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Topic Review
Ciclosporin
Ciclosporin, also spelled cyclosporine and cyclosporin, is a calcineurin inhibitor, used as an immunosuppressant medication. It is a natural product. It is taken orally or intravenously for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, Crohn's disease, nephrotic syndrome, and in organ transplants to prevent rejection. It is also used as eye drops for keratoconjunctivitis sicca (dry eyes). Common side effects include high blood pressure, headache, kidney problems, increased hair growth, and vomiting. Other severe side effects include an increased risk of infection, liver problems, and an increased risk of lymphoma. Blood levels of the medication should be checked to decrease the risk of side effects. Use during pregnancy may result in preterm birth; however, ciclosporin does not appear to cause birth defects. Ciclosporin is believed to work by decreasing the function of lymphocytes. It does this by forming a complex with cyclophilin to block the phosphatase activity of calcineurin, which in turn decreases the production of inflammatory cytokines by T-lymphocytes. Ciclosporin was isolated in 1971 from the fungus Tolypocladium inflatum and came into medical use in 1983. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. In 2019, it was the 195th most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 2 million prescriptions that year. It is available as a generic medication.
  • 2.4K
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Argonaut Class Reactor
The Argonaut class reactor is a design of small nuclear research reactor. Many have been built throughout the world, over a wide range of power levels. Its functions are to teach nuclear reactor theory, nuclear physics and for use in engineering laboratory experiments.
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  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Use of ChatGPT in Education
The use of ChatGPT in education has generated considerable interest due to its potential to enrich the learning experience of students. By providing quick and personalised responses, this system has the ability to address individual student needs, offer immediate feedback and facilitate the understanding of complex concepts. In this way, it becomes a promising tool that promotes a student’s active participation and cognitive advancement by adapting to their learning pace and offering continuous support in their knowledge acquisition process.
  • 2.4K
  • 29 Aug 2023
Topic Review
Plasmonic biosensing schemes for virus
The uncertain proportions of pandemic outbreaks have triggered the need of reliable and cost-effective protocols easily adaptable to the changing virulence of virus strains. In recent years, plasmonic biosensors are being increasingly applied for clinical diagnosis of viral and other infectious diseases. Typical plasmonic biosensing strategies rely on the versatility of SPR and LSPR as label-free detection systems capable of monitoring binding interactions in a short period of time. Nevertheless, the incorporation of technological advancements has precipitated the development of nanomaterial-based applications for improving the sensitivity and specificity of classical configurations. The unique optical properties of plasmonic nanostructures has been exploited in combination with SERS colorimetric, fluorescence or luminescence enhancement for viral diagnosis. Likewise, the development of plasmonic virus sensing approaches has also benefitted from the variety of virus biomarkers. Thus, a high number of virus plasmonic biosensors have prompted the advance of novel functionalization strategies to achieve the effective coverage of the biological receptor while ensuring the affinity and specificity towards the target viral nucleic acids, proteins or whole virus. The huge potential for single virus detection along with the effectiveness and simplicity of current plasmonic configurations will impact on the routine surveillance of virus in clinical settings during this decade.
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  • 27 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Fluorescent Protein-Based Autophagy Biosensors
Autophagy is an important cellular process of self-degradation for dysfunctional or unnecessary molecules and organelles, thus dysregulation of autophagy can be involved in various diseases such as neurodegenerative diseases. To understand complex process of autophagy and the related diseases, various methods have been developed, for example biochemical, chemical, and imaging assays. In particular, fluorescent protein (FP)-based autophagy biosensors allow sensitive and selective monitoring of autophagy progression in live cells. After the discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP), a variety of FPs has been discovered and engineered which have different physicochemical properties, such as excitation/emission spectra, Stokes shift, maturation rate, stability, photo-reactivity and pH-sensitivity. Advances in fluorescent protein technology and FP-based biosensors enabled the real-time monitoring of cellular and molecular events in live cells with high spatiotemporal resolutions.
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  • 22 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Contaminated Polymer Materials Shredding
Recently, a dynamic increase in the number of polymer elements ending their life cycle has been observed. There are three main ways of dealing with polymer waste: reuse in an unchanged form, recycling (both material and energy), and disposal (mainly in the form of landfilling or incineration). The legislation of European countries promotes in particular two forms of waste management: reuse and recycling. Recycling processes are used to recover materials and energy especially from contaminated waste, which are structurally changed by other materials, friction, temperature, machine, process, etc. The recycling of polymers, especially of multi-plastic struc-tural elements, requires the use of special technological installations and a series of preparatory operations, including crushing and separating.
