Daughter circumcision and maternal life satisfaction: a cultural moderation effect revealed across two multicountry studies.

Introduction: The present paper assessed the relationship between maternal life satisfaction (MLS) and the intergenerational transmission of female genital cutting (FGC, female circumcision). It was hypothesised that the association would be more strongly positive in countries in which FGC is more prevalent (ie, culturally normative), suggesting a practice that is socially reinforcing within sociocultural contexts in which it is common.

Methods: Across two studies with more than 85 000 participants in 15 African and Asian countries, mothers completed surveys reporting on their own FGC experiences and those of their daughters' and on their educational history and socioeconomic status.

BPAGS: a web application for bacteriocin prediction via feature evaluation using alternating decision tree, genetic algorithm, and linear support vector classifier.

The use of bacteriocins has emerged as a propitious strategy in the development of new drugs to combat antibiotic resistance, given their ability to kill bacteria with both broad and narrow natural spectra. Hence, a compelling requirement arises for a precise and efficient computational model that can accurately predict novel bacteriocins. Machine learning's ability to learn patterns and features from bacteriocin sequences that are difficult to capture using sequence matching-based methods makes it a potentially superior choice for accurate prediction.

Berry shrivel in grapevine: a review considering multiple approaches.

Grapevine berry shrivel, a ripening disorder, causes significant economic losses in the worldwide wine and table grape industries. An early interruption in ripening leads to this disorder, resulting in shriveling and reduced sugar accumulation affecting yield and fruit quality. Loss of sink strength associated with berry mesocarp cell death is an early symptom of this disorder; however, potential internal or external triggers are yet to be explored.

Evaluating Stage Motion for Automated Electron Microscopy.

Precise control is an essential and elusive quality of emerging self-driving transmission electron microscopes (TEMs). It is widely understood these instruments must be capable of performing rapid, high-volume, and arbitrary movements for practical self-driving operation. However, stage movements are difficult to automate at scale, owing to mechanical instability, hysteresis, and thermal drift.

Borderline personality features are associated with worse perceptions of (but not compliance with) chronic pain treatment.

Treating chronic illness requires ongoing patient-provider cooperation, but individual differences in patients' negative perceptions of care can undermine this cooperation. Research suggests people high on borderline personality disorder (BPD) features may react negatively to and comply less with mental health and medical treatment. This might be particularly problematic in chronic pain treatment, where BPD features are over-represented and the dysregulation typifying BPD likely undermines consistent care.

BaPreS: a software tool for predicting bacteriocins using an optimal set of features.

Background: Antibiotic resistance is a major public health concern around the globe. As a result, researchers always look for new compounds to develop new antibiotic drugs for combating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Bacteriocin becomes a promising antimicrobial agent to fight against antibiotic resistance, due to cases of both broad and narrow killing spectra.

Acetate Production from Syngas Produced from Lignocellulosic Biomass Materials along with Gaseous Fermentation of the Syngas: A Review.

Biotransformation of lignocellulose-derived synthetic gas (syngas) into acetic acid is a promising way of creating biochemicals from lignocellulosic waste materials. Acetic acid has a growing market with applications within food, plastics and for upgrading into a wide range of biofuels and bio-products. In this paper, we will review the microbial conversion of syngas to acetic acid.

Design and Application of Materials for Sequestration and Immobilization of Tc.

Technetium (Tc) is a hazardous radionuclide that poses a serious environmental threat. The wide variation and complex chemistries of liquid nuclear waste streams containing Tc often create unique, site specific challenges when sequestering and immobilizing the waste in a matrix suitable for long-term storage and disposal. Therefore, an effective management plan for Tc containing liquid radioactive wastes (such as storage (tanks) and decommissioned wastes) will likely require a variety of suitable materials/matrixes capable of adapting to and addressing these challenges.

New Directions in L2 Self-efficacy Research: Comparing Bifactor and Second-Order Models in the English Public Speaking Domain.

Reflecting an alternative model comparison framework and grounded in Bandura's self-efficacy theory and in western and Chinese English Public Speaking (EPS) competences literature, we examine the possibility of a hierarchical structure of the EPS self-efficacy construct. In particular, we contrast an established first-order model of the EPS self-efficacy with two higher-order rival models, testing for subordinate (second-order model) versus nested (bifactor model) relationships in a sample of 203 Chinese EFL college students. From a theoretical perspective, the results supported the bifactor model as a strong conceptual foundation for understanding the EPS self-efficacy construct as nested.

An Automated Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope Guided by Sparse Data Analytics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to reshape scientific inquiry and enable breakthrough discoveries in areas such as energy storage, quantum computing, and biomedicine. Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), a cornerstone of the study of chemical and materials systems, stands to benefit greatly from AI-driven automation. However, present barriers to low-level instrument control, as well as generalizable and interpretable feature detection, make truly automated microscopy impractical.

Radiobiology of Select Radionuclides in Hanford Site Tank Waste.

There are several important radionuclides involved in the "clean-up" or environmental isolation of nuclear waste contained in US Department of Energy Hanford Site underground waste tanks that drive many of the decisions associated with this activity. To make proper human health risk analyses and ensure that the most appropriate decisions are made, it is important to understand the radiation biology and the human health risk associated with these radionuclides. This manuscript provides some basic radiological science, in particular radiation biology, for some of these radionuclides, i.

Understanding calcium functionality by examining growth characteristics and structural aspects in calcium-deficient grapevine.

This study characterized growth characteristics and cellular details employing microscopy techniques in hydroponically-grown Ca-sufficient and Ca-deficient grapevines (Vitis vinifera) in a glasshouse. The Ca-deficient vines exhibited significant reductions in shoot length, shoot and trunk fresh weights, leaf area, chlorophyll, which eventually led to drooping, yellowing, and chlorosis of leaves. Roots were less dense and primarily dark and necrotic.

