Assessing the pharmaceutical residues as hotspots of the main rivers of Catalonia, Spain.

The global increase in pharmaceutical consumption, driven by factors such as aging populations and chronic diseases, has raised concerns regarding the environmental impact of pharmaceutical contaminants. Europe, and more specifically Catalonia (Spain), exhibits high pharmaceutical consumption rates, potentially exacerbating environmental contamination. Pharmaceuticals enter rivers through various pathways, persisting after wastewater treatment plants and posing risks to aquatic organisms and human health. Llobregat and Besòs Rivers in Catalonia, crucial water sources, demonstrate detectable pharmaceutical levels, necessitating comprehensive analysis. Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) proves effective in detecting pharmaceutical residues, facilitating their risk assessment. This paper reviews the occurrence, fate, and risks associated with 78 pharmaceuticals and metabolite in Llobregat and Besòs Rivers, using LC-MS/MS for analysis. Understanding pharmaceutical impacts on Catalonian River ecosystems is essential for developing mitigation strategies.

IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI)-related education and training materials through InChI Open Education Resource (OER).

The IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) is a structure-based chemical identifier that encodes various aspects of a chemical structure into a hierarchically layered line notation. Because InChI is non-proprietary, open-source, and freely available to everyone, it is adopted in popular chemical information resources and software programs. This paper describes the InChI Open Education Resource (OER) (https://www.inchi-trust.org/oer/), designed to provide educators and other interested parties with resources, training material, and information related to InChI. Currently, the OER contains over 100 materials collected from various sources and provides users with search, filtering, and sorting functionalities to locate specific records. New relevant materials can be suggested by anyone, allowing the scientific community to share and find InChI-related resources. This paper will show how to use the InChI OER tag taxonomy to filter content and demonstrate two resources within the InChI OER; the ChemNames2LCSS Google Sheet and the InChILayersExplorer, an Excel spreadsheet that breaks an InChI into its layers. While the InChI OER is of value to a broader chemistry community, this paper seeks to reach out to chemical educators and provide them with an understanding of InChI and its role in the practice of science.

Analysis of an event study using the Fama-French five-factor model: teaching approaches including spreadsheets and the R programming language.

The current financial education framework has an increasing need to introduce tools that facilitate the application of theoretical models to real-world data and contexts. However, only a limited number of free tools are available for this purpose. Given this lack of tools, the present study provides two approaches to facilitate the implementation of an event study. The first approach consists of a set of MS Excel files based on the Fama-French five-factor model, which allows the application of the event study methodology in a semi-automatic manner. The second approach is an open-source R-programmed tool through which results can be obtained in the context of an event study without the need for programming knowledge. This tool widens the calculus possibilities provided by the first approach and offers the option to apply not only the Fama-French five-factor model but also other models that are common in the financial literature. It is a user-friendly tool that enables reproducibility of the analysis and ensures that the calculations are free of manipulation errors. Both approaches are freely available and ready-to-use.

Teaching Cheminformatics through a Collaborative Intercollegiate Online Chemistry Course (OLCC).

While cheminformatics skills necessary for dealing with an ever-increasing amount of chemical information are considered important for students pursuing STEM careers in the age of big data, many schools do not offer a cheminformatics course or alternative training opportunities. This paper presents the Cheminformatics Online Chemistry Course (OLCC), which is organized and run by the Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE) of the American Chemical Society (ACS)'s Division of Chemical Education (CHED). The Cheminformatics OLCC is a highly collaborative teaching project involving instructors at multiple schools who teamed up with external chemical information experts recruited across sectors, including government and industry. From 2015 to 2019, three Cheminformatics OLCCs were offered. In each program, the instructors at participating schools would meet face-to-face with the students of a class, while external content experts engaged through online discussions across campuses with both the instructors and students. All the material created in the course has been made available at the open education repositories of LibreTexts and CCCE Web sites for other institutions to adapt to their future needs.