Development of a Low-Power Underwater NFC-Enabled Sensor Device for Seaweed Monitoring.

Aquaculture farming faces challenges to increase production while maintaining welfare of livestock, efficiently use of resources, and being environmentally sustainable. To help overcome these challenges, remote and real-time monitoring of the environmental and biological conditions of the aquaculture site is highly important. Multiple remote monitoring solutions for investigating the growth of seaweed are available, but no integrated solution that monitors different biotic and abiotic factors exists. A new integrated multi-sensing system would reduce the cost and time required to deploy the system and provide useful information on the dynamic forces affecting the plants and the associated biomass of the harvest. In this work, we present the development of a novel miniature low-power NFC-enabled data acquisition system to monitor seaweed growth parameters in an aquaculture context. It logs temperature, light intensity, depth, and motion, and these data can be transmitted or downloaded to enable informed decision making for the seaweed farmers. The device is fully customisable and designed to be attached to seaweed or associated mooring lines. The developed system was characterised in laboratory settings to validate and calibrate the embedded sensors. It performs comparably to commercial environmental sensors, enabling the use of the device to be deployed in commercial and research settings.

Making sense of COVID-19 over time in New Zealand: Assessing the public conversation using Twitter.

COVID-19 has ruptured routines and caused breakdowns in what had been conventional practice and custom: everything from going to work and school and shopping in the supermarket to socializing with friends and taking holidays. Nonetheless, COVID-19 does provide an opportunity to study how people make sense of radically changing circumstances over time. In this paper we demonstrate how Twitter affords this opportunity by providing data in real time, and over time. In the present research, we collect a large pool of COVID-19 related tweets posted by New Zealanders-citizens of a country successful in containing the coronavirus-from the moment COVID-19 became evident to the world in the last days of 2019 until 19 August 2020. We undertake topic modeling on the tweets to foster understanding and sensemaking of the COVID-19 tweet landscape in New Zealand and its temporal development and evolution over time. This information can be valuable for those interested in how people react to emergent events, including researchers, governments, and policy makers.

Conceptual Method of Temperature Sensation in Bionic Hand by Extraordinary Perceptual Phenomenon.

Lack of temperature sensation of myoelectric prosthetic hand limits the daily activities of amputees. To this end, a non-invasive temperature sensation method is proposed to train amputees to sense temperature with psychophysical sensory substitution. In this study, 22 healthy participants took part besides 5 amputee participants. The duration time of the study was 31 days with five test steps according to the Leitner technique. An adjustable temperature mug and a Peltier were used to change the temperature of the water/phantom digits to induce temperature to participants. Also, to isolate the surroundings and show colors, a Virtual Reality (VR) glass was employed. The statistical results conducted are based on the response of participants with questionnaire method. Using Chi-square tests, it is concluded that participants answer the experiment significantly correctly using the Leitner technique (P value < 0.05). Also, by applying the "Repeated Measures ANOVA", it is noticed that the time of numbness felt by participants had significant (P value < 0.001) difference. Participants could remember lowest and highest temperatures significantly better than other temperatures (P value < 0.001); furthermore, the well-trained amputee participant practically using the prosthesis with 72.58% could identify object's temperature with only once time experimenting the color temperature.

Curcumin for the prevention of myocardial injury following elective percutaneous coronary intervention; a pilot randomized clinical trial.

Due to the potential benefits of curcumin in the ischemic heart disease, this study was performed to evaluate whether pretreatment with curcumin may reduce myocardial injury following elective percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). A randomized clinical trial was performed on 110 patients undergoing elective PCI. The intervention group (n = 55) received a single dose of 480 mg nanomicelle curcumin orally and the standard treatment before PCI, while the control group (n = 55) received only the standard treatment., Serum concentrations of CK-MB and troponin I was measured before, 8 and 24 h after the procedure to assess myocardial damage during PCI. The results showed that the raise of CK-MB in curcumin group was half of the control group (4 vs. 8 cases) but was not significant. There were no significant differences in CK-MB levels at 8 (P = .24) and 24 h (P = .37) after PCI between the curcumin and the control group. No significant difference was also found in troponin I levels at 8 (P = 1.0) and 24 h (P = .35) after PCI between the groups. This study did not support the potential cardioprotective benefit of curcumin against pre-procedural myocardial injury in patients undergoing elective PCI.