Search Results (478)

Background: Social cognition research increasingly emphasizes cognitive processes in social contexts, with growing attention to socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SS-RIF). Behavioral evidence suggests that the mechanisms of SS-RIF are fundamentally aligned with those of retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). However, SS-RIF differs from RIF due to the influence of social interaction factors. This study investigated the cognitive neural mechanisms of SS-RIF, focusing on its commonalities and distinctions from RIF. Methods: Experiment 1 examined neural evidence associated with retrieval-related processes. Twenty-eight university students participated in a within-subject design including retrieval practice, social retrieval practice, and baseline conditions. Correct recall rates and P2/FN400 amplitudes were measured. Experiment 2 investigated the temporal dynamics of inhibitory mechanisms by narrowing the design to SS-RIF only, using a within-participant design with first, second, and third repetition blocks occurring within the social retrieval phase, and recall was tested across two days. Results: Classic RIF and SS-RIF effects were observed, accompanied by neural activity indicative of inhibition during both retrieval practice and social retrieval conditions. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that SS-RIF and RIF may share overlapping underlying cognitive operations. Typical RIF and SS-RIF phenomena were also observed across repetition conditions, while neural data showed no significant differences in P2 and FN400 amplitudes for SS-RIF, highlighting a distinction from patterns observed in RIF. Conclusions: Cognitive suppression accounts offer a compelling framework for explaining SS-RIF during social retrieval practice. However, compared with RIF, the duration of inhibition differs in SS-RIF. Unlike RIF, SS-RIF shows no reduction in specific EEG signal amplitudes over time. These findings provide cognitive neural evidence for inhibitory mechanisms in social retrieval and preliminary insights into the shared and distinct mechanisms of socially shared and individual RIF. Full article

Research on dialect contact often frames lexical shifts under pressure from dominant standard or prestige varieties as unidirectional replacement: supra-local forms spread and inherited local vocabulary recedes. This article re-examines that model through Northern Shaanxi Jin, a group of Jin varieties in long-term vertical contact with Standard Mandarin. The analysis draws on structured wordlists, contextual elicitation, an 810 min corpus of spontaneous speech, and a supplementary apparent-time response task with 38 younger speakers. Four domains are examined in detail: weather expressions, the hou (猴) diminutive network, the leng (冷)/liang (凉) temperature contrast, and the generalized classifier ge (个). The corpus and elicited data show that Mandarin-aligned forms have expanded, especially in reportive, institutional, cross-dialectal, and younger-peer settings. These forms, however, do not displace inherited lexical resources along a single trajectory. Local forms remain active in fixed weather and customary expressions, tactile distinctions, address and idiomatic uses, and routine nominal quantification. This pattern is analyzed as lexical stratification supported by semantic reallocation: sustained contact redistributes overlapping forms across semantic ranges, constructional environments, and interactional settings rather than producing uniform lexical replacement. Full article

Real-world home monitoring requires sensing systems that can capture daily behaviour without continuous raw-video retention or excessive user burden. However, domestic environments present irregular activity timing, fragmented human presence, asynchronous multimodal events, and privacy-sensitive data management. This study proposes an event-driven multimodal sensing and computing framework for context-aware home monitoring using stereo vision and dietary event anchoring. The framework integrates stereo RGB-based three-dimensional human motion sensing, dining-zone-triggered meal image acquisition, runtime event orchestration, timestamp-based cross-modal synchronization, privacy-aware local storage, and large-language-model-assisted dietary context interpretation. Instead of continuously recording all sensor streams, the system activates and organizes sensing through human presence detection, debounce logic, cooldown-based session control, and dining-zone occupancy events. Meal-related events are used as contextual anchors to associate motion sessions and dietary observations into synchronized behavioural episodes. The prototype was deployed for 11 consecutive days in a real kitchen–dining environment, with the stabilized real-time monitoring phase evaluated from 11 to 14 February 2026. During this phase, the system generated 26 event-driven motion sessions and 51,165 captured pose frames, of which 25,925 were valid. Sustained active sessions accounted for 30.8% of all sessions but contributed 81.5% of captured pose frames, indicating that event-driven orchestration concentrated motion data within behaviourally meaningful activity windows. Eight meal-related records were obtained, seven of which overlapped with motion sessions, resulting in 87.5% meal-event overlap coverage. Structured pose outputs required approximately 550 kB/min, corresponding to about 33 MB/h of recorded pose data. LLM-assisted meal-image interpretation achieved a mean absolute percentage error of 25.44%, supporting its use for coarse dietary-context description rather than precise nutritional quantification. However, this result is interpreted only as evidence for coarse dietary-context description and not as validation of a precise nutritional or clinical dietary assessment method. These results demonstrate the system-level feasibility of transforming irregular domestic observations into structured, temporally indexed, and privacy-aware multimodal behavioural records for future home monitoring applications. Full article

