An exploration of clinically meaningful definitions of cough bouts.

Rationale: The measurement of cough frequency is widely used in clinical trials, typically expressed as the number of explosive cough sounds per hour. However, this measure does not capture the clustering of coughs into bouts. Coughing bouts contribute to perceived cough severity and the physical complications of coughing, but an agreed standard definition of cough bouts is lacking.

Mapping of temperate upland habitats using high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning.

Upland habitats provide vital ecological services, yet they are highly threatened by natural and anthropogenic stressors. Monitoring these vulnerable habitats is fundamental for conservation and involves determining information about their spatial locations and conditions. Remote sensing has evolved as a promising tool to map the distribution of upland habitats in space and time.

Machine-learning prediction of thermal expansion coefficient for perovskite oxides with experimental validation.

Perovskite oxides have been of high-interest and relatively well studied over the last 20 years due to their various applications, specifically for solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) and solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOECs). One of the key properties for a perovskite to perform well as a component in SOFCs, SOECs, and other high-temperature applications is its thermal expansion coefficient (TEC). The use of machine learning (ML) to predict material properties has greatly increased over the years and has proven to be a very useful tool for materials screening.

The energetics and evolution of oxidoreductases in deep time.

The core metabolic reactions of life drive electrons through a class of redox protein enzymes, the oxidoreductases. The energetics of electron flow is determined by the redox potentials of organic and inorganic cofactors as tuned by the protein environment. Understanding how protein structure affects oxidation-reduction energetics is crucial for studying metabolism, creating bioelectronic systems, and tracing the history of biological energy utilization on Earth.

Evaluating Mineral Lattices as Evolutionary Proxies for Metalloprotein Evolution.

Protein coordinated iron-sulfur clusters drive electron flow within metabolic pathways for organisms throughout the tree of life. It is not known how iron-sulfur clusters were first incorporated into proteins. Structural analogies to iron-sulfide minerals present on early Earth, suggest a connection in the evolution of both proteins and minerals.

Design of synthetic collagens that assemble into supramolecular banded fibers as a functional biomaterial testbed.

Collagens are the most abundant proteins of the extracellular matrix, and the hierarchical folding and supramolecular assembly of collagens into banded fibers is essential for mediating cell-matrix interactions and tissue mechanics. Collagen extracted from animal tissues is a valuable commodity, but suffers from safety and purity issues, limiting its biomaterials applications. Synthetic collagen biomaterials could address these issues, but their construction requires molecular-level control of folding and supramolecular assembly into ordered banded fibers, comparable to those of natural collagens.

Electropolymerised pH Insensitive Salicylic Acid Reference Systems: Utilization in a Novel pH Sensor for Food and Environmental Monitoring.

This work summarizes the electrochemical response of a salicylic acid-based carbon electrode for use as a novel solid-state reference electrode in a redox-based pH sensor. This novel reference produces a pH insensitive response over a range of pH 3-10 in solutions with low buffer concentrations, different compositions, conductivities, and ionic strengths is produced. The pH of the local environment is shown to be determined by the chemistry and the electrochemical response of the redox active species on the surface of the electrode; the local pH can be controlled by the electropolymerized salicylic acid moieties due to the acid concentration on the surface, avoiding any perturbation in environmental pH and leading to a stable novel reference system.

Integrating Personal Air Sensor and GPS to Determine Microenvironment-Specific Exposures to Volatile Organic Compounds.

Personal exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from indoor sources including consumer products is an understudied public health concern. To develop and evaluate methods for monitoring personal VOC exposures, we performed a pilot study and examined time-resolved sensor-based measurements of geocoded total VOC (TVOC) exposures across individuals and microenvironments (MEs). We integrated continuous (1 min) data from a personal TVOC sensor and a global positioning system (GPS) logger, with a GPS-based ME classification model, to determine TVOC exposures in four MEs, including indoors at home (Home-In), indoors at other buildings (Other-In), inside vehicles (In-Vehicle), and outdoors (Out), across 45 participant-days for five participants.

The reactivated bike: Self-reported cycling activity during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in Australia.

In western societies, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic restrictions created a boom in cycling activity and business. This article reports findings from an Australia-wide survey that invited responses from those who changed their cycling behaviour during the pandemic lockdowns. The survey premise was that the pandemic lockdowns in each state presented the conditions of a 'natural experiment' to test whether the reduction in automobile traffic affected how cyclists reported experiencing the cycling environment.

Causes, Nature and Toxicology of Fentanyl-Associated Deaths: A Systematic Review of Deaths Reported in Peer-Reviewed Literature.

Purpose: Fentanyl poisoning has been widely reported, yet there is a lack of systematic evaluation of the nature and toxicology of associated deaths in the published literature. This article aims to systematically review the nature, causes, routes of administration and toxicology of fentanyl-associated deaths using case studies and case series in peer-reviewed published literature.

Methods: Four electronic databases including Embase, Medline (via Ovid), Scopus and Google Scholar were searched from inception until October 2019 to identify the studies reporting fentanyl related deaths.

Few-shot hypercolumn-based mitochondria segmentation in cardiac and outer hair cells in focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) data.

We present a novel AI-based approach to the few-shot automated segmentation of mitochondria in large-scale electron microscopy images. Our framework leverages convolutional features from a pre-trained deep multilayer convolutional neural network, such as VGG-16. We then train a binary gradient boosting classifier on the resulting high-dimensional feature hypercolumns.

Predicting knee osteoarthritis severity: comparative modeling based on patient's data and plain X-ray images.

