The effect of indoor daylight spectrum and intensity on viability of indoor pathogens on different surface materials

Built environments play a key role in the transmission of infectious diseases. Ventilation rates, air temperature and humidity affect airborne transmission while cleaning protocols, material properties and light exposure can influence viability of pathogens on surfaces. We investigated how indoor daylight intensity and spectrum through electrochromic (EC) windows can impact the growth rate and viability of indoor pathogens on different surface materials (polyvinyl chloride (PVC) fabric, polystyrene (PS), and glass) compared to traditional blinds. Our results showed that tinted EC windows let in higher energy, shorter wavelength daylight than those with clear window and blind. The growth rates of pathogenic bacteria and fungi were significantly lower in spaces with EC windows compared to blinds: nearly 100% growth rate reduction was observed when EC windows were in their clear state followed by 41-100% reduction in bacterial growth rate and 26-42% reduction in fungal growth rate when EC windows were in their darkest tint. Moreover, bacterial viabilities were significantly lower on PVC fabric when they were exposed to indoor light at EC-tinted window. These findings are deemed fundamental to the design of healthy modern buildings, especially those that encompass sick and vulnerable individuals.

Effects of delta-opioid receptor agonist pretreatment on the cardiotoxicity of bupivacaine in rats

Background Delta-opioid receptor is widely expressed in human and rodent hearts, and has been proved to protect cardiomyocytes against ischemia/reperfusion and heart failure. The antagonist of delta-opioid receptor could block the rescue effect of lipid emulsion against local anesthetic cardiotoxicity. However, no evidence is available for the direct effect of delta-opioid-receptor agonists on the cardiotoxicity of local anesthetics. Methods Anesthetized Sprague Dawley rats were divided into five groups. Group NS received 2 ml·kg−1·min−1 normal saline, group LE received 2 ml·kg−1·min−1 30% lipid emulsion and group BW received 0.1, 1.0, or 5.0 mg/kg BW373U86, a delta-opioid-receptor agonist, for 5 min. Then 0.5% bupivacaine was infused intravenously at a rate of 3.0 mg·kg−1·min−1 until asystole. The time of arrhythmia, 50% mean arterial pressure-, 50% heart rate-reduction and asystole were recorded, and the dose of bupivacaine at each time point was calculated. Results All three different doses of BW373U86 did not affect the arrhythmia, 50% mean arterial pressure-reduction, 50% heart rate-reduction and asystole dose of bupivacaine compared with group NS. 30% LE significantly increased the bupivacaine threshold of 50% mean arterial pressure-reduction (17.9 [15.4–20.7] versus 7.2 [5.9–8.7], p = 0.018), 50% heart rate-reduction (18.7 ± 4.2 versus 8.8 ± 1.7, p < 0.001) and asystole (26.5 [21.0–29.1] versus 11.3 [10.7–13.4], p = 0.008) compared with group NS. There was no difference between group LE and group NS in the arrhythmia dose of bupivacaine (9.9 [8.9–11.7] versus 5.6 [4.5–7.0], p = 0.060). Conclusions Our data show that BW373U86 does not affect the cardiotoxicity of bupivacaine compared with NS control in rats. 30% LE pretreatment protects the myocardium against bupivacaine-induced cardiotoxicity.

An Initiative to Reduce Insulin-Related Adverse Drug Events in a Children’s Hospital

Through standardization and automation, insulin error rates were reduced and insulin timeliness was improved in a pediatric hospital; the insulin error rate reduction was sustainable.

Corporate Taxes and the Earnings Distribution: Effects of the Domestic Production Activities Deduction

This paper investigates how corporate tax changes affect workers’ earnings. We use a dataset of U.S. worker-level W-2 filings matched with corporate tax returns and study the implementation of the Domestic Production Activities Deduction (DPAD). We find the DPAD tax rate reduction has a substantial effect on the distribution of annual wage earnings within a firm. Earnings of workers at the top of their firm’s earnings distribution rise relative to those at the bottom of the distribution. We estimate a semi-elasticity of average earnings of 1.1 with respect to the DPAD marginal tax rate reduction, while the semi-elasticity of median earnings is notably smaller—0.5. Furthermore, we estimate a semi-elasticity of 1.3 at the 95th percentile of workers’ earnings and 2.7 at the 99th percentile. This trend of larger semi-elasticities at the top of the earnings distribution is especially pronounced for small firms. Looking at overall employment effects, we see no change overall, but the number of employees rises at small firms and declines at large firms. In contrast, we find that capital investment rises for large firms, suggesting that the DPAD also resulted in domestic capitallabor substitution for large corporations. Our paper has significant implications for assessing the progressivity of the U.S. tax code and for analyzing the effect of corporate tax policy changes on the U.S. income distribution.

