Drawing on the costly signaling theory (CST), this study examined the need for status as a hidden motive to increase organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and result in the focal employee's overall evaluation. Moreover, as the activating cues, this study considered political skill as an individual characteristic and task visibility as a situational factor in the relationship between the need for status, OCB, and overall evaluation. To test these predictions, we obtained and analyzed 299 questionnaire responses from pairs of subordinates and supervisors in various South Korean industries.

Description of the mealtime of older adults with dementia in a long-term care facility: A video analysis.

This study analyzed the mealtime structure of older adults with dementia in long-term care facilities. The study conducted video observations at 2 long-term care facilities with 10 residents and 24 staff members, resulting in 41 dyads. The average mealtime duration was 12.

Snap-through inversion of elastic shells swelling solvent diffusion.

Snap-through buckling instability of elastic shells can provide a variety of biological and artificial mechanical systems with an efficient strategy to generate rapid and powerful actuation. However, snapping spherical shells studied to date have typically been shallow and thus are dominantly prone to axisymmetric inversions. Here, we study diffusion-swelling stimulated snap-through inversion of bilayer shells of a wide range of depth to cover non-axisymmetric as well as axisymmetric modes.

Combined Intermediate Cervical Plexus and Costoclavicular Block for Arthroscopic Shoulder Surgery: A Prospective Feasibility Study.

A combined cervical plexus and costoclavicular block provides effective shoulder analgesia without the risk of hemidiaphragmatic paralysis. However, whether this technique can also provide effective anesthesia for shoulder surgery remains unknown. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the feasibility and adverse effects of combined blocks in arthroscopic shoulder surgery.

The effect of natural disasters on human capital in the United States.

Although natural disasters are commonplace, they leave in their wake an enormous amount of damage. The physical damage they cause is immediately apparent, but less obvious is the potential magnitude of disruptions to learning and resulting damage to human capital. Using the universe of Presidential Disaster Declarations in the United States, we show that natural disasters impact a region's human capital both via reductions in learning for students who remain in school as well as a reduction in the years of schooling completed.

The Effects of Routinization on Radical and Incremental Creativity: The Mediating Role of Mental Workloads.

An important question within the creativity literature is whether routinization inhibits individuals' creative performance. Scholars have concentrated on complex and demanding jobs that promote creativity while ignoring the potential effects of routinized activities on creativity. Moreover, little is known about the impact of routinization on creativity, and the few studies investigating this matter have reported inconclusive and inconsistent results.

BLEND: a fast, memory-efficient and accurate mechanism to find fuzzy seed matches in genome analysis.

Generating the hash values of short subsequences, called seeds, enables quickly identifying similarities between genomic sequences by matching seeds with a single lookup of their hash values. However, these hash values can be used only for finding exact-matching seeds as the conventional hashing methods assign distinct hash values for different seeds, including highly similar seeds. Finding only exact-matching seeds causes either (i) increasing the use of the costly sequence alignment or (ii) limited sensitivity.

Multiple Compact Camera Fluorescence Detector for Real-Time PCR Devices.

The polymerase chain reaction is an important technique in biological research because it tests for diseases with a small amount of DNA. However, this process is time consuming and can lead to sample contamination. Recently, real-time PCR techniques have emerged which make it possible to monitor the amplification process for each cycle in real time.

Cost-Effective Multiplex Fluorescence Detection System for PCR Chip.

The lack of portability and high cost of multiplex real-time PCR systems limits the device to be used in POC. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a compact and cost-effective fluorescence detection system that can be integrated to a multiplex real-time PCR equipment. An open platform camera with embedded lens was used instead of photodiodes or an industrial camera.

Factors Influencing the Dementia-Preventive Behaviors among Middle-Aged Persons with Chronic Diseases in Korea.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of dementia literacy, internal health locus of control, and fear of dementia on dementia-preventive behaviors among middle-aged people with chronic diseases. The participants were middle-aged individuals with chronic diseases who had been taking medications for at least three months, recruited using convenience sampling. A total of 123 participants were recruited between 13 and 31 March 2020, using self-reported questionnaires.

A simplified modification to rapidly determine the residues of nitrofurans and their metabolites in aquatic animals by HPLC triple quadrupole mass spectrometry.

A simplified method is described for reducing the analysis time of nitrofurans (NFs) and nitrofuran metabolites (NFMs) in the aquatic animals. Most existing HPLC-MS/MS methods are intended only for NFMs and are based on their fast metabolic transformations. We optimized a method for simultaneously detecting major NFs and their metabolites, including nitrovin (NV) that imply use of an optimized buffer solution.