Background/Objectives: A substantial proportion of eyes with exudative macular diseases show a suboptimal response to standard-dose anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) therapy, and evidence regarding clinical outcomes after same-agent double-dose escalation remains limited. We evaluated the functional and anatomical outcomes of same-agent double-dose anti-VEGF therapy in such eyes. Methods: In this observational real-world cohort study, we retrospectively reviewed eyes with exudative macular diseases that were switched to same-agent double-dose anti-VEGF therapy because of a suboptimal response to prior standard-dose treatment. Eligibility required clinician-assessed persistent or recurrent exudative activity during the standard-dose treatment course despite at least three prior anti-VEGF injections, based on the longitudinal treatment and imaging history. Insufficient visual response and inadequate durability were considered additional, potentially overlapping features supporting dose escalation. Primary outcomes were functional and anatomical changes after switching. Secondary outcomes included injection interval, time-to-event outcomes, and associated baseline factors. Results: A total of 104 patients (111 eyes) were included. Mixed-effects modeling showed a small longitudinal improvement in BCVA of 0.007 logMAR per month (p = 0.028) and an estimated CST decrease of approximately 2.1% per month (p < 0.001). In visit-specific analyses, BCVA did not differ significantly from baseline at the first three post-switch visits and differed significantly only at the final follow-up (p = 0.004); however, the median BCVA was 0.70 logMAR at both baseline and final follow-up, and the median within-eye change was 0.00 logMAR (IQR, −0.25 to 0.10). CST was significantly lower than baseline at all post-switch visits (all p < 0.01). Among the 73 eyes with calculable paired interval data, injection intervals did not differ significantly between the standard-dose and double-dose phases (p = 0.289). Baseline pigment epithelial detachment was associated with a less favorable BCVA change (p = 0.002), and worse baseline visual acuity was associated with a higher risk of subretinal fibrosis (hazard ratio, 2.854; p = 0.002). Conclusions: In this uncontrolled pre–post cohort, anatomical changes after same-agent double-dose escalation were more consistent than functional changes. The BCVA change was statistically detectable but small in magnitude and of uncertain clinical relevance. No significant interval extension was observed among the 73 eyes with complete paired interval data during the relatively short follow-up. Full article

MARS (mineral–organic–aqueous reactor systems) theory is presented as a formal theory for planetary astrobiology, with Martian environments represented as coupled reactor–filter systems. Its central proposition holds that prebiotic synthesis, metabolic plausibility, and biosignature preservation are physically coupled, although their maxima may occur in different places, times, or mineral assemblages. Partial overlap is both allowed and expected; complete co-location is regarded as a restrictive scenario. Admissible states satisfy elemental and charge conservation, non-ideal activity relations, mineral-saturation constraints, reaction-affinity conditions, and cross-domain transport compatibility. Brines, reactive minerals, redox gradients, irradiation, burial, diagenetic overprint, impacts, volcanism, and hydrothermal alteration can therefore enhance one function while suppressing another. Time-dependent atmospheric and redox boundary conditions, cryo-thermal cycling, exogenous catalytic minerals, shock mineralogy, and post-impact hydrothermal circulation are incorporated as sign-variable controls. An illustrative reduced-state ensemble shows the internal logic of window displacement; it does not constitute a calibrated uncertainty analysis or a planet-wide simulation. The theory yields operational thresholds, observable tests, and falsifying outcomes for rover and returned-sample investigations without constituting evidence that life existed on Mars. Full article

Cooperative multi-robot exploration relies on a shared belief over teammates’ poses and maps, but bandwidth-limited radios refresh that belief only intermittently. We identify a failure mode beyond simply sending fewer messages: when robots broadcast on a common schedule, the shared belief goes stale in phase, the learned explorer acts on the same outdated information across the team, and robots herd toward the same frontiers. We call this the synchrony tax and show it is controllable at test time, without retraining. A scheduling layer over a frozen graph-attention policy fixes each robot’s broadcast rate and changes only the phase of transmissions, cutting travel by $9.8\%$ and sensing overlap by $13.2\%$ (independent replications reach $-12.9\%$). The primary contributing factor is a higher peak (not mean) team staleness, which a staleness-to-overlap bound links to redundant coverage; the benefit accordingly disappears on planners that barely use the shared belief. OW-Desync, a budget-constrained activation policy, carries even staggering to range-limited, heterogeneous channels, improving the freshness it controls while matching staggering on the task. Four-robot experiments over real WiFi reproduce the timing-to-staleness stage of the mechanism at a matched rate: across five repeated paired trials, staggering cuts the measured peak team staleness by $37\%$ (all pairs concordant, within $1.5\%$ of the predicted optimum) with the mean unchanged. Full article

