Advancing Open Science

Similarly well-formed welds can differ markedly in service performance, yet the metallurgical origin of this difference has rarely been quantified. Bead-on-plate welds were prepared on AA6061 with an ER4047 filler by pulsed gas metal arc welding (P-GMAW); with the pulse waveform kept constant, the base current was raised from 30 A to 110 A, which varied the heat input from 122 J/mm to 235 J/mm. The grain boundary (GB) morphology and the Al, Mg, and Si contents at the GBs and in the grain interior were quantified by SEM/EDS, together with tensile, bending, and impact tests. With increasing heat input, the GBs changed from convex to concave; Mg and Si segregated at the GBs to 8.5 and 31 times their contents in the grain interior; Al was depleted to 66.68% of its interior content; and solidification cracks multiplied. The tensile strength fell from 276.13 MPa to 252.92 MPa and the impact energy from 2.02 J to 1.57 J; the elongation rose from 4.21% to 4.99%, and the fracture mode changed from dimple–cleavage composite fracture to ductile dimple fracture and, at the highest heat input, to cleavage fracture. The deepening GB depressions reduced the load-bearing area, whereas the transition to ductile fracture governed the gain in elongation. The results therefore establish a quantitative link between the heat input, the GB microsegregation and morphology, and the mechanical behavior of well-formed P-GMAW welds.

Background: Furcation involvement (FI) represents one of the most challenging conditions in periodontal therapy due to the anatomic complexity of multi-rooted teeth and the progressive interradicular attachment loss that compromises long-term tooth stability. Deep periodontal pockets in molars and premolars often present as combined defects, including horizontal FI and infrabony components. Conventional non-surgical and surgical approaches, including resective procedures, have shown limited long-term advantages, with tooth-survival outcomes comparable to those achieved by open flap debridement. Regenerative strategies, supported by advances in biomaterials, biologic agents, and soft tissue management, have gained increasing interest for Class II and selected Class III defects. Methods: This narrative review summarizes current evidence on regenerative and soft-tissue surgical approaches for Class II furcation defects, focusing on indications, outcomes, and underlying biologic principles. Results: Current evidence, largely derived from heterogeneous study designs, suggests regenerative procedures for Class II furcation defects may improve clinical attachment level and probing depth reduction when case selection is appropriate. Adjunctive soft tissue grafting may help support wound stability and regenerative healing, although its specific contribution remains to be established. Conclusions: Regenerative therapy appears to be a promising option for selected furcation defects, though the evidence base remains heterogeneous and partly preliminary. Soft tissue management may represent a biologically plausible adjunct to regenerative endpoints and long-term stability, but its incremental effect on true periodontal regeneration remains to be established through controlled clinical trials.

Occlusion disrupts visual tracking of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) targets and makes their reappearance difficult to predict. We propose Forward-Seed to extract the foreground occluder boundary associated with a tracked target. The method combines target-relative depth ordering, a soft forward prior, multi-ray contact seeding, front-layer geodesic growth, and internal seam refinement. The evaluation includes controlled UE4 scenes, 80 flight trials across eight real UAV scenes, and a 760-event RGB-D object-tracking subset. On the additional RGB-D test subset, the mean IoU and Boundary F1 are 0.941 and 0.869, respectively. Task-matched comparisons, component ablations, and input perturbations assess the integrated design. Combining GRU trajectory predictions with Forward-Seed boundaries produces valid exit estimates for 728 of 760 events, with a mean error of 25.8 pixels across valid estimates. In complete-pipeline comparisons with LETrack, HIPTrack, and SMSTracker, GridTrack + Forward-Seed achieves tracking-success AUCs of 0.670, 0.622, and 0.597 on UE4, real-UAV, and RGBD1K tests, respectively. It achieves the highest AUC on UE4 and real-UAV tests and ranks second to SMSTracker on RGBD1K. Its recovery rates within 0.8 s of reappearance are 91.1%, 85.4%, and 84.9%, the highest among the tested pipelines. Recovery time is measured using video timestamps and excludes processing latency. The full boundary detector requires 0.806 s per 1280 × 800 image. The results support target-conditioned boundary extraction and improved recovery in the evaluated pipelines, although broader airborne validation and faster computation are still needed.

