Aims: Our aims for this project were to examine how long-acting antipsychotics are prescribed in the various teams (both inpatient, community and specialist services) across BCUHB, with a view to identify any emerging trends, and to compare this with data on efficacy and cost-effectiveness obtained via a systematic search of the available literature.

Methods: Data on depots prescribed across BCUHB was provided to us by the mental health pharmacy team for the year April 2023–March 2024. We extracted our points of interest from this data and demonstrated this graphically using Microsoft Excel.

We also completed a literature search of Ovid, Cochrane Library and Google Scholar on the topic, to identify relevant systematic reviews which included studies comparing depot antipsychotics head-to-head. This returned 1500 articles, of which 15 were shortlisted by title relevance, and 4 included following full-text analysis.

Results: According to the available research, there is no demonstrated clear superiority in efficacy of specific long-acting antipsychotics. The data on cost-effectiveness was somewhat conflicting; in that risperidone was found in a recent systematic review to be the most cost-effective in most studies apart from included UK studies; but that also paliperidone was more cost-effective than the typical antipsychotics. Our data showed that the three most commonly prescribed in BCUHB are typical antipsychotics, and interestingly, the unit price per depot for paliperidone in BCUHB was significantly higher than any other.

Conclusion: ‘Cost-effectiveness’ in the systematic review we looked at was defined by QALYS (‘one year of life in perfect health’). To look at the BCUHB ‘price per depot’, you may, incorrectly, assume that prescribing paliperidone would be a waste of money (with it being 173 times more expensive than the highest dose of the cheapest depot available). This suggests that use of paliperidone may make cost-savings in the longer-term, for example, in preventing admissions to hospital which are costly. In BCUHB, paliperidone is commonly prescribed to patients with learning disabilities, but is not a commonly prescribed depot amongst general adult groups (either inpatient or community).

There is limited guidance on choice of antipsychotic depot and given the absence of significant differences in their efficacy, it is generally down to clinician choice, taking into account patient preferences and drug tolerability profiles. As mentioned, cost does not equal cost-effectiveness and having an awareness of this may influence local guidance and decision-making.

The manufacturing sector is witnessing a paradigm shift toward servitization, where companies are transitioning from selling products to offering product–service systems. This shift creates additional challenges, where the providers must ensure the expected value throughout the operational phase of the solution. Especially when dealing with a system-of-systems (SoS), evaluating performance across diverse contexts and business models while understanding the interconnectedness between systems becomes critical. To address these challenges during the design phase, this article presents a novel integrated simulation framework that supports the development team in exploring value from a SoS perspective. This framework utilizes agent-based simulation and offers three key features: multifidelity, modular and multidisciplinary. The applicability of the proposed framework is further demonstrated in a quarry industry case.

The investigation of shock/blast wave diffraction over various objects has garnered significant attention in recent decades on account of the catastrophic changes that these waves inflict on the environment. Equally important flow phenomena can occur when the moving expansion waves diffract over bodies, which has been hardly investigated. To investigate the effect of expansion wave diffraction over different bodies, we conducted shock tube experiments and numerical simulations to visualise the intricate wave interactions that occur during this process. The current investigation focuses on the phenomenon of expansion wave diffraction across three distinct diffracting configurations, namely the bluff, wedge and ogive bodies. The diffraction phenomenon is subsequently investigated under varying expansion wave strengths through the control of the initial diaphragm rupture pressure ratios. The shock waves generated by the expansion wave diffraction in the driver side of the shock tube, which was initially identified in numerical simulations by Mahomed & Skews (2014 J. Fluid Mech., vol. 757, pp. 649–664), have been visualised in the experiments. Interesting flow features, such as unsteady shock generation, transition, and symmetric/asymmetric vortex breakdown, have been observed in these expansion flows. An in-depth analysis of such intricate flow features resulting from expansion wave diffraction is performed and characterised in the current study.

We investigate the onset of thermosolutal instabilities in a moderately dense nanoparticle suspension layer with a deformable interface. The suspension is deposited on a solid substrate subjected to a specified constant heat flux. The Soret effect and the action of gravity are taken into account. A mathematical model for the system considered with nanoparticle concentration-dependent density, viscosity, thermal conductivity and the Soret coefficient is presented in dimensional and non-dimensional forms. Linear stability analysis of the obtained base state is carried out using disturbances in the normal mode, and the corresponding eigenvalue problem is derived and numerically investigated. The onset of various instabilities is investigated for cases of both heating and cooling at the substrate. The monotonic solutocapillary instability is found in the case of cooling at the substrate, which exhibits two competing mechanisms that belong to two different disturbance wavelength domains. We identify the occurrence of both monotonic and oscillatory thermocapillary instabilities when the system is heated at the substrate. Furthermore, we show the emergence of the solutal buoyancy instability due to density variation which is promoted by the Soret effect adding nanoparticles heavier than the carrier fluid in the proximity of the layer interface. Transitions from the monotonic to oscillatory thermocapillary instability are found with variation in the gravity- and solutocapillarity-related parameters. Notably, we identify a previously unknown transition from monotonic to the oscillatory thermocapillary instability due to the variation in the strength of the thermal-conductivity stratification coupled with the Soret effect.

