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Topic Review
Cocoa
Botanically, cocoa (Theobroma cacao) is a typical evergreen tree belonging to the Sterculiaceae family, originally from tropics of Central and South America and then grown in the other parts of the world. The plant has three main cultivars, with different phytochemical content and sensory properties: Criollo, the first cultivated group, Forastero, the hardier and the most prevalent group, and Trinitario, a cross-breed of both Criollo and Forastero groups.
  • 2.5K
  • 11 Feb 2021
Topic Review
Nanoparticles Alleviate Heavy Metals Stress
Nanotechnology is playing a significant role in addressing a vast range of environmental challenges by providing innovative and effective solutions. Heavy metal (HM) contamination has gained considerable attention in recent years due their rapidly increasing concentrations in agricultural soil. Due to their unique physiochemical properties, nanoparticles (NPs) can be effectively applied for stress alleviation
  • 2.5K
  • 12 Jan 2021
Topic Review
Egg Protein
Egg protein is a remarkably abundant source of protein, with an amino acid score of 100 and the highest net protein utilization rate. However, there have been relatively fewer studies investigating the health benefits of egg protein. The available information regarding the health benefits of egg proteins based on human studies has been summarized. In particular, studies conducted on the characteristics of egg whites, as they are high in pure protein, have reported their various health functions, such as increases in muscle mass and strength enhancement, lowering of cholesterol, and visceral fat reduction. 
  • 2.5K
  • 10 Aug 2022
Topic Review
Fat Redistribution
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a chronic condition where the body is resistant to insulin leading to an elevated blood glucose state. Obesity is a main factor leading to T2D. Many clinical studies, however, have described a proportion of obese individuals who express a metabolically healthy profile, whereas some lean individuals could develop metabolic disorders. To study obesity as a risk factor, body fat distribution needs to be considered rather than crude body weight. Different individuals’ bodies favor storing fat in different depots; some tend to accumulate more fat in the visceral depot, while others tend to store it in the femoral depot. This tendency relies on different factors, including genetic background and lifestyle. Consuming some types of medications can cause a shift in this tendency, leading to fat redistribution. Fat distribution plays an important role in the progression of the risk of insulin resistance (IR). Apple-shaped individuals with enhanced abdominal obesity have a higher risk of IR compared to BMI-matched pear-shaped individuals who store their fat in the gluteal-femoral depots. This is related to the different adipose tissue physiology between these two depots. In this text, the recent evidence showing antidiabetic drugs that impact fat distribution as they manage the T2D condition is summarized. 
  • 2.5K
  • 14 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Holy Confucian Church
The Holy Confucian Church or Holy Church of Confucius (孔圣会 Kǒngshènghuì) or Holy Confucian Church of China (中华孔圣会 Zhōnghuá Kǒngshènghuì) is a body formed of many local Confucian churches or halls (孔圣堂 Kǒngshèngtáng) in China . The grassroots movement was initiated by Zhou Beichen, a disciple of the Confucian philosopher Jiang Qing, who founded the first holy church in Shenzhen in 2009. The aim of the movement was to develop a network of local Confucian churches throughout the country, eventually unifying into a national body and becoming the state religion of China. The Holy Confucian Church has received support from the Confucian Academy of Hong Kong, although it has developed independently from the latter. In 2010 the first holy church in Shenzhen was officially registered as a non-governmental non-profit (fēi qǐyè 非企业) organisation of public interest (gōngyì 公益) affiliated with the Federation of Confucian Culture of Qufu City. The Holy Church maintains close relations with local government officials and high-ranking dignitaries of the State Administration for Religious Affairs attend its ceremonies. The national and international body, the Holy Confucian Church of China, was finally established in late 2015.
  • 2.5K
  • 20 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Gut Microbiota in Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a complex multifactorial chronic inflammatory disease, that includes Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), having progressively increasing global incidence. Disturbed intestinal flora has been highlighted as an important feature of IBD and offers promising strategies for IBD remedies.
  • 2.5K
  • 13 Jul 2023
Topic Review
Chitosan-Based Nanoparticles for Drug Delivery
Nanoparticles (NPs) have an outstanding position in pharmaceutical, biological, and medical disciplines. Polymeric NPs based on chitosan (CS) can act as excellent drug carriers because of some intrinsic beneficial properties including biocompatibility, biodegradability, non-toxicity, bioactivity, easy preparation, and targeting specificity. Drug transport and release from CS-based particulate systems depend on the extent of cross-linking, morphology, size, and density of the particulate system, as well as physicochemical properties of the drug. All these aspects have to be considered when developing new CS-based NPs as potential drug delivery systems. This review is summarizing and discussing recent advances in CS-based NPs being developed and examined for drug delivery including the following sections: (i) CS and its derivatives, basic characteristics of CS NPs, (ii) preparation procedures used for CS NPs, (iii) CS-based-nanocomposites with organic polymers and inorganic material, and (iv) implementations of CS NPs and nanocomposites in drug delivery.