Homo-Acetogens: Their Metabolism and Competitive Relationship with Hydrogenotrophic Methanogens.

Homo-acetogens are microbes that have the ability to grow on gaseous substrates such as H/CO/CO and produce acetic acid as the main product of their metabolism through a metabolic process called reductive acetogenesis. These acetogens are dispersed in nature and are found to grow in various biotopes on land, water and sediments. They are also commonly found in the gastro-intestinal track of herbivores that rely on a symbiotic relationship with microbes in order to breakdown lignocellulosic biomass to provide the animal with nutrients and energy.

Quantifying the instrumental and noninstrumental underpinnings of Pavlovian responding with the Price equation.

The Price equation is a mathematical expression of selectionist and non-selectionist pressures on biological, cultural, and behavioral change. We use it here to specify instrumental and noninstrumental behaviors as they arise within the context of the Pavlovian autoshaping procedure, for rats trained under reward certainty and reward uncertainty. The point of departure for this endeavor is that some portion of autoshaped behavior referred to as goal-tracking appears instrumental-a function of resource attainment (the individual approaches the location where the unconditioned stimulus is to be delivered).

Assessment of the Risks and Needs of Middle School Students: Invariance Properties Related to Gender and Ethnicity.

The middle school version of the Washington Assessment of Risks and Needs of Students (msWARNS) is a self-report instrument designed for use by school personnel to identify barriers to school attendance and school success for sixth- to eighth-grade students. It measures six domains relevant to improving school outcomes that include aggression-defiance, depression-anxiety, substance use, peer deviance, home environment, and school engagement. In the present study, a bifactor S - 1 model, for which the aggression-defiance domain was the reference factor for the general factor and the other domains constituted the subfactors, had good fit and better fit than several other alternative models.

Heterologous expression and biophysical characterization of a mesophilic tannase following manganese nanoparticle immobilization.

In the current study, we analyzed the efficacy of manganese oxide nanoparticle (MnNP)-water dispersion as an immobilization matrix for bacterial tannase. The tannase-secreting Bacillus subtilis strain NJKL.tan.

Measurement of local magnetic fields in actinide tetrafluorides.

Fluorine-19 magnetic shielding tensors have been measured in a series of actinide tetrafluorides (AnF) by solid state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Tetravalent actinide centers with 0-8 valence electrons can form tetrafluorides with the same monoclinic structure type, making these compounds an attractive choice for a systematic study of the variation in the electronic structure across the 5f row of the Periodic Table. Pronounced deviations from predictions based on localized valence electron models have been detected by these experiments, which suggests that this approach may be used as a quantitative probe of electronic correlations.

A deeper and distributed search for culture.

The target article does not address the neural mediation of complex social behavior. I review evidence that such mediation may be compatible with proposed Bayesian information-processing principles. Notably, however, such mediation occurs subcortically as well as cortically, concerns reward uncertainty and information uncertainty, and impacts culture via group-level payoff structures that define individualism and collectivism.

The security-seeking impulse and the unification of attachment and culture.

Attachment theory is perhaps the most well-researched framework for understanding how early life experiences shape the developing child and his or her future social functioning. Influential cultural psychologists and anthropologists object to it, however, claiming it to be incompatible with non-Western child rearing practices and values. A rapprochement is attempted here based on a biologically informed understanding of attachment patterns as relatively enduring reflections of reinforcement schedules (i.

Model Optimization for the Prediction of Red Wine Phenolic Compounds Using Ultraviolet-Visible Spectra.

The primary objective of this work was to optimize red wine phenolic prediction with models built from wine ultraviolet-visible absorbance spectra. Three major obstacles were addressed to achieve this, namely algorithm selection, spectral multicollinearity, and phenolic evolution over time. For algorithm selection, support vector regression, kernel ridge regression, and kernel partial least squares regression were compared.

Contributions to Lignomics: Stochastic Generation of Oligomeric Lignin Structures for Interpretation of MALDI-FT-ICR-MS Results.

The lack of standards to identify oligomeric molecules is a challenge for the analysis of complex organic mixtures. High-resolution mass spectrometry-specifically, Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS)-offers new opportunities for analysis of oligomers with the assignment of formulae (C H O ) to detected peaks. However, matching a specific structure to a given formula remains a challenge due to the inability of FT-ICR MS to distinguish between isomers.

S-Persulfidation: Chemistry, Chemical Biology, and Significance in Health and Disease.

S-Persulfidation generates persulfide adducts (RSSH) on both small molecules and proteins. This process is believed to be critical in the regulation of biological functions of reactive sulfur species such as HS, as well as in signal transduction. S-Persulfidation also plays regulatory roles in human health and diseases.

Modelling of Rod-Like Fillers' Rotation and Translation near Two Growing Cells in Conductive Polymer Composite Foam Processing.

We developed a simple analytical model to describe the instantaneous location and angle of rod-like conductive fillers as a function of cell growth during the foaming of conductive polymer composites (CPCs). First, we modelled the motion of the fillers that resulted from the growth of one cell. Then, by taking into account the fillers located at the line that connected the centres of the two growing cells, we found the final filler's angle and location.

Identification of metabolite and protein explanatory variables governing microbiome establishment and re-establishment within a cellulose-degrading anaerobic bioreactor.

Proteins, metabolites, and 16S rRNA measurements were used to examine the community structure and functional relationships within a cellulose degrading anaerobic bioreactor. The bioreactor was seeded with bovine rumen fluid and operated with a 4 day hydraulic retention time on cellulose (avicel) as sole carbon and energy source. The reactor performance and microbial community structure was monitored during the establishment of the cellulose-degrading community.