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Recent studies have shown a significant increase in the utilization of computed tomography (CT) scans in the emergency department for a broad spectrum of conditions. This had a significant impact on the identification of patients with serious pathologies in a timely manner. However, the overutilization of computed tomography scans leads to increased identification of incidental findings. For example, pancreatic lesions are not uncommon findings that can be identified in imaging studies performed for other indications. Here, we report the case of a 55-year-old male with a history of urinary stone disease who presented with right flank pain and dysuria. The urinalysis findings revealed numerous red blood cells and leukocytes. Non-contrast computed tomography scan of the abdomen was performed to detect urinary stones, but no hyperdense stones were noted, suggesting the possibility of spontaneous passage of the stone. However, a lesion in the pancreatic tail was observed. This exhibited fat attenuation with no solid component in the pancreatic tail representing a pancreatic lipoma. No surgical intervention was made considering the benign nature of the incidentally detected tumor. Pancreatic lipoma is a very rare benign mesenchymal tumor of the pancreas. Recognition of the classic radiological feature of pancreatic lipoma is essential to avoid unnecessary investigation and procedures.

PFAS have been the target of increasing interest in recent years due to their persistence in environmental media and negative health effects on human health. In addition, PFAS is found in numerous environments around the world, where it often displays nonlinear sorption behavior due to its complex composition. This study conducted regression analysis on PFOS sorption results from 28 studies (n = 209) in order to analyze the effects of solid-phase properties on PFOS sorption, and evaluate the performance of 9 proposed sorption models (Kd) at environmental concentrations (0.05 mg/L and 0.1 mg/L). Correlations for the entire dataset showed that organic carbon has the largest contribution to PFOS sorption (R2 = 0.75), with silt and clay content, pH, CEC, and metal oxide content not attributing significant influence at the entire population level. Model estimates for the entire dataset were most accurate (R2 = 0.82) when employing multi-component sorption models that utilize both organic carbon and silt and clay content. Separating the above solid-phase population by OC content indicated that aquifer materials (OC < 0.2%) exhibited the highest sorption influence from silt and clay content (R2 = 0.58), whereas the remaining soils exhibited highest sorption influence by organic carbon content (mineral soils: R2 = 0.11, organic soils: R2 = 0.35). Additional analysis based on organic carbon and silt and clay content population differentiation showed that a two-component sorption model had the highest sorption prediction accuracy (R2 = 91 for high OC-low clay soils, R2 = 0.72 for low OC-high clay soils). Kd models employing components with aqueous calcium concentrations had high estimation accuracy (R2 = 0.94 for the entire dataset) but were limited in contributing sample count (n = 48) due to limited literature reporting and experimentation.

Taxonomic annotation is a substantial challenge for Archaea metabarcoding. A limited number of reference sequences are available; a substantial fraction of phylogenetic diversity is not fully characterized; widely used databases do not reflect current archaeal taxonomy and contain mislabelled sequences. We address these gaps with a systematic and tractable approach based around the Genome Taxonomy Database (GTDB) combined with the eukaryote PR2 and MIDORI mitochondrial databases. After removing incongruent, chimeric and duplicate SSU sequences, this combination (GTDB+) provides a small improvement in annotation of a set of estuarine Archaea Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) compared to SILVA. We add to this a collection of near full length rRNA sequences and the prokaryote SSU sequences in SILVA, creating a new reference database, KSGP (Karst, Silva, GTDB, and PR2). The additional sequences are (re-)annotated using three different approaches. The most conservative, using lowest common ancestor, gives a further small improvement. Annotation using SINTAX increases Class and Order assignments by 2.7 and 4.2 times over SILVA, although this may include some “lumping” of un-named and named clades. Still further improvement can be made using similarity based clustering to group database sequences into putative taxa at all taxonomic levels, assigning 60% and 41% of Archaea OTUs to putative family and genus level taxa respectively. GTDB without cleaning and GreenGenes2 both perform poorly and cannot be recommended for use with Archaea. We make the GTDB+ and KSGP databases available at ksgp.earlham.ac.uk; integrate them into a metabarcoding pipeline, LotuS2 and outline their use to annotate Archaea OTUs and metatranscriptomic data.

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.7759/cureus.20122.].

