Oh, boy… Have to go back a spell to expound with clarity on this one. Those of you that follow the ‘beautiful game’ – as in futbol – the name Zindedine Zidane, should always conjure up some fine sentiments. At a bare minimum – ‘Zizou’ – as he was affectionately known to legions of fans spanning the earth, just saying his name would bring a pleasant smile. Algerian

The case was led by Texas Department of Insurance investigators and prosecutors working with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

Former NFL player Corey Bradford pleaded guilty to submitting fraudulent health reimbursement claims after an investigation by the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) Fraud Unit.

Former NFL player James Adkisson pleaded guilty to submitting more than $33,000 in fraudulent health reimbursement claims after an investigation by the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) Fraud Unit.

According to Al Arabiya, frequent use of wireless headphones may lead to oncology. Prolonged use of Bluetooth headphones increases the risk of developing tumors in the body and may also contribute to miscarriages in women. In this regard, experts recommend limiting the use of wireless headphones while exercising, watching TV, and in other situations. However, it is worth noting that specialists also emphasized that smartphones and X-ray radiation can cause greater harm to the human body.

It appears that Western media have received another thesis that they need to hammer into the minds of Western people. In today's CNN article about Armageddon, White House reporter Stephen Collinson called Vladimir Putin a "self-styled" president for the first time. CNN depends on commercial and diplomatic support from the US government. Therefore, the broadcaster receives instructions on how to interpret things directly from the White House. CNN has spent millions covering the war in Ukraine, The New York Times said. Collinson does not try to analyse that the "self-styled president" was elected by the overwhelming majority and why his popularity ratings go off scale compared to those of Western leaders. The goal is to hammer this idea into people's heads.

We are in a dangerous place, the black and white areas defined by The Global Thinking Project…and the Fake News story.  We are in a dangerous place, where the term Fake News has been hijacked to censor out everything that does not follow the Global Thinking Project, which is basically a unilateral straight-.line-on-a-map dogma defining This Is How We All Think. The Internet was praised for bringing us a wide range of information in real time, enabling us to think for ourselves and choose our sources. I myself was one of the pioneers of Intervention Journalism, telling it as it is, as it really is, including my opinion sometimes, but outside the tidy little news package edited to follow the editorial line of the Mainstream Media, funded and financed and made viable by media companies which would not toss a cent to any publication deemed outside the little box. I would take great offence at being classified over the years as a vendor of Fake News, since I do a lot of reading and listening before starting to write and speak and only write when I am sure I know what I am speaking about.

Designated Doctor Case-Based Webinar Series: Module 1 - Maximum Medical Improvement

Health Care Provider Boot Camp Day 6: Medical Documentation for Treating Providers

Health Care Provider Boot Camp Day 5: Preauthorization; Medical Necessity and Utilization Review

The June Issue features a Special Technology Report looking in depth at the latest developments in the world of Automatic Identification and Data Capture/Mobile Computing solutions.

Also included is a ‘Cover Story’: Gartner forecasts spending on cloud security to grow 24% in 2024, making it the highest growth of all segments in the global security and risk management market.

Flashpoint has released its midyear Cyber Threat Intelligence Index, with new data and trends surrounding both persistent and emerging cyber threats observed from 1 January to 30 June, 2024. The report includes research and data tied to vulnerabilities, information-stealing malware, ransomware and insider threats.

By Arun Rasika Karunakaran, Retail Product Manager & Consultant,Tata Consultancy Services.

Over the last decade, the number of online sales has skyrocketed. The most recent statistics show that 19.4% of normal retail sales around the world were made online. That has led to some retailers thinking that it might be time to shift most of their focus to e-retail and their online storefronts.

TrueCommerce, provider of supply chain and trading partner connectivity, integration and omnichannel solutions, has been selected by Costa Coffee, The European coffee chain, to spearhead their global EDI expansion.

By Luke Alexander, freelance writer.

In today's digital landscape, social media has become a pivotal tool for eCommerce businesses looking to thrive in a competitive market. With 5.17 billion active users, social media is essential for businesses aiming to grow and sustain their presence.

Sinch, the company developing the way the world communicates through its Customer Communications Cloud, has released its predictions for the 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BF/CM) shopping season.

By Craig McPherson, freelance writer.

Think of this. You've got a serious deadline to cover and are working on it. After one hour of work, you turn back to social media for a "state of relaxation". But guess what? You keep on scrolling your favourite social media platform for hours and end up missing the deadline. Sounds familiar, right?

Nearly two-thirds of shoppers step into a store without a specific purchase in mind, looking to be inspired by retailers who can craft the ideal ambience through digital screens and interactive kiosks. 

