Many people and organizations across the globe work towards a sustainable future. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a powerful tool in their efforts.AI technologies, which aim to imitate the natural intelligence of humans and animals, have made enormous progress in the past decade. AI has brought us a whole range of futuristic tools — from self-driving cars to virtual assistants, smart home appl

Background: There are indications that early-life exposure to perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) can impact neurodevelopment, but results are inconclusive. The objective was to investigate if high early-life exposure to primarily perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) increases the risk of developmental language disorder in children up to seven years of age.Meth

We are surrounded by various chemicals, both naturally occurring and synthetically produced. Some, but not all, chemicals can be hazardous for human health following exposure, especially for vulnerable population groups including children, adolescents, and pregnant women. The increased use and production of chemicals have contributed positively to society in numerous ways, while also resulting in

Uncharacterized side activities of enzymes can have significant effects on reaction products and yields. Hence, their identification and characterization are crucial for the development of successful reaction systems. Here, we report the presence of feruloyl esterase activity in CtXyn5A from Acetivibrio thermocellus, besides its well-known arabinoxylanase activity, for the first time. Activity ana

The enzymatic depolymerization of synthetic polyesters has become of great interest in recycling plastics. Most of the research in this area focuses on the depolymerization of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) due to its widespread use in various applications. However, the enzymatic activity on other commercial polyesters is less frequently investigated. Therefore, AkestraTM attracted our attention

Astrocytes are one of the major cell types in the central nervous system and are indispensable for brain development and function. The human brain and human astrocytes have unique structures and functions that are not present in other animal species. Studies of fundamental astrocyte biology in humans and their role in neurological disease have been hindered by shortage of native human astrocytes f

Individuals with a family history of colorectal cancer (CRC) are at a high risk of developing CRC. Preclinical and population-based evidence suggests that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) might play a role in preventing CRC. We performed a nationwide cohort study to explore whether the use of SSRIs could reduce CRC risk among individuals with family history. We identified individual

A hot-carrier solar cell aims to generate power from energetic, photoexcited, charge carriers, so called hot carriers, in order to reach higher conversion efficiencies than current solar cell technology.Creating a hot-carrier solar cell has proven challenging for two main reasons: hot carriers lose their energy very quickly, and they need to be extracted over distances of a few hundrednanometers v

Poly(xanthene)s (PXs) carrying trimethyl ammonium, methylpiperidinium and quinuclidinium cations were synthesized and studied as a new class of anion exchange membranes (AEMs). The polymers were prepared in a superacid-mediated polyhydroxyalkylation involving 4,4’-biphenol and 1-bromo-3-(trifluoroacetylphenyl)-propane, followed by quaternization reactions with the corresponding amines. The archite

Since the founding of the field of Western esotericism, The Theosophical Society has been counted among the more obvious cases of the field's objects of study, regardless of how "Western esotericism" itself has been defined. This paper explores the connection between Western esotericism as a research field, esotericism as its object of study, and the Theosophical Society as an example of esoterici

The aim of the present paper is to explore the interrelated and complex relationships between religionsvetenskap (Religious Studies), religionskunskap (Religious Education) and religionsdidaktik (Religion and Education). After briefly outlining the concurrent developments of Religious Studies as a university discipline and Religion and Eudcation as a non-confessional school subject, both of which

Key points• Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a disabling mental disorder with a lifetime prevalence of around 2% with similar rates across age groups and countries.• Diagnosis is made based on a pattern of time-consuming, clinically distressing, or impairing obsessions and compulsions and most cases emerge during puberty or early adulthood.• Obsessions are recurrent, persistent, and intrusive thou

Here we present a toolbox for natural language processing tasks related to SARS-CoV-2. It comprises English dictionaries of synonyms for SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, a silver standard corpus generated with the dictionaries and a gold standard corpus of 10 Pubmed abstracts manually annotated for disease, virus, symptom and protein/gene terms. This toolbox is freely available on github and can be used f

The synthesis of high-value fuels and plastics starting from small hydrocarbon molecules plays a central role in the current transition towards renewable energy. However, the detailed mechanisms driving the growth of hydrocarbon chains remain to a large extent unknown. Here we investigated the formation of hydrocarbon chains resulting from acetylene polymerization on a Ni(111) model catalyst surfa

While the Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the machine learning field, its adaptation to 3D shape recognition is non-trivial. Due to its quadratic computational complexity, the self-attention operator quickly becomes inefficient as the set of input points grows larger. Furthermore, we find that the attention mechanism struggles to find useful connections between individual points

In 2008, the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE TM46 UC) presented an annual-fixed thermal energy benchmark of 240 kWh/m2/yr for university campus (UC) buildings as an attempt to reduce energy consumption in public buildings. However, the CIBSE TM46 UC benchmark fails to consider the difference between energy demand in warm and cold months, as the thermal performance of bu

Several contrasting effects are reported in the existing literature concerning the impact assessment of the COVID-19 outbreak on the use of energy in buildings. Following an in-depth literature review, we here propose a GIS-based approach, based on pre-pandemic, partial, and full lockdown scenarios, using a bottom-up engineering model to quantify these impacts. The model has been verified against