Search Results (4,384)

In this paper, silver oxide (AgO) and copper oxide (CuO) coatings are placed on a single sputtering target with the direct-current magnetron sputtering (DCMS) and high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HIPIMS) methods. All the tested coatings are obtained in a reactive process using a metallic target made by the Kurt Lesker company. The investigated coatings are deposited at room temperature on substrates made of pure iron (ARMCO) and polypropylene (PP) without substrate polarization. The deposition time for all the coatings is the same. The results of SEM and TEM investigations clearly show that using the HIPIMS method for the deposition of AgO and CuO coatings reduces their thickness and increases their structure density. Coatings produced with the HIPIMS method are characterized by a higher hardness and Young’s modulus. The value of hardness for AgO and CuO coatings deposited by the HIPIMS method is around 50% higher for AgO coatings and around 24% higher for CuO coatings compared to the coatings obtained by the DC method. This is also true of Young’s modulus values, which are around 30% higher for AgO coatings and 15% higher for CuO coatings produced by the HIPIMS method compared to those of coatings obtained with the DC method. AgO and CuO coatings deposited with both the methods (HIPIMS and DCMS) showed 100% reduction in the viability of two reference laboratory bacteria strains—Escherichia coli (Gram−) and Staphylococcus aureus (Gram+)—on both types of substrates. Additionally, these coatings are characterized by their hydrophobic properties, which means that they can create a protective barrier, making it difficult for bacteria to stick to the surface, limiting their development and preventing the phenomenon of biofouling. The HIPIMS technology allows for the deposition of coatings with better mechanical properties than those produced with the DCMS method, which means that they are more resistant to brittle fractures and wear and have very good antimicrobial properties. Full article

A compact fork-shaped four-element multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system with wide bandwidth for 5G millimeter-wave (mmWave) applications is presented. The antenna elements are arranged orthogonally to achieve a compact footprint of $20\times 26{\mathrm{mm}}^2$. To enhance the gain, a frequency selective surface (FSS) is placed above the MIMO system, providing an average gain improvement of 1.5 dB across the entire operating band and achieving a peak gain of 7.5 dB at 41 GHz. The proposed design operates in the Ka-band (22–46 GHz), making it well suited for 5G communications. The antenna exhibits an isolation greater than 20 dB and radiation efficiency exceeding 80% across the band. Moreover, key MIMO performance metrics, including diversity gain (DG ≈ 10) and envelope correlation coefficient (ECC < 0.05), meet the required standards. A prototype of the proposed system was fabricated and measured, with the experimental results showing good agreement with simulations. Full article

Pertussis is an infectious disease that contributes to hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide each year. Despite the prevalence of preventive vaccination programs, there has been an increasing number of new cases of the disease over the past few decades. This poses a particular problem for the pediatric population among whom the highest mortality from the disease is recorded. Several reasons for this phenomenon can be mentioned, but what is particularly important from the microbiological point of view is the correlation of the increased number of pertussis cases with the introduction of a new form of vaccine—the acellular vaccine in place of the whole-cell vaccine. In this review, we summarized the current state of knowledge on potential factors that may contribute to the decline in immunization efficacy against the pathogen. The post-vaccination response profile, symptomatic of vaccination with vaccination-acellular, is characterized by recruitment of Th₂ and Th₁₇ lymphocytes; it has been reported that in the long term, this results in insufficient activation of B cells and low titers of antibodies to key bacterial antigens (hemagglutinin, pertactin). Moreover, the immune response proceeds by bypassing the recruitment of tissue-resident memory T cells, resulting in a lack of protection against colonization of the nasal cavity by the bacterium despite vaccination. The decline in vaccination efficacy should also be attributed to the phenotypic variability of Bordetella. The popularization of the PtxP3 strain, characterized by its ability to incompletely activate immune mechanisms, poses a real threat to public health. The growing resistance of B. pertussis to standardly used antibiotics including macrolides also remains a problem. This makes it difficult to eradicate pathogens from the nasal cavity area and increases the pool of bacterial carriers in the population area. The increasing prevalence of the disease prompts reflection on more effective methods of prevention. Particularly promising in this field seem to be new vaccines, especially mucosally implemented, e.g., intranasal, or developed on the basis of B. pertussis antigens other than those used so far. Full article

