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Overwatering and underwatering grass are widespread issues with environmental and financial consequences. This study developed an accessible method to assess grass water use efficiency (WUE) combining smartphone imaging with open access color unmixing analysis. The method can be applied in automated irrigation systems or apps, providing grass WUE assessment for regular consumer use.

The authors looked at the ability of Spirulina platensis to reduce contaminants in wastewater in order to develop a more accessible treatment option. They found that S platensis did reduce the concentration of pollutants present within simulated agricultural wastewater.

Irrespective of the final application of a molecule, synthetic accessibility is the rate-determining step in discovering and developing novel entities. However, synthetic complexity is challenging to quantify as a single metric, since it is a composite of several measurable metrics, some of which include cost, safety, and availability. Moreover, defining a single synthetic accessibility metric for both natural products and non-natural products poses yet another challenge given the structural distinctions between these two classes of compounds. Here, we propose a model for synthetic accessibility of all chemical compounds, inspired by the Central Limit Theorem, and devise a novel synthetic accessibility metric assessing the overall feasibility of making chemical compounds that has been fitted to a Gaussian distribution.

The authors combine fine needle aspiration biopsy and machine learning algorithms to develop a breast cancer detection method suitable for resource-constrained regions that lack access to mammograms.

This article helps in understanding the effect of various social determinants on maternal mortality in the United States. It explains the relationship between maternal mortality rates and factors like race, income, education, and health insurance access.

Asthma is one of the most prevalent chronic conditions in the United States. But not all people experience asthma equally, with factors like healthcare access and environmental pollution impacting whether children are likely to be hospitalized for asthma's effects. Li, Li, and Ruffolo investigate what demographic and environmental factors are predictive of childhood asthma hospitalization rates across Pennsylvania.

The authors looked at differences in water quality between Chinatown and Bayside. They wanted to look at the racial and economic demographics of each region and how that correlated to access to clean drinking water. Ultimately they did not find any significant differences in water quality, but identified important future directions for this work.

Plant diseases can cause up to 50% crop yield loss for the popular tomato plant. A mobile device-based method to identify diseases from photos of symptomatic leaves via computer vision can be more effective due to its convenience and accessibility. To enable a practical mobile solution, a “shallow” convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with few layers, and thus low computational requirement but with high accuracy similar to the deep CNNs is needed. In this work, we explored if such a model was possible.

The main goal of this study is to determine what demographics are related to tuberculosis incidence in the United States populations, particularly if changing demographics are related to differences in tuberculosis risk over two discrete time periods. The major finding is that in the two studied time periods, tuberculosis risk factors were somewhat consistent and may be influenced by things such as immigration, healthcare access, and race or ethnicity, although the top predictor did change.

A trial study was performed in 2021 to investigate the link between technology and transactive memory. Transactive memory is shared knowledge in which members share the responsibility to encode, store, and retrieve certain tasks or assignments, leading to a successful and collective performance. We hypothesize that a participants’ expected access to an external source affects the recall rate and retrieval of information.