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The authors surveyed individuals diagnosed with coronary artery disease about their mental health to study a potential connection between coronary artery disease and depression.

Ethinyl estradiol and progestin norgestrel are commonly present in contraceptive tablets and it is unknown how they affect the environment. In this study, the authors investigate the role that ethinyl estradiol and progestin norgestrel have on the growth of flowering plants. The percentage germination, embryonic and adventitious tissue proliferation, root length, and shoot length were measured in V. radiata and T. aestivum treated with each compound and results demonstrate that ethinyl estradiol and progestin norgestrel can induce growth in both plants at certain concentrations. These findings have important implications as societal use of chemicals increases and more make their way into the environment.

Malaria is a major public health issue, especially in developing countries, and vector control is a major facet of malaria eradication efforts. Recently, sterile insect technique (SIT), or the release of sterile mosquitoes into the wild, has shown significant promise as a method of keeping vector populations under control. In this study, the authors investigate the Anopheles gambiae transglutaminase 3 protein (AgT3), which is essential to the mating of the Anopheles mosquito. They show that an active site mutation is able to abolish the activity of the AgT3 enzyme and propose it as a potential target for chemosterilant inhibitors.

In this study, the ability of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi to limit the growth of an agricultural weed Cirsium arvense is tested. This has important implications for developing natural herbicides.

Catalase is a biocatalyst used to break down toxic hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen in industries such as cheese and textiles. Improving the efficiency of catalase would help us to make some industrial products, such as cheese, less expensively. The best way to maintain catalase’s conformation, and thus enhance its activity, is to immobilize it. The primary goal of this study was to find a new way of immobilizing catalase.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the authors noticed a change in the physical activity of many people, as well as a change in the type of physical activity they practice. Here, the authors used a cross-sectional survey of 150 participants from the province of Basra in Iraq. They found an overall decrease in the number of days of physical activity for participants along with an increasing proportion of at-home exercises compared to other activities that are performed inside sports clubs during the pandemic.

Physical activity when performed regularly has beneficial effects on all systems of the body, including pulmonary functions. This study, conducted at Springdales School in Dhaula Kuan, New Delhi, aimed to determine the effect of sports and singing on the vital capacity (the maximum amount of air a person can expel from the lungs after a maximum inhalation), an important measure of pulmonary health.

Here the authors investigate whether there are mathematical inaccuracies of perspective in artists' paintings that are undetectable with our naked eyes. Using the cross-ratio method, they find that there are three significant errors in various famous paintings which increase as the structures in the paintings recede from the viewer.

Plant diseases can cause up to 50% crop yield loss for the popular tomato plant. A mobile device-based method to identify diseases from photos of symptomatic leaves via computer vision can be more effective due to its convenience and accessibility. To enable a practical mobile solution, a “shallow” convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with few layers, and thus low computational requirement but with high accuracy similar to the deep CNNs is needed. In this work, we explored if such a model was possible.

In this study, the authors investigate a potential case of cross antibiotic-resistance. Using swabs from an individual who received long-term treatments of azithromycin, they addressed the question of whether any bacteria in this individual might develop resistance to not only azithromycin, but also other antibiotics with similar structures. This study cleverly addresses the important issue of antibiotic resistance from a new and thoughtful approach.