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Abstract: The characterization of phases in Al73Mn27−x Fe x (x =2, 4 and 6) alloys was performed using X-ray diffraction, differential thermal analysis, and scanning electron microscopy enabling energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. Both the annealed and the thermally cycled states were studied. In the annealed states the occurrence of T-phase was expected, however it was confirmed for alloys Al73Mn25Fe2 and Al73Mn23Fe4 only. The annealing of the Al73Mn21Fe6 alloy probably led to the formation of decagonal quasicrystal (D). The T- and D-phases were found to be unstable at low temperatures. In the states after DTA the low temperature Al11(Mn,Fe)4 and γ2 phases were observed in the Al73Mn25Fe2 and Al73Mn21Fe6 alloys, while only the former phase was observed in the Al73Mn23Fe4 alloy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Background: The human stress response is characterized by increases in neuromodulators, including norepinephrine (NE) and cortisol. Both neuromodulators can enter the brain and affect neurofunctional responses. Two brain areas associated with stress are the amygdala and the hippocampus. The precise influence of NE and cortisol on the amygdala and hippocampal resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) is poorly understood., Aims: To investigate the influence of NE and cortisol on the amygdala and hippocampal RSFC., Methods: We recruited 165 participants who received 10 mg yohimbine and/or 10 mg hydrocortisone in a randomized, placebo-controlled design. With seed-based analyses, we compared RSFC of the hippocampus and amygdala separately between the three groups that received medication versus placebo., Results: We found no differences between yohimbine and placebo condition or between hydrocortisone and placebo condition regarding amygdala or hippocampal FC. Compared with placebo, the yohimbine/hydrocortisone condition showed increased amygdala and hippocampal RSFC with the cerebellum. Also, they had increased hippocampal RSFC with the amygdala and cerebral white matter., Discussion: The group with elevated NE and cortisol showed significantly increased RSFC between the amygdala, hippocampus, and cerebellum compared to placebo. These three brain areas are involved in associative learning and emotional memory, suggesting a critical role for this network in the human stress response. Our results show that NE and cortisol together may influence the strength of this association. Compared to placebo, we found no differences in the groups receiving only one medication, suggesting that increasing one neuromodulator alone may not induce differences in neurofunctional responses. The study procedure has been registered at clinicaltrials.gov (ID: NCT04359147)., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Introduction: Selective attention to salient emotional information can enable an advantage in the face of danger. The present study aims to investigate the influence of the stress neuromodulators, norepinephrine and cortisol, on selective attention processes to fearful faces and its neuronal activation., Methods and Materials: We used a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled design. 167 healthy men between 18 and 35 years (mean [SD] age: 25.23 [4.24] years) participated in the study. Participants received either: (A) yohimbine (n= 41), (B) hydrocortisone (n = 41), (C) yohimbine and hydrocortisone (n = 42) or (D) placebo only (n= 43) and participated in a dot-probe task with fearful and neutral faces in an fMRI scanner., Results: We found an attentional bias toward fearful faces across all groups and related neuronal activation in the left cuneus. We did not find any differences between experimental treatment groups in selective attention and its neuronal activation., Discussion: Our results provide evidence that fearful faces lead to an attentional bias with related neuronal activation in the left cuneus. We did not replicate formerly reported activation in the amygdala, intraparietal sulcus, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and thalamus. Suitability of the dot-probe task for fMRI studies and insignificant treatment effects are discussed., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has led to a wide range of clinical presentations, with respiratory symptoms being common. However, emerging evidence suggests that the gastrointestinal (GI) tract is also affected, with angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, a key receptor for SARS-CoV-2, abundantly expressed in the ileum and colon. The virus has been detected in GI tissues and fecal samples, even in cases with negative results of the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction in the respiratory tract. GI symptoms have been associated with an increased risk of ICU admission and mortality. The gut microbiome, a complex ecosystem of around 40 trillion bacteria, plays a crucial role in immunological and metabolic pathways. Dysbiosis of the gut microbiota, characterized by a loss of beneficial microbes and decreased microbial diversity, has been observed in COVID-19 patients, potentially contributing to disease severity. We conducted a comprehensive gut microbiome study in 204 hospitalized COVID-19 patients using both shallow and deep shotgun sequencing methods. We aimed to track microbiota composition changes induced by hospitalization, link these alterations to clinical procedures (antibiotics administration) and outcomes (ICU referral, survival), and assess the predictive potential of the gut microbiome for COVID-19 prognosis. Shallow shotgun sequencing was evaluated as a cost-effective diagnostic alternative for clinical settings. Our study demonstrated the diverse effects of various combinations of clinical parameters, microbiome profiles, and patient metadata on the precision of outcome prognostication in patients. It indicates that microbiological data possesses greater reliability in forecasting patient outcomes when contrasted with clinical data or metadata. Furthermore, we established that shallow shotgun sequencing presents a viable and cost-effective diagnostic alternative to deep sequencing within clinical environments., Competing Interests: AW-W, MK, DC-L, WM, and IŁ were employed by the Sanprobi Sp. z o.o. Sp. k. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Kopera, Gromowski, Wydmański, Skonieczna-Żydecka, Muszyńska, Zielińska, Wierzbicka-Woś, Kaczmarczyk, Kadaj-Lipka, Cembrowska-Lech, Januszkiewicz, Kotfis, Witkiewicz, Nalewajska, Feret, Marlicz, Łoniewski, Łabaj, Rydzewska and Kosciolek.)