Cultural heritage sites play a crucial role in safeguarding identity, fostering cultural exchange, and generating sustainable tourism. Within this context, the Palace Museum in Beijing, which attracts 19 million annual visitors, offers a compelling case for examining the dynamics that shape revisit intention. This study explores the relationships among perceived authenticity, place attachment, destination satisfaction, visitor engagement, and revisit intention within the context of heritage tourism. Using Partial Least Squares–Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), data were collected from local visitors to the Palace Museum to analyze both the direct and mediating effects of these constructs. Findings indicate that perceived authenticity significantly enhances both destination satisfaction and visitor engagement, while place attachment makes a strong contribution to visitor engagement. Moreover, visitor engagement emerged as a more influential mediator than destination satisfaction in linking perceived authenticity to revisit intention, showing the importance of immersive and meaningful participation in shaping tourists’ behavioral intentions. These results suggest that while satisfaction remains a relevant concept, strategies that emphasize authenticity-driven experiences and fostering of deeper emotional and participatory bonds are more effective in sustaining revisits. This study advances the understanding of heritage tourism and provides practical insights for managing iconic heritage sites such as the Palace Museum. Full article

The pursuit of a comprehensive understanding of human consciousness, which includes the subjective experience of perception, is a long-standing endeavor. A multitude of disciplines have sought to elucidate and define consciousness, with a particular emphasis on its etiology. What is the cause of consciousness? One particularly eye-opening idea is that humans attempt to identify the source of consciousness by leveraging their own consciousness, as if something is attempting to elucidate itself. Strikingly, the results of brain-imaging experiments indicate that the brain processes a considerable amount of information outside conscious awareness of the organism in question. Perhaps, the vast majority of decision making, thinking, and planning processes originate from non-conscious brain processes. Nevertheless, consciousness is a fascinating phenomenon, and its intrinsic nature is both intriguing and challenging to ascertain. In the end, it is not necessarily given that consciousness, in particular the phenomenon of perception as the subjective experience it is, is a tangible function or process in the first place. This is why it must be acknowledged that this theoretical paper is not in a position to offer a definitive solution. However, it does present an interesting new concept that may at least assist future research and potential investigations in achieving a greater degree of elucidation. The concept is founded upon a physical (mathematical) phenomenon known as stochastic resonance. Without delving into the specifics, it is relatively straightforward to grasp one of its implications, which is employed here to introduce a novel direction regarding the potential for non-conscious information within the human brain to become conscious through the introduction of noise. It is noteworthy that this phenomenon can be visualized through a relatively simple approach that is provided in the frame of this paper. It is demonstrated that a completely white image is transformed into an image depicting clearly recognizable content by the introduction of noise. Similarly, information in the human brain that is processed below the threshold of consciousness could become conscious within a neural network by the introduction of noise. Thereby, the noise (neurophysiological energy) could originate from one or more of the well-known activating neural networks, with their nuclei being located in the brainstem and their axons connecting to various cortical regions. Even though stochastic resonance has already been introduced to neuroscience, the innovative nature of this paper is a formal introduction of this concept within the framework of consciousness, including higher-order perception phenomena. As such, it may assist in exploring novel avenues in the search for the origins of consciousness and perception in particular. Full article

Traditions in connection with foods do not just refer to the kinds of food consumed, but also to the place and society they originated from and the ways the items to be consumed were obtained and prepared. There is a tendency to believe that what people ate in former times was more natural, nutritionally superior and generally healthier than what we include in our diets nowadays. Although this is true for some foods, it is not correct for all foods and one needs to be critical and accept that even in the past some, dangerously unhealthy and nutritionally deficient food items and diets existed and that in our modern society we avoid various foods for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, in addition to age-old methods to preserve foods and make them palatable, we developed new ways to increase the shelf life of our food products and learned to improve taste and quality of some of our foods. Some dishes and ingredients are used to highlight important occasions and commemorative events. This paper critically evaluates the nutritional and cultural significance of traditional foods and explores the factors influencing their acceptance or rejection among contemporary consumers. By re-evaluating the cultural and nutritional roles of traditional foods, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions on health, identity, and sustainability in the global food landscape. Moreover, it functions as a conceptual lens to help decide which of the traditional foods and beverages to keep, modify, or discard. Full article

Existing clinical assessments of Parkinson’s disease (PD) primarily focus on stratifying symptom severity or progression rate, which limits their ability to capture changes in functional mobility—an important factor in evaluating rehabilitation outcomes. To address this gap, we developed a novel methodology, the Functional Mobility Assessment for Parkinson’s (FMA-P), which integrates motion capture and pressure-sensitive gait analysis to explore key aspects of functional mobility. Study 1. To develop the FMA-P, we conducted a pilot study involving 12 individuals with PD and 12 age-matched healthy controls, who each completed the FMA-P sequence three times. The sequence included the following tasks: rising from a chair, walking through a doorway, turning, bending to pick up and place an object, and returning to a seated position. Results from Study 1 demonstrated that the FMA-P is a sensitive tool for identifying functional impairments in PD. In particular, significant differences between people with Parkinson’s (PwP) and controls were observed during chair rise (higher peak trunk inclination, p = 0.006; lower mean trunk jerk, p = 0.003) and turning task (longer task duration, p = 0.026 and lower mean heel strike angle, p = 0.007), providing critical insights into postural stability. Study 2. To assess changes in functional mobility over time, we conducted a 12-week repeated-measures intervention study with 12 participants with PD. Results from Study 2 indicated notable improvements in turning stability and balance. Participants demonstrated reduced turning time (p = 0.006) and increased yaw rotation in the head (p = 0.001), trunk (p = 0.002), and pelvis (p = 0.012). In contrast, no significant changes were observed in standard clinical measures (i.e., Timed Up and Go and task duration). The FMA-P offers fine-grained insights into movement quality, making it a valuable tool for early diagnosis, monitoring intervention efficacy, and guiding rehabilitation strategies in individuals with PD. Full article

