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Purpose: Critically ill patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) are frequently prescribed antibiotics, with many reporting an antibiotic allergy label, predominantly to penicillin. Mislabeling contributes to suboptimal antibiotic use, increasing multidrug-resistant organisms and Clostridium difficile infections, and increased hospital length of stay. This prospective study implemented an antibiotic allergy assessment and testing program in the ICU, independently of clinical immunology/allergy services., Materials and Methods: Trained ICU staff prospectively identified and risk assessed eligible patients as having a non-immune mediated drug reaction, or a low, intermediate or high risk antibiotic allergy. Non-immune mediated reactions were directly de-labeled. Low-risk allergies underwent direct drug provocation testing, while intermediate-risk allergies included skin testing followed by drug provocation testing. High-risk allergies were confirmed without testing., Results: Of 71 eligible patients, 62 underwent assessment. Antibiotic allergy de-labeling occurred in 48 of 51 patients (94 %) with a non-immune, low or intermediate risk allergy. High risk allergies were confirmed in 11 patients (18 %). The study resulted in increased penicillin use and decreased broad-spectrum antibiotic use. No adverse events occurred from testing., Conclusions: This study shows the feasibility of ICU led antibiotic allergy assessment and testing, highlighting a potential model for implementation in settings lacking immunology/allergy services., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no competing interests., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Layered manufacturing, the underlying technology of 3-D printing, has made rapid strides over the last 30 years. We discuss layered manufacturing from the artist's perspective, especially for intricate ceramic pottery. We contend that opportunities exist for applying visualization to the foremost problems plaguing layered manufacturing. Virtual pottery involves meeting two conflicting constraints: rapid visualization during modeling and accurate rapid prototyping during manufacturing. Artists simultaneously need both low polygon shape representation for interactive visualization and adequate representation for generating accurate printable models. Artists also face the additional complexities of adding surface details that cannot be achieved by hand and handling materials like clay used in the manufacturing of real pottery. Illustrated by a system we have developed that uses sound resonance patterns to create volumetric textures for virtual pottery, we show how visualization helps address both these problem areas.

Background: Human senses have evolved to recognise sensory cues. Beyond our perception, they play an integral role in our emotional processing, learning, and interpretation. They are what help us to sculpt our everyday experiences and can be triggered by aesthetics to form the foundations of our interactions with each other and our surroundings. In terms of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), robots have the possibility to interact with both people and environments given their senses. They can offer the attributes of human characteristics, which in turn can make the interchange with technology a more appealing and admissible experience. However, for many reasons, people still do not seem to trust and accept robots. Trust is expressed as a person's ability to accept the potential risks associated with participating alongside an entity such as a robot. Whilst trust is an important factor in building relationships with robots, the presence of uncertainties can add an additional dimension to the decision to trust a robot. In order to begin to understand how to build trust with robots and reverse the negative ideology, this paper examines the influences of aesthetic design techniques on the human ability to trust robots., Method: This paper explores the potential that robots have unique opportunities to improve their facilities for empathy, emotion, and social awareness beyond their more cognitive functionalities. Through conducting an online questionnaire distributed globally, we explored participants ability and acceptance in trusting the Canbot U03 robot. Participants were presented with a range of visual questions which manipulated the robot's facial screen and asked whether or not they would trust the robot. A selection of questions aimed at putting participants in situations where they were required to establish whether or not to trust a robot's responses based solely on the visual appearance. We accomplished this by manipulating different design elements of the robots facial and chest screens, which influenced the human-robot interaction., Results: We found that certain facial aesthetics seem to be more trustworthy than others, such as a cartoon face versus a human face, and that certain visual variables ( i.e., blur) afforded uncertainty more than others. Consequentially, this paper reports that participant's uncertainties of the visualisations greatly influenced their willingness to accept and trust the robot. The results of introducing certain anthropomorphic characteristics emphasised the participants embrace of the uncanny valley theory, where pushing the degree of human likeness introduced a thin line between participants accepting robots and not. By understanding what manipulation of design elements created the aesthetic effect that triggered the affective processes, this paper further enriches our knowledge of how we might design for certain emotions, feelings, and ultimately more socially acceptable and trusting robotic experiences., Competing Interests: The authors declare there are no competing interests., (©2022 Pinney et al.)

