The development of cost-effective and active water-splitting electrocatalysts is an essential step toward the realization of sustainable energy. Its success requires an intensive improvement in the kinetics of the anodic half-reaction of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), which determines the overall system efficiency to a large extent. In this work, we designed a facile and one-route strategy to activate the surface of metallic nickel (Ni) for the OER in alkaline media by ultrasound (24 kHz, 44 W, 60% acoustic amplitude, ultrasonic horn). Sonoactivated Ni showed enhanced OER activity with a much lower potential at + 10 mA cm-2 of + 1.594 V vs. RHE after 30 min ultrasonic treatment compared to + 1.617 V vs. RHE before ultrasonication. In addition, lower charge transfer resistance of 11.1 Ω was observed for sonoactivated Ni as compared to 98.5 Ω for non-sonoactivated Ni. In our conditions, ultrasound did not greatly affect the electrochemical surface area (Aecsa) and Tafel slopes however, the enhancement of OER activity can be due to the formation of free OH• radicals resulting from cavitation bubbles collapsing at the electrode/electrolyte interface.

The aim of this study was to explore concerns and coping mechanisms during the first national COVID-19 lockdown in Portugal. The general population provided statements via an open comment box as part of an online prospective study.

This was an Internet-based open cohort study.

Individuals aged ≥16 years were eligible to participate in this study. Inductive content analysis was performed on completed questionnaires submitted between 23 and 29 March 2020 and 27 April and 3 May 2020 (corresponding with the early and late phases of the first national lockdown, respectively).

Data suggest the prominence of behavioural and emotional responses to COVID-19; namely, self-compliance with measures promoted by the government; adopting practices of self-care and supporting/protecting others; and enacting hope (both currently and for the future). Concerns were related to the perception of vulnerabilities for oneself, family and others and to challenging situations presenting in society (e.g. physical and mental heaolicies that are sensitive to the concerns, motivations and expectations of the population. Awareness of changing public opinions enables governments to continue to effectively mobilise the population to take recommended actions to reduce the transmission of COVID-19.

Our aim was to examine the willingness to pay (WTP) for SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen tests and its correlates during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.

A representative online survey was conducted in late summer 2021 (with n=3075; the average age was 44.5 years; 14.8 years ranging from 18 to 70 years) in Germany. Two-part models were conducted. Various correlates (such as empathy or altruism) were included in the regression analysis.

