Bioadhesive Hyaluronic Acid-Based Hydrogels for Spinal Cord Injury.

Spinal cord injuries (SCI) have devastating physical, psychological, and psychosocial consequences for patients. One challenge of nerve tissue repair is the lack of a natural extracellular matrix (ECM) that guides the regenerating axons. Hyaluronic acid (HA) is a major ECM component and plays a fundamental role in facilitating lesion healing. Herein, we developed HA-based adhesive hydrogels by modification of HA with dopamine, a mussel-inspired compound with excellent adhesive properties in an aqueous environment. The hydrogels were loaded with the anti-inflammatory drug ibuprofen and the response of neuronal cells (SH-SY5Y) was evaluated in terms of viability, morphology, and adhesion. The obtained results suggested that the developed materials can bridge lesion gaps, guide axonal growth, and simultaneously act as a vehicle for the delivery of bioactive compounds.

The impact of cash transfer participation on unhealthy consumption in Brazil.

We assess the impact of the Brazilian government's conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família on unhealthy consumption by households, proxied by expenses with ultra-processed food, alcohol, and tobacco products. Using machine learning techniques to improve the propensity score estimation, we analyze the intensive and extensive margin effects of participating in the program on the household purchase of unhealthy products. Our results reveal that program participants spend more on food in general, but not necessarily more on unhealthy options. While we find evidence that participants increase their probability of spending more on food away from home, they do not significantly alter their expenditures on packaged food, alcohol, or tobacco products.

Acinetobacter baumannii: insights towards a comprehensive approach for the prevention of outbreaks in health-care facilities.

Acinetobacter baumannii is known to be an opportunistic pathogen frequently responsible for outbreaks in health-care facilities, particularly in Intensive Care Units (ICU). It can easily survive in the hospital setting for long periods and can be transmitted throughout the hospital in a variety of ways, explored in this review. It can also easily acquire antibiotic resistance determinants rendering several antibiotic drugs useless. In 2019, the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) considered the organism as an urgent threat. The aim of this review was to raise the awareness of the medical community about the relevance of this pathogen and discuss how it may impact seriously the healthcare institutions particularly in the aftermath of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. PubMed was searched, and articles that met inclusion criteria were reviewed. We conclude by the need to raise awareness to this pathogen's relevance and to encourage the implementation of preventive measures in order to mitigate its consequences namely the triage of specific high-risk patients.

Drones for litter mapping: An inter-operator concordance test in marking beached items on aerial images.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS, aka drones) are being used to map macro-litter on the environment. Sixteen qualified researchers (operators), with different expertise and nationalities, were invited to identify, mark and categorize the litter items (manual image screening, MS) on three UAS images collected at two beaches. The coefficient of concordance (W) among operators varied between 0.5 and 0.7, depending on the litter parameter (type, material and colour) considered. Highest agreement was obtained for the type of items marked on the highest resolution image, among experts in litter surveys (W = 0.86), and within territorial subgroups (W = 0.85). Therefore, for a detailed categorization of litter on the environment, the MS should be performed by experienced and local operators, familiar with the most common type of litter present in the target area. This work provides insights for future operational improvements and optimizations of UAS-based images analysis to survey environmental pollution.

Shared and specific signatures of locomotor ataxia in mutant mice.

Several spontaneous mouse mutants with deficits in motor coordination and associated cerebellar neuropathology have been described. Intriguingly, both visible gait alterations and neuroanatomical abnormalities throughout the brain differ across mutants. We previously used the LocoMouse system to quantify specific deficits in locomotor coordination in mildly ataxic Purkinje cell degeneration mice (pcd; Machado et al., 2015). Here, we analyze the locomotor behavior of severely ataxic reeler mutants and compare and contrast it with that of pcd. Despite clearly visible gait differences, direct comparison of locomotor kinematics and linear discriminant analysis reveal a surprisingly similar pattern of impairments in multijoint, interlimb, and whole-body coordination in the two mutants. These findings capture both shared and specific signatures of gait ataxia and provide a quantitative foundation for mapping specific locomotor impairments onto distinct neuropathologies in mice.

Mapping marine litter with Unmanned Aerial Systems: A showcase comparison among manual image screening and machine learning techniques.

Recent works have shown the feasibility of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) for monitoring marine pollution. We provide a comparison among techniques to detect and map marine litter objects on an UAS-derived orthophoto of a sandy beach-dune system. Manual image screening technique allowed a detailed description of marine litter categories. Random forest classifier returned the best-automated detection rate (F-score 70%), while convolutional neural network performed slightly worse (F-score 60%) due to a higher number of false positive detections. We show that automatic methods allow faster and more frequent surveys, while still providing a reliable density map of the marine litter load. Image manual screening should be preferred when the characterization of marine litter type and material is required. Our analysis suggests that the use of UAS-derived orthophoto is appropriate to obtain a detailed geolocation of marine litter items, requires much less human effort and allows a wider area coverage.