Strain and charge co-mediated magnetoelectric coupling are expected in ultra-thin ferromagnetic/ferroelectric multiferroic heterostructures, which could lead to significantly enhanced magnetoelectric coupling. It is however challenging to observe the combined strain charge mediated magnetoelectric coupling, and difficult in quantitatively distinguish these two magnetoelectric coupling mechanisms. We demonstrated in this work, the quantification of the coexistence of strain and surface charge mediated magnetoelectric coupling on ultra-thin Ni0.79Fe0.21/PMN-PT interface by using a Ni0.79Fe0.21/Cu/PMN-PT heterostructure with only strain-mediated magnetoelectric coupling as a control. The NiFe/PMN-PT heterostructure exhibited a high voltage induced effective magnetic field change of 375 Oe enhanced by the surface charge at the PMN-PT interface. Without the enhancement of the charge-mediated magnetoelectric effect by inserting a Cu layer at the PMN-PT interface, the electric field modification of effective magnetic field was 202 Oe. By distinguishing the magnetoelectric coupling mechanisms, a pure surface charge modification of magnetism shows a strong correlation to polarization of PMN-PT. A non-volatile effective magnetic field change of 104 Oe was observed at zero electric field originates from the different remnant polarization state of PMN-PT. The strain and charge co-mediated magnetoelectric coupling in ultra-thin magnetic/ferroelectric heterostructures could lead to power efficient and non-volatile magnetoelectric devices with enhanced magnetoelectric coupling.

Public water systems are increasingly facing higher bromide levels in their source waters from anthropogenic contamination through coal-fired power plants, conventional oil and gas extraction, textile mills, and hydraulic fracturing. Climate change is likely to exacerbate this in coming years. We estimate bladder cancer risk from potential increased bromide levels in source waters of disinfecting public drinking water systems in the United States. Bladder cancer is the health end point used by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its benefits analysis for regulating disinfection byproducts in drinking water. We use estimated increases in the mass of the four regulated trihalomethanes (THM4) concentrations (due to increased bromide incorporation) as the surrogate disinfection byproduct (DBP) occurrence metric for informing potential bladder cancer risk. We estimate potential increased excess lifetime bladder cancer risk as a function of increased source water bromide levels. Results based on data from 201 drinking water treatment plants indicate that a bromide increase of 50 μg/L could result in a potential increase of between 10(-3) and 10(-4) excess lifetime bladder cancer risk in populations served by roughly 90% of these plants.

Widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has resulted in the collection of massive amounts of clinical data. In ophthalmology in particular, the volume range of data captured in EHR systems has been growing rapidly. Yet making effective secondary use of this EHR data for improving patient care and facilitating clinical decision-making has remained challenging due to the complexity and heterogeneity of these data. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques present a promising way to analyze these multimodal data sets. While AI techniques have been extensively applied to imaging data, there are a limited number of studies employing AI techniques with clinical data from the EHR. The objective of this review is to provide an overview of different AI methods applied to EHR data in the field of ophthalmology. This literature review highlights that the secondary use of EHR data has focused on glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, and cataracts with the use of AI techniques. These techniques have been used to improve ocular disease diagnosis, risk assessment, and progression prediction. Techniques such as supervised machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing were most commonly used in the articles reviewed.

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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a leading cause of childhood blindness. Screening and treatment reduces this risk, but requires multiple examinations of infants, most of whom will not develop severe disease. Previous work has suggested that artificial intelligence may be able to detect incident severe disease (treatment-requiring retinopathy of prematurity [TR-ROP]) before clinical diagnosis. We aimed to build a risk model that combined artificial intelligence with clinical demographics to reduce the number of examinations without missing cases of TR-ROP. METHODS Infants undergoing routine ROP screening examinations (1579 total eyes, 190 with TR-ROP) were recruited from 8 North American study centers. A vascular severity score (VSS) was derived from retinal fundus images obtained at 32 to 33 weeks’ postmenstrual age. Seven ElasticNet logistic regression models were trained on all combinations of birth weight, gestational age, and VSS. The area under the precision-recall curve was used to identify the highest-performing model. RESULTS The gestational age + VSS model had the highest performance (mean ± SD area under the precision-recall curve: 0.35 ± 0.11). On 2 different test data sets (n = 444 and n = 132), sensitivity was 100% (positive predictive value: 28.1% and 22.6%) and specificity was 48.9% and 80.8% (negative predictive value: 100.0%). CONCLUSIONS Using a single examination, this model identified all infants who developed TR-ROP, on average, >1 month before diagnosis with moderate to high specificity. This approach could lead to earlier identification of incident severe ROP, reducing late diagnosis and treatment while simultaneously reducing the number of ROP examinations and unnecessary physiologic stress for low-risk infants.

The invasive Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) is established worldwide and displaces native ant species. In northern California, however, the native winter ant (Prenolepis imparis) persists in invaded areas. We found that in aggressive interactions between the two species, P. imparis employs a potent defensive secretion. Field observations were conducted at P. imparis nest sites both in the presence and absence of L. humile. These observations suggested and laboratory assays confirmed that P. imparis workers are more likely to secrete when outnumbered by L. humile. Workers of P. imparis were also more likely to secrete near their nest entrances than when foraging on trees. One-on-one laboratory trials showed that the P. imparis secretion is highly lethal to L. humile, causing 79% mortality. The nonpolar fraction of the secretion was chemically analyzed with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, and found to be composed of long-chain and cyclic hydrocarbons. Chemical analysis of dissected P. imparis workers showed that the nonpolar fraction is derived from the Dufour's gland. Based on these conclusions, we hypothesize that this chemical defense may help P. imparis to resist displacement by L. humile.

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