Functional optimality underpins the repeated evolution of the extreme "saber-tooth" morphology.

"Saber teeth"-elongate, blade-like canines-are a classic example of convergence, having evolved repeatedly throughout mammalian history. Within canine teeth, there is a trade-off between the aspects of shape that improve food fracture and those that increase tooth strength. Optimal morphologies strike a balance between these antagonistic functional criteria.

Addressing Financial Toxicity From a Global Perspective: How to Advance Shared-Learning to Facilitate Change?

Financial Toxicity is a global issue requiring international efforts, but importantly, where to next?

Assessing blue carbon in mangrove ecosystems of Seychelles.

Mangrove forests play an important role in climate change mitigation and adaptation, globally recognized as natural climate solution. The protection and restoration of mangrove ecosystems are especially important to Small Island Developing States, like Seychelles, due to their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise and tropical cyclones. Therefore, it is crucial for countries like Seychelles to develop baseline information on the status of their mangrove forests to guide conservation and management actions.

Enhancing Recommender Systems through Imputation and Social-Aware Graph Convolutional Neural Network.

Recommendation systems are vital tools for helping users discover content that suits their interests. Collaborative filtering methods are one of the techniques employed for analyzing interactions between users and items, which are typically stored in a sparse matrix. This inherent sparsity poses a challenge because it necessitates accurately and effectively filling in these gaps to provide users with meaningful and personalized recommendations.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae inactivation during water disinfection by underwater plasma bubbles: Preferential reactive species production and subcellular mechanisms.

The escalating challenges posed by water resource contamination, especially exacerbated by health concerns associated with microbial fungi threats, necessitate advanced disinfection technologies. Within this context, non-thermal plasma generated within bubble column reactors emerges as a promising antifungal strategy. The effects of direct plasma bubbles within different discharge modes and thus-produced plasma activated water (PAW) on the inactivation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae are investigated.

Inhibition of the canonical Wnt/β-catenin pathway interferes with macropinocytosis to suppress pseudorabies virus proliferation.

Pseudorabies virus (PRV) is one of the highly contagious pathogens causing significant economic losses to the swine industry worldwide. More importantly, PRV is becoming a potential "life-threatening zoonosis" since the human-originated PRV strain was first isolated in 2019. Previously we found that the canonical Wnt/β-catenin pathway facilitates PRV proliferation, while the underlying mechanism remains unknown.

Sucralose uses reward pathways to promote acute caloric intake.

Non-nutritive sweeteners (NNSs) are used to reduce caloric intake by replacing sugar with compounds that are sweet but contain little or no calories. In this study, we investigate how non-nutritive sweetener sucralose to promote acute food intake in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Our results showed that acute exposure to NNSs sweetness induces a robust hyperphagic response in flies.

Immune-modulating nanomedicines for enhanced drug delivery to non-small-cell lung cancer.

Immune-modulating peptides have shown potential as novel immune-stimulating agents which enhance the secretion of anticancer cytokines in vitro. However, fast clearance from blood hampers the ability of such peptides to accumulate in the tumour and results in limited therapeutic efficacy in animal studies. To address the fast blood clearance, this work reports the development and validation of a novel polymeric nanoparticle delivery system for the efficient localization of an immunomodulating peptide in the tumour microenvironment (TME).

Growing contribution to radiative forcing from China's on-farm nitrous oxide emissions requires more attention.

Agricultural systems are important emission sources of non-CO greenhouse gases (GHGs), including the relatively short-lived GHG methane (CH). As a pivotal emitter, China's CH emissions have received wide attention. For the first time, this study applied an indicator of radiative forcing-based climate footprint (RFCF) to compare the climate impacts of China's on-farm non-CO GHG emissions including CH and nitrous oxide (NO).

Outcomes With Radiation Therapy as Primary Treatment for Unresectable Cutaneous Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma.

Aims: Unresectable cutaneous squamous cell cancer of the head and neck (HNcSCC) poses treatment challenges in elderly and comorbid patients. Radiation therapy (RT) is often employed for locoregional control. This study aimed to determine progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) outcomes achieved with upfront RT in unresectable HNcSCC.

Cultural Adaptation of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Maternal and Child mHealth Intervention: Protocol for a Co-Design and Adaptation Research Study.

Background: There is limited evidence of high-quality, accessible, culturally safe, and effective digital health interventions for Indigenous mothers and babies. Like any other intervention, the feasibility and efficacy of digital health interventions depend on how well they are co-designed with Indigenous communities and their adaptability to intracultural diversity.

Objective: This study aims to adapt an existing co-designed mobile health (mHealth) intervention app with health professionals and Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander mothers living in South Australia.

Protocol for extracting flow hydrograph shape metrics for use in time-series flood hydrology analysis.