Successful recovery from stress is integral for adaptive responding to the environment. At a cellular level, this involves (slow genomic) actions of cortisol, which alter or reverse rapid effects of noradrenaline and cortisol associated with acute stress. At the network scale, stress recovery is less well understood but assumed to involve changes within salience-, executive control-, and default mode networks. To date, few studies have investigated this phase and directly tested these assumptions. Here, we present results from a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-group paradigm (N = 165 healthy males) administering 10 mg oral yohimbine and/or 10 mg oral hydrocortisone two hours prior to resting state scanning. We found no changes in within-network connectivity of the three networks, both after single and combined drug administration. We further report the results of Bayesian parameter inference to provide evidence for the null hypothesis. Our results contrast with previous findings, which may be attributable to systematic differences between paradigms, highlighting the need to isolate paradigm-specific effects from those related to stress., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)

While the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is dominated by pharmacological agents, transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) is gaining attention as an alternative method for treatment. Most current meta-analyses have suggested that tES can improve cognitive functions that are otherwise impaired in ADHD, such as inhibition and working memory, as well as alleviated clinical symptoms. Here we review some of the promising findings in the field of tES. At the same time, we highlight two factors, which hinder the effective application of tES in treating ADHD: 1) the heterogeneity of tES protocols used in different studies; 2) patient profiles influencing responses to tES. We highlight potential solutions for overcoming such limitations, including the use of active machine learning, and provide simulated data to demonstrate how these solutions could also improve the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of ADHD., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

The pancreas has dual functions, endocrine and exocrine, that complement each other and work closely together, contributing to the digestion, absorption, and metabolism of foods. More than a decade ago, it was demonstrated that pancreatic exocrine insufficiency occurs in a significant number of patients with diabetes mellitus. Diabetes mellitus affects virtually every organ system in the body, and the degree of organ involvement depends on the duration and severity of the disease, as well as other co-morbidities. Gastrointestinal side effects include pancreatopathy, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, oesophageal dysmotility, gastroesophageal reflux disease, gastroparesis, neuropathy, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2020 Termedia.)

