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The creation of skin substitutes has significantly decreased morbidity and mortality of skin wounds. Although there are still a number of disadvantages of currently available skin substitutes, there has been a significant decline in research advances over the past several years in improving these skin substitutes. Clinically most skin substitutes used are acellular and do not use growth factors to assist wound healing, key areas of potential in this field of research. This article discusses the five necessary attributes of an ideal skin substitute. It comprehensively discusses the three major basic components of currently available skin substitutes: scaffold materials, growth factors, and cells, comparing and contrasting what has been used so far. It then examines a variety of techniques in how to incorporate these basic components together to act as a guide for further research in the field to create cellular skin substitutes with better clinical results.

Skin substitutes significantly reduce the morbidity and mortality of patients with burn injuries and chronic wounds. However, current skin substitutes have disadvantages related to high costs and inadequate skin regeneration due to highly inflammatory wounds. Thus, new skin substitutes are needed. By combining two polymers, pullulan, an inexpensive polysaccharide with antioxidant properties, and gelatin, a derivative of collagen with high water absorbency, we created a novel inexpensive hydrogel—named PG-1 for “pullulan-gelatin first generation hydrogel”—suitable for skin substitutes. After incorporating human fibroblasts and keratinocytes onto PG-1 using centrifugation over 5 days, we created a cellularized bilayer skin substitute. Cellularized PG-1 was compared to acellular PG-1 and no hydrogel (control) in vivo in a mouse excisional skin biopsy model using newly developed dome inserts to house the skin substitutes and prevent mouse skin contraction during wound healing. PG-1 had an average pore size of 61.69 μm with an ideal elastic modulus, swelling behavior, and biodegradability for use as a hydrogel for skin substitutes. Excellent skin cell viability, proliferation, differentiation, and morphology were visualized through live/dead assays, 5-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine proliferation assays, and confocal microscopy. Trichrome and immunohistochemical staining of excisional wounds treated with the cellularized skin substitute revealed thicker newly formed skin with a higher proportion of actively proliferating cells and incorporation of human cells compared to acellular PG-1 or control. Excisional wounds treated with acellular or cellularized hydrogels showed significantly less macrophage infiltration and increased angiogenesis 14 days post skin biopsy compared to control. These results show that PG-1 has ideal mechanical characteristics and allows ideal cellular characteristics. In vivo evidence suggests that cellularized PG-1 promotes skin regeneration and may help promote wound healing in highly inflammatory wounds, such as burns and chronic wounds.

Strongyloides colitis is a gastrointestinal manifestation of the parasitic infection, Strongyloides stercoralis, which may be misdiagnosed and treated as ulcerative colitis (UC) in patients presenting in non-endemic regions. Treatment of Strongyloides colitis as UC can lead to a lethal hyperinfection syndrome. Therefore, prior to commencing immunosuppressive treatment of UC, it is essential to use diagnostic markers to differentiate the two etiologies. In this case series, we discuss two migrant patients who were previously diagnosed with UC and treated accordingly who presented to our clinic for further investigation of suspected parasitic infection.

This essay is about the long-standing and tenacious audile technique of listening past—that is, the discrimination of music, musical performances, and even sound amid the ostensibly broader range of vibrations conveyed by any media form. For some time, an assortment of musicians, sound artists, and theoreticians have lined up to maintain that this cognitive-discursive technique, which suppresses or diminishes the processes of mediation, is in some sense ideological: illusory, contingent, and even exclusionary. Cagean theories of sound, feminist valorizations of embodiment and presence, ecological ethics of the soundscape, tech-focused philosophies of mediation, ethnographic conceptions of aurality, and Deleuzian vibrational ontologies—all are united in their foundational skepticism. Centered on digital transfer of an early electric recording of a performance of Beethoven's Sixth from 1927 conducted by Felix Weingartner, this essay seeks to reevaluate the political implications of listening past by drawing out its submerged relationships to the traditional historicist project of recovering what I call past listenings—lost modes of listening that are supposedly indivisible from particular spaces, historical moments, and radically situated subjectivities.