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  • 10 Mar 2021
Topic Review
Loyalty
Loyalty, in general use, is a devotion and faithfulness to a nation, cause, philosophy, country, group, or person. Philosophers disagree on what can be an object of loyalty, as some argue that loyalty is strictly interpersonal and only another human being can be the object of loyalty. The definition of loyalty in law and political science is the fidelity of an individual to a nation, either one's nation of birth, or one's declared home nation by oath (naturalization).
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  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Liquid Hydrogen in the Transportation Sector
The European Green Deal aims to transform the EU into a modern, resource-efficient, and competitive economy. The REPowerEU plan launched in May 2022 as part of the Green Deal reveals the willingness of several countries to become energy independent and tackle the climate crisis. Therefore, the decarbonization of different sectors such as maritime shipping is crucial and may be achieved through sustainable energy. Hydrogen is potentially clean and renewable and might be chosen as fuel to power ships and boats. Hydrogen technologies (e.g., fuel cells for propulsion) have already been implemented on board different types of vehicles mainly during demonstration projects.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Spatial-Frequency Domain Imaging
Measurement of optical properties is critical for understanding light-tissue interaction, properly interpreting measurement data, and gaining better knowledge of tissue physicochemical properties. However, conventional optical measuring techniques are limited in point measurement, which partly hinders the applications on characterizing spatial distribution and inhomogeneity of optical properties of biological tissues. Spatial-frequency domain imaging (SFDI), as an emerging non-contact, depth-varying and wide-field optical imaging technique, is capable of measuring the optical properties in a wide field-of-view on a pixel-by-pixel basis. 
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  • 01 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Acremonium Strictum
Acremonium strictum is an environmentally widespread saprotroph species found in soil, plant debris, and rotting mushrooms. Isolates have been collected in North and Central America, Asia, Europe and Egypt. A. strictum is an agent of hyalohyphomycosis and has been identified as an increasingly frequent human pathogen in immunosuppressed individuals, causing localized, disseminated and invasive infections. Although extremely rare, A. strictum can infect immunocompetent individuals, as well as neonates. Due to the growing number of infections caused by A. strictum in the past few years, the need for new medical techniques in the identification of the fungus as well as for the treatment of human infections has risen considerably. A. strictum has been shown to be involved in some myoparasitic relationships, as well as a wide range of plant endophytic and parasitic relationships, and further studies are required to determine A. strictum's use as a biological control agent and role as a parasite that reduces crop yields. A. strictum exhibits metabolism of many products that imply future agricultural and pharmaceutical significance.
  • 2.4K
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Mitochondrial Transplantation in Mitochondrial Medicine
Mitochondria are cytoplasmic double-membrane organelles defined as eukaryotic cells’ powerhouses due to their involvement in the cellular bioenergetics. In particular, mitochondrial synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is associated with the functionality of aerobic oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS). In addition to energy production, mitochondria play many critical roles in cellular function and signalling, including fatty acid biosynthesis, calcium homeostasis, reactive oxygen species production, cell survival, proliferation, apoptosis, autophagy, stem cell differentiation, and regulation of the immune response. 
  • 2.4K
  • 07 Feb 2023
Topic Review
HiPSC-Derived Cardiac Tissue
Relevant, predictive normal, or disease model systems are of vital importance for drug development. The difference between nonhuman models and humans could contribute to clinical trial failures despite ideal nonhuman results. As a potential substitute for animal models, human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes (CMs) provide a powerful tool for drug toxicity screening, modeling cardiovascular diseases, and drug discovery.
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  • 14 Dec 2020
Topic Review
Network Function Virtualization and Service Function Chaining Frameworks
Network slicing has become a fundamental property for next-generation networks, especially because an inherent part of 5G standardisation is the ability for service providers to migrate some or all of their network services to a virtual network infrastructure, thereby reducing both capital and operational costs. With network function virtualisation (NFV), network functions (NFs) such as firewalls, traffic load balancers, content filters, and intrusion detection systems (IDS) are either instantiated on virtual machines (VMs) or lightweight containers, often chained together to create a service function chain (SFC). 
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  • 01 Mar 2022
Topic Review
Hydrogels Classification
Hydrogels are attractive biomaterials with favorable characteristics due to their water uptake capacity. However, hydrogel properties are determined by the cross-linking degree and nature, the tacticity, and the crystallinity of the polymer. 
  • 2.4K
  • 08 Dec 2021
Topic Review
BBSOAS Neurodevelopmental Disorder: Clinical Manifestations and Mouse Models
Bosch–Boonstra–Schaaf Optic Atrophy Syndrome (BBSOAS; OMIM 615722; ORPHA 401777) is a genetic neurodevelopmental syndrome caused by the haploinsufficiency of the NR2F1 gene, a key transcriptional regulator of brain and eye development. Although intellectual disability, developmental delay and visual impairment are arguably the most common symptoms affecting BBSOAS patients, multiple additional features are often reported, including epilepsy, autistic traits and hypotonia. These features can be present alone or as comorbidities, with a severity degree that presumably varies depending on the type of NR2F1 genetic perturbation, following a still not well characterized genotype–phenotype correlation. Pathogenic BBSOAS point mutations are principally located in the two most conserved functional domains of the NR2F1 protein: the DNA-binding domain (DBD), responsible for the interaction with target gene regulatory sequences, and the ligand-binding domain (LBD), necessary for dimerization and co-factor binding. 
