A Survey of Meteorite-specific Minerals

Dozens of exotic materials are found only in meteorites. These “meteorite minerals” are formed in the solar system's cold, long-lived, proto-planetary disk, in the slowly cooling cores of planetesimals, and in high-speed collisions. To the best of our knowledge no recent published work has aggregated information about minerals only found in meteorites in a comprehensive and machine readable manner. Thus, we have compiled a preliminary catalog of 81 known meteorite minerals from the literature to serve as a stepping stone for a future, more extensive effort. We also explore the distribution of these meteorite minerals by meteorite type.

Identifying the Elements of Great Online Customer Encounters

Customer service is a major factor in the success of digital marketing. This study examines the service encounters between tourists and service providers, in this case, Visit Helsinki. The goal is to understand what are the dimensions of service quality in online chat discussions between tourists and DMO personnel and what elements in these discussions support the co-creation of great customer experiences. Altogether 123 chat discussions in June 2020 were downloaded and analysed using qualitative content analysis and statistical tests. The results show that great customer experiences are the result of extensive effort from the customer service agents where they go beyond just providing a satisfactory solution for the customer. The results are managerially important for destinations and tourism businesses around the world and increase the theoretical understanding of the moment of truth concept and its different elements in online service encounters.

Engineering Selectively Targeting Antimicrobial Peptides

The rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacterial pathogens has necessitated the development of new therapeutics. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a class of compounds with potentially attractive therapeutic properties, including the ability to target specific groups of bacteria. In nature, AMPs exhibit remarkable structural and functional diversity, which may be further enhanced through genetic engineering, high-throughput screening, and chemical modification strategies. In this review, we discuss the molecular mechanisms underlying AMP selectivity and highlight recent computational and experimental efforts to design selectively targeting AMPs. While there has been an extensive effort to find broadly active and highly potent AMPs, it remains challenging to design targeting peptides to discriminate between different bacteria on the basis of physicochemical properties. We also review approaches for measuring AMP activity, point out the challenges faced in assaying for selectivity, and discuss the potential for increasing AMP diversity through chemical modifications. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering, Volume 23 is June 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

A Mini-Review and Perspective on Anti-hypoxic Hypothesis of COVID-19

A novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China; in December 2019 and has widely affected the global community. After months of extensive effort, much remains to be understood of the pathogenesis of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). The available evidence raises a critical question : Is COVID-19 a lung disorder leading to circulatory problems, or a systemic disorder that leads to lung problems?. If the latter scenario is correct, investigations on hypoxia conditions and the development of anti-hypoxia agents may lead to potential front-line treatments in combination with antivirals for hypoxemic COVID-19 patients. Hence, anti-hypoxic agents may become a potential part of combination therapy in hypoxemic respiratory failure and COVID-19.

Karolina Widerström och skolans dissektionsundervisning 1900–1920

Karolina Widerström and Animal Dissection in Swedish Schools 1900–1920. This article examines the attempts to introduce dissections of small animals in Swedish primary schools and secondary girls’ schools during the early twentieth century. It demonstrates that the new teaching methods were a part of a further ambition to transform the pupil’s relationship to nature and how teachers taught the natural sciences. Knowledge of the human body was emphasised and produced in analogy with other species, leaving none of the body’s organs or basic functions outside the curriculum. One of the strongest voices in this process was the Swedish physician Karolina Widerström (1856–1948). Through hers—but also others—engagement in annual training courses in basic dissection techniques for female teachers and the production of wildly distributed illustrated dissection manuals, extensive effort was made to change the pupil’s understanding of nature in general as well as their own bodies including the fundamental principles of human reproduction.

Analysis of user Awareness for Saudi State Mobile Applications

In this article, we analyze the perception of Saudi state application users about password selection from real-world data. A total of 1,082 participants provided information about their behavior on state applications. The study extracts useful information related to the users’ weak practices. The findings include useful information representing thousands of minds and individual behaviors in using state applications. As a contribution to the area, it is found that the state applications were developed properly regarding security practices. However, users still represent the weakest party, and they are not aware of the proper practices they should follow. Thus, extensive effort is required to be spent on user education. On the other hand, the diversity of state applications may represent an extra effort to users in the way that they have separate passwords for each application, which makes a unified login portal for all the state applications the appropriate solution.