  • 2.5K
  • 18 Oct 2021
Topic Review
Resistive Random-Access Memory
Resistive random access memory (RRAM), also often referred to as a memristor, is a non-volatile memory made from the simple structure of a metal–insulator–metal (MIM) sandwich, which is generally integrated into an elementary crossbar circuit. Resistive random access memory stands out among memory technologies due to its scalability, high-speed operation, and low power consumption. 
  • 2.5K
  • 14 Mar 2023
Topic Review
Targeting hypoxia-driven metabolic reprogramming
Hypoxia-driven metabolic adaptation of cancer cells revolutionizes the current understanding of hypoxia-associated tumor development and progression. Several hypoxia-responsive molecular determinants, such as hypoxia-inducible factors, guide the cellular adaptation to hypoxia by gene activation, which is critical for promoting malignant progression in the hostile tumor microenvironment. This article fully recaps the major research progress in this topic in order to assess its potential as a targetable pathway to better combat cancer and overcome treatment resistance. Knowledge from this article facilitates cancer researchers to sharpen their focus on gaining mechanistic insights into metabolic transformation in hypoxic cancers and developing novel strategies to target tumor metabolic rewiring driven by hypoxia, which would open avenues to improve the management of tumor hypoxia.
  • 2.5K
  • 11 Aug 2020
Topic Review
Polyphenols in Wine Authenticity
Polyphenols are a diverse group of compounds possessing various health-promoting properties that are of utmost importance for many wine sensory attributes. Apart from genetic and environmental parameters, the implementation of specific oenological practices as well as the subsequent storage conditions deeply affect the content and nature of the polyphenols present in wine. However, polyphenols are effectively employed in authenticity studies. Provision of authentic wines to the market has always been a prerequisite meaning that the declarations on the wine label should mirror the composition and provenance of this intriguing product. Nonetheless, multiple cases of intentional or unintentional wine mislabeling have been recorded alarming wine consumers who demand for strict controls safeguarding wine authenticity. The emergence of novel platforms employing instrumentation of exceptional selectivity and sensitivity along with the use of advanced chemometrics such as NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance)- and MS (mass spectrometry)-based metabolomics is considered as a powerful asset towards wine authentication.
  • 2.5K
  • 27 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Contractual Systems in Oil/Gas Sector
Production activities in the oil and gas industry are capital intensive and associated with high technology, with these assets not always being available to oil-producing countries or national companies. Any form of interaction between the parties involved in natural resource extraction requires clear regulation regarding contractual relationships. This study attempts to analyze Indonesia’s production sharing contract system in order to assess its applicability to other conditions. The article covers the key aspects of contract theory, provides a classification of contractual systems in the oil and gas sector, and discusses the most common types of contractual agreements. It also considers the key principles of production sharing contracts (PSCs), analyzes the development of PSC practices in Indonesia over the past sixty years, and highlights PSC advantages and disadvantages.
  • 2.5K
  • 10 Sep 2021
Topic Review
Masurian Dialect
The Masurian ethnolect (Masurian: mazurská gádkä; Polish: Mazurski; German: Masurisch), according to some linguists, is a dialect group of the Polish language; others consider Masurian to be a separate language, spoken by the Masurian peoples in northeastern Poland .
  • 2.5K
  • 06 Oct 2022
Topic Review
European Nucleotide Archive
The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) is a repository providing free and unrestricted access to annotated DNA and RNA sequences. It also stores complementary information such as experimental procedures, details of sequence assembly and other metadata related to sequencing projects. The archive is composed of three main databases: the Sequence Read Archive, the Trace Archive and the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (also known as EMBL-bank). The ENA is produced and maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute and is a member of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) along with the DNA Data Bank of Japan and GenBank. The ENA has grown out of the EMBL Data Library which was released in 1982 as the first internationally supported resource for nucleotide sequence data. As of early 2012, the ENA and other INSDC member databases each contained complete genomes of 5,682 organisms and sequence data for almost 700,000. Moreover, the volume of data is increasing exponentially with a doubling time of approximately 10 months.
  • 2.5K
  • 28 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Phoneme Acquisition
Speech is an acoustically variable signal, and one of the sources of this variation is the presence of multiple speakers. Empirical evidence has suggested that adult listeners possess remarkably sensitive (and systematic) abilities to process speech signals despite speaker variability. It includes not only a sensitivity to speaker-specific variation but also an ability to utilize speaker variation with other sources of information for further processing. In the present paper, we review evidence for speaker variability and speech processing in adults, and speaker variability and speech processing in young children, with an emphasis on how they make use of speaker-specific information in word learning situations. Finally, we will build on these findings to make a novel proposal for the use of speaker-specific information processing in phoneme learning in infancy.
  • 2.5K
  • 08 Mar 2021
Topic Review
Protein
Protein is a critical macronutrient for maintenance of normal bodily functions. Required daily protein intake varies by age, sex, and degree of daily activity, but is critical to maintain muscle mass and strength throughout an individual’s lifespan.
