Background. Aortic stiffness is a marker of vascular ageing. Non-conventional risk markers reflecting vascular ageing are largely unexplored. We aimed to investigate the relationship between self-perceived age (SPA) and self-rated health (SRH) with aortic stiffness in the general population. Methods. Cross-sectional assessment of 3760 participants from two Swedish population-based cohorts (mean ag

Railway incidents undermine both punctuality and capacity. As traffic volumes increase, the frequency of these incidents is also expected to increase, driven by higher asset utilization, reduced time for maintenance, and further worsened by climate change. This highlights the importance of efficient incident management and corrective maintenance. This study uses a combination of exploratory data a

BackgroundIn a previous phase II trial, intraperitoneal local anaesthetics shortened the time interval between surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy, an endpoint associated with improved survival in advanced ovarian cancer. Our objective was to test this in a phase III trial.MethodsA double-blind, phase III parallel superiority trial was conducted at two university hospitals in Sweden, within a public

Dynamic polyimine-amide networks with exceptional properties, including high flexibility, excellent thermal stability and dual closed-loop circularity were designed by combining dynamic covalent imine-functionalities with amide-chemistry. The solvent free up-scalable synthesis started from carboxyl-functionalization of lignin-derivable aldehydes followed by melt polycondensation with a triamine to

There is currently intensive research on the development of biobased polymers as potential alternatives to the environmentally hazardous isocyanate-based polyurethanes. In this context, polythioureas (PTUs) form a particularly attractive target because they can be synthesized by using isothiocyanates, a class of molecules that can be found in nature with expected low toxicity. Herein, a series

In this paper, we discuss the ethical concerns that may arise from the synthesis of human DNA. To date, only small stretches of DNA have been constructed, but the prospect of generating human genomes is becoming feasible. At the same time, the significance of genes for identity, health and reproduction is coming under increased scrutiny. We examine the implications of DNA synthesis and its impact

Digital contact tracing substantially improves the identification of high-risk contacts during pandemics. Despite several attempts to encourage people to use digital contact-tracing applications by developing and rolling out decentralized privacy-preserving protocols (broadcasting pseudo-random IDs over Bluetooth Low Energy-BLE), the adoption of digital contact tracing mobile applications has been

The spread of global multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) for the2030 Agenda for sustainable development has generatedsignificant expectations on policy synergies and transformativegovernance. This article contributes to the study of the currentgeneration of MSPs by focusing on the self-legitimation attemptsthat MSPs undertake to justify their authority. We compare theself-legitimation claims of a

Background: There is a long-standing debate about the role of spacing and stopping in the fertility transition, fueled by a lack of methods to appropriately model spacing and stopping. Traditional event-history analysis cannot distinguish between the two processes in analyzing the determinants of birth risks, and attempts to separately model spacing and stopping have been criticized from a methodo

The ACMG/AMP guidelines include five categories of which variants of uncertain significance (VUSs) have received increasing attention. Recently, Fowler and Rehm claimed that all or most VUSs could be reclassified as pathogenic or benign within few years. To test this claim, we collected validated benign, pathogenic, VUS and conflicting variants from ClinVar and LOVD and investigated differences at

This paper presents a methodology for the assessment of time-dependent reliability of post-tensioned (PT) girders. As possible lack of consistent maintenance efforts and the constraints of economic and temporal resources become increasingly apparent, there is a need to comprehend their remaining service life, intricately tied to the gradual evolution of their reliability over time. In this study,

The service life of infrastructures is of high relevance for the provision of societal and industrial functionality and sustainability. Despite this high relevance, the service life is not explicitly considered of the design and operation procedures. Towards an efficient and sustainable service life management, this paper contains a description of approaches for service life limit quantification a

Warm Jupiters are ideal laboratories for testing the limitations of current tools for atmospheric studies. The cross-correlation technique is a commonly used method to investigate the atmospheres of close-in planets, leveraging their large orbital velocities to separate the spectrum of the planet from that of the star. Warm Jupiter atmospheres predominantly consist of molecular species, notably wa