The leading cause of death during earthquakes is the collapse of urban infrastructures and the subsequent delay of emergency responders in identifying and reaching the affected sites. To overcome this challenge, we designed and evaluated a crowdsensing system that detects collapsed buildings using end-user smartphones as distributed sensors. We present our evaluation of smartphones' accuracy in inferring a building collapse by detecting falls onto solid surfaces, and estimating the false positive rate. Further sensors can present more detailed information about each potential collapse event. We conduct simulations to identify strategies for dealing with false-positive data under scenarios of varying population density. Potential building collapses can be determined with 95% accuracy given 10 connected devices within a 125m radius, increasing to 99.99% for 50 devices. End-user devices can proactively offer valuable help to emergency responders during earthquakes, potentially saving lives.
Millions of people worldwide suffer from acute or chronic liver inflammation caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV). Metal ion chelators have achieved widespread success in the development of antiviral drugs. Some inhibitors with metal ion chelating structures have been proven to have good inhibitory activities on non-structural protein 5B (NS5B) polymerase. However, most of the reported metal ion chelators showed poor anti-HCV potency at the cellular level. Hence, we designed and synthesized a series of 3-hydroxyquinazoline-2,4(1H,3H)-dione derivatives with novel metal ion chelating structures. Typical compounds such as 21h, 21k, and 21t showed better anti-HCV activities than ribavirin with EC50 values less than 10 μM. 21t is currently known as one of the metal ion chelators with the best anti-HCV potency (EC50 = 2.0 μM) at the cellular level and has a better therapeutic index (TI > 25) as compared to ribavirin and the reported compound 6. In the thermal shift assay, the representative compounds 21e and 21k increased the melting temperature (Tm) of NS5B protein solution by 1.6 °C and 2.1 °C, respectively, at the test concentration, indicating that these compounds may exert an anti-HCV effect by targeting NS5B. This speculation was also supported by our molecular docking studies and ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectrophotometry assay, in which the possibility of binding of 3-hydroxyquinazoline-2,4(1H,3H)-diones with Mg2+ in the NS5B catalytic center was observed.
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