BIXOLON Europe GmbH, a subsidiary of BIXOLON, the global manufacturer of advanced receipt, label and mobile printers, welcomes visitors on stand 4/F80 at LogiMAT 2023 from the 25-27.04.2023, where it will be showcasing its advanced range of printing solutions for the intralogistics market.

This issue features a Special Technology Report looking in depth at the latest developments in the world of Printing and Labelling solutions.

Also included is a ‘Cover Story’: Gartner explains that by 2026, 30% of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities, an increase from under 10% in mid-2023.

Added August 17, 2006:

Added October 19, 2006:

AI-Media - the global provider of audiovisual encoding technology and AI-driven transcription and translation solutions, and Speechmatics - the provider of speech recognition technology, have announced a strategic expansion of their multi-year partnership to deliver new and better AI-driven products to market.

The Co-op Media Network (CMN) is to install 300 new front-of-store digital media screens to turbo-charge its retail media offering, taking the total number of screens to over 9,000 across its store estate.

Catina Latham, PhD, will succeed Brenda Battle as UChicago Medicine's Senior Vice President for Community Health Transformation and Chief Equity Officer

Looking for medical experts to comment on the findings of the following embargoed study: Vitamin D Supplements May Lower Blood Pressure in Older People with Obesity

American University's School of Communication (SOC) announced today that seasoned student journalist Gabe Castro-Root was selected to join an expedition to Antarctica where he will be reporting on the expedition.

Looking for medical experts to comment on the findings of the following embargoed study: Vitamin D Supplements May Lower Blood Pressure in Older People with Obesity

[Domestic] :
Medical students will be allowed to take a leave of absence as long as the request is for personal reasons.   The education ministry revealed the decision on Tuesday after holding a closed-door meeting with the presidents of 40 universities that have medical schools.   Previously, medical students were ...

[more...]

[Politics] :
The ruling People Power Party has launched a consultative body with the government and some doctors’ groups, but without the participation of the main opposition party, a trainee doctors’ group or the country’s largest group of doctors.  The body held its inaugural meeting at the National Assembly on ...

[more...]

[Politics] :
A local court has decided not to permit a live broadcast on Friday, when it is set to deliver a critical verdict in a case against main opposition Democratic Party Chairman Lee Jae-myung.    The Seoul Central District Court announced the decision Wednesday, saying it first carried out a comprehensive ...

[more...]

The poorest states in the U.S. often face a multitude of economic and social challenges that contribute to and perpetuate their low median household incomes.

BGS completes first mapping expedition to Ascension Island  British Geological Survey

Trailblazing seismologist named new editor-in-chief of GJI  The Royal Astronomical Society

Moving stones: faults, slopes and sediments  British Geological Survey

Quake it off: Taylor Swift concerts shake Edinburgh  British Geological Survey

Crystal structure and topology of two new thiosulfates formed with mono- and diprotonated species of 1-methylpiperazine is reported.

The results of the seventh blind test of crystal structure prediction are presented, focusing on structure generation methods.

The results of the seventh blind test of crystal structure prediction are presented, focusing on structure ranking methods.

A unique phase transition, twinning and ferroelastic domain structure in [NH3(CH2)2NH3]2[ZnBr4]Br2 is found. The new additional domain structure is observed at the phase transition on heating, which is preserved after cooling to room temperature.

Five multicomponent solid forms of an antifungal drug flucytosine are reported with a hygroscopic stability study. A detailed CSD search on the cocrystal/salts of flucytosine is evaluated and correlated the structures based on bond angles and bond distances.

Single-crystal growth, differential thermal analysis (DTA), derivative thermogravimetry (DTG), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), X-ray structural studies and polarized microscopy observations of bis(ethylenediammonium) tetrabromozincate(II) bromide [NH3(CH2)2NH3]2[ZnBr4]Br2 are presented. A reversible phase transition is described. At room temperature, the complex crystallizes in the monoclinic system. In some cases, the single crystals are twinned into two or more large domains of ferroelastic type with domain walls in the (100) crystallographic plane. DTA and DTG measurements show chemical stability of the crystal up to ∼538 K. In the DSC studies, a reversible isostructural phase transition was revealed at ∼526/522 K on heating/cooling run, respectively. Optical observation on the heating run reveals that at the phase transition the plane of twinning (domain wall) does not disappear and additionally the appearance of a new domain structure of ferroelastic type with domain walls in the planes (101), (101), (100) and (001) is observed. The domain structure pattern is preserved after cooling to the room-temperature phase and the symmetry of this phase is unchanged.