Frosty pod rot (FPR), caused by Moniliophthora roreri, severely constrains cacao production in the Neotropics, yet evidence supporting molecular breeding for resistance remains fragmented and is often conflated with findings from witches’ broom disease. We conducted a structured critical review, not a systematic review, and classified each FPR-related claim with an author-developed, multidimensional evidence classification system (E0–E5) separating directness, genetic replication, mechanistic inference and breeding utility. The evidence supports a quantitative, partial and context-dependent architecture of resistance. The strongest QTL have been re-detected only within the Pound 7 × UF273 pedigree (E2a), and no FPR locus replicated in genetically independent material (E2b) was identified in the literature retrieved and verified. Genomic predictive ability reached 0.60–0.67 under random cross-validation within one clonal panel but averaged approximately 0.16 when models were transferred among related populations; these values answer different questions and are not directly comparable. Host and pathogen transcriptomics provide correlative evidence (E3a), and recombinant M. roreri effectors show biological activity in heterologous or cacao tissues (E3b-i), but no stable genetic manipulation altering FPR in a pod-challenge assay (E4) and no documented breeding utility (E5) were identified. We propose a Phenotyping and Reporting Guideline for FPR (PRG-FPR) and MIGGA, a modular, evidence-gated decision framework illustrated with a retrospective worked example; its effect on realised genetic gain remains to be tested.

Straw return is an important practice for replenishing soil organic matter (SOM) and recycling agricultural residues. This review synthesizes straw decomposition characteristics, drivers, and agroecological effects across China’s four major grain-producing regions. The relevant literature was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and manually selected based on their relevance to straw decomposition and associated agroecological responses. In Northeast China, low temperature and a short effective decomposition period limit straw breakdown. In the Huang-Huai-Hai region, intensive winter wheat–summer maize rotation, seasonal straw inputs, and fluvo-aquic soil properties regulate decomposition. In the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, favorable hydrothermal conditions support decomposition, while paddy–upland alternation and flooding modify decomposition pathways. In Southwest China, warm, humid conditions favor decomposition, but erosion and nutrient losses on sloping croplands can weaken long-term fertility benefits. Straw return can improve SOM accumulation, nutrient availability, soil structure, and crop productivity; however, these benefits depend on climate, soil properties, cropping systems, and management. Responses of CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O emissions also vary, particularly with soil moisture and nitrogen management. Future studies should integrate long-term field experiments, microbial ecology, carbon–nitrogen cycling, and life cycle assessment to develop region-specific straw return strategies that balance agronomic benefits and environmental risks.

Forest carbon projects have become increasingly relevant for climate mitigation, yet integrated evidence regarding their territorial distribution, governance arrangements, carbon-market performance, and environmental integrity remains limited in Peru. This study provides an integrated assessment of carbon projects implemented between 2010 and 2026 using a mixed-methods approach that combined carbon-registry records, institutional documentation, supplementary project information, and the scientific literature. The analysis evaluated project scope, geographic distribution, governance structures, land tenure, carbon-credit dynamics, co-benefits, and integrity-related risks. The results indicate that Peru’s carbon project portfolio is strongly concentrated in forest-based mitigation pathways, particularly REDD+, ecological restoration, afforestation, and agroforestry initiatives located in the Amazon region. Most projects are implemented in Indigenous territories, private lands, and forest concessions, while private and Indigenous governance arrangements predominate over collaborative or multi-stakeholder models. Patterns of carbon-credit generation and retirement indicate substantial participation in voluntary carbon markets, although market activity is highly concentrated in a small number of large Amazonian REDD+ projects. Furthermore, projects reported biodiversity conservation, ecological restoration, livelihoods, and capacity-building benefits, while concerns related to additionality, leakage, permanence, safeguard implementation, and market transparency persist. Overall, the findings suggest that the long-term effectiveness and credibility of forest carbon projects depend not only on carbon performance but also on governance quality, environmental integrity, territorial rights, transparency, and equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms.

