In 1972, Tutte posed the 3‐Flow Conjecture: that all 4‐edge‐connected graphs have a nowhere‐zero 3‐flow. This was extended by Jaeger et al. to allow vertices to have a prescribed, possibly nonzero ...difference (modulo 3) between the inflow and outflow. They conjectured that all 5‐edge‐connected graphs with a prescription function have a nowhere‐zero 3‐flow meeting that prescription. Kochol showed that replacing 4‐edge‐connected with 5‐edge‐connected would suffice to prove the 3‐Flow Conjecture and Lovász et al. showed that both conjectures hold if the edge connectivity condition is relaxed to 6‐edge‐connected. Both problems are still open for 5‐edge‐connected graphs. The 3‐Flow Conjecture was known to hold for planar graphs, as it is the dual of Grötzsch's Colouring Theorem. Steinberg and Younger provided the first direct proof using flows for planar graphs, as well as a proof for projective planar graphs. Richter et al. provided the first direct proof using flows of the Strong 3‐Flow Conjecture for planar graphs. We prove the Strong 3‐Flow Conjecture for projective planar graphs.
Aims
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of ambient or altered environmental conditions on the inactivation of SARS‐CoV‐2 applied to materials common in libraries, archives and ...museums.
Methods and Results
Porous and non‐porous materials (e.g. paper, plastic protective book cover) were inoculated with approximately 1 × 105 TCID50 SARS CoV‐2 (USA‐WA1/2020), dried, placed within test chamber in either a stacked or unstacked configuration, and exposed to environmental conditions ranging from 4 to 29°C at 40 ± 10% relative humidity. The amount of infectious SARS‐CoV‐2 was then assessed at various timepoints from 0 to 10 days. Ambient conditions resulted in varying inactivation rates per material type. Virus inactivation rate decreased when materials were stacked or at colder temperatures. Virus inactivation rate increased when materials were unstacked or at warmer temperatures.
Conclusions
SARS‐CoV‐2 at ambient conditions resulted in the inactivation of virus below limit of quantitation (LOQ) for all materials by Day 8. Warmer temperatures, for a subset of materials, increased SARS‐CoV‐2 inactivation, and all were <LOQ by Day 3.
Significance and Impact of the Study
These results provide information for the library, archives and museum community regarding the inactivation of SARS‐CoV‐2, showing that inactivation is possible using prescribed environmental conditions and is a potential method of decontamination for items not compatible with common liquid disinfectants.
Purpose
Several studies on the quality of life in patients with endometriosis have been performed with conflicting results. This cross-section survey examines the influence of endometriosis on the ...psychological well-being and the quality of life and the incidence of anxiety and depression among these patients, recruited from a tertiary care center in Austria.
Methods
Three standardized questionnaires of 62 patients with endometriosis were evaluated: status of health questionnaire (SF-36), hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS-D), and endometriosis health profile (EHP-30). Quality of life status (EHP-30) was compared with published samples of the Oxford hospital and the Charite Berlin. Chi-square tests, independent sample
t
-tests, and one-way independent ANCOVA’s were used to compare SF- 36 and HADS- D scores to 61 healthy controls. Pearson product-moment-correlation coefficients were used to investigate correlations between symptoms of depression and anxiety in the patient sample.
Results
Moderate to severe anxiety symptoms were found in 29 %; depressive symptoms were present in 14.5 % of the patients. Both symptoms occurred in 12.9 %. We found significant better values in all subscales of the EHP compared to the Oxford and Berlin samples. The control sample showed significant better subjective general health (
p
< 0.001), vitality (
p
< 0.001), mental health (
p
< 0.001), and better emotional role functioning (
p
< 0.001). Participants age significantly influenced mental health and emotional role functioning.
Conclusions
The impact of endometriosis on life quality in our study was considerably less than in other studies but equivalent to other chronic medical conditions. It could be shown that endometriosis is influenced by biopsychosocial variables. However, the elevated presence of anxiety and depressive symptoms indicates the need of psychosomatic treatment of affective disorders to prevent manifestation.