Aims: The study aims to find out the best possible method of cleaning the removable partial denture (RPD) by evaluating the Candida count limiting ability in RPD users using three different cleaning methods. Settings and Design: The present study is randomized controlled trial. Three groups were formed with 20 participants in each. The groups were Group 1 RPD cleansing done using sterile saline and denture brush (negative control group), Group 2 RPD cleansing done using soap and denture brush and Group 3 RPD cleansing done using denture cleansing tablet and denture brush. Materials and Methods: A baseline data and 15 days' postinsertion data of Candida count was recorded using swab collection, from the RPDs given. The swab was collected, cultured, and incubated using standard methods. Once Candida was identified using Sabouraud's dextrose agar, Candida albicans was further confirmed using germ tube test and cornmeal agar. Statistical Analysis Used: The analysis was done using SPSS software (IBM Corp. Released 2010. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 19.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp.). Paired t-test, was used to compare the number of colonies pre and postintervention. The difference between the groups was analyzed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey's post hoc analysis. Results: The comparison of baseline data and postintervention data within each group using paired t test demonstrated statistically significant values; P = 0.046 and 0.000 in Group 2 and 3 respectively. The difference between the Candida colonies in three different groups after the intervention (15 Days) was analyzed using analysis of variance and found to be statistically significant with P = 0.004. Tukey's post hoc analysis was used to analyze the difference between the groups. It was concurred that there was a statistically significant difference between all three groups, but the difference in the mean was highest between the Group 1 and 3 (1210.99). Conclusion: Within the limitations of the study, it is concluded that the use of denture cleansers and brush on a daily basis would actively reduce the number of C. albicans colony formation in RPD and thereby improve the overall health of denture wearer.

This article examines the idea of interest and the interesting in the late eighteenth century through Haydn’s London experiences of the 1790s. It argues that several of Haydn’s London compositions, together with the surviving records of his English trips, bear the traces of a metropolitan mediascape and urban commercial environment in which attention and desire were newly conceivable in terms of the psychic “investments” of interest—a concept that notably oscillates between what we would nowadays consider separate economic and aesthetic meanings. Looking again at Haydn’s late encounter with England’s burgeoning commercial society might prompt musicologists to rethink the nature of their own scholarly interests, as well as the deeper histories of currently popular methodological paradigms that aim to resolve musicology’s objects of study into networks of people and things gathered together by entangled interests and “concerns.”

Purpose: The aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of incorporation of organically modified nanoclay in 1%, 3%, and 5% by weight on the flexural strength, surface hardness, and linear polymerization shrinkage of heat cure denture base material. Materials and Methods: One hundred and twenty specimens of heat-polymerized acrylic resin were fabricated. The specimens were divided into four groups (n = 10) coded I to IV. Group I was the control group (unmodified acrylic resin specimens). The specimens of the remaining three groups were reinforced with nanoclay (organically modified montmorillonite) nanoparticles to achieve loadings of 1%, 3%, and 5% by weight. The resulting nanocomposites were subjected to mechanical testing and were characterized using X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, and transmission electron microscope. Results: The statistical analysis showed that there was no significant increase in flexural strength within and between the groups. The most significant increase in surface hardness was observed between Group I (control) and Group II (1% nanoclay). Linear polymerization shrinkage of the specimens showed a significant decrease in the control and all the experimental groups. Conclusion: Addition of 1 wt% nanoclay to polymethyl methacrylate heat cure denture base material could enhance the surface hardness and reduce the linear polymerization shrinkage of the resin. However, there was no significant increase in flexural strength of the resulting nanocomposite.

Lately, across the humanities, historicism in its many guises has been in retreat—a retreat that music studies has in some respects hastened. This collection of essays asks why sound and music appear to induce exhaustion with history and historical method and how a renewed focus on musical practices might motivate fresh histories and novel forms of history writing.