The organism Caenorhabditis elegans is a performant model system for studying human biological processes and diseases, but until now all phenome data are produced as population-averaged read-outs. Monitoring of individual responses to drug treatments would however be more informative. Here, a new strategy to track different phenotypic traits of individual C. elegans nematodes throughout their full life-cycle—i.e., embryonic and post-embryonic development, until adulthood onset, differently from life-span—is presented. In an automated fashion, single worms were synchronized, isolated, and cultured from egg to adulthood in a microfluidic device, where their identity was preserved during their whole development. Several phenotypes were monitored and quantified for each animal, resulting in high-content phenome data. Specifically, the method was validated by analyzing the response of C. elegans to doxycycline, an antibiotic fairly well-known to prolong the development and activate mitochondrial stress-response pathways in different species. Interestingly, the obtained extensive single-worm phenome not only confirmed the dramatic doxycycline effect on the worm developmental delay, but more importantly revealed subtle yet severe treatment-dependent phenotypes that are representative of minority subgroups and would have otherwise stayed hidden in an averaged dataset. Such heterogeneous response started during the embryonic development, which makes essential having a dedicated chip that allows including this early developmental stage in the drug assay. Our approach would therefore allow elucidating pharmaceutical or therapeutic responses that so far were still being overlooked.

Reinforced epoxy composite adhesives of expanded graphite (EG) and graphene nanoplatelet (GNPs) were prepared by hand layup and mechanical mixing method. Disk-shaped epoxy composite samples with EG and GNP mixtures in varying ratios were prepared to measure the thermal conductivity (TC) enhancement. Thermal characterization testing data showed high thermal conductivity enhancement with three different hybrid filler concentrations of 10, 25, and 35 wt%, respectively. The highest thermal conductivity of 3.6 W/m K was obtained for an epoxy adhesive composite having 30 wt.% EG and 5 wt.% GNP which was tested by guarded heat flow meter technique. This significant improvement in thermal conductivity can be attributed to the lowering of overall thermal interface resistance due to small amounts of nanofiller (GNP) improving the thermal contact between the primary microfillers (graphite). The synergistic effect of this hybrid filler system is lost at higher loadings of the GNP relative to expanded graphite. The structure of the graphite flake, GNP/epoxy, EG/epoxy and hybrid EG/GNP/epoxy composites was investigated by XRD. The EG prepared by acid intercalation and abrupt thermal expansion showed good compatibility with GNP and the epoxy resin. From scanning electron microscopy photographs, the formation of conducting network observed through the expanded graphite and GNPs in a low conducting epoxy matrix. The thermal decomposition temperature of the composite increased to 450 and 615 °C with the addition of 10 and 35 wt% of hybrid EG/GNP inside epoxy matrix, respectively. LAP shear strength of single and hybrid filled epoxy adhesive decreased at 35 wt.% loading than neat epoxy.

The Himalayan Mountains and valley glaciers within it are coupled in such a way that they maintain the ecosystem along the draining stream from the young to old stage. They produce meltwater and nutrient-rich sediments, which serve as precious resources for low-lying areas. Meltwater is assumed to be an important agent of transportation and deposition of sediments in warm-based valley glaciers. Overall, the glacial environment acts as a good erosional system, and the sediments produced form a good-quality aquifer above the hard bedrock in the outwash plain. The glaciofluvial and glaciolacustrine sediments were collected from the Chandra Basin and analysed for the permeability, porosity, density and statistical parameters. Correlation among the different parameters was explained through the regression analysis. The correlation between permeability and mean grain size showed a good regression coefficient, R² = 0.86 and R² = 0.97, for glaciofluvial and glaciolacustrine sediments respectively. Correlation between density and porosity was also established against the mean grain size with a good regression coefficient. The physioempirical parameters, effective diameter (D₁₀) and coefficient of uniformity (C_u) were also examined for their dependability on permeability. Hence, this preliminary study attempts to use sediment grain size and texture as a tool to understand the permeability, porosity, density and movement and mobility of water through the glaciofluvial and glaciolacustrine sediments. Also, the correlation study showed that the mean grain size could be used as a factor for predicting the physioempirical model in that region.

In this paper we observe the association between changes in air quality and number of hospital admission during “holi—the festival of colours”. Proposed research performed during holi festival, where playing colour are very common practice. Fine particle and its ion concentration were analyzed by air monitoring and ion chromatography. Reported concentration profile of fine particle were 25–40 μg m⁻³, 54–171 μg m⁻³, and 35–70 μg m⁻³, for PM_2.5 and while for PM₁₀, 53–251 μg m⁻³, 92–291 μg m⁻³, and 58–277 μg m⁻³, respectively, which are more than the permissible limit. The major anions (Sulphate, Nitrate, and Chloride) and cations (Sodium, Potassium, and Magnesium) were obtained on fine particle with higher permissible limit. PM_2.5 were 67 μg m⁻³, which was 1.11 times and ~ 2 times higher than Indian and WHO standards, moreover, probably first time reported during holi festival. Very limited study is available on association between fine particle (PM_2.5) available in air quality and number of hospital admission. The pollution generated due to holi festival and hospital admission related data were collected in four different locations and nine hospitals near by the selected study area, respectively. Empirical relationships have been developed between particle concentration due to colour festival and hospital admission.

Multichannel wireless systems have become a standard solution to address our information society’s ever-increasing demand for information transfer. The capacity that such systems can achieve is ultimately limited by the channel diversity in a given propagation medium, and numerous approaches to reduce channel cross-talk by engineering software or hardware details of the signals and antenna arrays have been proposed. Here we show that optimal channel diversity can be achieved by physically shaping the propagation medium itself. Using a reconfigurable metasurface placed inside a random environment, we tune the disorder and impose perfect orthogonality of wireless channels. We report experiments in the microwave domain in which we impose equal weights of the channel matrix eigenvalues for up to 4 × 4 systems, and almost equal weights in larger systems. We also demonstrate enhanced wireless image transmission in an office room in which we augmented the 3 × 3 system’s number of effectively independent channels from two to the optimum of three.

Neural networks promise to bring robust, quantitative analysis to medical fields. However, their adoption is limited by the technicalities of training these networks and the required volume and quality of human-generated annotations. To address this gap in the field of pathology, we have created an intuitive interface for data annotation and the display of neural network predictions within a commonly used digital pathology whole-slide viewer. This strategy used a ‘human-in-the-loop’ to reduce the annotation burden. We demonstrate that segmentation of human and mouse renal micro compartments is repeatedly improved when humans interact with automatically generated annotations throughout the training process. Finally, to show the adaptability of this technique to other medical imaging fields, we demonstrate its ability to iteratively segment human prostate glands from radiology imaging data.

This study refers to experimental investigations about the semiconductor material (P-wt50%/C-wt50%)-mw obtained from pure curcumin and paracetamol starting molecules when physically mixed together and treated by microwaves in water. After some analysis aimed to understand the chemical structure of the resulting (P-wt50%/C-wt50%)-mw mixture performed by ¹H- and ¹³C-NMR techniques, some more FT-IR and UV–Vis analysis have been performed in order to investigate deep the way in which the precursors interact each other in the bulk semiconductor system. After the explanation that only admitting the existence of a peculiar supramolecular structure among the two pure materials, our study proceeded performing some morphological analysis. The SEM observations obtained so far show the presence of flaking planes which could slide on each other and, as consequence, could be responsible for the pronounced semiconducting properties shown by (P-wt50%/C-wt50%)-mw mixture. XRD spectra show a modification of the crystal organization of the mixture when obtained in the presence of microwaves.

Graphical abstract