Microplastic monitoring needs methods that operate directly in water with minimal sample handling. Conventional techniques such as infrared and Raman spectroscopy and pyrolysis–GC/MS provide polymer-specific information but require sample preparation and delayed laboratory analysis. We propose an optical sensor concept for real-time, in situ microplastic assessment, based on multispectral pulsed transmission in the visible range using synchronized laser-diode lines and the directly transmitted signal through an active sensor volume. After calibration on particle-free water, each particle event reduces to a water-normalized transmission whose deficit is set by geometrical beam–particle overlap and the wavelength-dependent extinction efficiency. The weak polymer absorption is represented by the Urbach-tail formalism, the refractive-index-related redirection of light by a Fresnel-based, surface- and orientation-averaged probability of direct transmission, and particle size and shape are decoupled through an effective optical length. The coupled nonlinear system is solved for the bounds of the polymer absorption coefficient per candidate geometry. Because each polymer occupies a bounded region in multi-wavelength absorption space fixed by its band gap and structural state, the method can, in principle, separate structural modifications of identical composition, such as low- and high-density polyethylene. This is a sensor concept with a model-based proof of concept, not full environmental validation. Experimental verification on real reference particles is reported separately; the present article establishes the measurement model and inversion scheme that this verification builds on. Full article

Background: Processed extracellular lipid–protein preparations require rigorous analytical characterization to determine whether their compositional profile, processing stability, and short-term cellular compatibility are preserved across storage and handling conditions. Methods: In this study, we quantitatively characterized a processed phospholipoproteic secretome-derived formulation under fresh, concentrated, cryopreserved, and lyophilized conditions. Results: Label-free quantitative proteomic analyses performed using timsTOF Pro mass spectrometry coupled to dia-PASEF acquisition identified 574 human proteins across all experimental conditions following predefined analytical quality criteria. Comparative analyses demonstrated preservation of the overall structural proteomic profile following processing and storage procedures, with retention of membrane-associated and extracellular structural proteins consistently exceeding 90% relative to the fresh reference condition. Quantitative reproducibility remained high across all experimental groups, with coefficients of variation ranging from 3.0% to 4.5% and strong inter-replicate Pearson correlations. Principal component analysis, hierarchical clustering, peptide/protein overlap analyses, and differential expression profiling demonstrated limited proteomic divergence while preserving the majority of quantified proteins within conserved abundance ranges. Complementary real-time live-cell kinetic imaging performed in non-malignant dermal-derived cells using the IncuCyte^® S3 platform demonstrated stable short-term confluence kinetics and cellular viability exceeding 92% over 48 h across all evaluated formulations. No sustained proliferative suppression or detectable morphological evidence of cytotoxicity was observed. Collectively, these findings support the preservation of compositional stability, analytical reproducibility, and short-term ex vivo cellular compatibility across defined processing and storage conditions. These integrated proteomic and kinetic datasets provide a quantitative framework for the analytical evaluation of processed extracellular phospholipoproteic preparations, while functional barrier activity, membrane incorporation, lipid raft engagement, and long-term tissue-level effects remain to be addressed in dedicated future studies. Full article

Ebola virus disease (EVD) has traditionally been considered an acute infection characterized by high mortality and severe systemic inflammation. However, growing evidence accumulated over the last decade has progressively challenged this view, demonstrating that Ebola virus may persist long after apparent clinical recovery within immune-privileged anatomical compartments, including the male genital tract, ocular tissues, central nervous system, and breast milk. Persistent viral reservoirs have been associated with prolonged RNA shedding, sexual transmission, recrudescence phenomena, and outbreak resurgence, highlighting the clinical and public health relevance of post-acute Ebola persistence. At the same time, increasing evidence suggests that EVD survivors frequently exhibit chronic inflammatory activation and long-lasting immune dysfunction. Persistent alterations involving cytokine signaling, T-cell responses, and antiviral immune regulation may contribute to incomplete viral clearance and reservoir maintenance. In this context, the potential interaction between Ebola virus persistence and HIV-associated immune dysregulation remains poorly explored despite the substantial geographical overlap between both infections in sub-Saharan Africa. This narrative review examines current evidence regarding Ebola virus persistence, immune-privileged reservoirs, survivor immune dysfunction, and persistence-associated transmission. Additionally, we discuss the biological plausibility that chronic immune activation, T-cell exhaustion, and impaired antiviral surveillance observed in people living with HIV (PWH) could theoretically influence persistence dynamics and long-term reservoir biology. Understanding these interactions may have implications for survivor monitoring, outbreak preparedness, and future research on post-acute viral reservoir diseases. Importantly, this review does not argue that HIV has been clinically established as a modifier of Ebola virus persistence. Rather, it examines Ebola virus persistence as an established post-acute phenomenon and considers whether HIV-associated immune dysregulation in people living with HIV (PWH) may represent a biologically plausible, but still untested, determinant of viral clearance and reservoir biology. Full article