  • 2.5K
  • 13 Jan 2022
Topic Review
CMOS Amplifiers
CMOS amplifiers are ubiquitous analog circuits which are used in computers, audio systems, smart phones, cameras, telecommunication systems, biomedical circuits and many other systems, and their performance has great impact on the overall specifications of the systems. They take their name from the use of MOSFET (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) as opposite to Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJT). MOSFETS are simpler to fabricate and therefore less expensive than BJT amplifiers, still providing a sufficiently high transconductance to allow the design of very high performance circuits. In high performance CMOS amplifier circuits, transistors are not only used to amplify the signal but are also used as active loads to achieve higher gain and output swing in comparison with resistive loads. CMOS technology had been primarily introduced to design digital circuits. In the last decades, in order to improve speed, power consumption, required area and other aspects of digital integrated circuits (ICs), the feature size of MOSFET transistors has shrunk (minimum channel length of transistors reduces in newer CMOS technologies). This phenomenon predicted by Gordon Moore in 1975, which is called Moore’s law, and states that in about each 2 years, the number of transistors doubles for the same silicon area of ICs. Progress in memory circuits design is an interesting example to see how process advancement have affected the required size and their performance in the last decades. In 1956, a 5MB Hard Disk Drive (HDD) weighted over a tone, while these days having 50000 times more capacity with a weight of several tens of grams is very common. While digital ICs have enormously benefited from the feature size shrinking, analog CMOS amplifiers have not gained corresponding advantages due to the intrinsic limitations imposed by an analog design, like the intrinsic gain reduction of short channel transistors which affects the overall gain of amplifier. Novel techniques to achieve higher gain also create new problems, like stability of amplifier for closed-loop applications. In the following, we will address both aspects and summarize few different methods to overcome these problems.
  • 2.5K
  • 07 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Lipid and Polymer-Based siRNA Carriers for Cancer Therapy
RNA interference (RNAi) uses small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to mediate gene-silencing in cells and represents an emerging strategy for cancer therapy. Successful RNAi-mediated gene silencing requires overcoming multiple physiological barriers to achieve efficient delivery of siRNAs into cells in vivo, including into tumor and/or host cells in the tumor micro-environment (TME).
  • 2.5K
  • 26 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Immediate Hypersensitivity Reactions Induced by COVID-19 Vaccines
As the world deals with the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination remains vital to successfully end this crisis. However, COVID-19-vaccine-induced immediate hypersensitivity reactions presenting with potentially life-threatening systemic anaphylactic reactions are one of the reasons for vaccine hesitancy. Studies have suggested that different mechanisms, including IgE-mediated and non-IgE-mediated mast cell activation, may be involved in immediate hypersensitivity. The main culprits triggering hypersensitivity reactions have been suggested to be the excipients of vaccines, including polyethylene glycol and polysorbate 80. Patients with a history of allergic reactions to drugs, foods, or other vaccines may have an increased risk of hypersensitivity reactions to COVID-19 vaccines. Various strategies have been suggested to prevent hypersensitivity reactions, including performing skin tests or in vitro tests before vaccination, administering different vaccines for the primary and following boosters, changing the fractionated doses, or pretreating the anti-IgE antibody.
  • 2.5K
  • 01 Jun 2022
Topic Review
Ketosis
Ketosis is a metabolic state characterized by elevated levels of ketone bodies in the blood or urine. Physiological ketosis is a normal response to low glucose availability, such as low-carbohydrate diets or fasting, that provides an additional energy source for the brain in the form of ketones. In physiological ketosis, ketones in the blood are elevated above baseline levels, but the body's acid–base homeostasis is maintained. This contrasts with ketoacidosis, an uncontrolled production of ketones that occurs in pathologic states and causes a metabolic acidosis, which is a medical emergency. Ketoacidosis is most commonly the result of complete insulin deficiency in type 1 diabetes or late-stage type 2 diabetes. Ketone levels can be measured in blood, urine or breath and are generally between 0.5 and 3.0 millimolar (mM) in physiological ketosis, while ketoacidosis may cause blood concentrations greater than 10 mM. Trace levels of ketones are always present in the blood and increase when blood glucose reserves are low and the liver shifts from primarily metabolizing carbohydrates to metabolizing fatty acids. This occurs during states of increased fatty acid oxidation such as fasting, starvation, carbohydrate restriction, or prolonged exercise. When the liver rapidly metabolizes fatty acids into acetyl-CoA, some acetyl-CoA molecules can then be converted into ketone bodies: acetoacetate, beta-hydroxybutyrate, and acetone. These ketone bodies can function as an energy source as well as signalling molecules. The liver itself cannot utilize these molecules for energy, so the ketone bodies are released into the blood for use by peripheral tissues including the brain. When ketosis is induced by carbohydrate restriction, it is sometimes referred to as nutritional ketosis. A low-carbohydrate, moderate protein diet that can lead to ketosis is called a ketogenic diet. Ketosis is well-established as a treatment for epilepsy and is also effective in treating type 2 diabetes.
  • 2.5K
  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Coaching
Coaching is a form of development in which an experienced person, called a coach, supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training and guidance. The learner is sometimes called a coachee. Occasionally, coaching may mean an informal relationship between two people, of whom one has more experience and expertise than the other and offers advice and guidance as the latter learns; but coaching differs from mentoring by focusing on specific tasks or objectives, as opposed to more general goals or overall development.
  • 2.5K
  • 10 Nov 2022
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