Nitrate contamination of groundwater sources is a prominent issue in remote small communities that are residing in proximity of agricultural activities. Nitrate exposure through potable water consumption poses multiple human health risks and thus impaired community groundwater sources must be treated to ensure the availability of safe drinking water. In this regard, reverse osmosis (RO) water treatment can be integrated into existing community small water systems for effective nitrate removal and salinity reduction.RO membrane treatment offers a broad range of protection against multiple different contaminants, but high recovery operation is essential in order to reduce the challenge of managing the discharge from RO treatment. Accordingly, the present research provides a detailed investigation of the technical feasibility of high recovery RO treatment utilizing steady state RO with partial concentrate recycle. Through extensive process simulations, and based on water use patterns in three small communities in the California Salinas Valley, it was concluded that nitrate removal can be achieved to produce treated water at a nitrate level that is significantly below the regulatory maximum contamination level (MCL). The above treatment performance was possible via single and two pass RO treatment for the small remote communities considered in the present study, while enabling sufficient high recovery that would generate a residual stream that can be accommodated in the communities’ septic systems. The process configuration was optimized with respect to the number of RO elements and number of treatment passes. Detailed RO system design specifications were then developed, along with the design of treatment stages (pretreatment, RO module, and post-treatment) to meet the above-mentioned specifications. In addition, the correlation between nitrate passage and salt passage were explored for RO treatment of the source water in the study communities demonstrating that is may be feasible to predict the nitrate concentration in the permeate stream based on measurement of permeate salinity.RO process design specifications were derived on the basis of optimizing high recovery operation for permeate production capacity for each of the study sites ranging from 1,966 to 5,600 gallons per day. System design was based on treatment of well water of nitrate level of 45–389.7 mg/L as NO3−, and salinity in the range of 564–1,927 mg/L as total dissolved solids (TDS). RO operation specifications under the production capacity were not to exceed average element recovery of 20%, and single-pass recovery of 15% per element. The daily concentrate stream discharge from the RO systems constituted about 4.9%–12.5% of the community septic tank capacity for system treatment at 90% recovery operating at recycle ratios ranging from 0.67–2.05. Post-treatment of the produced permeate was also considered using a limestone contactor to remineralize and pH stabilize the product water.

Metabarcoding is increasingly used to uncover diversity and characterise communities of Archaea In various habitats, but taxonomic annotation of their sequences remains more challenging than for bacteria. Fewer reference sequences are available; widely used databases do not reflect recent revisions of higher level archaeal taxonomy and a substantial fraction of their phylogenetic diversity remains to be fully characterised. We address these gaps with a systematic and tractable approach based around the Genome Taxonomy Database (GTDB). GTDB provides a standardized taxonomy with normalized ranks based on protein coding genes, allowing us to identify and remove incongruent SSU sequences. We then use this in combination with the eukaryote PR2 database to annotate a collection of near full length rRNA sequences and the Archaea SSU sequences in SILVA, creating a new reference database, KSGP (Karst, Silva, GTDB and PR2). GTDB SSUs alone provides a small improvement in annotation of an example marine Archaea OTU data set over standardized SSU databases such as SILVA and Greengenes2, while KSGP increases Class and Order assignments by 145% and 280% respectively and is likely to provide some improvement in annotation of bacterial sequences too. We make the KSGP database and a cleaned and deduplicated subset of GTDB SSU sequences available at ksgp.earlham.ac.uk; integrate them into a metabarcoding pipeline, LotuS2 and outline rapid and robust strategies to generate a set of annotated Archaea OTUs and to determine the proportion of Archaea sequences in metatranscriptomic data. We also demonstrate simple tools to visualise the completeness of database coverage and outline strategies to further understand poorly characterised components of the archaeal community which will be equally applicable to bacteria.

After many years of substantial investments by the Saudi Arabian government in the education of its citizens, the results, especially in the area of employment, are felt by many to be less than satisfactory. While various factors may be contributing to the rising problem of unemployment in the country, the one focused on in this study was the relationship between self-efficacy and career choices. Specifically, the study examined the relationships between career decision-making self-efficacy, occupational preferences, and gender. Career decision-making self-efficacy was measured with an existing scale (CDMSES-SF). An instrument was designed in this study to measure occupational preferences. The surveys were administered to 476 male and 424 female undergraduate students at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The results of the study found no significant relationship between gender and career decision-making self-efficacy. There were, however, a significant relationship between gender and career preferences for such occupations as accounting/finance, administration, computer technology, engineering, security, and social services fields; while in the education, health, and law fields no significant relationships were found. Career decision-making self-efficacy was not related to occupational preferences for any of the fields in this study. The relationship between career decision-making self-efficacy and occupational preferences is not affected by gender. The results show that, for males and females, there is no relationship between career decision-making self-efficacy and occupational preference within gender for traditionally male-dominated fields, for traditionally female-dominated fields, or for the neutral fields. The negative results of the study provide evidence that the general level of CDMSE is low for males and for females. The study concluded that the results of this study were inconsistent with pervious studies that have reported gender differences in career self-efficacy in general and in self-efficacy for the female-dominated versus the male-dominated occupations. The study concludes with policy recommendations directed at helping students improve their CDMSE scores. These recommendations are career development programs, career counseling, job fairs, database information, and government financial support. Further research is suggested to enhance the findings and validity of this study.