Urban parks are widely regarded as healthy and sustainable urban infrastructures, yet their respiratory benefits depend on the coupling of design, behaviour, and perception rather than ambient PM concentrations alone. A multi-season daytime fair-weather panel study across five urban park space types integrated in situ PM monitoring, SOPARC-based behavior mapping (9173 users), dwell-time surveys, and inhalation-rate libraries to estimate per capita inhaled doses, while an on-site survey (n = 837) assessed perceived PM and its influence on space choice. Understory and water spaces exhibited the highest PM₁₀ and TSP concentrations, whereas waterfront areas were the cleanest; winter concentrations were elevated but preserved the same space-type ranking. Sports spaces had the most intense activity profiles (61.9% moderate-to-extreme), and understory and sports spaces supported the longest stays, with little seasonal change in either intensity or duration. Consequently, per capita PM exposure was highest in sports and understory spaces and lowest in water and waterfront spaces. Spaces that attracted more users also delivered higher per capita doses, indicating an overlap between popularity and high-dose micro-environments. Perceptually, 94.9% of users rated PM as low or relatively low in water spaces, whereas squares had the highest share of “moderate or worse” ratings (26.4%); 78.1% chose locations based on perceived air quality, despite weak or even negative correlations with measured PM. These findings reveal a design-driven exposure architecture in which space configuration organizes both PM concentrations and user behavior, while misperception can steer visitors, especially in winter, toward the very park micro-environments that deliver the highest inhaled doses. This study provides evidence for exposure-aware park design and management that can reduce respiratory risk while supporting sustainable outdoor recreation and healthier urban living. Full article

Fall-from-height (FFH) detection is a critical component in wearable safety systems, particularly in environments where high-intensity movements can lead to frequent false positives. Conventional approaches based on simple thresholding of acceleration signals often fail to reliably distinguish FFH events from non-fall activities due to overlapping signal characteristics. This paper proposes a data-driven FFH detection method that integrates multiple complementary features into a unified score-based model. The proposed approach first performs structured peak detection to extract candidate impact events while significantly reducing the number of samples requiring further processing. Each candidate is then evaluated using pre-peak structure, post-impact stability, and pressure variation, which respectively capture structural, temporal, and physical characteristics of FFH events. Based on statistical analysis, feature-wise score contributions are designed to reflect their discriminative strength, and the final FFH decision is performed using an additive scoring mechanism. This formulation enables flexible handling of ambiguous cases while preserving strong FFH characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method maintains 100% recall at the selected decision threshold while significantly reducing false positives from non-FFH activities. In addition, the peak detection stage reduces more than 99% of raw samples, enabling efficient on-device processing suitable for wearable systems. The proposed method also includes quantitative analysis of latency characteristics. Although FFH inference latency is influenced by asynchronous pressure sensing, the delay remains bounded and predictable, and most detections are completed within a practical time range for real-time wearable safety applications. Overall, the proposed method achieves a practical balance between detection sensitivity, false-positive suppression, computational efficiency, and real-time feasibility, demonstrating its applicability to wearable safety systems. Full article

OpenWorld Role-Playing Games (OWRPGs) differ from other video game genres in that they offer players vast digital landscapes and significant freedom: they can fight, use diplomacy, play stealthily, or pursue activities like farming or trading. This player autonomy creates a space rich in unintended consequences, incidental learning being just one. A study of higher education (HE) students explored this phenomenon. While existing research on incidental learning in games focuses mainly on language acquisition, the current study argues that commercial OWRPGs have the same educational power as purpose-built learning games, and that the scope of incidental learning is far broader than previously examined. Using a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) approach, 25 semi-structured interviews were conducted and written gaming journals collected from 11 additional participants. All 36 participants played OWRPGs in their leisure time. The analysis identified 34 distinct forms of incidental learning, with language acquisition being just one. These were grouped into three categories: self-improvement, academic, and employability skills, with considerable overlap between each. This study shows that OWRPGs can act as a setting for incidental learning in skills over and above lexical improvement. As a result, it is suggested that future research analyse in further depth the skills this research has discovered, looks for further skills that may be honed via incidental learning, and examine other video game genres to highlight any forms of incidental learning that occur. Full article

