We report on a fused deposition modeling 3D-printable rotary valve fabricated from high-grade plastics such as polyether ether ketone or lower-grade plastics like polylactic acid. The valve weighs less than 90 g and has the potential to be integrated into portable and autonomous chemical analysis systems. It has been demonstrated to be leak-proof up to 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe coronavirus pandemic outbreak of 2019 highlighted the critical importance of preparedness for current and future public health threats (https://www.mmv.org/mmv-open/global-health-priority-box/about-global-health-priority-box).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Previous research has identified that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ+) social care service users have concerns and/or negative experiences of their care due to staff views and attitudes about them/their sexual and gender identities. This has resulted in a number of barriers and challenges for the delivery of social care to this population. However, there is a little research relating to what types of evidence-based interventions can help overcome these barriers, enhance knowledge and promote positive attitude change in staff.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The purposes of this study were to determine whether positive work environments affect clinician wellbeing and mental health, and to identify participants' priority interventions to improve clinician wellbeing. This study was designed to determine the potential benefit of modifying the aforementioned factors for clinicians and hospitals to impact positive patient outcomes.
Background: The SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic has become one of the leading causes of death in the United States and worldwide, and has exacerbated widespread burnout among health care professionals.
Aims: This study aimed to explore the perceptions of Meals on Wheels (MoWs) service users (SUs), and people who refer them to MoWs ('referrers'), with accessing and commencing the service in England, the barriers that might hinder service uptake, and what information would be valued when considering accessing the service.
Methods: Semistructured interviews were conducted in May-July 2022 with seven SUs and 21 referrers, recruited from four MoWs providers across England. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis.
The search for chemical indicators of life is a fundamental component of potential future spaceflight missions to ocean worlds. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a useful separation method for the determination of the small organic molecules, such as amino acids and nucleobases, that could be used to help determine whether or not life is present in a sample collected during such missions. CE is under development for spaceflight applications using multiple detection systems, such as laser induced fluorescence (LIF) and mass spectrometry (MS).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Meals on Wheels (MoWs) could help adults with care and support needs continue living independently. However, many people are not aware that the service still exists in England, or that it could provide benefits beyond nutrition.
Objective: Working with an existing advisory group of six people with lived experience of MoWs (an adult who uses MoWs and people who have referred a family member to MoWs), this work aimed to co-produce knowledge translation resources (two infographics and a film) to raise awareness of MoWs and their benefits.
Background: A healthy nursing workforce is vital to ensuring that patients are provided quality care. Assessing nurses' well-being and related factors requires routine evaluations from health system leaders that leverage brief psychometrically sound measures. To date, measures used to assess nurses' well-being have primarily been psychometrically tested among other clinicians or nurses working in specific clinical practice settings rather than in large, representative, heterogeneous samples of nurses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAssessing real-world emissions from buses and taxis is vital to comprehend their impact on urban air quality. Such vehicles differ significantly from the majority of the fleet owing to their higher mileage rates. However, few studies have focused on specifically assessing the emissions from this segment of the vehicle fleet.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWith advances in commercial space launch capabilities and reduced costs to orbit, humans may arrive on Mars within a decade. Both to preserve any signs of past (and extant) martian life and to protect the health of human crews (and Earth's biosphere), it will be necessary to assess the risk of cross-contamination on the surface, in blown dust, and into the near-subsurface (where exploration and resource-harvesting can be reasonably anticipated). Thus, evaluating for the presence of life and biosignatures may become a critical-path Mars exploration precursor in the not-so-far future, circa 2030.