Bentley (Canada)

A patient on long-term glucocorticoid therapy for peristomal pyoderma gangrenosum (PPG) who developed mucormycosis (MM) of the wound with dissemination was presented. The importance of skin biopsy, together with clinical evaluation in patients with PPG who are resistant to conventional therapy or who develop new symptoms related to their PPG is stressed. The risk and pathogenesis of invasive fungal infections with long-term corticosteroid therapy were explored. The epidemiology and detection of mucormycosis is discussed in this article.

Abstract Global power generation from floating offshore wind turbines is expected to grow from 132 MW in 2022 to 289 GW by 2035. During the design phase these floating systems will require advanced numerical analysis tools to ensure strucutural integrity and reliability. A new method for the hydrodynamic analysis of these structures is presented. The long standing offshore operations simulation software MOSES has been enhanced with the addition of the AeroDyn aeroelastic wind turbine solver from OpenFAST. This coupled analysis tool is designed to compute the motions and loads on the floating system. An added benefit of using MOSES is that these loads can be readily mapped on to a structural model for assessing code compliance. In this paper the MOSES-AeroDyn solver has been validated against published numerical and model test data of the OC3-Hywind system in regular waves. The coupled MOSES-AeroDyn results were found to be in good agreement with both the experimental and numerical data.

This case study looks at implications of transitioning live to recorded lectures, a subject that has acquired an acute importance given COVID19 and the unexpected need to move lectures online. Over a period of six years, from 2015 to 2020, a questionnaire was handed out at the end of a ‘unit’ on environmental geoscience; a ‘unit’ at Australian universities represents a ‘course’ in the European and American tertiary system. This is a 2nd semester, 3rd year core unit of an Applied Geology course meaning that (most of) the polled students were about to acquire a bachelor of science finishing their undergraduate studies. The students were asked multiple questions related to iLectures and their attitude towards this asynchronous content delivery approach as integral part of a flipped classroom. Provided that such a STEM unit with 40-120 students can be deemed representative of the wider student community, the findings indicate that students in general have come to terms with online lectures, way before COVID19 gave them no other choice. Acceptance rates for iLectures were over 50 % across all years, except for 2020, a clear indication that COVID19 marred the online experience, probably due to oversaturation and isolation. The majority of the students saw benefits in this asynchronous lecturing approach, irrespective of whether the rationale behind it had been explained in detail. Despite seeing benefits of the flipped classroom and recorded lectures, one out of three students preferred live lectures. This number has increased after COVID19 to 40 %, yet another sign of the negative impact of the pandemic on online lecturing. This inference is unrelated to the quality of the recordings which was deemed high. Other than the conspicuous pandemic effect, the data show enough scatter to rule out any sustained trend of student attitudes across the years. This demonstrates the heterogeneous demographics of the students taking this unit. Finally, the importance of meaningful extended lecture notes to complement the recordings is highlighted.

A battery energy storage system (BESS) can play a critical role in regulating system frequency and voltage in an islanded microgrid. A <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula> -synthesis-based robust control has been proposed for dc link voltage regulation of BESS for achieving frequency regulation and voltage quality enhancement of islanded microgrid. Variation in the operating condition of ac microgrid affects the operating condition of the BESS’ converter. This controller synthesis accounts for such uncertain variations as parametric uncertainty. The stability and performance of the proposed controller can be guaranteed for bounded parametric variations. The bounds on parameters are selected based on practical limitations of BESS. In this article, the proposed controller's performance is tested on an islanded CIGRE TF C6:04:02 benchmark low voltage ac microgrid system. The importance of dc link voltage regulation is analyzed based on performance comparison with a benchmark controller. The controller performance is also validated using a real-time Typhoon HIL emulator.

Abstract Little empirical research has explored whether or not firm strategy is linked with corporate social responsibility (CSR) and to that end we explore the impact of low-cost and differentiation strategies on CSR. Using a sample of 229 Italian firms, a low-cost strategy is negatively associated with ethical and discretionary CSR, while a differentiation strategy is positively associated with both. Given its focus on nonfinancial outcomes and stakeholders, we test if a performance management system (PM system) acts as a moderating influence. We find that a PM system positively moderates the negative association between a low-cost strategy and ethical and discretionary CSR, while also positively moderating these relationships with respect to a differentiation strategy. These findings advance the literature on strategy and CSR, while demonstrating the contingent effect of PM systems. The findings are discussed along with limitations and directions for future research.

Fauna biodiversity assessments often rely on traditional biomonitoring techniques such as camera traps, which may have biases that lead to gaps in biodiversity data. Environmental DNA (eDNA) has emerged as a new source of biodiversity data that may account for these gaps. However, eDNA biodiversity assessment remains relatively untested in terrestrial environments. We compared vertebrate detections using two independent monitoring methods: camera traps and eDNA (n = 160), across two sites in south-western Australia. We also investigated the suitability of tree hollow sediment as a source of eDNA, and the effect of other factors (visitation frequency and timing, animal size) on vertebrate species detectability. We detected 31 taxa with eDNA and 47 with camera traps of which 14 overlapped (12 mammals and 2 birds). Tree hollow sediment detected a wider range of biodiversity than did soil at the entrance of the hollow. By comparing camera trap data with eDNA sequence reads, we were able to detect animals with eDNA that had visited the area up to two months prior to sample collection, with a negative correlation between sequence read amount and days since last recorded detection via camera. “Large” animals (>3kg) detected via camera were associated with significantly higher sequence read amounts than smaller animals. Our results show the effect of substrate selection, frequency of sampling and animal size, on eDNA based surveys. If the aim is to detect broad taxon diversity eDNA based approaches need to be complemented by traditional vertebrate survey methods.

The Class F G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) include Smoothened and the ten Frizzled receptors, which are major cell membrane receptors in the Hedgehog and Wnt signalling pathways respectively and of enormous interest in embryonic development and as therapeutic targets in cancer. Recent crystal structures of Smoothened provide the opportunity to investigate the structural biology of Class F GPCRs in more detail, in turn, informing the development of therapeutics. A key question in this area is how one receptor may trigger distinct pathways - particularly relevant for Wnt signalling, in which signals may be transduced from a Frizzled via Dishevelled or G proteins, depending on the context. In this study, we employ adiabatic biased molecular dynamics and umbrella sampling to investigate the activation of Smoothened and Frizzled-7 in both the native state and bound to endogenous ligands, as well as how the clinically used Smoothened antagonist vismodegib alters this signalling. The results highlight key energetic barriers in the activation of these receptors, and the molecular features of the receptors mediating these barriers, demonstrating our approach as a robust means of investigating signalling through these receptors.