Higher-rate relativistic quantum key distribution

One of the major problems in the field of quantum key distribution (QKD) is the low key rates at which the systems operate. The reasons for this are the processes used to ensure the key distribution itself: sifting, parameter estimation, key reconciliation, and privacy amplification. So, this reduction in the rate of communication is inherent to all existing quantum key distribution schemes. This paper is concerned with proposing a solution to mitigate the rate reduction of the so-called relativistic QKD. To mitigate the reduction, we introduce a modified relativistic QKD protocol, which is based on Mach–Zehnder interferometer being used as a probabilistic basis selection system (basis misalignment occurs between the parties in approximately half of the transferred qubits). The interferometric scheme allows the participating parties to correlate the mutual unbiased bases (MUBs) chosen by them. In this regard, a qubit could be used to transfer more than one bit of information. To be precise, by implementing the proposed interferometric scheme into a relativistic QKD protocol, a qubit is able to transfer two bits of information. This results in achieving a protocol, which is characterized with a greater rate of communication, two times greater than the usual rate. The modified protocol is proven to be secure against intercept-resend and collective attacks.

Effect of short-acting b--blockers on heart rate and blood pressure in patients with acute coronary syndrome during percutaneous and coronary intervention

Background. The use of b- blockers in acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is recommended for all patients, who has not contraindications. The study of the effects of esmolol during percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) remains relevant. Objective. To evaluate the features of the effect of esmolol (Biblock, “YURiA-PHARM”) on heart rate and blood pressure in patients with ACS during PCI.Materials and methods. The study included 30 patients, 15 men and 15 women, who were hospitalized in a specialized cardiology department with ACS with elevation of the ST segment. All patients underwent a general clinical examination, ECG recording in 12 leads, PCI according to the standard protocol with ECG and blood pressure monitoring. All patients were given infusion of esmolol before the standard therapy. The level of heart rate reduction, systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), the correlation of heart rate reduction during esmolol infusion with the clinical and functional parameters of patients and the degree of coronary artery (CA) damage were analyzed.Results. Decreased heart rate and blood pressure during infusion of esmolol in all patients. Before the infusion, the heart rate av-eraged (109.8 ± 4.0) beats per minute. After the infusion – (92.8 ± 3.2) beats per minute, (p < 0.001) with an average duration of infusion (18.2 ± 2.3) minutes. The decrease in SBP levels during infusion occurred on average by (22.8 ± 2.5) mm Hg, DBP – by (16.0 ± 2.1) mm Hg, no patient had hypotension. According to the results of correlation analysis, it was found that the decrease in heart rate with the use of esmolol has a correlation with the average age of patients (r = -0.47, p = 0.0012), with the presence of multivascular coronary artery disease (r = -0.38, p = 0.002). Weaker negative correlation was found with the initial level of SBP (r = -0.28, p = 0.015), the presence of a history of myocardial infarction (r = -0.27, p = 0.005), the presence of signs of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) on the ECG (r = -0.22, p = 0.008), and a history of arterial hypertension that was not treated according to current recommendations (r = -0.21, p = 0.032).Conclusions. The use of esmolol solution in patients with ACS who have supraventricular tachycardia and elevated blood pressure during PCI can improve control of heart rate, SBP and DBP, a significant decrease is observed after 10 minutes of dose titration. Careful titration of esmolol solution and monitoring of ECG and blood pressure revealed no side effects, including bradycardia and hypotension, which indicates a high safety profile of the drug.

Dynamic Pressure Test and Analysis of Marine Ballasted Centrifugal Pump under Rapid Changing Conditions

Ship ballast pumps have stringent requirements for their transient characteristics. Here, the pneumatic control valve and programmable logic controller (PLC) are applied to realize the rapid reduction in flow rate for ballast pumps, and the dynamic pressure of steady and transient conditions and inner flow for the ballast pump are tested and analyzed. The results show that the dynamic pressure of each study scheme has cyclical increasing trends, however, the larger the amplitude of the flow rate reduction is, the greater the pressure increasing rate of the two measuring points. While the flow rate decreases to 0.4× Qd and 0.2× Qd, the rate of pressure increase is first fast and then slow. The dynamic pressure pulsation intensity is higher than the corresponding steady-state conditions after the transient conditions. With the increase in flow rate reduction, the characteristic frequencies of the dynamic pressure are 1APF (axial passing frequency) and 1BPF (blade passing frequency) and their harmonic frequency. The rapid decrease in flow rate causes the separation vortex in the impeller channel to be generated in advance, and the scale increases, which reduces the pulsation intensity of the pump outlet to prevent an increase in the level of broadband pulsation between 2APF and 1BPF.

Confidence Learning for Semi-Supervised Acoustic Event Detection

In recent years, the involvement of synthetic strongly labeled data, weakly labeled data, and unlabeled data has drawn much research attention in semi-supervised acoustic event detection (SAED). The classic self-training method carries out predictions for unlabeled data and then selects predictions with high probabilities as pseudo-labels for retraining. Such models have shown its effectiveness in SAED. However, probabilities are poorly calibrated confidence estimates, and samples with low probabilities are ignored. Hence, we introduce a confidence-based semi-supervised Acoustic event detection (C-SAED) framework. The C-SAED method learns confidence deliberately and retrains all data distinctly by applying confidence as weights. Additionally, we apply a power pooling function whose coefficient can be trained automatically and use weakly labeled data more efficiently. The experimental results demonstrate that the generated confidence is proportional to the accuracy of the predictions. Our C-SAED framework achieves a relative error rate reduction of 34% in contrast to the baseline model.