Paediatric departments need to improve residents' training in adolescent medicine and health: a position paper of the European Academy of Paediatrics.

In many European countries, paediatric junior staff has no formal training in adolescent medicine and is ill-equipped to deal with issues and health problems such as substance use, unprotected sex, eating disorders and transition to adult care. This position paper of the European Academy of Paediatrics proposes a set of competency-based training goals and objectives as well as pedagogic approaches that are expected to improve the capacity of paediatricians to meet the needs of this important segment of the paediatric population. The content has been developed from available publications and training programmes and mostly covers the generic aspects of adolescent healthcare, such as how to communicate effectively, how to review and address lifestyles, how to perform a respectful and relevant physical examination, how to address common problems of adolescents and how to support adolescents in coping with a chronic condition. CONCLUSION: The European Academy of Paediatrics urges national bodies, paediatric associations and paediatric teaching departments to adopt these training objectives and put them into practice, so that paediatricians will be better prepared in the future to meet the challenge of delivering appropriate and effective healthcare to adolescents.

Endohedral fullerenes for organic photovoltaic devices.

So far, one of the fundamental limitations of organic photovoltaic (OPV) device power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) has been the low voltage output caused by a molecular orbital mismatch between the donor polymer and acceptor molecules. Here, we present a means of addressing the low voltage output by introducing novel trimetallic nitride endohedral fullerenes (TNEFs) as acceptor materials for use in photovoltaic devices. TNEFs were discovered in 1999 by Stevenson et al. ; for the first time derivatives of the TNEF acceptor, Lu(3)N@C(80), are synthesized and integrated into OPV devices. The reduced energy offset of the molecular orbitals of Lu(3)N@C(80) to the donor, poly(3-hexyl)thiophene (P3HT), reduces energy losses in the charge transfer process and increases the open circuit voltage (Voc) to 260 mV above reference devices made with [6,6]-phenyl-C(61)-butyric methyl ester (C(60)-PCBM) acceptor. PCEs >4% have been observed using P3HT as the donor material. This work clears a path towards higher PCEs in OPV devices by demonstrating that high-yield charge separation can occur with OPV systems that have a reduced donor/acceptor lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy offset.

Effects of fiber-optic probe design and probe-to-target distance on diffuse reflectance measurements of turbid media: an experimental and computational study at 337 nm.

Fiber-optic probes are widely used in optical spectroscopy of biological tissues and other turbid media. Only limited information exists, however, on the ways in which the illumination-collection geometry and the overall probe design influence the interrogation of media. We have investigated both experimentally and computationally the effect of probe-to-target distance (PTD) on the diffuse reflectance collected from an isotropically (Lambertian) scattering target and an agar-based tissue phantom. Studies were conducted with three probes characterized by either common (single-fiber) or separate (two bifurcated multifiber probes) illumination and collection channels. This study demonstrates that PTD, probe design, and tissue scattering anisotropy influence the extent of the transport of light into the medium, the light-collection efficiency, and the sampling volume of collected light. The findings can be applied toward optimization of fiber-optic probe designs for quantitative optical spectroscopy of turbid media including biological tissues.