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Contaminated drinking water is a major health hazard in large urban areas as well as remote communities. Several pollutants detected in rivers and lakes are hormone disruptors that are harmful to consumers as well as aquatic life. In this contribution, we present a new material, synthesized using novel green technologies, designed for solar- or LED-driven degradation of pollutants. This material is based on a glass fiber support, loaded with black TiO2, a modified form of TiO2 with strong visible light absorption and without any toxic metal or non-metal dopants. This photocatalyst is fully compatible with flow applications. The effectiveness of the catalyst is demonstrated with crocin and 17β-estradiol, the former being a natural carotenoid used as a screening tool and the latter being a common hormonal disruptor. Our work shows that under visible light illumination, our supported black TiO2 can degrade these water contaminants with greater efficiency than conventional TiO2. We envision that our findings can contribute to the production of inexpensive, large-scale solar or LED-based water decontamination systems that could be rapidly deployed to sites in need. Operation of such systems would require minimal training and could be monitored remotely. In addition to the catalyst's non-toxicity and inflow compatibility, the material also has a long shelf life and is easy and inexpensive to produce, making it an attractive candidate for developing water treatment devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite numerous screening tools for colorectal cancer (CRC), 25 % of patients are diagnosed with advanced disease. Novel diagnostic technologies that are early, accurate, and rapid are imperative to assess the therapeutic efficacy of clinical drugs and identify new biomarkers of treatment response. Here Raman spectroscopy (RS) was used to track metabolic reprogramming in KRAS‐mutant HCT116 and SW837 cells, and KRAS wild‐type CC cells. RS combined with multivariate analysis methods distinguished nonresponsive, partially responsive, and responsive cells treated with cetuximab, a monoclonal antibody for EGFR inhibition, sotorasib, a clinically approved KRAS inhibitor, and various doses of trametinib, an inhibitor of the MAPK pathway. Cells treated with a combination of subtoxic doses of trametinib and BKM120, an inhibitor of the PI3K pathway, showed a synergistic response between the two pathways. Using a supervised machine learning regression model, we established a scoring methodology trained to a priori predict therapeutic response to new treatment combinations. RS metabolites were verified with mass spectrometry, and enrichment pathways were identified, including amino acid, purine, and nicotinate and nicotinamide metabolism that differentiated monotherapy from combination therapy. Our approach may ultimately be applicable to patient‐derived primary cells and cultures of patient tumors to predict effective drugs for individualized care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sequential analysis (SA) as a sampling technique has notable advantages like smaller average sample size and reduced value of risk compared to similarly comparable fixed-sample techniques. In this study, we first propose a few models for the estimation of the regression parameters or functions of parameters under the multiple linear regression (MLR) setup using a balanced loss function (BLF). Thereafter, we obtain the expressions of risk functions and optimal fixed sample sizes for the proposed models based on the bounded risk criteria. We establish that no fixed-sample procedures can tackle these estimation problems. Hence, we propose different multistage sampling methodologies, viz. (i) two-stage sampling, (ii) three-stage sampling, (iii) purely sequential sampling, and (iv) batch sequential sampling, and corroborate the same with the detailed simulation and real data analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The characterization of the triplet state of decatungstate (3DT*) and its NIR phosphorescence with lifetimes ∼100 ns in acetonitrile allow the easy determination of rate constants that are key to understanding its role in catalysis. The absence of oxygen quenching can now be understood as the excitation energy of 3DT* is lower than the energy of singlet oxygen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]