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAbsorption spectra of the solvatochromic dye 2,6-diphenyl-4-2,4,6-triphenyl-1-pyridinophenolate (B30) were measured in seven solvents of varying polarity over temperature ranging from each solvent's freezing point to 300 K. The excitation energies and their variances allowed calculations of the solvent reorganization energies, reorganization free energies and reorganization entropies as functions of temperature. The entropies of solvent packing around the chromophore are found to make major contributions to the reorganization free energies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report on a field demonstration of a rover-based drilling mission to search for biomolecular evidence of life in the arid core of the Atacama Desert, Chile. The KREX2 rover carried the Honeybee Robotics 1 m depth The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploration of New Terrains (TRIDENT) drill and a robotic arm with scoop that delivered subsurface fines to three flight prototype instruments: (1) The Signs of Life Detector (SOLID), a protein and biomolecule analyzer based on fluorescence sandwich microarray immunoassay; (2) the Planetary Capillary Electrophoresis System (PISCES), an amino acid analyzer based on subcritical water extraction coupled to microchip electrophoresis analysis; and (3) a Wet Chemistry Laboratory cell to measure soluble ions using ion selective electrodes and chronopotentiometry. A California-based science team selected and directed drilling and sampling of three sites separated by hundreds of meters that included a light-toned basin area showing evidence of aqueous activity surrounded by a rocky desert pavement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report here the first fully automated capillary electrophoresis (CE) system that can be operated underwater. The system performs sample acquisition and analysis by coupling CE to contactless conductivity detection. Using 5 M acetic acid as the background electrolyte (BGE), inorganic cations and amino acids at concentrations as low as 5.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe intersections between aging, social minority status and housing needs in later life is a neglected area of sociological exploration, even more so for older people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT). Recent sociological findings indicate that older LGBT people in housing schemes stress the importance of bonding social capital and look to other people in their social networks who reflect their identities and experiences as sources of support. In this paper, we examine the insider-outsider status occupied by older LGBT residents living in housing schemes that provide some form of care and support, for example extra care and independent living schemes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures imposed as a result affected the lives of people in all parts of society across the world. In 2020, during the first UK national lockdown, older adults (aged 70 years and over) were told to 'shield' within their homes, as they were regarded as being at higher risk of serious COVID-19 infection compared to other age groups. This paper explores older adults' experiences of COVID-19 lockdown measures whilst living in housing with care schemes for older people.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Urgent Care (UC) encounters result in more inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions than other outpatient setting. Few stewardship interventions have focused on UC.
Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of an antibiotic stewardship initiative to reduce antibiotic prescribing for respiratory conditions in a UC network.
Capillary electrophoresis (CE) holds great promise as an in situ analytical technique for a variety of applications. However, typical instrumentation operates with open reservoirs (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSample injection is a critical step in a capillary electrophoresis (CE) analysis. Electrokinetic injection is the simplest approach and is often selected for implementation in portable CE instruments. However, in order to minimize the effect of sample matrix upon the results of a CE analysis, hydrodynamic injection is preferred.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Housing with care is often lauded as a way to combat loneliness and social isolation in later life. This study examined whether housing with care created better outcomes for residents in terms of loneliness and social isolation than they might expect if they were living in the community.
Research Design And Methods: A survey was distributed to residents of housing with care as part of the Diversity in Care Environments project.
Fatty acids are a well-established class of compounds targeted as biosignatures for future missions to look for evidence of life on ocean worlds such as Europa and Enceladus. In order to establish their abiotic or biotic origin, we need to separate and quantify fatty acids to determine their relative abundances within a sample. In this study, we demonstrate the high potential of capillary electrophoresis coupled to mass spectrometry (CE-MS) for the efficient separation and sensitive detection of a wide variety of fatty acids.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater, Mars, to investigate ancient lake and river deposits. We report observations of the crater floor, below the crater's sedimentary delta, finding that the floor consists of igneous rocks altered by water. The lowest exposed unit, informally named Séítah, is a coarsely crystalline olivine-rich rock, which accumulated at the base of a magma body.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCapillary electrophoresis (CE) is a promising liquid-based technique for chemical analysis on ocean worlds that allows the detection of a wide range of organic molecules relevant to the search for life. CE coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) is particularly valuable as it also enables the discovery of unknown compounds. Here we demonstrate that CE coupled to MS via electrospray ionization (ESI) can readily analyze samples containing up to half the saturation levels of salts relevant to ocean worlds when using 5 M acetic acid as the separation media.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn open-source, low noise, low cost, and tunable transimpedance amplifier is presented. The compact circuit board requires few parts and costs less than $65 USD. The transimpedance amplifier is intended for low-light detection and operation with commercial photomultiplier tubes (PMTs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDF