Search Results (1,499)

Humidity sensing is essential in medical fields such as respiratory support, neonatal care, sterilization, and pharmaceutical storage. However, current sensors face limitations, including slow response/recovery, low sensitivity, and poor long-term stability. To address these challenges, we developed borophene-multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) heterostructures using a stepwise in situ thermal decomposition method. The resulting humidity sensor exhibits an ultrabroad detection range (11–97% RH), ultra-high sensitivity (55,000% at 97% RH), and fast response/recovery times (10.04 s/4.8 s). Through interfacial charge-transfer engineering, the system facilitates rapid electron migration, enhances Schottky barrier modulation, and provides abundant active adsorption sites for water molecules, thereby achieving comprehensive improvement in sensing performance. It also demonstrates excellent selectivity, mechanical flexibility, and operational stability. Notably, the sensor’s sensitivity at 97% RH surpasses that of sensors based on pure borophene or MWCNT by 37–462 times, highlighting the advantages of heterostructure engineering. The multifunctionality of the device suggests its potential in areas beyond conventional sensing, including non-contact voice recognition, skin humidity mapping, and real-time breath monitoring. These results lay a solid foundation for developing borophene-MWCNT heterostructures into a high-performance platform for next-generation medical diagnostics and intelligent health monitoring. Full article

Co-created research outputs are considered the gold standard in research translation projects. It is often a requirement for gaining funding to work with affected community members and partners when working to provide resources or support communities with a lived experience of trauma. However, there is limited literature on combining a co-creation framework and trauma-informed approaches. This paper adds to these studies by describing our project, which combined co-creation with trauma-informed principles to work with potentially vulnerable communities, specifically service families who experience high family mobility (e.g., military and first responder families). The approach taken prioritised safety, trust, transparency, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, and voices of those with lived and living experiences, while also emphasising participant choice to ensure safe engagement and maintain research partner commitment. After many rounds of feedback from those with lived and living experience (over 35 initial co-creation participants), we tested the suitability of the resources on other affected community and research partners. Twelve (additional) participants provided rich feedback that was analysed using inductive thematic analysis. This included the appropriateness of the resources for the age group, the use of children’s narrative story techniques and engagement, increasing caregiver capacity and knowledge, and integration into family, educational and professional settings. We examine here potential strategies to better support this type of research and propose an improved research framework that combines co-creation and a trauma-informed approach. Although complex and time-consuming, this combined approach offers an effective means of developing targeted supports. Further testing, research and refinement with potentially vulnerable populations are needed, and successful implementation may require institutional research systems to adapt to support this approach in the future. Full article

Real-time telecom scam detection is difficult without cloud AI, particularly for privacy-sensitive, low-resource environments. We developed a lightweight, offline voice scam detector using on-device audio segmentation, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and semantic similarity. Four detection strategies were implemented. We used Whisper ASR and DeepSeek to process 5 s speech chunks. An analysis of 120 synthetic and paraphrased Mandarin phone call dialogues reveals the A4 voting strategy’s superior performance in optimizing early detection and minimizing false positives, achieving an F1 score of 0.90, a 2.5% false positive rate, and a mean response time of under 4 s. The system is deployable on ESP32 for offline mobile inference. The proposed architecture provides a robust and scalable defense against threats targeting vulnerable user groups, such as older adults. It introduces a new method for real-time voice threat mitigation on devices through interpretable segment-level semantic analysis. Full article

What does “Big Bang” mean? What was the actual origin of these two words? There are many aspects hidden under this name, which are seldom explained. They are discussed here. To frame the analysis, help will be sought from the highly authoritative voices of two exceptional writers: William Shakespeare and Umberto Eco. Both have explored the tension existing between words and the realities they name. And this includes names given to outstanding theorems and spectacular discoveries, too. Stigler’s law of eponymy is recalled in this context. These points will be at the heart of the quest here, concerning the concept of “Big Bang”, which only a few people know what it means, actually. Fred Hoyle was the first to pronounce these words, in a BBC radio program, with a meaning that was later called inflation. But listeners were left with the image he was trying to destroy: the explosion of Lemaître’s primeval atom (an absolutely wrong concept). Hoyle’s Steady State will be carefully compared with inflation cosmology. They are quite different, and yet, in both cases, the possibility of creating matter/energy out of expanding space is rooted in the same fundamental principles: those of General Relativity. As is also, the possibility of having a universe with zero total energy, anticipated by R.C. Tolman, in 1934 already. It will be shown, how to obtain accelerated expansion from negative pressure; how to reconcile energy conservation with matter creation in an expanding universe; and a curious relation between de Sitter spacetime and Steady State cosmology. Concerning the naming issue, it will be remarked that, today, the same label “Big Bang” is used in very different contexts: (a) the Big Bang Singularity; (b) as the equivalent of cosmic inflation; (c) speaking of the Big Bang cosmological model; (d) to name a very popular TV program; and more. Full article

News coverage provides an influential platform for sharing and amplifying women’s perspectives and expertise, yet women remain significantly underrepresented as sources in the news. Despite increasing awareness of the gender imbalance in news, progress has been minimal. While quantitative research has documented the dominance of male voices, there is limited understanding of the factors that may encourage or deter women from engaging with the media. The study outlined here addresses this gap by analysing qualitative survey responses from 157 Australian women experts and spokespeople. Guided by the research question, “What are women sources seeking from their initial interactions with journalists?”, this research highlights the importance of journalists’ communication in addressing women’s reservations about media engagement. By centering women’s perspectives, this study offers practical recommendations to promote gender equity in news coverage and enhance the diversity of voices represented. Full article

Various sensors are increasingly being adopted to support intelligent healthcare systems, which address the growing problem of staff shortages in assisted-living communities. In this context, detecting and assessing pain remain critical yet challenging tasks in both clinical and non-clinical settings. Traditional approaches such as self-reporting, physiological signal monitoring, and facial expression analysis often face limitations related to accessibility, equipment costs, and the need for professional support. To overcome these challenges in this work, we investigate a sensor-assisted system for pain detection and propose a lightweight framework that enables real-time classification of pain levels using acoustic sensors. Our system exploits the spectral features of voice signals that strongly correlate with pain to train Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. Our system has been validated through simulations in Jupiter Notebook and a Raspberry Pi-based hardware prototype. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed three-level pain classification approach obtains an average accuracy of 72.74%, outperforming existing methods with the same pain-level granularity by 18.94–26.74% and achieving performance comparable to that of binary pain detection methods. Our hardware prototype, built from commercial off-the-shelf components for under 100 USD, achieves real-time processing speeds ranging from approximately 6 to 22 s. In addition to CNN models, our experiments demonstrate that other machine learning algorithms, such as Artificial Neural Networks, XGBoost, Random Forests, and Decision Trees, also prove to be applicable within our pain level classification framework. Full article

How do survivors mourn when violence controls movement, speech, and public grief? This article reads lament as a political–theological practice that keeps the dead publicly addressable under forced (im)mobilities—conditions in which some are deported, disappeared, or killed while others are compelled to remain amid ruins, surveillance, and stigma. Through a comparative reading of Lamentations and Han Kang’s Human Acts, this study develops “fourth-person lament” to name a ruin-saturated address (“you”) that is relayed through multiple voices and across the boundary of death, refusing to resolve responsibility into a single speaker or a finished story. The analysis shows how lament is mediated through bodies that remain—hunger, wounds, exhaustion, unburied dead—and through spaces turned into archives of violence, so that catastrophe cannot be sealed into closure or denial. By tracing struggles over memory and affect—over who may move, who must stay, and whose deaths can appear as grievable—this article argues that lament operates as resistant passage within enforced (im)mobility: a communal and public insistence that memory, mourning, and responsibility remain open to contestation. Full article

In a context marked by polarization and diminished trust in nonviolent solutions, this article examines whether Christian political discernment can offer a viable response to the apparent inevitability of war. In light of Pope Francis’s critique of the applicability of just war reasoning amid today’s global arm’s race and advanced technology, this study investigates how Ignacio Ellacuría confronted the question of violence in El Salvador and reflects on its transnational relevance for Christian ethics in the face of contemporary conflicts. Through a close reading of Ellacuría’s philosophical and theological writings, informed by Xavier Zubiri’s philosophy, this article reconstructs the ambiguities and multiple meanings of violence that arise in situations of structural injustice and limit situations. Ellacuría’s commitment to the historical reality reveals his critique of the deficiencies of abstract or universal theories, including the appeal to legitimate defense, in favor of a praxis of discernment grounded in the lived experience of the poor. This study finds that Ellacuría locates the epistemic center of political judgment in the suffering of victims. This article concludes that Ellacuría’s provides an important contribution for renewing Christian political ethics in the 21st century by prioritizing the voices of those who suffer as the fundamental criterion for responding ethically to democratic crises and structural oppression. Full article

