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As digital tools become more prevalent in medicine, the ability for individuals to understand and take actions based on what they read on the internet is crucial. eHealth literacy is defined as as the ability to seek, find, understand, and evaluate health information from electronic sources and apply the knowledge gained to addressing or solving a health problem. In general, Americans have low eHealth literacy rates. However, limited research has been conducted to understand the eHealth literacy level among older Chinese adult immigrants in the U.S. To determine the eHealth literacy of elderly Chinese immigrants, we sent out an eHealth survey and relevant computer skills survey using a modified version of the eHEALS (eHealth Literacy Scale) health literacy test. We hypothesized that elders who consumed more electronic health content would have a higher eHealth literacy score. The results of this survey showed that there was a positive correlation between the frequency of electronic health information consumption and the participant's eHealth literacy rate. In addition, the results of our computer literacy test show that the frequency of consumption and computer literacy are positively correlated as well. There is a strong positive correlation between the level of computer skills and eHealth literacy of participants. These results reveal possible steps individuals can take to reduce health misinformation and improve their own health by attaining, understanding, and taking action on health material on the internet.

Anticholinergics are used in treating asthma, a chronic inflammation of the airways. These drugs block human M1 and M2 muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, inhibiting bronchoconstriction. However, studies have reported complications of anticholinergic usage, such as exacerbated eosinophil production and worsened urinary retention. Modification of known anticholinergics using bioisosteric replacements to increase efficacy could potentially minimize these complications. The present study focuses on identifying viable analogs of anticholinergics to improve binding energy to the receptors compared to current treatment options. Glycopyrrolate (G), ipratropium (IB), and tiotropium bromide (TB) were chosen as parent drugs of interest, due to the presence of common functional groups within the molecules, specifically esters and alcohols. Docking score analysis via AutoDock Vina was used to evaluate the binding energy between drug analogs and the muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. The final results suggest that G-A3, IB-A3, and TB-A1 are the most viable analogs, as binding energy was improved when compared to the parent drug. G-A4, IB-A4, IB-A5, TB-A3, and TB-A4 are also potential candidates, although there were slight regressions in binding energy to both muscarinic receptors for these analogs. By researching the effects of bioisosteric replacements of current anticholinergics, it is evident that there is a potential to provide asthmatics with more effective treatment options.

The current five-year survival rate of metastasized prostate cancer is only 30% and occurs in every one in nine men. Researchers have shown that people with a type of dwarfism called Laron’s Syndrome are immune to cancer due to their low levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). For this reason, experimentally modifying the level of IGF-1 could provide better insight into whether lowering the levels of IGF-1 in prostate cancer cell lines (e.g. PC-3) could be an effective treatment to reduce their rates of proliferation and migration and increase apoptosis. We selected three compounds, which researchers have shown decrease IGF-1 levels, to test and combine to determine which is the most promising.

The purpose of this study was to determine the necessity of previous non-algorithmic attacks (Adversarial Training) in light of algorithmic defense methods (Gradient Masking and Defensive Distillation) against FGSM attacks. We found a significant increase in image classification accuracy from defense methods with the non-algorithmic defense method compared to ones without. By analyzing the significance with a McNemar test, we determined that the inclusion of non-algorithmic defense methods is still necessary in light of new algorithmic defense methods.

Elevated acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity contributes to cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, motivating the search for more effective inhibitors with better bioavailability. This study used computational methods to design novel, non-toxic AChE inhibitors.

This study examines the possibility of utilizing proteins from Drosophila melanogaster in early drug discovery. Structural and sequence analysis of five diverse Drosophila proteins and its human homologs were conducted. Drosophila proteins with high conservation of amino acids at functionally significant positions are better candidates for use as human surrogate in drug discovery efforts.

The authors evaluated the effect of concentration and variant of N-Acetylcysteine in hydrolyzing mucus.

This study used an improved CMS-seq method to profile 5hmC in ormalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples from HNC tumors and adjacent normal tissues, identifying three genes (PRKD2, HADHA, and AIPL1) with promising potential as biomarkers for Head and neck cancer (HNC) diagnosis.

This study examines the higher harmonics in an oscillating string by analyzing the sound produced by a guitar with a spectrum analyzer. The authors mathematically hypothesized that the higher harmonics in the series of the directly excited 2^nd harmonic contain the alternate frequencies of the fundamental series, the higher harmonics of the directly excited 3^rd harmonic series contain every third frequency of fundamental series, and so on. To test the hypotheses, they enforced artificial nodes to excite the 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th harmonics directly, and analyzed the resulting spectrum to verify the mathematical hypothesis. The data analysis corroborates both hypotheses.

In this study, the authors sought to find out how many mathematical solutions there were to the Indian mathematician Ramanujan's formula, which is a³ + b³ + c³ = d³, and also quantify the densities its solutions. They wrote their own computer program to do so and kept values of a, b, and c less than 10,000. While conducting the analysis, they were also looking for perfect power taxicab numbers and their frequency. They were able to find solutions and densities for the equation. Additionally, while they found that most perfect cube taxicab numbers had a frequency of 2 or 3, they also found on number with a frequency of 42!