Hustedallison0214

In the intervention trial, the urinary concentrations of 2-hydroxyfluorene (2-OH-FLU) and 9-hydroxyphenanthrene (9-OH-PHE) were elevated significantly by 16.5% (95% CI, 2.1%, 33.1%) and 37.9% (95% CI, 8.4%, 75.4%), respectively, in association with a doubling increase in personal PM2.5 exposure. Urinary 9-OH-PHE was also significantly positively associated with the increase in the sum of PM2.5-bound parent PAHs. Furthermore, the levels of urinary OH-PAHs such as 2-OH-FLU and 9-OH-PHE in the haze events were elevated by 31.1% (95% CI, 8.7%, 53.4%) and 73.5% (95% CI, 16.0%, 131.0%), respectively, in association with a doubling increase in personal PM2.5 exposure. The findings indicated that urinary 2-OH-FLU and 9-OH-PHE could serve as potential internal exposure biomarkers for assessing short-term PM2.5 exposure in nonoccupational populations.Current assessments of human exposure to flame retardants (FRs) via dust ingestion rely on measurements of FR concentrations in dust samples collected at specific points in time and space. Such exposure assessments are rendered further uncertain by the possibility of within-room and within-building spatial and temporal variability, differences in dust particle size fraction analysed, as well as differences in dust sampling approach. A meta-analysis of peer-reviewed data was undertaken to evaluate the impact of these factors on reported concentrations of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and organophosphate esters (OPEs) in dust and subsequent human exposure estimates. Except for a few cases, concentrations of FRs in elevated surface dust (ESD) exceeded significantly those in floor dust (FD). The implications of this for exposure assessment are not entirely clear. However, they imply that analysing FD only will underestimate exposure for adults who likely rarely ingest floor dust, while analysing ESD only wounded period such dust spends in the dust bag. Temporal variability in FR concentrations is apparent during month-to-month or seasonal monitoring, with such variability likely due more to changes in room contents rather than seasonal temperature variation.The current estimations of the burden of disease (BD) of PM2.5 exposure is still potentially biased by two factors ignorance of heterogeneous vulnerabilities at diverse urbanization levels and reliance on the risk estimates from existing literature, usually from different locations. Our objectives are (1) to build up a data fusion framework to estimate the burden of PM2.5 exposure while evaluating local risks simultaneously and (2) to quantify their spatial heterogeneity, relationship to land-use characteristics, and derived uncertainties when calculating the disease burdens. The feature of this study is applying six local databases to extract PM2.5 exposure risk and the BD information, including the risks of death, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and respiratory disease (RD), and their spatial heterogeneities through our data fusion framework. We applied the developed framework to Tainan City in Taiwan as a use case estimated the risks by using 2006-2016 emergency department visit data, air quality monitoring data, and land-use characteristics and further estimated the BD caused by daily PM2.5 exposure in 2013. Our results found that the risks of CVD and RD in highly urbanized areas and death in rural areas could reach 1.20-1.57 times higher than average. Furthermore, we performed a sensitivity analysis to assess the uncertainty of BD estimations from utilizing different data sources, and the results showed that the uncertainty of the BD estimations could be contributed by different PM2.5 exposure data (20-32%) and risk values (0-86%), especially for highly urbanized areas. In conclusion, our approach for estimating BD based on local databases has the potential to be generalized to the developing and overpopulated countries and to support local air quality and health management plans.Recently we showed that higher reward results in increased pupil dilation during listening (listening effort). Remarkably, this effect was not accompanied with improved speech reception. Still, increased listening effort may reflect more in-depth processing, potentially resulting in a better memory representation of speech. Here, we investigated this hypothesis by also testing the effect of monetary reward on recognition memory performance. Twenty-four young adults performed speech reception threshold (SRT) tests, either hard or easy, in which they repeated sentences uttered by a female talker masked by a male talker. We recorded the pupil dilation response during listening. Participants could earn a high or low reward and the four conditions were presented in a blocked fashion. After each SRT block, participants performed a visual sentence recognition task. In this task, the sentences that were presented in the preceding SRT task were visually presented in random order and intermixed with unfamiliar sentences. Participants had to indicate whether they had previously heard the sentence or not. The SRT and sentence recognition were affected by task difficulty but not by reward. Contrary to our previous results, peak pupil dilation did not reflect effects of reward. However, post-hoc time course analysis (GAMMs) revealed that in the hard SRT task, the pupil response was larger for high than low reward. We did not observe an effect of reward on visual sentence recognition. Hence, the current results provide no conclusive evidence that the effect of monetary reward on the pupil response relates to the memory encoding of speech.In the contaminant remediation of groundwater, the release history of contaminant sources and hydraulic conductivity field are two key parameters that need to know, but their actual values are difficult to obtain and can only be inversely identified by limited measured data. However, the process of solving the inverse problem needs to repeatedly call the forward model of contaminant transport, which is very time-consuming, especially for