Learning is inhibited by heat exposure, both internationally and within the United States.

Human capital generally, and cognitive skills specifically, play a crucial role in determining economic mobility and macroeconomic growth. While elevated temperatures have been shown to impair short-run cognitive performance, much less is known about whether heat exposure affects the rate of skill formation. We combine standardized achievement data for 58 countries and 12,000 US school districts with detailed weather and academic calendar information to show that the rate of learning decreases with an increase in the number of hot school days.

STAT5 is Expressed in CD34/CD38 Stem Cells and Serves as a Potential Molecular Target in Ph-Negative Myeloproliferative Neoplasms.

Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) and signal transducer and activator of transcription-5 (STAT5) play a key role in the pathogenesis of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN). In most patients, V617F or mutations are found and lead to activation of various downstream signaling cascades and molecules, including STAT5. We examined the presence and distribution of phosphorylated (p) STAT5 in neoplastic cells in patients with MPN, including polycythemia vera (PV, = 10), essential thrombocythemia (ET, = 15) and primary myelofibrosis (PMF, = 9), and in the V617F-positive cell lines HEL and SET-2.

The ERBB-STAT3 Axis Drives Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease.

The marsupial Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) faces extinction due to transmissible devil facial tumor disease (DFTD). To unveil the molecular underpinnings of this transmissible cancer, we combined pharmacological screens with an integrated systems-biology characterization. Sensitivity to inhibitors of ERBB tyrosine kinases correlated with their overexpression.

Sustained Release of BMP-2 from Porous Particles with Leaf-Stacked Structure for Bone Regeneration.

Sustained release of bioactive molecules from delivery systems is a common strategy for ensuring their prolonged bioactivity and for minimizing safety issues. However, residual toxic reagents, the use of harsh organic solvents, and complex fabrication procedures in conventional delivery systems are considered enormous impediments toward clinical use. Herein, we describe bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2)-immobilized porous polycaprolactone particles with unique leaf-stacked structures (LSS particles) prepared using clinically feasible materials and procedures.

Pharmacologic inhibition of STAT5 in acute myeloid leukemia.

The transcription factor STAT5 is an essential downstream mediator of many tyrosine kinases (TKs), particularly in hematopoietic cancers. STAT5 is activated by FLT3-ITD, which is a constitutively active TK driving the pathogenesis of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Since STAT5 is a critical mediator of diverse malignant properties of AML cells, direct targeting of STAT5 is of significant clinical value.

Comparative analysis of human Wharton's jelly mesenchymal stem cells derived from different parts of the same umbilical cord.

Easy isolation, lack of ethical issues, high proliferation, multi-lineage differentiation potential and immunomodulatory properties of umbilical cord (UC)-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) make them a valuable tool in stem cell research. Recently, Wharton's jelly (WJ) was proven as the best MSC source among various compartments of UC. However, it is still unclear whether or not Wharton's jelly-derived MSCs (WJMSCs) from different parts of the whole cord exhibit the same characteristics.

Multivalent ion-based in situ gelling polysaccharide hydrogel as an injectable bone graft.

We prepared in situ gelling alginate (ALG)/hyaluronic acid (HA) hydrogels with a controllable gelation rate using CaSO as a crosslinking agent and NaHPO as a crosslinking retardation agent. The ALG/HA hydrogels provided sustained release of bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2) immobilized in the hydrogels over 5 weeks. The BMP-2-immobilized ALG/HA hydrogels with different ALG/HA ratios were investigated for their in vitro osteogenic differentiation behavior of human bone marrow stem cells (hBMSCs) and in vivo bone regeneration behavior using an animal model (mandibular defect model of miniature pigs).

The involvement of histone methylation in osteoblastic differentiation of human periosteum-derived cells cultured in vitro under hypoxic conditions.

Although oxygen concentrations affect the growth and function of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), the impact of hypoxia on osteoblastic differentiation is not understood. Likewise, the effect of hypoxia-induced epigenetic changes on osteoblastic differentiation of MSCs is unknown. The aim of this study was to examine the in vitro hypoxic response of human periosteum-derived cells (hPDCs).

High-throughput thermofluor-based assays for inhibitor screening of STAT SH2 domains.

The development of STAT protein-specific inhibitors has been the focus of a number of drug discovery programs. STAT activation occurs through phosphorylation at the STAT SH2 domain, resulting in dimerization, translocation to the nucleus, and transcription of proliferative genes. Due to the functional significance of the SH2 domain in mediating multiple components of the STAT signalling cascade, many libraries of inhibitors have been designed to target the SH2 domain.