Chronic Exposure to Two Regimens of Waterpipe Smoke Elicits Lung Injury, Genotoxicity, and Mitochondrial Impairment with the Involvement of MAPKs Activation in Mice.

While the pulmonary effects of regular waterpipe smoking (R-WPS) are well-defined, the impact of occasional waterpipe smoking (O-WPS) on the lungs remains less established. This study investigated the pulmonary toxicity and underlying mechanisms of O-WPS versus R-WPS following 6 months of exposure, focusing on histopathology, inflammation in the lung, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF), and plasma, as well as oxidative stress, genotoxicity, mitochondrial dysfunction, and the expression of mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) in lung homogenates. Exposure to both O-WPS and R-WPS resulted in significant histological changes, including increased numbers of alveolar macrophages and lymphocytes, as well as interstitial fibrosis.

Recent developments in photo-fermentative hydrogen evolution: Fundamental biochemistry and influencing factors a review.

The global shift towards renewable energy sources highlights the urgent need for sustainable hydrogen production, with photo-fermentative hydrogen evolution (PFHP) emerging as a promising solution. This review addresses the challenges and opportunities in optimizing PFHP, specifically the role of photosynthetic bacteria (PBS) in utilizing sunlight for hydrogen production. We focus on the key factors influencing PFHP, including light intensity, reactor design, substrate selection, carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, metal ions, temperature, pH, charge transfer and genetic engineering.

Dysphagia in Rare Diseases and Syndromes: Current Approaches to Management and Therapeutic Innovations-A Systematic Review.

This study presents a comprehensive investigation into the correlation between Rare Diseases and Syndromes (RDS) and the dysphagic disorders manifested during childhood and adulthood in affected patients. Dysphagia is characterized by difficulty or an inability to swallow food of any consistency, as well as saliva or medications, from the oral cavity to the stomach. RDS often present with complex and heterogeneous clinical manifestations, making it challenging to develop standardized diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.

A foundation model of transcription across human cell types.

Transcriptional regulation, which involves a complex interplay between regulatory sequences and proteins, directs all biological processes. Computational models of transcription lack generalizability to accurately extrapolate to unseen cell types and conditions. Here we introduce GET (general expression transformer), an interpretable foundation model designed to uncover regulatory grammars across 213 human fetal and adult cell types.

In Situ Preparation of Silver Nanoparticles/Organophilic-Clay/Polyethylene Glycol Nanocomposites for the Reduction of Organic Pollutants.

This work focuses on the preparation and application of silver nanoparticles/organophilic clay/polyethylene glycol for the catalytic reduction of the contaminants methylene blue (MB) and 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) in a simple and binary system. Algerian clay was subjected to a series of treatments including acid treatment, ion exchange with the surfactant hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide (HTABr), immobilization of polyethylene glycol polymer, and finally dispersion of AgNPs. The molecular weight of polyethylene glycol was varied (100, 200, and 4000) to study its effect on the stabilization of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and the catalytic activity of the resulting samples.

Mindful Eating, BMI, Sleep, and Vitamin D: A Cross-Sectional Study of Cypriot and Greek Adults.

Background: Obesity and related health challenges remain significant concerns in Cyprus and Greece. Mindful eating (ME) has emerged as a behavioral approach to address these issues, yet its relationship with BMI, vitamin D levels, and sleep duration in Mediterranean populations is underexplored.

Objectives: This study aimed to examine associations between ME subcategories (Awareness, Distraction, Disinhibition, Emotional, and External Cues), BMI, vitamin D levels, and sleep duration among Cypriot and Greek adults across two cohorts.

Enhancing Communication and Swallowing Skills in Children with Cri Du Chat Syndrome: A Comprehensive Speech Therapy Guide.

A specific deletion on the short arm of chromosome 5 (5p) is the hallmark of the rare genetic syndrome called Cri du Chat Syndrome (CdCS). It causes severe difficulty with swallowing, speech, motor skills, and cognitive deficiencies. These arise from characteristic laryngeal abnormalities and oral-motor dysfunctions.

Unveiling the power of language models in chemical research question answering.