Increasing sustainability expectations requires support for the design of systems that are reactive in minimizing potential negative impact and proactive in guiding engineering decision-making toward more value-robust long-term decisions. This article identifies a gap in the methodological support for the design of circular systems, building on the hypothesis that computer-based simulation models will drive the development of more value-robust systems designed to behave positively in a changeable operational environment during the whole lifecycle. The article presents a framework for value-robust circular systems design, complementing the current approaches for circular design aimed at increasing decision-makers’ awareness about the complexity of circular systems to be designed. The framework is theoretically described and demonstrated through its applications in four case studies in the field of construction machinery investigating new circular solutions for the future of mining, quarrying and road construction. The framework supports the development of more resilient and sustainable systems, strengthening the feedback loop between exploring new technologies, proposing innovative concepts and evaluating system performance.

In this work, we studied the broadband temporal and spectral properties of the flat-spectrum radio quasar Ton 599. We collected the long-term data from January 2019 to August 2024 when the source was in a long flaring episode. We used the Bayesian block methodology to identify the various flux states, including three flares. The broadband fractional variability is estimated during two flaring states. The F$_{\text{var}}$ variation with respect to frequency shows a nearly double hump structure similar to broadband SED. The power spectral density shows a pink-noise kind of stochastic variability in the light curve, and we do not see any break in the power spectrum, suggesting a much longer characteristic timescale is involved in gamma-ray variability. The flux distribution is well-fitted with a double log-normal flux distribution, suggesting the variability of non-linear in nature. The gamma-ray, optical, and X-ray emissions were found to be highly correlated with a zero time lag, suggesting a co-spatial origin of their emissions. We used the one-zone leptonic model to reproduce the broadband spectrum in the energy range from the IR to very high-energy gamma rays. The increase in the magnetic field and the Doppler factor were found to be the main causes for high flux states. The XMM-Newton spectra taken during one of the flaring durations exhibit a signature of thermal black body emission from the accretion disc, suggesting a possible disc-jet coupling. This has also been indicated by the gamma-ray flux distribution, which shows the distribution as non-linear in nature, which is mostly seen in galactic X-ray binaries or active galactic nuclei, where the accretion disc dominates the emission.

Data-based methods have gained increasing importance in engineering. Success stories are prevalent in areas such as data-driven modeling, control, and automation, as well as surrogate modeling for accelerated simulation. Beyond engineering, generative and large-language models are increasingly helping with tasks that, previously, were solely associated with creative human processes. Thus, it seems timely to seek artificial-intelligence-support for engineering design tasks to automate, help with, or accelerate purpose-built designs of engineering systems for instance in mechanics and dynamics, where design so far requires a lot of specialized knowledge. Compared with established, predominantly first-principles-based methods, the datasets used for training, validation, and test become an almost inherent part of the overall methodology. Thus, data publishing becomes just as important in (data-driven) engineering science as appropriate descriptions of conventional methodology in publications in the past. However, in mechanics and dynamics, quite widely, still traditional publishing practices are prevalent that largely do not yet take into account the rising role of data as much as that may already be the case in pure data-scientific research. This article analyzes the value and challenges of data publishing in mechanics and dynamics, in particular regarding engineering design tasks, showing that the latter raise also challenges and considerations not typical in fields where data-driven methods have been booming originally. Researchers currently find barely any guidance to overcome these challenges. Thus, ways to deal with these challenges are discussed and a set of examples from across different design problems shows how data publishing can be put into practice.