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  • 27 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Potential Contamination in Fuel Ethanol Production
Ethanol can be produced from sugary, starchy, and lignocellulosic feedstocks. Each feedstock requires different procedures for its conversion to fermentable sugar. Lignocellulosic biomass requires extra pretreatment compared to sugar and starch feedstocks to disrupt the structure and improve enzymatic hydrolysis efficiency. However, the greatest concern regarding the pretreatment process is inhibitor formation, which might retard enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation. In addition to the inhibitors from pretreatment, chemicals used during the pretreatment and fermentation of byproducts may remain in the final product if they are not removed by ethanol distillation and dehydration. Maintaining the quality of ethanol during storage is another concerning issue. Initial impurities of ethanol being stored and its nature, including hygroscopic, high oxygen and carbon dioxide solubility, influence chemical reactions during the storage period and change ethanol’s characteristics (e.g., water content, ethanol content, acidity, pH, and electrical conductivity).
  • 2.4K
  • 12 May 2022
Topic Review
Ceph
Ceph (pronounced /ˈsɛf/) is an open-source software-defined storage platform that implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster and provides 3-in-1 interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage. Ceph aims primarily for completely distributed operation without a single point of failure, scalability to the exabyte level, and to be freely available. Since version 12, Ceph does not rely on other filesystems and can directly manage HDDs and SSDs with its own storage backend BlueStore and can completely self reliantly expose a POSIX filesystem. Ceph replicates data and makes it fault-tolerant, using commodity hardware and Ethernet IP and requiring no specific hardware support. The Ceph’s system offers disaster recovery and data redundancy through techniques such as replication, erasure coding, snapshots and storage cloning. As a result of its design, the system is both self-healing and self-managing, aiming to minimize administration time and other costs. In this way, administrators have a single, consolidated system that avoids silos and collects the storage within a common management framework. Ceph consolidates several storage use cases and improves resource utilization. It also lets an organization deploy servers where needed.
  • 2.4K
  • 14 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Karst Plateau (Italy-Slovenia)
The Karst Plateau or the Karst region (Slovene: Kras, Italian: Carso), also locally called Karst, is a karst plateau region extending across the border of southwestern Slovenia and northeastern Italy. It lies between the Vipava Valley, the low hills surrounding the valley, the westernmost part of the Brkini Hills, northern Istria, and the Gulf of Trieste. The western edge of the plateau also marks the traditional ethnic border between Italians and Slovenes. The region gave its name to karst topography. For this reason, it is also referred to as the Classical Karst.
  • 2.4K
  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Astrophysics
Astrophysics is the branch of astronomy that employs the principles of physics and chemistry "to ascertain the nature of the astronomical objects, rather than their positions or motions in space". Among the objects studied are the Sun, other stars, galaxies, extrasolar planets, the interstellar medium and the cosmic microwave background. Emissions from these objects are examined across all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the properties examined include luminosity, density, temperature, and chemical composition. Because astrophysics is a very broad subject, astrophysicists apply concepts and methods from many disciplines of physics, including classical mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, nuclear and particle physics, and atomic and molecular physics. In practice, modern astronomical research often involves a substantial amount of work in the realms of theoretical and observational physics. Some areas of study for astrophysicists include their attempts to determine the properties of dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and other celestial bodies; whether or not time travel is possible, wormholes can form, or the multiverse exists; and the origin and ultimate fate of the universe. Topics also studied by theoretical astrophysicists include Solar System formation and evolution; stellar dynamics and evolution; galaxy formation and evolution; magnetohydrodynamics; large-scale structure of matter in the universe; origin of cosmic rays; general relativity, special relativity, quantum and physical cosmology, including string cosmology and astroparticle physics.
  • 2.4K
  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Base 16 Floating Point
IBM System/360 computers, and subsequent machines based on that architecture (mainframes), support a hexadecimal floating-point format (HFP). In comparison to IEEE 754 floating-point, the IBM floating-point format has a longer significand, and a shorter exponent. All IBM floating-point formats have 7 bits of exponent with a bias of 64. The normalized range of representable numbers is from 16−65 to 1663 (approx. 5.39761 × 10−79 to 7.237005 × 1075). The number is represented as the following formula: (−1)sign × 0.significand × 16exponent−64.
  • 2.4K
  • 01 Dec 2022
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