While the abilities of language models are thoroughly evaluated in areas like general domains and biomedicine, academic chemistry remains less explored. Chemical QA tools also play a crucial role in both education and research by effectively translating complex chemical information into an understandable format. Addressing this gap, we introduce ScholarChemQA, a large-scale QA dataset constructed from chemical papers.

Perceptions of Resilience Among Nurses: A Qualitative Study Based on the Society-To-Cells Framework.

Aim(s): To explore the perceptions of resilience among nurses using the Society-to-Cells Resilience Theory and examine how multilevel factors influence their ability to maintain resilience in high-stress environments.

Design: A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews.

Methods: Sixteen registered nurses from various healthcare settings in the Asir region, Saudi Arabia, participated in face-to-face interviews conducted from February to April 2024.

Optimizing VGG16 deep learning model with enhanced hunger games search for logo classification.

Accurate classification of logos is a challenging task in image recognition due to variations in logo size, orientation, and background complexity. Deep learning models, such as VGG16, have demonstrated promising results in handling such tasks. However, their performance is highly dependent on optimal hyperparameter settings, whose fine-tuning is both labor-intensive and time-consuming.

Unifying invariant and variant features for graph out-of-distribution via probability of necessity and sufficiency.

Graph Out-of-Distribution (OOD), requiring that models trained on biased data generalize to the unseen test data, has considerable real-world applications. One of the most mainstream methods is to extract the invariant subgraph by aligning the original and augmented data with the help of environment augmentation. However, these solutions might lead to the loss or redundancy of semantic subgraphs and result in suboptimal generalization.

Suboptimal Attainment of Global Goals of Human Rights, Universal Health Coverage and Sustainable Development Goals in Gaza During 2023-2024.

The Israel military occupation, ongoing for over 75 years, has profoundly impacted the health and well-being of Palestinians. Despite longstanding calls for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and sustainable development, the response of global health systems and organizations to crises such as the recent large-scale military assault on Gaza in October 2023 has been inadequate. There is a critical need to examine why these global health approaches have failed and how they can be restructured to address the unique challenges in Gaza effectively.

How to build the virtual cell with artificial intelligence: Priorities and opportunities.

Cells are essential to understanding health and disease, yet traditional models fall short of modeling and simulating their function and behavior. Advances in AI and omics offer groundbreaking opportunities to create an AI virtual cell (AIVC), a multi-scale, multi-modal large-neural-network-based model that can represent and simulate the behavior of molecules, cells, and tissues across diverse states. This Perspective provides a vision on their design and how collaborative efforts to build AIVCs will transform biological research by allowing high-fidelity simulations, accelerating discoveries, and guiding experimental studies, offering new opportunities for understanding cellular functions and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations in open science.

The effect of age discrimination on employee silence: The role of age similarity with familiar individuals.

This study investigates whether one person's experience of perceived discrimination at work can lead to someone they know exhibiting ineffectual silence in their own job. Data were collected using Study Response, an online panel, from focal employees and their paired participants who know them well (N = 296 pairs). Data were analyzed using moderated hierarchical linear analysis in SPSS 26.

Collage-based narratives of mothers of third culture kids: the in-between space of transnational families in the UAE.

This study delves into the lives of transnational families in the UAE, exploring their complex identities using a visual research approach known as the Collage Life Elicitation Technique (CLET). Both the topic and the methodology are framed within a theoretical lens of (understanding) with a view to further exploring the lives of transnational families in the context of a pragmatic phenomenology and within the setting of the UAE as a rentier state. The lives of families such as these are characterized by a cross-cultural lifestyle, high mobility and expected repatriation.

Navigating ethical considerations in the use of artificial intelligence for patient care: A systematic review.

Aim: To explore the ethical considerations and challenges faced by nursing professionals in integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into patient care.

Background: AI's integration into nursing practice enhances clinical decision-making and operational efficiency but raises ethical concerns regarding privacy, accountability, informed consent, and the preservation of human-centered care.

Methods: A systematic review was conducted, following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines.

Cognitive behavioral therapy-enhanced through videoconferencing for night eating syndrome, binge-eating disorder and comorbid insomnia: a Case Report.

Background: Both night-eating syndrome and binge-eating disorder are characterized by episodes of excessive food consumption, significant distress, and functional impairment related to maladaptive eating behaviors. Both types of eating disorders are associated with poorer sleep quality. Cognitive behavioral therapy has demonstrated good outcomes for binge-eating disorder; however, it is unknown if it is effective for night-eating syndrome and comorbid insomnia.

