Evidence Review and Practice Recommendation on the Material, Design, and Maintenance of Cloth Masks.

Despite numerous masking recommendations from public health agencies, including the World Health Organization, editorials, and commentaries providing support for this notion, none had examined different homemade masks or demonstrated that perhaps not all cloth masks are the same. This article aims to provide evidence-based recommendations on cloth-mask materials, its design, and, importantly, its maintenance. Articles were obtained from PubMed and preprint servers up to June 10, 2020. Current evidence suggests that filtration effectiveness can range from 3% to 95%. Multiple layer (hybrid) homemade masks made from a combination of high density 100% cotton and materials with electrostatic charge would be more effective than one made from a single material. Mask fit greatly affects filtration efficiency, and adding an overhead knot or nylon overlay potentially provides the best fit for cloth masks. There is a paucity of evidence for masks maintenance as most studies are in the laboratory setting; however, switching every 4 hours as in medical masks and stored in dedicated containers while awaiting disinfection is recommended. Outside of these recommendations to improve the effectiveness of cloth masks to reduce infection transmission, there is a need for countries to set up independent testing labs for homemade masks made based on locally available materials. This can use existing occupational health laboratories usually used for accrediting masks and respirators.

Pavement crack analysis by referring to historical crack data based on multi-scale localization.

Pavement crack analysis, which deals with crack detection and crack growth detection, is a crucial task for modern Pavement Management Systems (PMS). This paper proposed a novel approach that uses historical crack data as reference for automatic pavement crack analysis. At first, a multi-scale localization method, which including GPS based coarse localization, image-level localization, and metric localization has been presented to establish image correspondences between historical and query crack images. Then historical crack pixels can be mapped onto the query crack image, and these mapped crack pixels are seen as high-quality seed points for crack analysis. Finally, crack analysis is accomplished by applying Region Growing Method (RGM) to further detect newly grown cracks. The proposed method has been tested with the actual pavement images collected in different time. The F-measure for crack growth is 88.9%, which demonstrates the proposed method has an ability to greatly simplify and enhances crack analysis result.

The new Scopus CiteScore formula and the Journal Impact Factor: a look at top ranking journals and middle ranking journals in the Scopus categories of General Physics and Astronomy, Materials Science, General Medicine and Social Sciences.

In June 2020 Elsevier announced that the CiteScore metric of journals underwent a change. This work examines the effect of these changes for 40 journals, chosen from the top five and middle five (ranked by CiteScore) journals in the subject areas of General Physics and Astronomy, Materials Science, Medicine, Social Sciences) and compares to the Journal Impact Factor. It is shown that in the data studied here, the new methodology is less susceptible to influence of the proportion of editorial material in a journal, but tends to favour journals in research fields that publish articles which get cited more quickly.

A new stress field intensity model and its application in component high cycle fatigue research.

Fatigue limit load is one of the most important and concerned factors in designing and manufacturing critical mechanical parts such as the crankshafts. Usually, this governing parameter is obtained by experiment, which is expensive, time-consuming and only feasible in analyzing the case of simple structure. Still, there's a big obstacle to clear to get the fatigue limit load of a sophisticated structure effectively and efficiently. This paper applied the stress field intensity theory to make quick component fatigue limit load predictions. First, the field diameter of a given crankshaft was determined based on its limit stress state and a stress distribution fitting approach. Then, this parameter was used to predict the high-cycle bending fatigue limit load of a new crankshaft composed of the same material. Finally, a corresponding experimental verification was conducted to evaluate the accuracy of the predictions. The results indicated that the original stress field intensity model may not be suitable due to the errors in the predictions, which can be attributed to the structural features. The new model proposed in this paper can provide higher accuracy in quick fatigue load prediction, making it superior to the traditional model in engineering application.

The "Materials Chemistry" Section of Molecules: A Multidisciplinary Environment for Materials-Based Researches.

The "Materials Chemistry" Section of Molecules is an open access place for the dissemination of theoretical and experimental studies related to the chemical approaches to materials-based problems [...].

Early Years of High-Throughput Experimentation and Combinatorial Approaches in Catalysis and Materials Science.

This is a report on the early years of combinatorial materials science and technology. High-throughput technologies (HTTs) are found in life- and materials-science laboratories. Although HTTs have long been the standard in life sciences in academia as well as in industry, HTTs in materials science have become the standard in industry but not in academia. In life science, successful drugs developed with HTTs have been reported, but there is no information on successful materials developed with HTTs that have made it to the market. Some initial development of HTTs in materials science is summarized, especially early applications of artificial intelligence. This outlook attempts to summarize the development of combinatorial materials sciences from the early years to today.