The near-IR spectra of thioacetamide were recorded for the investigation of hydrogen bonding between thioacetamide (TA) and N,N-dimethylalkylamides (DMF, OMA, DMP) in chloroform over the range of 5°C to 55°C. The v0 + amide II combination band has been resolved into contributions from monomeric TA, 1:1 hydrogen bonded complex and 1:2 complex by the parameterized matrix modeling method. The association constants

BACKGROUND: As the elderly population continues to expand, it becomes increasingly important to develop treatments to improve wound healing in the elderly. One problem limiting the research is the lack of appropriate animal models for wound healing in elde

Due to the high prevalence and long incubation periods often without symptoms, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has infected millions of individuals globally, causing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Even with the recent approval of the anti-viral drug, remdesivir, and Emergency Use Authorization of monoclonal antibodies against S protein, bamlanivimab and casirimab/imdevimab, efficient and safe COVID-19 vaccines are still desperately demanded not only to prevent its spread but also to restore social and economic activities via generating mass immunization. Recent Emergency Use Authorization of Pfizer and BioNTech's mRNA vaccine may provide a pathway forward, but monitoring of long-term immunity is still required, and diverse candidates are still under development. As the knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis and interactions with the immune system continues to evolve, a variety of drug candidates are under investigation and in clinical trials. Potential vaccines and therapeutics against COVID-19 include repurposed drugs, monoclonal antibodies, antiviral and antigenic proteins, peptides, and genetically engineered viruses. This paper reviews the virology and immunology of SARS-CoV-2, alternative therapies for COVID-19 to vaccination, principles and design considerations in COVID-19 vaccine development, and the promises and roles of vaccine carriers in addressing the unique immunopathological challenges presented by the disease.

Schools have long existed as a means of maintaining democracy in the United States and, given the centrality of race relations to the success of democracy, this paper suggests that schools can be called upon to address racism as well. As such, this paper looks to our rapidly diversifying nation and asks: “What would it take to move closer to meaningfully addressing the legacy of racism in the United States, and what role might schools play in this process?”

Consider the following file caching problem: in response to a sequence of requests for files, where each file has a specified size and retrieval cost, maintain a cache of files of total size at most some specified k so as to minimize the total retrieval cost. Specifically, when a requested file is not in the cache, bring it into the cache and pay the retrieval cost, and remove other files from the cache so that the total size of files remaining in the cache is at most k. This problem generalizes previous paging and caching problems by allowing objects of arbitrary size and cost, both important attributes when caching files for world-wide-web browsers, servers, and proxies. We give a simple deterministic on-line algorithm that generalizes many well-known paging and weighted-caching strategies, including least-recently-used, first-in-first-out, flush-when-full, and the balance algorithm. On any request sequence, the total cost incurred by the algorithm is at most k/(k - h + 1) times the minimum possible using a cache of size h ≤ k. For any algorithm satisfying the latter bound, we show it is also the case that for most choices of k, the retrieval cost is either insignificant or at most a constant (independent of k) times the optimum. This helps explain why competitive ratios of many on-line paging algorithms have been typically observed to be constant in practice.

Korea has the second highest incidence of colorectal cancer in the world. Instruments that are culturally and contextually sensitive, as well as valid and reliable, for determining health beliefs regarding colorectal cancer screening are essential for obtaining accurate information. The purpose of this study was to adapt and validate the health belief model scale for Koreans regarding colorectal cancer and fecal occult blood test utilization. Individual and cognitive interviews (also known as cognitive debriefing) with 33 Koreans, expert reviews with seven nursing practitioners and professors, and a pilot test with 18 Koreans were conducted to make the existing health belief model scale culturally and contextually sensitive. Subsequently, a cross-sectional survey with 728 Koreans aged >50 years was conducted. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the construct validity and internal consistency reliability supported the adapted health belief model scale. The adapted and validated health belief model scale in this study could contribute to the assessment of health beliefs regarding the fecal occult blood test among Koreans with a greater degree of accuracy with respect to Korean culture and context.

The so-called “apparatus theory” that developed in France, England and the US in the 1970s, moving beyond formalist and aesthetic approaches, produced an analysis of the structural conditions (technological, social and economic) of the cinema. The concept of voyeurism was central to those accounts: the “cinematic apparatus” aligns the spectator’s look with the “all-seeing” look of the camera (the famous “primary identification” theorized by Metz). In offering him a “vicarious look” onto a world to which he is not responsible, the apparatus constructs the spectator, through technical means, as a voyeur: he (for this position was also shown to be gendered) sees without being seen. Subsequent approaches in film and media theory have attempted to de-prioritize vision, invoking a spectator who is embodied, synesthetic, proprioceptive, or involved in an “intersubjective” exchange with the “film body.” Exploring the virtues and limitations of such approaches, this paper argues that the idea of a technically mediated “vicarious look” remains crucial to an account of the “cinematic apparatus” and suggests a basis for understanding post-cinematic media as well. The argument proceeds through an analysis of the films of Andy Warhol, which offer, it argues, a profound reflection on the very “ontology” of the medium. Warhol’s proto-strutural ‘60s films, in isolating the operations of primary identification, restored to those operations a sense of their erotic foundation. Treating Warhol not as a gay iconoclast but as a film theorist, and putting him as such in conversation with Metz and Baudry, as well as Stanley Cavell and Linda Williams, the paper argues—clearing up some misapprehensions about the term—that the ontological “voyeurism” of the cinematic apparatus, though not always specifically sexual, is fundamentally queer. Finally, it suggests that even as apparatus theory describes a set of technological and spectatorial conditions that are no longer paradigmatic, its signal achievement was to lay bare the relation of technological elements to psychically dense modes of subjectivity, a relation which (far from universal) is both historical and ideological. This in turn gives us a crucial foundation for asking in what ways post-cinematic media produce a new orientation of, and technical infrastructure for, desire.