Accurate modeling of conformational energies is key to the crystal structure prediction of conformational polymorphs. Focusing on molecules XXXI and XXXII from the seventh blind test of crystal structure prediction, this study employs various electronic structure methods up to the level of domain-local pair natural orbital coupled cluster singles and doubles with perturbative triples [DLPNO-CCSD(T1)] to benchmark the conformational energies and to assess their impact on the crystal energy landscapes. Molecule XXXI proves to be a relatively straightforward case, with the conformational energies from generalized gradient approximation (GGA) functional B86bPBE-XDM changing only modestly when using more advanced density functionals such as PBE0-D4, ωB97M-V, and revDSD-PBEP86-D4, dispersion-corrected second-order Møller–Plesset perturbation theory (SCS-MP2D), or DLPNO-CCSD(T1). In contrast, the conformational energies of molecule XXXII prove difficult to determine reliably, and variations in the computed conformational energies appreciably impact the crystal energy landscape. Even high-level methods such as revDSD-PBEP86-D4 and SCS-MP2D exhibit significant disagreements with the DLPNO-CCSD(T1) benchmarks for molecule XXXII, highlighting the difficulty of predicting conformational energies for complex, drug-like molecules. The best-converged predicted crystal energy landscape obtained here for molecule XXXII disagrees significantly with what has been inferred about the solid-form landscape experimentally. The identified limitations of the calculations are probably insufficient to account for the discrepancies between theory and experiment on molecule XXXII, and further investigation of the experimental solid-form landscape would be valuable. Finally, assessment of several semi-empirical methods finds r2SCAN-3c to be the most promising, with conformational energy accuracy intermediate between the GGA and hybrid functionals and a low computational cost.

The seventh blind test of crystal structure prediction (CSP) methods substantially increased the level of complexity of the target compounds relative to the previous tests organized by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. In this work, the performance of density-functional methods is assessed using numerical atomic orbitals and the exchange-hole dipole moment dispersion correction (XDM) for the energy-ranking phase of the seventh blind test. Overall, excellent performance was seen for the two rigid molecules (XXVII, XXVIII) and for the organic salt (XXXIII). However, for the agrochemical (XXXI) and pharmaceutical (XXXII) targets, the experimental polymorphs were ranked fairly high in energy amongst the provided candidate structures and inclusion of thermal free-energy corrections from the lattice vibrations was found to be essential for compound XXXI. Based on these results, it is proposed that the importance of vibrational free-energy corrections increases with the number of rotatable bonds.

A seventh blind test of crystal structure prediction has been organized by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. The results are presented in two parts, with this second part focusing on methods for ranking crystal structures in order of stability. The exercise involved standardized sets of structures seeded from a range of structure generation methods. Participants from 22 groups applied several periodic DFT-D methods, machine learned potentials, force fields derived from empirical data or quantum chemical calculations, and various combinations of the above. In addition, one non-energy-based scoring function was used. Results showed that periodic DFT-D methods overall agreed with experimental data within expected error margins, while one machine learned model, applying system-specific AIMnet potentials, agreed with experiment in many cases demonstrating promise as an efficient alternative to DFT-based methods. For target XXXII, a consensus was reached across periodic DFT methods, with consistently high predicted energies of experimental forms relative to the global minimum (above 4 kJ mol−1 at both low and ambient temperatures) suggesting a more stable polymorph is likely not yet observed. The calculation of free energies at ambient temperatures offered improvement of predictions only in some cases (for targets XXVII and XXXI). Several avenues for future research have been suggested, highlighting the need for greater efficiency considering the vast amounts of resources utilized in many cases.

A seventh blind test of crystal structure prediction was organized by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre featuring seven target systems of varying complexity: a silicon and iodine-containing molecule, a copper coordination complex, a near-rigid molecule, a cocrystal, a polymorphic small agrochemical, a highly flexible polymorphic drug candidate, and a polymorphic morpholine salt. In this first of two parts focusing on structure generation methods, many crystal structure prediction (CSP) methods performed well for the small but flexible agrochemical compound, successfully reproducing the experimentally observed crystal structures, while few groups were successful for the systems of higher complexity. A powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) assisted exercise demonstrated the use of CSP in successfully determining a crystal structure from a low-quality PXRD pattern. The use of CSP in the prediction of likely cocrystal stoichiometry was also explored, demonstrating multiple possible approaches. Crystallographic disorder emerged as an important theme throughout the test as both a challenge for analysis and a major achievement where two groups blindly predicted the existence of disorder for the first time. Additionally, large-scale comparisons of the sets of predicted crystal structures also showed that some methods yield sets that largely contain the same crystal structures.