The average WTP for SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen tests (in euros) was 6.6 (standard deviation 8.4) in the general adult population. It markedly differed between subgroups (e.g. the average WTP was 2.9 among individuals not vaccinated against COVID-19 and 7.5 among individuals vaccinated against COVID-19; it was 5.4 among the lowest income decile, whereas it was 8.6 among the highest income decile). Regressions showed that a higher WTP for SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen tests was associated with being male, being in the highest income group, being vaccinated against COVID-19, and having hi. Approximately one-fourth of the sample reported a WTP for SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen tests of €0 among individuals vaccinated against COVID-19, whereas approximately two-thirds of those not vaccinated against COVID-19 reported such a WTP. Knowledge about the WTP for COVID-19 rapid antigen tests is important for policy makers (e.g. for testing strategies) during this pandemic. It may also give a rough estimation of the acceptance of such rapid tests.Although natural language processing (NLP) can rapidly extract disease labels from radiology reports to create datasets for deep learning models, this may be less accurate than having radiologists manually review the images. In this study, we compared agreement between natural language processing (NLP) and radiologist-curated labels for possible tuberculosis (TB) on chest radiographs (CXR) and evaluated the performance of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) trained to identify TB using the preceding two sets of labels. We collected 10,951 CXRs from the NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset and labeled them as positive or negative for possible TB based on two methods 1) NLP-derived disease labels and 2) radiologist-review of images. These images were used to train DCNNs on varying dataset sizes for possible TB and tested on an external dataset of 800 CXRs. Area under the ROC curve (AUC) was used to evaluate DCNNs. There was poor agreement between NLP and radiologist-curated labels for potential TB (Kappa coefficient 0.34). DCNNs trained using radiologist-curated labels had higher performance than the algorithm trained using the NLP-labels, regardless of the number of images used for training. The best-performing DCNN had an AUC of 0.88, which was trained on 10,951 images using the radiologist-annotated sets. DCNNs trained on CXRs labeled by a radiologist consistently outperformed those trained on the same CXRs labeled by NLP, highlighting the benefit of radiologists’ determining groundtruth for machine learning dataset curation.Analogical mapping – the core component of analogical reasoning – consists of establishing the relational structure shared by two analogous situations and inferring the missing elements in a less familiar situation from a more familiar one. Several existing models of analogy predicted that the complete relational structure can be considered in parallel. Other models postulated that mapping can be less or more incremental – it can access only a relatively small part of the structure, and needs to move to its other parts in steps in order to construct the final relational correspondence. However, the precise time course of analogical mapping, especially in sufficiently complex analogies, to date was rarely studied empirically. In two studies, eye tracking was used to assess in a rigorous way the extent to which mapping can be incremental. In a newly designed geometric ABCD task, pattern D was generated from C according to the same shape transformations that generated pattern B from A. The six possible response options differed systematically in the number of correct transformations, from no transformation matching, via partial relational match, up to the full match. JAK2 inhibitors clinical trials In Study 1, the relational match of options fixated on by participants was initially low but increased monotonically over the course of analogy. The number of corresponding eye fixations predicted 68% variance in relational match of the final response. The correct option was chosen only if fixated on for a sufficiently long time. Study 2 replicated the findings using a more ecologically valid and less demanding task variant that required to map the changes in people’s appearance. The results support these theoretical models of analogy which postulate strictly incremental mapping.Whether people change their mind after making a perceptual judgement may depend on how confident they are in their decision. Recently, it was shown that, when making perceptual judgements about stimuli containing high levels of ‘absolute evidence’ (i.e., the overall magnitude of sensory evidence across choice options), people make less accurate decisions and are also slower to change their mind and correct their mistakes. Here we report two studies that investigated whether high levels of absolute evidence also lead to increased decision confidence. We used a luminance judgment task in which participants decided which of two dynamic, flickering stimuli was brighter. After making a decision, participants rated their confidence. We manipulated relative evidence (i.e., the mean luminance difference between the two stimuli) and absolute evidence (i.e., the summed luminance of the two stimuli). In the first experiment, we found that higher absolute evidence was associated with decreased decision accuracy but increased decision confidence. In the second experiment, we additionally manipulated the degree of luminance variability to assess whether the observed effects were due to differences in perceived evidence variability. We replicated the results of the first experiment but did not find substantial effects of luminance variability on confidence ratings. Our findings support the view that decisions and confidence judgements are based on partly dissociable sources of information, and suggest that decisions initially made with higher confidence may be more resistant to subsequent changes of mind.How do we know what sort of people we are? Do we reflect on specific past instances of our own behaviour, or do we just have a general idea? Previous work has emphasized the role of personal semantic memory (general autobiographical knowledge) in how we assess our own personality traits. Using a standardized trait empathy questionnaire, we show in four experiments that episodic autobiographical memory (memory for specific personal events) is associated with people’s judgments of their own trait empathy. Specifically, neurologically healthy young adults rated themselves as more empathic on questionnaire items that cued episodic memories of events in which they behaved empathically. This effect, however, was diminished in people who are known to have poor episodic memory older adults and individuals who have undergone unilateral excision of medial temporal lobe tissue (as treatment for epilepsy). Further, self-report ratings on individual questionnaire items were generally predicted by subjectively rated phenomenological qualities of the memories cued by those items, such as sensory detail, scene coherence, and overall vividness. We argue that episodic and semantic memory play different roles with respect to self-knowledge depending on life experience, the integrity of the medial temporal lobes, and whether one is assessing general abstract traits versus more concrete behaviours that embody these traits. Future research should examine different types of self-knowledge as well as personality traits other than empathy.Meaningful changes in context create “event boundaries”, segmenting continuous experience into distinct episodes in memory. A foundational finding in this literature is that event boundaries impair memory for the temporal order of stimuli spanning a boundary compared to equally spaced stimuli within an event. This seems surprising in light of intuitions about memory in everyday life, where the order of within-event experiences (did I have coffee before the first bite of bagel?) often seems more difficult to recall than the order of events per se (did I have breakfast or do the dishes first?). Here, we aimed to resolve this discrepancy by manipulating whether stimuli carried information about their encoding context during retrieval, as they often do in everyday life (e.g., bagel-breakfast). In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that stimuli inherently associated with a unique encoding context produce a “flipped” order memory effect, whereby temporal memory was superior for cross-boundary than within-event item pairs.