Using the Internationally Recognized Frameworks of Nursing Competences to address the challenges of nurse refugees without documentation

Individuals seeking refuge in host countries is a global reality. Some of these individuals are qualified nurses. If, and when, the documents pertaining to a nurse qualification are not presented to the respective authorities of a host country, the challenges for these qualified nurses to secure registration and employment as nurses are numerous and often unsurmountable. Access to higher education opportunities is similarly compromised in the absence of relevant documents. This is happening against the backdrop of a widely reported global shortage of qualified nurses, and an extensive effort and investment to address this shortage in many countries. This paper explores the feasibility and appropriateness of applying internationally recognized frameworks of competences of nurses, to processes which seek to evaluate and verify the nurse training and qualification claimed by refugee nurses. The author seeks to determine whether such frameworks of nurse competences may effectively and efficiently contribute towards initiatives which are geared towards addressing the gap in (qualification) document availability, traceability, verification and reproduction of nurse refugees. A critical consideration of a few existent initiatives is presented in view of exploring, the identification of a tool which may enable a homogenous transnational approach which is consistent across salient parameters. Received: 16 April 2020Accepted: 31 August 2020

To which extent a convalescent plasma therapy could be a benefit for COVID-19 patients?

The emergence of an unprecedented pandemic SARS-COV-2 caused perplexed in the medical community because of a high infection rate and rising mortality among COVID-19 patients. Till now, there is no particular treatment for the disease; nevertheless, there is an extensive effort from scientists to find out an immediate therapeutic plan to show how to deal with the current situation. One of the solutions currently presented is Convalescence plasma (CP). Through this narrative review, we will shed light on CP's efficiency as a therapeutic agent for COVID-19, especially there is no proven vaccine or antiviral available up to date. CP could be considered one of the therapeutic approaches, but some limitations are still considered before it is established as a therapeutic agent. Along with evaluating CP from blood donors, the plasma companies could take future steps by manufacturing a target dose of globulins that contain standardized antibody, to reach the terms of health setting administering therapy.

Exploring Impact of Requirements Engineering on Other IT Project Areas – Case Study

Requirements Engineering (RE) is recognized as one of the most important (yet difficult) areas of software engineering that has a significant impact on other areas of IT projects and their final outcomes. Empirical studies investigating this impact are hard to conduct, mainly due to the great effort required. It is thus difficult for both researchers and industry practitioners to make evidence-based evaluations about how decisions about RE practices translate into requirement quality and influence other project areas. We propose an idea of a lightweight approach utilizing widely-used tools to enable such an evaluation without extensive effort. This is illustrated with a pilot study where the data from six industrial projects from a single organization were analyzed and three metrics regarding the requirement quality, rework effort, and testing were used to demonstrate the impact of different RE techniques. We also discuss the factors that are important for enabling the broader adoption of the proposed approach.

SIX LECTURES ON THE PREVENTION OF ENCEPHALITIS EPIDEMICS IN SIBERIA

This review summarizes the work of large teams of researchers to prevent two separate encephalitis epidemics in Siberia. The first three lectures sum up an extensive effort to study and control the Tick-borne enceph-alitis (TBE) epidemic in the Kemerovo region of Western Siberia. The study has helped to create a mathematical model that details the TBE epidemic process and offers a quantitative approach to the development of strategies for preventing TBE epidemics. Ten-year effort to combat TBE in the Kemerovo region led to a significant and sustained reduction in TBE morbidity and mortality. Fifty years after completion of this work, the proposed strategy has not been tested in other endemic regions, although the incidence of TBE worldwide has almost doubled, taking hundreds of lives and causing disability in thousands. The second disease described here is Viliuisk encephalomyelitis (VEM), first discovered 150 years ago in a small rural population of Eastern Siberia. The disease later spread to densely populated areas of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), reaching epidemic proportions. The three lectures on VEM provide an overview of multi-year studies on clinical presentation, neuropathology, pathogenesis, etiology, and epidemiology of VEM. We report here for the first time how a prolonged hospitalization of VEM patients during the acute and subacute phases of the disease prevent-ed transmission to susceptible individuals in their families and communities, which has helped to put an end to the further spread of this deadly disease. VEM is a new example of a local disease that has spread to a large territory and could potentially invade other countries if left unchecked. This review is based on a series of lectures delivered to different audiences at different times. The purpose of combining discrete topics in a single review is to emphasize approaches to solving problems, to illustrate the main results of the fight against Siberian epidemics and, when possible, reflect on the individual contribution of each researcher.