This article describes the latest diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations in chronic pancreatitis, developed by the Working Group of the Polish Society of Gastroenterology and the Polish Pancreas Club. The recommendations refer to the diagnosis of chronic pancreatitis, autoimmune pancreatitis, conservative management, treatment of pain, and exocrine and endocrine pancreatic insufficiency, treatment of chronic pancreatitis by endoscopic and surgical methods, and oncological surveillance of chronic pancreatitis. This paper refers to the Polish recommendations published in 2011, which have been updated and supplemented. All recommendations were voted by experts of the Polish Society of Gastroenterology and the Polish Pancreas Club, who evaluated them each time on a five-degree scale, where I meant full acceptance, II - acceptance with some reservation, III - acceptance with serious reservation, IV - rejection with some reservation and V - full rejection. The results of the voting, together with a brief commentary, have been included with each recommendation put to the vote. In addition, the expert group assessed the value of clinical studies on which the statements are based, on a scale where A means high (based on meta-analyses and randomised clinical trials), B means medium (based on clinical trials and observational studies), and C means low (based mainly on expert opinion).

This paper reports on a new type of high-frequency mode-matched gyroscope with significantly reduced dependencies on environmental stimuli such as temperature, vibration, and shock. A novel stress-isolation system is used to effectively decouple an axis-symmetric bulk-acoustic wave (BAW) vibratory gyro from its substrate, minimizing the effect that external sources of error have on the offset and scale factor of the device. Substrate-decoupled (SD) BAW gyros with a resonance frequency of 4.3 MHz and Q values near 60 000 were implemented using the high aspect ratio poly and single-crystal silicon (HARPSS) process to achieve ultra-narrow capacitive gaps. Wafer-level packaged sensors were interfaced with a customized application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) to achieve low variations in the offset across temperature (±26° s -1 from -40 to 85 °C), supreme random-vibration immunity (0.012° s -1  g RMS -1 ) and excellent shock rejection. With a scale factor of 800 μV (°s -1 ) -1 , the SD-BAW gyro system attains a large full-scale range (±1250° s -1 ) with a non-linearity of less than 0.07%. A measured angle-random walk (ARW) of 0.39°/√h and a bias instability of 10.5°h -1 are dominated by the thermal and flicker noise of the integrated circuit (IC), respectively. Additional measurements using external electronics show bias-instability values as low as 3.5°h -1 , which are limited by feed-through signals coupled from the drive loop to the sense channel, which can be further reduced through proper re-routing of the gyroscope pin-out configuration., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Ethylenediamine-N,N,N',N'-tetrakismethylene phosphonate (EDTMP) and ascorbic acid (AA) were determined in two batches of lyophilized experimental radiopharmaceutical kits by using ion chromatography with UV detection. The separation of EDTM and AA was carried out on PRP-X 800 weak cation exchange column and as an eluant 0.0025 mol L(-1) sodium sulfate was used. Validation parameters of both analytical procedures: limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantitation (LOQ), linearity, precision, accuracy and system suitability test (SST) parameters are presented.

Optimum conditions for the direct reversed-phase LC determination of fluoride based on the ternary M-(F-)-(5-Br-PADAP) complexes [M = ZrIV or HfIV and 5-Br-PADAP = 2-(5-bromo-2-pyridylazo)-5-diethylaminophenol] were evaluated. Chromatographic separation was performed with C18 end-capped column with an eluent consisting of acetonitrile-water (85 + 15 v/v) mixture of pH 4.0 +/- 0.3 (flow rate 1 ml min-1), and the eluate was monitored spectrophotometrically at lambda max = 585 nm. The calibration curves were linear over a wide range of fluoride concentrations: from 1 to 110 and 150 ng ml-1 for the ZrIV-(F-)-(5-Br-PADAP) and HfIV-(F-)-(5-Br-PADAP) systems, respectively (using a 20 microliters loop). Under such conditions the detection limits were 0.8 and 0.7 ng ml-1, respectively, and the quantification limit is 1.0 ng ml-1 for both methods. When a 100 microliters loop was used, the limits of both detection and quantification in the method based on the zirconium system were 0.2 ng ml-1. Using the proposed method, fluoride was determined directly in tap water, saliva and an anti-cancer agent for prostatic cancer (Leuprolid).