Thermal remote sensing from unmanned aerial vehicles is a slowly but steadily growing field of application. New hyperspectral systems operating in the thermal infrared are deployable on such systems ...and are also usable for ground based monitoring, such as in mining applications. Temperature/emissivity retrieval methods have to be adapted for these new situations. This contribution presents an extension of the Drone Atmospheric Correction method (DROACOR®) for thermal infrared imaging spectroscopy. The method includes an implementation of the semi-automatic normalized emissivity mapping (NEM) method for temperature/ emissivity separation. Furthermore, an extension of the method for correction of low emissivity targets, appearing as cold targets in the temperature mapping is introduced. Two examples of DROACOR-thermal processing are presented for a nadir looking drone based and a horizontal ground based data acquisitions are shown. The resulting spectral emissivitiy distributions and temperature mappings are plausible. They are well comparable to spectral library references and allow for the detection of materials only visible in the thermal infrared range.
Atoms and molecules attached to rare-gas clusters are ionized by an interatomic autoionization process traditionally termed “Penning ionization” when the host cluster is resonantly excited. Here we ...analyze this process in the light of the interatomic Coulombic decay (ICD) mechanism, which usually contains a contribution from charge exchange at a short interatomic distance and one from virtual photon transfer at a large interatomic distance. For helium (He) nanodroplets doped with alkali metal atoms (Li, Rb), we show that long-range and short-range contributions to the interatomic autoionization can be clearly distinguished by detecting electrons and ions in coincidence. Surprisingly, ab initio calculations show that even for alkali metal atoms floating in dimples at a large distance from the nanodroplet surface, autoionization is largely dominated by charge-exchange ICD. Furthermore, the measured electron spectra manifest the ultrafast internal relaxation of the droplet mainly into the 1s2s1S state and partially into the metastable 1s2s3S state.
Angiopoietin-2 (Ang-2) is a key mediator of vascular disease during sepsis, and elevated plasma levels of Ang-2 are associated with organ injury scores and poor clinical outcomes. We have previously ...observed that biomarkers of endothelial glycocalyx (EG) damage correlate with plasma Ang-2 levels, suggesting a potential mechanistic linkage between EG injury and Ang-2 expression during states of systemic inflammation. However, the cell signaling mechanisms regulating Ang-2 expression following EG damage are unknown. In the current study, we determined the temporal associations between plasma heparan sulfate (HS) levels as a marker of EG erosion and plasma Ang-2 levels in children with sepsis and in mouse models of sepsis. Second, we evaluated the role of shear stress–mediated 5′-adenosine monophosphate–activated protein kinase (AMPK) signaling in Ang-2 expression following enzymatic HS cleavage from the surface of human primary lung microvascular endothelial cells (HLMVECs). We found that plasma HS levels peaked before plasma Ang-2 levels in children and mice with sepsis. Further, we discovered that impaired AMPK signaling contributed to increased Ang-2 expression following HS cleavage from flow-conditioned HLMVECs, establishing a paradigm by which Ang-2 may be upregulated during sepsis.
Embedded atoms or molecules in a photoexcited He nanodroplet are well-known to be ionized through inter-atomic relaxation in a Penning process. In this work, we investigate the Penning ionization of ...acetylene oligomers occurring from the photoexcitation bands of He nanodroplets. In close analogy to conventional Penning electron spectroscopy by thermal atomic collisions, the
n
= 2 photoexcitation band plays the role of the metastable atomic 1s2s
3,1
S He*. This facilitates electron spectroscopy of acetylene aggregates in the sub-Kelvin He environment, providing the following insight into their structure: the molecules in the dopant cluster are loosely bound van der Waals complexes rather than forming covalent compounds. In addition, this work reveals a Penning process stemming from the
n
= 4 band where charge-transfer from autoionized He in the droplets is known to be the dominant relaxation channel. This allows for excited states of the remnant dopant oligomer Penning-ions to be studied. Hence, we demonstrate Penning ionization electron spectroscopy of doped droplets as an effective technique for investigating dopant oligomers which are easily formed by attachment to the host cluster.