The purpose of this study was to establish a machine-learning model that predicts heart dose in left-sided breast cancer patients treated with volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT). As radiotherapy (RT) poses an increased risk of cardiac toxicity, the model employs anatomical features to predict heart dose, tackling a significant issue in the management of breast cancer. This retrospective analysis focused on 53 patients with left-sided breast cancer who received VMAT RT. Various partial arc VMAT techniques were assessed, including the 2P, 4P and 5P methods. Key anatomical parameters measured included mean heart distance (MHD), total heart volume (THV) within the treatment field, heart volume (HV) and planning target volume (PTV). Elastic Net regression models were created to forecast heart dose metrics associated with different VMAT techniques. The Elastic Net regression models successfully predicted heart dose metrics, with VMAT-4P achieving the best performance, reflected in the lowest root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0·9099 and a median absolute error (MEDAE) of 0·5760 for the mean dose. VMAT-5P was particularly effective in predicting V5Gy, with an RMSE of 4·8242 and a MEDAE of 2·1188, while VMAT-2P recorded the lowest MEDAE for V25Gy at 1·0053. The feature importance analysis highlighted MHD as the primary predictor, contributing 75%, followed by THV at 18%, HV at 4% and PTV at 3%. The findings of this study emphasise the critical need to consider patient-specific anatomical features and the effectiveness of VMAT techniques in the treatment planning for left-sided breast cancer. The predictive models established present a pathway for personalised treatment enhancement. Treatment planners are encouraged to assess a range of anatomical characteristics when choosing the optimal VMAT technique.

Suicidality is a significant public health concern, with neuroimaging studies revealing abnormalities in the brains of suicidal individuals and post-mortem samples. However, the genetic architecture between suicidality and subcortical brain volumes remains poorly characterized. Using genome-wide association studies (GWAS), we investigated the genetic overlap between suicidality and subcortical brain volume. GWAS summary statistics for suicidal behaviours, including Suicide Attempts, Ever Self-Harmed, and Thoughts of Life Not Worth Living, from the UK Biobank, Suicide from the FinnGen Biobank, and data on seven subcortical brain volumes and Intracranial Volume from the ENIGMA2 study, were used to investigate the genetic correlation between phenotypes as well as potential genetic factors. A common genetic factor was identified, comprising two categories: Suicide Attempt, Ever Self-Harmed, and Thoughts of Life Not Worth Living from the UK Biobank, and Suicide from FinnGen, Intracranial Volume, and subcortical brain volumes. Cross-phenotype GWAS meta-analysis of each category at variant, gene and subnetwork levels unveils a list of significant variants (P-value <5 × 10−8), and potential hub genes (P-value <0.05) of consideration. Network, pathway, and Gene Ontology analyses of these joint categories highlighted enriched pathways and biological processes related to blood-brain barrier permeability suggesting that the presence and severity of suicidality are associated with an inflammatory signature detectable in both blood and brain tissues. This study underscores the role of brain and peripheral blood inflammation in suicide risk and holds promise for developing targeted interventions and personalized treatment strategies to reduce suicidality in at-risk populations.

This work studies the reliability function of K-out-of-N systems with a general repair time distribution and a single repair facility. It introduces a new repair mechanism using an effort function, described by a nonlinear ordinary differential equation. Three theoretical results are obtained: regularity properties preventing simultaneous failures and repairs, derivation of a Kolmogorov forward system for micro-state and macro-state probabilities, and comparison of reliability functions of two K-out-of-N systems. An additional hypothesis on the model’s parameters allows us to obtain an ordering relation between the reliability functions. A numerical example demonstrates the model’s practical application and confirms the theoretical results.

Providing nursery habitats to a number of marine fish larvae that recruit after prolonged pelagic larval duration, has been identified as one of ecosystem services rendered by estuaries and protected inshore water bodies like mangroves, mudflats, swamps, and marshes. Larval fish congregation and survival are largely dependent on abiotic and biotic potential of such systems and many migrant marine fishes are adapted to them. However, occurrences of larval forms of tropical reef-associated vagrant species which are known for extensive range adaptations generate considerable academic interest. The present study provides the first report of ontogenic habitat utilization of yellow fin surgeon fish, Acanthurus xanthopterus Valenciennes 1835 in a tropical microtidal positive estuary, the Vembanad lake, South India. Surface plankton collections from the downstream part of the estuary revealed considerable proportions of acanthurid larvae in post monsoon (mean 354 ± 180 numbers/100 m3) and pre monsoon (mean 217 ± 120 numbers/100 m3) while they were absent in monsoon season. These acronurus larval forms were morphologically identified and sorted before being subjected for DNA barcoding. Mitochondrial DNA COI sequences developed from morphologically characterized acronurus larvae exhibited genetic congruency to sequence of A. xanthopterus which was evident from phylogram (bootstrap support of 100) and genetic distance data (intraspecific distance of 0%). The study indicates that Acronurus larvae of A. xanthopterus, after extensive cross-habitat dispersal, utilize the estuarine habitat to promote potential growth.

This paper reports one mytiloid species, Amygdalum anoxicolum P. G. Oliver, 2001 from the summit of a seamount located in the eastern Arabian Sea. This species was encountered from the core of the Arabian Sea oxygen minimum zone at a depth of 340 m and possessed several adaptations to low-oxygen concentration. This paper presents the first-ever DNA barcodes for this species.