Phishing attacks are on the increase. The fact that our ways of living, studying and working have drastically changed as a result of the COVID pandemic (i.e., almost everything being done online) has created many new cyber security concerns. In particular, with the move to remote working, the number of phishing emails threatening employees has increased. The 2020 Phishing Attack Landscape Report (Greathorn: 2020 Phishing attack landscape. https://info.greathorn.com/report-2020-phishing-attack-landscape/, 2020) highlights a sharp increase in the frequency of attempted phishing attacks. In this paper, we are interested in how the phishing email attack has evolved to this very threatening state. In detail, we explore the current phishing attack characteristics especially the growing challenges that have emerged as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper documents a study that presented test participants with five different categories of emails (including phishing and non phishing) . The findings from the study show that participants, generally, found it difficult to detect modern phishing email attacks. Saying that, participants were alert to the spelling mistakes of the older phishing email attacks, sensitive information being requested from them and any slight change to what they were normally used to from an email. Moreover, we have found that people were not confident, worried and often dissatisfied with the current technologies available to protect them against phishing emails. In terms of trust, these feelings alerted us to the increasing severity of the phishing attack situation and just how vulnerable society has become/ still is., Competing Interests: Conflict of InterestThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

Handcrafting ceramic pottery in the traditional method or virtual reality (VR) with intricate surface details is still challenging for the ceramic and graphic artist. Free-form pottery modeling can be efficiently geometrically modeled with the right tools with detailed 3D print outputs, yet challenging to be manufactured using traditional art. The new advanced pottery VR simulation is a promising method to recreate the traditional pottery simulation for a better experience with some barriers. The challenges that arise from surface detail in pottery are a tedious task accomplished by mesh blending and retopology. This paper focuses on refining the VP application's performance by adding unique sound resonance as a more likely infinite geometric phenomenon textures, blending it into the basic shapes. This paper combines creativity and visual computing technologies such as VR, mesh blending, fixing errors, and 3D printing to bring the ceramic artist's imagination to life. We have used sound resonance with virtual pottery (VP) systems refinements to demonstrate several standard pottery methods from free form deformed pottery, retopology, mesh blended for surface details, and 3D printed pottery with materials including polymer and ceramic resins., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestAuthors declare that they have no conflicts of interest., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

GABA systems have been implicated as targets for ethanol at the cellular, molecular and behavioural level. The present study was designed to further examine the potential of the GABA(B) receptor as a target for regulating operant alcohol responding. Given that the prototypic agonist, baclofen, reduces the self-administration of alcohol, we hypothesized that the GABA(B) receptor allosteric modulator, CGP7930, might have similar actions but a reduced side-effect profile. In this context, inbred alcohol-preferring (iP) rats were trained to respond for 10% v/v ethanol in a fixed ratio paradigm; all drug testing was performed under an FR3 schedule. Both baclofen and CGP7930 independently reduced voluntary responding for 10% ethanol in a dose-related manner. Neither drug impacted upon responding for water. A combination of subthreshold doses of baclofen and CGP7930 was also able to reduce operant responding for ethanol, suggesting that CGP7930 is indeed acting to facilitate GABA(B) receptor-mediated signalling in this paradigm. These data demonstrate the potential of positive allosteric modulators of metabotropic GABA(B) receptors to regulate alcohol responding.

Olfactory dysfunction has been implicated in various neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease but, despite intense interest in the neurobiology of the olfactory bulb (OB), studies of neurodegenerative mechanisms have not been attempted in primary OB cultures. This study was aimed at developing a primary OB culture under serum-free conditions in order to investigate injury and excitotoxicity in vitro. Olfactory bulbs from rat pups were rapidly trypsinised and mechanically dissociated and the resultant single cell suspension was centrifuged through a high bovine serum albumin concentration gradient to reduce cellular debris before being seeded in multi-well culture plates. Cells were plated in neurobasal medium containing 0.5 mM glutamine, 25 mM K(+), 2% B27 and 10% fetal calf serum (FCS) for 24 h and, after 1 day in vitro (div1), were maintained without FCS. At div8, neurones exhibited extensive neuritic networks, were present as a monolayer and were mainly bipolar and immunopositive for gamma-aminobutyric acid indicating that they were intrinsic OB neurones. At div8, neurones (positive for microtubule-associated protein-2, 73%) predominated over astrocytes (positive for glial fibrillary acidic protein, 27%). Cellular injury produced by staurosporine, hydrogen peroxide and kainate, when assessed by morphological and biochemical procedures, was shown to be concentration-dependent and significantly reduced the numbers of neurones and astrocytes. Further analyses of kainate-induced injury revealed the presence of TUNEL-positive cells (indicative of apoptosis) and increases in intracellular free calcium, both of which were antagonised by CNQX. Thus, the serum-free culture developed here is amenable to morphological and high throughput neurochemical analyses of mechanisms contributing to the injury of OB neurones in vitro.