Boisenbragg7401

Electronic cigarette use (i.e., vaping) has become increasingly popular, especially among youth. Although vaping nicotine is thought to be safer than smoking combustible cigarettes, vaping cessation has become a topic of interest because of health concerns and the potential risk of electronic cigarette use leading to the use of other substances. The current study is the first to explore the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of a remotely delivered intervention using financial incentives to reinforce vaping abstinence among young adults. A secondary purpose of the study was to compare two cotinine measures, NicAlert and Alere iScreen, for remotely monitoring vaping abstinence. Using a single-case design, college students (N = 8) were given NicAlert and iScreen saliva cotinine tests to verify vaping abstinence. During a baseline condition, financial incentives were delivered contingent on submitting cotinine samples during live telemedicine calls (across varying baseline durations, consistent with multiple-baseline designs), whereas during an abstinence condition, escalating financial bonuses were delivered contingent on negative cotinine samples only. All participants attended 100% of their scheduled telemedicine calls and all participants quit vaping nicotine during the 2-week intervention, following the introduction of abstinence-contingent bonuses. Participants also rated the intervention favorably on a number of dimensions. Participants liked the iScreen cotinine tests, and found them easier to use, than NicAlert. Future research should focus on exploring strategies for promoting long-term sustainability of incentive-based interventions for vaping abstinence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Despite its frequent use for pain relief, no experimental pain research has tested the analgesic effects of cannabidiol (CBD) in humans. The goal of this study was to experimentally test the effects of CBD and expectancies for receiving CBD on human pain reactivity. Using a crossover, 2 × 2 factorial balanced placebo design, drug administration (given inactive substance or given active CBD) and verbal instruction sets (told inactive substance or told active CBD) were experimentally manipulated. Fifteen healthy adults each completed four separate experimental sessions. Participants were randomly assigned to different counterbalanced manipulation conditions at each session control (told inactive-given inactive); expectancy (told active CBD-given inactive); drug (told inactive-given active CBD); and expectancy + drug (told active CBD-given active CBD). Primary outcomes were pain threshold, tolerance, intensity, unpleasantness, conditioned pain modulation (CPM), and offset analgesia (OA). There was a significant main effect of instructions on OA, such that the OA response was significantly larger when participants were told that they received CBD, regardless of drug content. Pain unpleasantness was significantly reduced in the drug, expectancy, and expectancy + drug conditions, relative to the control condition. The drug and expectancy conditions separately improved CPM, whereas the expectancy + drug and control conditions produced the lowest CPM change scores. We did not detect significant effects for pain threshold, tolerance, or intensity. Our results indicated that separate pain outcomes can be differentially affected by CBD and/or expectancies for receiving CBD. Future investigations of the psychological and pharmacological mechanisms underlying CBD analgesia are warranted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).A series of dicyanomethylene-functionalized triarylboranes is reported in this work, with low-lying LUMO energy levels at ca. -3.66 eV for FMesB-ACN. The single-crystal structures of the mono- and dianion of Mes*B-ACN were obtained via chemical reduction, which revealed a conversion from a quinoidal to an aromatic structure. The strong Lewis acidity of these compounds is reflected in a fluoride-anion binding experiment. This work introduces a facile strategy for modulating the electron deficiency of boron-containing compounds.Protein and peptide aggregation is a ubiquitous phenomenon with implications in medicine, pharmaceutical industry, and materials science. Avacopan An important issue in peptide aggregation is the molecular mechanism of aggregate nucleation and growth. In many experimental studies, sigmoidal kinetics curves show a clear lag phase ascribed to nucleation; however, experimental studies also show downhill kinetics curves, where the monomers decay continuously and no lag phase can be seen. In this work, we study peptide aggregation kinetics using a coarse-grained implicit solvent model introduced in our previous work. Our simulations explore the hypothesis that the interplay between interchain attraction and intrachain bending stiffness controls the aggregation kinetics and transient aggregate morphologies. Indeed, our model reproduces the aggregation modes seen in experiment no observed aggregation, nucleated aggregation, and rapid downhill aggregation. We find that the interaction strength is the primary parameter determining the aggregation mode, whereas the stiffness is a secondary parameter modulating the transient morphologies and aggregation rates more attractive and stiff chains aggregate more rapidly and the transient morphologies are more ordered. We also explore the effects of the initial monomer concentration and the chain length. As the concentration decreases, the aggregation mode shifts from downhill to nucleated and no-aggregation. This concentration effect is in line with an experimental observation that the transition between downhill and nucleated kinetics is concentration-dependent. We find that longer peptides can aggregate at conditions where short peptides do not aggregate at all. It supports an experimental observation that the elongation of a homopeptide, e.g., polyglutamine, can increase the aggregation propensity.We report the vibrational and thermodynamic properties of four known CsPbI3 polymorphs in the framework of the density functional theory. We compare the recently introduced strongly constrained and appropriately normed (SCAN) meta-generalized gradient approximation (meta-GGA) with the local density approximation (LDA). We found that the SCAN, compared to the LDA, could explain discrepancies between theoretical and experimental results. Evaluating the Helmholtz free energy as a function of temperature, we found that within the SCAN (a) all polymorphs had negative formation enthalpies at the room temperature and (b) CsPbI3 underwent the phase transition from the δ- to α-phase at 480 K. This is not true for the LDA. In contrast to the previous reports based on the LDA, we did not find the ferroelectric instability in the phonon spectra of the cubic and tetragonal phases at the meta-GGA level. This result agrees with the lack of observation of the ferroelectricity in CsPbI3.