Visible corrosion on coated steel bridge surfaces is manifested through irregular changes in color, texture, apparent roughness, and boundary morphology. RGB inspection images can record these surface appearance features, but they do not directly measure coating thickness, coating adhesion, corrosion depth, or residual structural capacity. This study therefore focuses on the pixel-level segmentation of four visible corrosion condition states—Good, Fair, Poor, and Severe—and proposes a lightweight semantic segmentation network, termed DE-YOLO26n-sem. Built on the YOLO26n semantic segmentation baseline, the network uses a stride-2 convolution to align shallow P2/4 features with the P3/8 feature scale before injecting them into the main segmentation branch. This design helps preserve corrosion boundaries and fine surface details weakened by downsampling. An efficient channel attention module then adaptively recalibrates color and texture responses without reducing the channel dimension. Training combines weighted cross-entropy, Dice loss, and auxiliary supervision. The method is evaluated on 440 pixel-annotated images from the Corrosion Condition State Semantic Segmentation Dataset v2 using a five-fold nested procedure. In each outer iteration, one-fold is reserved exclusively for testing, while architecture screening and checkpoint selection are conducted only within the remaining development data. A6, which combines scale-matched detail injection and efficient channel attention, is selected in four of the five inner screening procedures, while A4 is selected in the remaining iteration. Across the five independent outer test folds, the nested-selected configurations, comprising A6 in four folds and A4 in one fold, achieve an mIoU of 41.52% ± 0.66%, compared with 40.76% ± 0.85% for the baseline. Severe-class F1 increases from 14.10% ± 5.60% to 18.72% ± 6.20%, while pixel accuracy changes from 82.61% ± 0.71% to 82.34% ± 0.65%. In the single-seed efficiency evaluation, the model has 1.694 million parameters and requires 1.896 GFLOPs, with a forward-pass latency of 4.07 ms for a 384 × 384 image on an RTX 4070 SUPER GPU. Ablation experiments show that a direct P2 output branch and CARAFE do not provide consistent improvements; neither is included in the final network. The resulting pixel-level maps characterize the spatial distribution of visible corrosion appearances and can support digital inspection records and the prioritization of follow-up examinations. The resulting pixel-level condition maps can support digital inspection records and help identify image regions requiring follow-up examination. The predicted classes should not be interpreted as direct measurements of coating degradation, corrosion depth, section loss, residual load-carrying capacity, or remaining service life, all of which require additional material or structural measurements.

Chitin, mainly derived from marine organisms, is the second-most abundant natural polysaccharide. Notably, marine sponge-derived chitin has recently emerged as a highly promising resource due to its unique naturally pre-organized three-dimensional nanofibrous network and high purity, offering unparalleled advantages for modern biomedical engineering and advanced materials science. Generally, chitin and its derivatives have shown great application potential in the fields of biomedicine and agriculture due to their excellent biocompatibility and diverse biological activities such as antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, and antitumor properties. However, the poor solubility and structural inertia of natural chitin limit its development and utilization to a certain extent. In this review, we systemically summarized the biological activities and structural functionalization strategies of chitin, chitosan, chitooligosaccharide and their derivatives from 2020 to 2025. Then, their mechanisms of action and structure–activity relationships (SARs) were concluded. Moreover, the applications of these marine-derived biopolymers in future therapeutics and sustainable smart materials were prospected. Finally, we analyzed the current scientific challenges from laboratory research and development to large-scale application. Hopefully, we enthusiastically anticipate that this review will offer readers valuable insights and proposals on developing chitin-based effective agents in the future.