The shape characteristics of flow hydrographs hold essential information for understanding, monitoring and assessing changes in flow and flood hydrology at reach and catchment scales. However, the analysis of individual hydrographs is time consuming, making the analysis of hundreds or thousands of them unachievable. A method or protocol is needed to ensure that the datasets being generated, and the metrics produced, have been consistently derived and validated.

Preliminary characterisation of the spatial immune and vascular environment in triple negative basal breast carcinomas using multiplex fluorescent immunohistochemistry.

Triple negative breast cancers often contain higher numbers of tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes compared with other breast cancer subtypes, with their number correlating with prolonged survival. Since little is known about tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte trafficking in triple negative breast cancers, we investigated the relationship between tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes and the vascular compartment to better understand the immune tumour microenvironment in this aggressive cancer type. We aimed to identify mechanisms and signaling pathways responsible for immune cell trafficking in triple negative breast cancers, specifically of basal type, that could potentially be manipulated to change such tumours from immune "cold" to "hot" thereby increasing the likelihood of successful immunotherapy in this challenging patient population.

Synthesising enablers and barriers to hepatocellular carcinoma surveillance-A systematic review of qualitative findings.

Background & Aims: This systematic literature review of qualitative findings aims to identify the perceived barriers and enablers for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) surveillance from patient and clinician perspectives.

Methods: A systematic search of databases using key term combinations with the following inclusion criteria: 1) qualitative and quantitative (survey) studies exploring barriers and enablers of HCC surveillance, and 2) qualitative and quantitative (survey) studies exploring barriers and enablers of enagagement in clinical care for patients with cirrhosis and/or viral hepatitis.

Results: The search returned 445 citations: 371 did not meet the study criteria and were excluded.

Groundwater releases CO to diverse global coastal ecosystems.

Coastal ecosystems play a major role in marine carbon budgets, but substantial uncertainties remain in the sources and fluxes of coastal carbon dioxide (CO). Here, we assess when, where, and how submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) releases CO to shallow coastal ecosystems. Time-series observations of dissolved CO and radon (Rn, a natural groundwater tracer) across 40 coastal systems from 14 countries revealed large SGD-derived CO fluxes.

High-throughput design of a light and strong refractory eutectic medium entropy alloy with outstanding He-ion irradiation resistance.

Light, strong, and radiation-tolerant materials are essential for advanced nuclear systems and aerospace applications. However, the comprehensive properties of current radiation-tolerant materials are far from being satisfactory in harsh operating environments. In this study, a high-throughput-designed NbVTaSi refractory eutectic medium entropy alloy realizes the controllable formation of the β-NbSi phase with a high content and has outstanding comprehensive properties, i.

Beyond Increasing Sample Sizes: Optimizing Effect Sizes in Neuroimaging Research on Individual Differences.

Linking neurobiology to relatively stable individual differences in cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior can require large sample sizes to yield replicable results. Given the nature of between-person research, sample sizes at least in the hundreds are likely to be necessary in most neuroimaging studies of individual differences, regardless of whether they are investigating the whole brain or more focal hypotheses. However, the appropriate sample size depends on the expected effect size.

Topical review: Ocular surface abnormalities in neurodegenerative disorders.

Significance: In an aging population, the number of people living with neurodegenerative disease is projected to increase. It is vital to develop reliable, noninvasive biomarkers to detect disease onset and monitor progression, and there is a growing body of research into the ocular surface as a potential source of such biomarkers.

Background: This article reviews the potential of in vivo corneal confocal microscopy and tear fluid analysis as tools for biomarker development.

Multiomics dissection of human RAG deficiency reveals distinctive patterns of immune dysregulation but a common inflammatory signature.

Human recombination-activating gene (RAG) deficiency can manifest with distinct clinical and immunological phenotypes. By applying a multiomics approach to a large group of -mutated patients, we aimed at characterizing the immunopathology associated with each phenotype. Although defective T and B cell development is common to all phenotypes, patients with hypomorphic variants can generate T and B cells with signatures of immune dysregulation and produce autoantibodies to a broad range of self-antigens, including type I interferons.

Safety, Efficacy and Pharmacokinetics of daily optimised doses of Rifampicin for the Treatment of Tuberculosis: A Systematic Review and Bayesian Network Meta-Analysis.

Background: Higher than standard doses of rifampicin could improve the treatment outcome of drug-susceptible tuberculosis without compromising the safety of patients.

Methods: We performed a systematic review of prospective clinical studies including adults with pulmonary and extrapulmonary TB receiving rifampicin doses above 10mg/kg/day. We extracted the data on overall adverse events (AE), hepatic AE, sputum culture conversion (SCC) at week 8, recurrence, mortality, and pharmacokinetics.

Spontaneous Cloacal Prolapse in a Farm Ostrich (Struthio camelus): Case Management and Literature Review.

Captive ratites, including the ostrich (Struthio camelus), are susceptible to various gastrointestinal conditions. However, spontaneous cloacal prolapse is a relatively less frequent diagnosis. This report details the clinical management of cloacal prolapse in an ostrich, including a brief literature review.