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Oil spills are one of the most devastating events for marine life. Finding ways to clean up oil spills without the need for harsh chemicals could help decrease the negative impact of such spills. Here the authors demonstrate that using a combination of several biodegradable substances can effectively adsorb oil in seawater in a laboratory setting. They suggest further exploring the potential of such a combination as a possible alternative to commonly-used non-biodegradable substances in oil spill management.

In this work, based on centuries of history where spices have been used and thought to have antimicrobial properties that prolong the shelf life of food, the authors investigated if several spices used in Indian cooking could delay the spoilage of cooked white rice. Based on changed in appearance and smell, as well as growth on agar plates, they found that cinnamon was the most effective in delaying spoilage, followed by cumin, pepper, garlic, and ginger. Their findings suggest the ability to use spices rather than chemical food preservatives to prolong the shelf life of foods.

Chemical preservatives are often used to reduce grain spoilage due to mold, but can have harmful heath and environmental effects. In this study, the authors tested three low toxic compounds for their effects on mold growth on corn kernels and found that all three were successful at slowing growth.

In this article, the authors propose an effective, environmentally-friendly method of producing conductive ink using expired waste oil, polystyrene, and graphene.

While serving as an immediate address for psychological safety and stability, psychological first aid (PFA) currently lacks the incorporation of triage. Without triage, patients cannot be prioritized in correspondence to condition severity that is often called for within emergency conditions. To disentangle the relevance of a potential triage system to PFA, the authors of this paper have developed a method to quantify resilience - a prominent predictor of the capability to recover from a disaster. With this resilience index, they have quantified resilience of differing age, race, and sex demographics to better inform the practice of PFA and potential demographic prioritization via a triage system.

This manuscript tackles a major social issue in the health news sector, with social media being one of the primary sources of information and a prime spot to propagate fake news. The author proposes X-HND , which is a unique architecture that combines emotional and contextual analysis in a Graph Neural Network to accurately detect fake news. This was a multi-step process which involved the creation of a custom health news dataset (HNDataset), and an emotional variant that uses RoBERTa to extract emotion. These dataset were then used to prove the hypothesis that accuracy increases when the custom dataset is used to train the model and that with the integration of emotion capture, the detection accuracy increases further.

Here, seeking to better understand on the effects of social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors used a survey during April and May of 2020 of participants primarily in Long Island, NY to assess the physical and mental health of the general population. They found negative impacts to physical health and increases in depressive symptoms and feelings of loneliness across all groups. More significant increases in negative mental health symptoms were observed in younger age groups and amongst women.

The luxury market has grown through digital marketing, with many brands benefiting from exclusivity, which limits product availability. While exclusivity boosts sales, it may negatively affect consumers' mental health. This study of 129 respondents explored the main motivation for purchasing luxury goods and connection to mental health.

This study evaluates the potential of natural language processing (NLP) models in an emotion-driven bibliotherapy framework to improve mental health challenges.

While increased access to Wi-Fi has been a great advancement, we have a limited understanding if there are any health effects on animals. In this study, Anand and Anand exposed fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to different concentrations of Wi-Fi electromagnetic fields, and observed effects on their reproduction and survivability.