the high-dimensional inverse problems. In this study, based on the training data generated from a prior range of parameters (the release strength of contaminant sources and hydraulic conductivity at pilot points), the self-organizing maps (SOM) algorithm was employed to construct the surrogate model for the numerical model of contaminant transport in a simplified hypothetical aquifer, then the surrogate model was used to retrieve jointly the contaminant strength of sources and the hydraulic conductivity at pilot points, and the Kriging method of geostatistics was further used to process the estimated K-values at pilot points to obtain the hydraulic conductivity field. Also, to investigate the ability of the SOM-based surrogate model for retrieving both contaminant source strengths and hydraulic conductivity, we gradually expanded the prior range and increased the number of inversion terms in each prior range. Moreover, the robustness of the SOM-based surrogate model for inversion was illustrated by proposing the scarcity of data and different degrees of measurement error in the limited actual observation data. When the actual observation data is reduced by 2/3, the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of retrieving source strengths and hydraulic conductivity at pilot points are 1.07 and 0.09, respectively. The results indicated the SOM-based surrogate model shows remarkable inversion precision and robustness, and an accurate estimation of the actual hydraulic conductivity field could be obtained by the Kriging method based on that.The objective of the study was the construction of a generic curriculum development model for the use of biomedical physics (BMP) educators teaching the non-physics healthcare professions (HCP) in Europe. A comprehensive, qualitative cross-sectional Europe-wide survey of the curricula delivered by BMP in Faculties of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS) was carried out. Curricular content was collected from faculty web-sites, curricular documents and textbooks. find more The survey data was supplemented with semi-structured interviews and direct observation during onsite visits. The number of faculties studied was 118 from 67 universities spread all over Europe, whilst the number of onsite visits/interviews was 15 (geographically distributed as follows Eastern Europe 6, North Western Europe 5, and South Western Europe 4). EU legislation, recommendations by European national medical councils, educational benchmark statements by higher education quality assurance agencies, research journals concerning HCP education and other documents relevant to standards in clinical practice and undergraduate education were also analyzed. Best practices and BMP learning outcomes were elicited from the curricular materials, interviews and documentation and these were subsequently used to construct the curriculum development model. A structured, comprehensive BMP learning outcomes inventory was designed in the format required by the European Qualifications Framework (EQF). The structures of the inventory and curriculum development model make them ideally suited for use by BMP involved in European curriculum development initiatives for the HCP.Salinity is a key devastating abiotic factor that hinders the development and yield of safflower. The sole and combined application of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO-NPs) and a biofertilizer (BF) to improve salt tolerance in safflower has not been thoroughly explored. The response of safflower plants in a pot experiment to the foliar spray of ZnO-NPs alone and in combination with a BF was thus detected. We determined that a ZnO-NP concentration of 17 mg/L was sufficient to protect safflower against salinity (250 mM NaCl) by increasing the plant productivity, percent water content, and osmolyte levels. Coapplication of ZnO-NPs and Phytoguard protected safflower plants from salinity stress by improving the activities of antioxidant enzymes and decreasing the levels of proline (leaves (61%) and roots (63%)) and malondialdehyde (MDA) (leaves (54%) and roots (65%)). Under salt stress, the Na+ content increased, while seed coating with biofertilizer and ZnO-NP spray significantly decreased the Na+ concentration (74% in leaves and 60% in roots). For the K+ concentration, however, antagonistic outcomes were observed. Additionally, the combined treatment significantly enhanced agronomic parameters such as the number of leaves and pods per plant, capitulum weight, and the number of yellow and wilted leaves per plant under salinity stress. Thus, ZnO-NPs could be an effective bio-source for the protection of safflower plants under salinity stress. Our findings showed that in the combined treatment of ZnO-NPs and biofertilizer, the salinity tolerance was more pronounced than in the single treatment and untreated control. A thorough analysis at the molecular level, however, is still required to understand the mechanism by which ZnO-NPs and BF in safflower plants alleviate salt stress.Acetochlor is one of the most widely used chiral herbicides in the world, and it is usually produced and used as racemic form (Rac). The potential effects of acetochlor in human body are mainly induced by its residue in agriculture food. The direct target exposed is the liver in human body. However, the potential toxic and mechanism threat to human liver cells caused by chiral acetochlor has been rarely reported. The purpose of this study is to explore the potential mechanism of the toxicity caused by chiral acetochlor in HepG2 cells. The results revealed that acetochlor and its enantiomers could inhibit cell activity and cause DNA damage in HepG2 cells. The toxicity of Rac was higher than that of the two enantiomers, mainly derived from S configuration. The mechanism is through inducing decreased membrane potential (△Ψ), up-regulated Bax/BcL-2 expression, caused a cascade reaction, activated casepase-3 and casepase-9 and cleaved PARP, which maybe lead to cell death through apoptotic-signaling pathway in the end.