Comparative occipital pressure mapping in the operating room.

Background: Hospital-acquired occipital pressure injuries are a preventable cause of morbidity and mortality in the perioperative setting.

Purpose: To find the occipital cushion/pillow with the lowest measured peak pressures and the highest measured surface area using pressure mapping technology.

Materials And Methods: A quality improvement project involving 3 operating room staff volunteers was conducted using pressure mapping.

Mid-infrared spectroscopy determines the provenance of coastal marine soils and their organic and inorganic carbon content.

Vegetated coastal ecosystems (VCE), encompassing tidal marshes, mangroves, and seagrasses, serve as significant 'blue' carbon (C) sinks. Improving our understanding of VCE soils and their spatial and temporal dynamics is essential for conservation efforts. Conventional methods to characterise the dynamics and provenance of VCE soils and measure their total organic carbon (TOC) and inorganic carbon (TIC) contents are cumbersome and expensive.

How much organic carbon could the soil store? The carbon sequestration potential of Australian soil.

Soil is a huge carbon (C) reservoir, but where and how much extra C can be stored is unknown. Current methods to estimate the maximum amount of mineral-associated organic carbon (MAOC) stabilized in the fine fraction (clay + silt, ) fit through the MAOC versus clay + silt relationship, not their maxima, making their estimates more uncertain and unreliable. We need a function that 'envelopes' that relationship.

Drought legacy interacts with wildfire to alter soil microbial communities in a Mediterranean climate-type forest.

Mediterranean forest ecosystems will be increasingly affected by hotter drought and more frequent and severe wildfire events in the future. However, little is known about the longer-term responses of these forests to multiple disturbances and the forests' capacity to maintain ecosystem function. This is particularly so for below-ground organisms, which have received less attention than those above-ground, despite their essential contributions to forest function.

Ethylene-mediated metabolic priming increases photosynthesis and metabolism to enhance plant growth and stress tolerance.

Enhancing crop yields is a major challenge because of an increasing human population, climate change, and reduction in arable land. Here, we demonstrate that long-lasting growth enhancement and increased stress tolerance occur by pretreatment of dark grown seedlings with ethylene before transitioning into light. Plants treated this way had longer primary roots, more and longer lateral roots, and larger aerial tissue and were more tolerant to high temperature, salt, and recovery from hypoxia stress.