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek, is transforming healthcare by enhancing clinical decision-making, education, and patient interaction. This exploratory study compares the responses of ChatGPT (GPT-4.1) and DeepSeek-V2 against 90 final-year physiotherapy students in Greece on the quality of the responses to 60 clinical questions across four rehabilitation domains: low back pain, multiple sclerosis, frozen shoulder, and knee osteoarthritis (15 questions per domain). The questions spanned basic knowledge, diagnosis, alternative treatments, and rehabilitation practices. The responses were evaluated for their relevance, accuracy, clarity, completeness, and consistency with clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), emphasizing conceptual understanding. This study provides novel contributions by (i) benchmarking LLMs in physiotherapy-specific domains (low back pain, multiple sclerosis, frozen shoulder, and knee osteoarthritis) underrepresented in prior AI-health evaluations; (ii) directly comparing the LLM written response quality to student performance under exam constraints; and (iii) highlighting the improvement potential for education, complementing ChatGPT’s established role in physician decision support. The results indicate that the LLMs produced higher-quality written responses than students in most domains, particularly in the global response quality and the conceptual depth of written responses, highlighting their potential as educational aids for knowledge-based tasks, although not equivalent to clinical expertise. This suggests AI’s role in physiotherapy as a supportive tool rather than a replacement for hands-on clinical skills and asks whether GenAI could transform physiotherapy practice by augmenting, rather than threatening, human-centered care, for its potential as a knowledge support tool in education, pending validation in clinical contexts. This study explores these findings, compares them with the related work, and discusses whether GenAI will transform or threaten physiotherapy practice. Ethical considerations, limitations, and future directions, including AI voice assistants and AI characters, are addressed. Full article

Modern battlefield operations require wearable technologies to operate reliably under harsh physical, environmental, and security conditions. This review looks at today and tomorrow’s potential for ready field-grade wearables embedded with biometric authentication systems. It details physiological, kinematic, and multimodal sensor platforms built to withstand rugged, high-stress environments, and reviews biometric modalities like ECG, PPG, EEG, gait, and voice for continuous or on-demand identity confirmation. Accuracy, latency, energy efficiency, and tolerance to motion artifacts, environmental extremes, and physiological variability are critical performance drivers. Security threats, such as spoofing and data tapping, and techniques for template protection, liveness assurance, and protected on-device processing also come under review. Emerging trends in low-power edge AI, multimodal integration, adaptive learning from field experience, and privacy-preserving analytics in terms of defense readiness, and ongoing challenges, such as gear interoperability, long-term stability of templates, and common stress-testing protocols, are assessed. In conclusion, an R&D plan to lead the development of rugged, trustworthy, and operationally validated wearable authentication systems for the current and future militaries is proposed. Full article

Theologians have a moral responsibility to attend to the grave disorder in which the language of morality currently suffers. I argue that the healing of this disorder involves a morally prescribable disloyalty to the semblance of the virtue of charity. In this paper, I will review the moral blind spots and ethical inconsistencies in how the semblance of the virtue of charity is confused with the actual virtue of charity and is thus actualized inappropriately in today’s society. I will then investigate the virtue of solidarity as a prescription to help repair the potentiality of what the virtue of charity ought to be and look like. In looking to solidarity, I will turn to Ada María Isasi-Díaz’ epistemological concept of lo cotidiano as a means of practicing accountability in virtue theory and virtue practice. First, I will explore mujerista theology as an approach and why it is important to ethically attend to the voices on the margins; then, I will investigate the concept of lo cotidiano as a methodology that centers a commitment of responsibility to the other; lastly, I will turn to the virtue of solidarity and argue how attending to solidarity enhances our call to charity in an authentic and accountable way (A version of this paper was presented at the 2025 Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) in Portland, Oregon). Full article

This article examines how the early Pentecostal movement in Kerala created a liminal space for Dalits and women—groups historically marginalized by caste and patriarchy—to exercise spiritual agency and contest social hierarchies. Grounded in a Spirit-centered theology that emphasized charismatic openness and the democratization of spiritual gifts, early Pentecostalism disrupted conventional modes of authority and belonging. Drawing on Victor Turner’s theory of liminality, this study interprets this early period as a threshold moment wherein new forms of identity and communal life briefly emerged. While Pentecostalism offered a radically inclusive grammar of participation, its emancipatory potential was ultimately constrained by institutionalization and the reassertion of social norms. Nonetheless, within this fragile and contested space, Dalits and women found opportunities for voice, leadership, and embodied transformation rarely available in other ecclesial traditions. By recovering the theological and historical significance of this liminal journey, this article contributes to broader conversations on decolonial ecclesiology, Spirit-led resistance, and the ongoing tension between charisma and structure in Pentecostal movements. Full article

