Patients exposed to a surgical safety checklist experience better postoperative outcomes, but this could simply reflect wider quality of care in hospitals where checklist use is routine.

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Chinese Yam chips were dried using a heat pump (HP) dryer alone or in combination with far infrared radiation (FIR) at 500, 1000 and 2000 W (500 FIR, 1000 FIR, and 2000. The experimental results were presented in terms of the drying characteristics, and dried product qualities (shrinkage, color, texture, percentage of rehydration, and moisture content). Samples with initial moisture content of approximately 76% (w.b.) were dried to a final moisture content of <17% (w.b.) at the drying temperature of 50°C and at an air flow rate of 1.0 m s À1 for all of the experiments. The data showed that FIR + HP drying increased the drying rate by reducing the drying time, and the resulted dried Chinese Yam chips generally had higher values of lightness and comparable values of redness and yellowness than the HP-treated samples. In the case of HP + 1000FIR, the dried Chinese Yam chips had lower shrinkage, improved rehydration ability, lower hardness and higher brittleness than those dried by HP, HP + 500FIR and HP + 2000FIR. It is worth noting that the total energy used for FIR-assisted drying processes decreased with the increase of FIR intensity. The present data suggest that HP + FIR drying is an effective and economical method for Chinese Yam chip drying, and HP + 1000FIR can obtain the best dried product. Ó 2016 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

A novel sensor based on well-dispersed Au nanoparticles on a nanosheet-based three-dimensionally hierarchical ZnO matrix was fabricated to sensitively detect DA.

The association between sleep duration and prostate cancer (PCa) risk is still unclear. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to explore if sleep duration is associated with PCa in men. A comprehensive literature search was conducted in November 2019 based on the Pubmed, Embase, and Cochrane databases. After extracting the data, the random effects model was used to calculate the pooled Risk Ratio (RR) and it's 95% confidence interval (CI) to represent the correlation between sleep duration and PCa risk. Overall, we included 6 studies in our meta-analysis. Our pooled results showed that neither short sleep (RR = 0.99; 95%CI:0.91-1.07, P = .74) nor long sleep (RR = 0.88; 95%CI:0.75-1.04, P = .15) was associated with the risk of PCa. Sleep duration has no significant effect on PCa risk. Long sleep may have a potential protective effect on PCa incidence.

Melting curves of Cu, Pt, Pd and Au were calculated via the molecular dynamics method in the temperature range of [Formula: see text]1000–5000 K. The simulation results were compared with the recent high pressure experimental data reported by Errandonea, and the obtained melting curves of Cu, Pt and Au were all in good agreement with his results. For Pd, there were some differences between the obtained melting curve and the experimental data and these differences increased with decreasing temperature to about 7 GPa at 2000 K. The effects of the interaction forces between metal atoms at high atomic densities on the pressure of the system were analyzed. It was found that the pressure in metals predominantly depends on the interaction forces between atoms at high atomic densities. In addition, expressions for melting pressure as a function of temperature have been obtained by fitting the simulation results.

A novel metamaterial-based and broadband planar integrated Luneburg lens antenna is designed, fabricated, and measured. A substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) horn antenna is applied as the source to illuminate the operation of the Luneburg lens. In particular, air-via metamaterial structures are loaded in front of the SIW horn aperture to realize broadband performance. Meanwhile, the feeding structure by the SIW horn antenna and the Luneburg lens are integrated through this air-via metamaterial transition. Accordingly, the air-via unit cells are designed and arranged in an array with an equivalent gradient refractive index through diameters to achieve good wave focusing effects. Besides, a good agreement is observed between simulations and experiments. The measured results indicate that a wide bandwidth from 16 to 28 GHz is realized with the return loss below-10 dB. Moreover, high end-fire gains varying from 12.5 to 17 dBi are obtained in the band of 18-27 GHz. INDEX TERMS Broadband, integrated, planar Luneburg lens, SIW horn antenna.