Waxes comprise a diverse set of materials from lubricants and coatings to biological materials such as the intracuticular wax layers on plant leaves that restrict water loss to inhibit dehydration. Despite the often mixed hydrocarbon chain lengths and functional groups within waxes, they show a propensity for ordering into crystalline phases, albeit with a wealth of solid solution behavior and disorder modes that determine chemical transport and mechanical properties. Here, we reveal the microscopic structure and heterogeneity of replica leaf wax models based on the dominant wax types in the plant, namely CH and CHOH and their binary mixtures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Lack of social support negatively impacts medical trainees' wellness. Programmes to educate medical trainees and their support persons (SPs) have been developed to improve resident wellness, but implementation of these programmes at other institutions remains unclear. We aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the Family Anesthesia Experience (FAX) programme across multiple institutions and to assess the programme's utility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers are currently the only clinically validated biofluid diagnostic test for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) available in Australia. Testing of CSF biomarkers via lumbar puncture (LP), including quantification of amyloid-β peptide, total tau protein, and phosphorylated tau, can give insight into underlying pathophysiological changes and provide greater certainty in confirming or excluding the presence of Alzheimer's disease changes compared to standard clinical and radiological assessments. Despite CSF analysis being a safe and cost-effective diagnostic method, the use of CSF biomarkers in the evaluation of potential AD remains limited in Australian clinical practice due to a variety of factors, including regional access challenges, concerns over the perceived invasiveness of LP and a lack of confidence among clinicians in interpreting the results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe direct epitaxial growth of high-quality III-V semiconductors on Si is a challenging materials science problem with a number of applications in optoelectronic devices, such as solar cells and on-chip lasers. We report the reduction of dislocation density in GaAs solar cells grown directly on nanopatterned V-groove Si substrates by metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy. Starting from a template of GaP on V-groove Si, we achieved a low threading dislocation density (TDD) of 3 × 10 cm in the GaAs by performing thermal cycle annealing of the GaAs followed by growth of InGaAs dislocation filter layers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOncolytic viruses are a promising approach for cancer treatment where viruses selectively target and kill cancer cells while also stimulating an immune response. Among viruses with this ability, bovine herpesvirus-1 (BoHV-1) has several advantages, including observations suggesting it may not require viral replication for its anti-cancer effects. We previously demonstrated that binding and penetration of enveloped virus particles are sufficient to trigger intrinsic and innate immune signaling in normal cells, while other groups have published the efficacy of non-replicating viruses as viable immunotherapies in different cancer models.
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