In terms of his reception in East Asia and the legacy of his commentaries and compendia in translation, Vasubandhu 世親 (ca. 320–400 centuries CE) is among the most important figures in the textual history of Indian Buddhism. Although perhaps best known by modern scholars through his works concerning abstruse intellectual ideas presented from the Yogācāra or mind-only and Abhidharma perspectives, his legacy is arguably best represented as an authoritative voice concerning the Pure Land of Amitāyus buddha. Both Nāgārjuna 龍樹 (ca. 150–250 CE) and Vasubandhu are considered to be patriarchs (soshi 祖師) for Jōdo Shin 浄土真宗 Buddhists, following Shinran’s 親鸞 (1173–1263) teachings. In this paper I investigate the textual history of these two Indian masters who are considered to be patriarchs by Pure Land and Shin Buddhists in Japan. No one believes these individuals transmitted some sort of true mind or essential teaching from one to another as in the Chan or Zen 禪宗 tradition; they are recognized because of fundamental texts with key ideas that are ascribed to them. These key texts were never singled out in any Chinese or Indian set of special texts, nor were they highlighted in various catalogs to the Buddhist “canon.” This research demonstrates how the sacred teachings ascribed to Vasubandhu, and to a certain extent Nāgārjuna as well, by Pure Land and Shin Buddhists reveal how and why Pure Land practices were expected to be seen as mainstream Mahāyāna Buddhism and nothing at all like a reformation for a later age. Full article

Physical Education (PE) is envisioned differently across generations, yet these perspectives can be aligned with contemporary curriculum reform. Guided by Strauss–Howe generational theory and Turkey’s 2025 Türkiye Century Education Model, this qualitative study examines lesson design preferences among teachers (Generations X and Y) and students (Generation Z). Thirty-two purposively selected participants from provinces identified by Ministry success indicators completed semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed through directed content analysis alongside thematic analysis. Findings indicate convergence on gamified, technology-supported, and individualized PE with process-oriented, fair assessment. Teachers endorse this vision while foregrounding constraints associated with infrastructure, time, space, and class size. The emergent profile mirrors the 2025 curriculum’s virtue–value–action orientation and its literacy and socio-emotional competencies. Four priorities translate the framework into implementable design: (i) multi-evidence assessment that captures performance and growth, (ii) systematic differentiation via station-based and modular activity designs, (iii) short feedback cycles coupled with structured student-voice mechanisms, and (iv) strengthened school digital infrastructure with targeted professional learning to build digital pedagogical competence. Overall, the study articulates a generationally informed, feasible architecture for PE that bears implications for curriculum development, teacher education, and school improvement. Full article

Self-supervised learning (SSL) models have achieved remarkable success in speaker verification tasks, yet their robustness to real-world audio degradation remains insufficiently characterized. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of how audio quality degradation affects three prominent SSL-based speaker verification systems (WavLM, Wav2Vec2, and HuBERT) across three diverse datasets: TIMIT, CHiME-6, and Common Voice. We systematically applied 21 degradation conditions spanning noise contamination (SNR levels from 0 to 20 dB), reverberation (RT60 from 0.3 to 1.0 s), and codec compression (various bit rates), then measured both objective audio quality metrics (PESQ, STOI, SNR, SegSNR, fwSNRseg, jitter, shimmer, HNR) and speaker verification performance metrics (EER, AUC-ROC, d-prime, minDCF). At the condition level, multiple regression with all eight quality metrics explained up to 80% of the variance in minDCF for HuBERT and 78% for WavLM, but only 35% for Wav2Vec2; EER predictability was lower (69%, 67%, and 28%, respectively). PESQ was the strongest single predictor for WavLM and HuBERT, while Shimmer showed the highest single-metric correlation for Wav2Vec2; fwSNRseg yielded the top single-metric R² for WavLM, and PESQ for HuBERT and Wav2Vec2 (with much smaller gains for Wav2Vec2). WavLM and HuBERT exhibited more predictable quality-performance relationships compared to Wav2Vec2. These findings establish quantitative relationships between measurable audio quality and speaker verification accuracy at the condition level, though substantial within-condition variability limits utterance-level prediction accuracy. Full article