Triglyceride and Glucose Index as an Optimal Predictor of Metabolic Syndrome in Lebanese Adults.

Globally, the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) is on the rise, especially in Arab countries, which emphasizes the need for reliable ethnic-specific biochemical screening parameters. Two hundred twenty-one Lebanese adults were enrolled in this cross-sectional study. Biochemical parameters including Homeostasis Model Assessment (HOMA), Triglyceride and Glucose index (TyG), ratio of Triglycerides to High-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol (TG/HDL-C), Atherogenic Index of Plasma (AIP), and Visceral Adiposity Index (VAI) were assessed for their prediction of MetS.

A hybrid approach of vision transformers and CNNs for detection of ulcerative colitis.

Ulcerative Colitis is an Inflammatory Bowel disease caused by a variety of factors that lead to a serious impact on the quality of life of the patients if left untreated. Due to complexities in the identification procedures of this disease, the treatment timeline and quality can be severely affected, leading to further consequences for the sufferer. The difficulties in identification are due to high patients to healthcare professionals ratio.

Cassava for the future: embryogenic liquid cultures suitable for new biotech techniques.

Cassava, a crop of importance for subsistence farming in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has the potential to benefit from global economic integration as a versatile industrial resource. Enhancing cassava productivity is not just a matter of agricultural competitiveness but a crucial step toward ensuring many communities' food security and livelihoods. Given its high performance in marginal environments, where climate change poses threats, ensuring food security and livelihoods relies on rapidly adapting cassava.

How to Build the Virtual Cell with Artificial Intelligence: Priorities and Opportunities.

The cell is arguably the most fundamental unit of life and is central to understanding biology. Accurate modeling of cells is important for this understanding as well as for determining the root causes of disease. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), combined with the ability to generate large-scale experimental data, present novel opportunities to model cells.

From science to society: Exploring the nexus between obesity research and public awareness in Brazil.

Raising public awareness about the medical aspects of obesity is crucial in Brazil, given its escalating prevalence. This study investigated the correlation between scientific research on obesity in the country and public awareness by scrutinizing scientific publications and online search trends. Scientific data were sourced from Dimensions, while online engagement data were extracted from Google Trends.

Interaction-knowledge semantic alignment for recommendation.

In order to alleviate the issue of data sparsity, knowledge graphs are introduced into recommender systems because they contain diverse information about items. The existing knowledge graph enhanced recommender systems utilize both user-item interaction data and knowledge graph, but those methods ignore the semantic difference between interaction data and knowledge graph. On the other hand, for the item representations obtained from two kinds of graph structure data respectively, the existing methods of fusing representations only consider the item representations themselves, without considering the personalized preference of users.

SimLVSeg: Simplifying Left Ventricular Segmentation in 2-D+Time Echocardiograms With Self- and Weakly Supervised Learning.

Objective: Achieving reliable automatic left ventricle (LV) segmentation from echocardiograms is challenging due to the inherent sparsity of annotations in the dataset, as clinicians typically only annotate two specific frames for diagnostic purposes. Here we aim to address this challenge by introducing simplified LV segmentation (SimLVSeg), a novel paradigm that enables video-based networks for consistent LV segmentation from sparsely annotated echocardiogram videos.

Methods: SimLVSeg consists of two training stages: (i) self-supervised pre-training with temporal masking, which involves pre-training a video segmentation network by capturing the cyclic patterns of echocardiograms from largely unannotated echocardiogram frames, and (ii) weakly supervised learning tailored for LV segmentation from sparse annotations.

Individual and combinatorial application of nanosilica and carbon nanoparticles alleviate nickel stress in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.): Impacts on gene expression, AsA - GSH cycle, cellular fractionation, and proline metabolism.

Nanotechnology is grabbing great attention all over the world because of its stimulating use in numerous fields, and the nanosilica (nSi) and carbon nanoparticles (CNPs) application has been examined in various studies. Conversely, the nSi and CNPs combinatorial use is a new method and researched in limited literature. For this purpose, a pot experiment was conducted to examine various growth and biochemical parameters in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.