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a disease that impairs knee function and causes pain. A radiologist reviews knee X-ray images and grades the severity level of the impairments according to the Kellgren and Lawrence grading scheme; a five-point ordinal scale (0-4). In this study, we used Elastic Net (EN) and Random Forests (RF) to build predictive models using patient assessment data (i.

Role of simple descriptors and applicability domain in predicting change in protein thermostability.

The melting temperature (Tm) of a protein is the temperature at which half of the protein population is in a folded state. Therefore, Tm is a measure of the thermostability of a protein. Increasing the Tm of a protein is a critical goal in biotechnology and biomedicine.

Soil uranium concentration at Ranger Uranium Mine Land Application Areas drives changes in the bacterial community.

Soil microorganisms may respond to metal stress by a shift in the microbial community from metal sensitive to metal resistant microorganisms. We assessed the bacterial community from low (2-20 mg kg), medium (200-400 mg kg), high (500-900 mg kg) and very high (>900 mg kg) uranium soils at Ranger Uranium Mine in northern Australia through pyrosequencing. Proteobacteria (28.

Muscle activation and sound during voluntary single coughs and cough peals in healthy volunteers: Insights into cough intensity.

Very few studies have addressed how coughing varies in intensity. We assessed the influence of cough effort and operating volume on the mechanics of coughing using respiratory muscle surface electromyography (EMG), oesophageal/gastric pressures and cough sounds recorded from 15 healthy subjects [8 female, median age 30 (IQR 30-50)years] performing 120 voluntary coughs from controlled operating volume/effort and three cough peals. For single coughs, low operating volumes and high efforts were associated with the highest EMG activity (p < 0.

Characterization of Disulfide-Linked Peptides Using Tandem Mass Spectrometry Coupled with Automated Data Analysis Software.

Disulfide bond formation is critical for maintaining structure stability and function of many peptides and proteins. Mass spectrometry has become an important tool for the elucidation of molecular connectivity. However, the interpretation of the tandem mass spectral data of disulfide-linked peptides has been a major challenge due to the lack of appropriate tools.

Real-time field sports scene classification using colour and frequency space decompositions.

This paper presents a novel approach to recognize a scene presented in an image with specific application to scene classification in field sports video. We propose different variants of the algorithm ranging from bags of visual words to the simplified real-time implementation, that takes only the most important areas of similar colour into account. All the variants feature similar accuracy which is comparable to very well-known image indexing techniques like SIFT or HoGs.

Spatial and Temporal Microbial Patterns in a Tropical Macrotidal Estuary Subject to Urbanization.

Darwin Harbour in northern Australia is an estuary in the wet-dry tropics subject to increasing urbanization with localized water quality degradation due to increased nutrient loads from urban runoff and treated sewage effluent. Tropical estuaries are poorly studied compared to temperate systems and little is known about the microbial community-level response to nutrients. We aimed to examine the spatial and temporal patterns of the bacterial community and its association with abiotic factors.

Collagen mimetic peptide discs promote assembly of a broad range of natural protein fibers through hydrophobic interactions.

Collagen mimetic peptides that alone formed two-dimensional nanoscale discs driven by hydrophobic interactions were shown in electron microscopy studies to also co-assemble with natural fibrous proteins to produce discs-on-a-string (DoS) nanostructures. In most cases, peptide discs also facilitated bundling of the protein fibers. This provides insight into how synthetic and natural proteins may be combined to develop multicomponent, multi-dimensional architectures at the nanoscale.

UK Fixation of Distal Tibia Fractures (UK FixDT): protocol for a randomised controlled trial of 'locking' plate fixation versus intramedullary nail fixation in the treatment of adult patients with a displaced fracture of the distal tibia.

Introduction: The treatment of displaced, extra-articular fractures of the distal tibia remains controversial. These injuries are difficult to manage due to limited soft tissue cover, poor vascularity of the area and proximity to the ankle joint. Surgical treatment options are expanding and include locked intramedullary nails, plate and screw fixation and external fixator systems.

Molecular screening of microbial communities for candidate indicators of multiple metal impacts in marine sediments from northern Australia.

Coastal sediments accumulate metals from anthropogenic sources and as a consequence industry is required to monitor sediment health. The total concentration of a metal does not necessarily reflect its potential toxicity or biological impact, so biological assessment tools are useful for monitoring. Rapid biological assessment tools sensitive enough to detect relatively small increases in metal concentrations would provide early warning of future ecosystem impact.

Characterisation of microcontaminants in Darwin Harbour, a tropical estuary of northern Australia undergoing rapid development.

The detection of microcontaminants in aquatic environments raises concerns about their potential to exert ecotoxicological effects and impact human health. In contrast to freshwater habitats, little information is available on environmental concentrations in urban estuarine and marine environments. This study investigated an extensive range of organic and inorganic microcontaminants in the Darwin Harbour catchment, a tropical estuary in northern Australia undergoing rapid urbanisation and industrial development.

Land application of mine water causes minimal uranium loss offsite in the wet-dry tropics: Ranger Uranium Mine, Northern Territory, Australia.

Ranger Uranium Mine (RUM) is situated in the wet-dry tropics of Northern Australia. Land application (irrigation) of stockpile (ore and waste) runoff water to natural woodland on the mine lease is a key part of water management at the mine. Consequently, the soil in these Land Application Areas (LAAs) presents a range of uranium (U) and other metals concentrations.

Institutional decision making: empowering of health system and economic transformation.

Organized medicine (OM) is an institution built to defend the American health care system of the 20th century. The institutional structures that it employed, however, operated mechanically and independently of its practitioner base, which drew from physician and nonphysician health professions. This article suggests that OM's institutional structures were founded and defended by a "logic of confidence," which initially served as a buffer against external socioeconomic pressures.