Construction site fires caused by spatiotemporal overlaps between hot work (ignition sources) and combustible substances remain a critical concern. The traditional method identifies fire hazards based on the intersections among hot works and other works with combustible substances. However, the intersections between hot work and built elements containing combustible materials are ignored, which can also lead to fire accidents. In addition, the detection of such intersections relies on the computationally intensive proximity search from the ignition source to the potential combustible substances, resulting in a long-time calculation in large construction projects with the dynamic construction process. To address this limitation, this study proposes a voxel-based fire hazard identification method applicable to large 4D-BIM models, fast and accurately. By discretizing BIM into reusable LEGO voxels, both the construction activities and the building components can be mapped to the voxels, enabling a simultaneous intersection identification between ignition sources and both activities and BIM elements. In addition, voxel-based proximity searching is efficient, enabling a fast and accurate fire hazard identification. Validation tests demonstrate high accuracy with calculatable spatial error (maximum 0.57 m for 200 mm voxels) and superior efficiency (126–1368% faster than mesh-based methods). By reusing the voxelized BIM data, the speed can be enhanced by between 400% and 1975%. This method offers an efficient and reliable digital solution for proactive construction fire safety management in 4D-contexts. Full article

Three entropic functions are used to characterize the seismic activity prior and after the major $M_w$8.8 earthquake of Maule (Chile) dated on 27 February 2010. Shannon entropy, mutability, and Tsallis entropy are calculated globally on the seisms extracted from the catalog of the National Center of Seismology (Chile). Calculations are done both globally on the whole data and also dynamically on windows of different number of seisms after filtering data with a Gutenberg–Richter analysis. The data are time series based on two observables: seism magnitudes and inter-event intervals. It is found that the two entropies and mutability give similar descriptions on the different regimes present between 2005 and 2022. However, mutability can be calculated in a direct and straightforward way. It is also found that the results for inter-event intervals produce more contrast between periods than the corresponding ones for magnitudes. The region spanning six degrees in latitude is split in five overlapping subzones of two degrees each. This allows us to find the way the rupture takes place: from south to north, for about 400 km. Full article

Full-physics reservoir simulation for CO₂ storage becomes computationally expensive when many operational schedules must be screened, motivating machine-learning (ML) surrogates that reduce simulation burden while preserving the essential physics-driven response. We propose an activity-based partitioning methodology that produces an interpretable applicability map, identifying regions where surrogate substitution is expected to be reliable and regions where highly active dynamics make it unsafe. In this work, we focus exclusively on the slow-varying region and develop proxy models for pressure and saturation time derivatives in that domain. The fast-varying region is intentionally excluded, and no fully coupled hybrid simulator is claimed at this stage. The partition is constructed from temporal changes in derivative signals and aggregated across multiple schedules to obtain a conservative, scenario-robust delineation. For slow cells, local stencil-based neural proxies leverage overlapping time windows and features describing the local state, schedule forcing, and injector influence. Because saturation derivatives in the slow region are strongly zero-inflated, with many cells remaining outside the advancing CO₂ plume for long periods, a two-stage strategy is adopted: first detecting whether meaningful change occurs and then predicting the derivative magnitude only when active, with additional smoothing to suppress near-zero artifacts. The framework also supports selective surrogate deployment over user-selected time windows. The objective is therefore to establish a conservative zone of applicability for derivative-based ML updates, rather than to demonstrate full simulator replacement or end-to-end coupled acceleration. In the case study, 5914 of the 8243 grid blocks evaluated by the proxy workflow were classified as slow-varying, corresponding to 71.7% of the evaluated proxy-analysis domain. For the blind schedule, full-rollout pressure reconstruction produced mean absolute errors of 5.34, 3.69, and 2.80 psi over early, middle, and late time-window groups, respectively. In a future coupled implementation using the same partition, these 5914 cells could be advanced by the ML proxy, while the remaining dynamically active or unsupported cells would remain under full-physics treatment. This would reduce the full-physics active-cell count from 9212 to 3298 in the future coupled setting, although direct wall-clock acceleration remains to be quantified after simulator integration. Full article