Penning spectroscopy of acetylene molecules dissolved in superfluid He nanodroplets reveals the loosely held molecular aggregate collapsing into a covalently bound oligomer ion upon indirect ionization effected by the photoexcited He* in the host.
The electronic properties of a diboron molecule, namely bis(catecholato)diboron (2-(1,3,2-benzodioxaborol-2-yl)-1,3,2-benzodioxaborole) (B
2
Cat
2
), have been studied by comparing the results of ...photoemission (XPS) and near edge X-ray absorption spectroscopy (NEXAFS) experiments with the outcome of DFT calculations. The B 1s, C 1s and O 1s K-edges have been investigated for both the isolated gas phase molecule and the adsorbed one on the Au(111) surface. The main features of the polarized NEXAFS spectra at each of the three edges considered are not significantly affected by the presence of the substrate, with respect to the isolated molecule, indicating that the molecule-gold interaction is weak. Moreover, the comparison between the observed dichroism in the NEXAFS spectra of the adsorbed B
2
Cat
2
and that in the NEXAFS spectra of the isolated molecule has confirmed the orbital symmetry assigned in the gas phase absorption spectra. The transitions to π(B-B) bonding and π*(B-B) anti-bonding final states represent the most relevant probe of the chemistry of the B
2
Cat
2
molecule. We show that their theoretical description requires that the treatment of the relaxation changes among different excited state configurations, which we successfully implemented by using ΔSCF-DFT (ΔSCF) calculations.
ΔSCF calculations reveal the nature of the transitions in a B-B containing molecule, describing its electronic structure.
Alkali metal dimers attached to the surface of helium nanodroplets are found to be efficiently doubly ionized by electron transfer mediated decay (ETMD) when photoionizing the helium droplets. This ...process is evidenced by detecting in coincidence two energetic ions created by Coulomb explosion and one low-kinetic energy electron. The kinetic energy spectra of ions and electrons are reproduced by simple model calculations based on diatomic potential energy curves, and are in agreement with
ab initio
calculations for the He-Na
2
and He-KRb systems. This work demonstrates that ETMD is an important decay channel in heterogeneous nanosystems exposed to ionizing radiation.
Double ionization of alkali dimers attached to He nanodroplets by electron transfer mediated decay (ETMD).
AbstractObjectiveLow-grade epithelial ovarian cancers (EOC), constitute the minority among all epithelial cancers. Our study objective was to focus on low-grade recurrent EOC and compare the survival ...with high-grade disease, as well as in regard to “platinum-sensitive” and “-resistant” recurrences according to platinum-free interval. MethodsThis is an exploratory analysis within the North-Eastern German Society of Gynecological Oncology (NOGGO) database including five randomized phase II/III trials comparing different chemotherapy regimens in recurrent EOC. We conducted survival analyses and cox-proportional regression models. ResultsOut of 1050 patients having the first recurrence, 42 (4%) patients had low-grade and 1008 (96%) patients had high-grade disease. In the subgroup of platinum-sensitive recurrences, progression-free survival (PFS) ( 8.7 m vs 9.7 m, p = 0.7) and overall survival (OS) (23.9 m vs 24.8 m, p = 0.9) did not differ between low-grade and high-grade diseases. In platinum-resistant recurrences, patients with low-grade ovarian cancer had significantly better PFS (7.6 m vs 3.6 m, p = 0.03) and OS (41.9 m vs 9.5 m p = 0.002) in comparison to those with high-grade cancer. At low-grade EOC, there were no significant PFS ( p = 0.91) and OS ( p = 0.25) differences between platinum-sensitive and –resistant recurrences. Patients with low-grade non-serous histology had lower PFS with compared to those with low-grade serous histology ( p = 0.004). At cox regression analysis presence of ascites and residual disease after secondary cytoreductive surgery were independently associated with poor PFS within low-grade recurrent EOC. ConclusionOur study indicates, platinum-free interval does not have any prognostic significance at recurrent low-grade EOC and non-serous histology is associated with poorer outcome in recurrence. Secondary surgical cytoreduction to no-gross residual disease and ascites are independently associated with disease progression.
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