Border surveillance, as a critical component of national security, places increasingly stringent demands on the target perception capabilities of video monitoring systems, especially in wide-area and complex environments. To address the limitations of existing systems in low-confidence target detection and multi-camera collaboration, this paper proposes a novel visual enhancement method for cooperative control of multiple PTZ (Pan–Tilt–Zoom) cameras based on hierarchical reinforcement learning. The proposed approach establishes a hierarchical framework composed of a Global Planner Agent (GPA) and multiple Local Executor Agents (LEAs). The GPA is responsible for global target assignment, while the LEAs perform fine-grained visual enhancement operations based on the assigned targets. To effectively model the spatial relationships among multiple targets and the perceptual topology of the cameras, a graph-based joint state space is constructed. Furthermore, a graph neural network is employed to extract high-level features, enabling efficient information sharing and collaborative decision-making among cameras. Experimental results in simulation environments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of target coverage and visual enhancement performance. Hardware experiments further validate the feasibility and robustness of the approach in real-world scenarios. This study provides an effective solution for multi-camera cooperative surveillance in complex environments. Full article

In his 1926 “Criteria of Negro Art,” W.E.B. Du Bois advocates for art’s role in the quest for liberation while acknowledging the challenges facing the creation of Black art, observing, “We can go on the stage; we can be just as funny as white Americans wish us to be; we can play all the sordid parts that America likes to assign to Negroes; but for anything else there is still small place for us.” He elaborates, “As it is now we are handing everything over to a white jury.” Almost 100 years later, the issues Du Bois raises about Black art, the quest for Black freedom, and the structures of white supremacy that stymie this striving remain troublingly relevant for contemporary Shakespearean performance. As scholars have noted, complex challenges (the Shakespeare system, capitalist pressures, etc.) continue to make contemporary American Theater, and Shakespeare within it, “still a small space” for Black artists. In the face of these forces, what can and does resistance look like for Black artists within predominantly white theatrical spaces? Here, I tackle this question, thereby continuing the scholarly interrogation of the relationship between contemporary Shakespeare performance, race, and social justice. I turn to a recent lauded adaptation of Shakespeare that, in its move from local theater to Broadway, inevitably had to engage with the structures of American theater’s (and Shakespeare’s) racial capitalism—James Ijames’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Fat Ham (2021). Fat Ham, I contend, tackles head on the historical racial scripts imposed on Black subjects and, through a range of adaptive moves, exposes and resists them, offering counterscripts that insist on the personal and interpersonal complexity and flourishing of Black subjectivity. Full article

This article explores a participatory and Geomedia-based approach to urban planning through the concept of place design. Place design as an approach emphasises the integration of collective knowledge, sociocultural values, and digital representation into planning processes. The integration of Geomedia studies further enriches this approach by examining how media technologies influence spatial experiences, representations, and power relations. By introducing place design as a transformative and participatory approach, physical, digital, and social dimensions of place bridge heritage and future aspirations. Through case studies from Kristinehamn, Sunne, and Sysslebäck in Sweden, the article examines methods for in-depth interviewing, capturing diverse representations. The article advocates for a participatory planning approach, establishing the groundwork for more democratic, inclusive, and context-aware development. It concludes by urging urban planners to adopt working methods that respond to the complexity of place, people and technology, promote new ways of thinking and working with design, and make a clear shift from planning for places to designing with people and places. Full article

In Bayesian analysis, testing for linearity requires placing a prior to the entire space of potential regression functions. This poses a problem for many standard tests, as assigning positive prior probability to such a hypothesis is challenging. The Full Bayesian Significance Test (FBST) sidesteps this issue, standing out for also being logically coherent and offering a measure of evidence against H 0 , although its application to nonparametric settings is still limited. In this work, we use Gaussian process priors to derive FBST procedures that evaluate general linearity assumptions, such as testing the adherence of data and performing variable selection to linear models. We also make use of pragmatic hypotheses to verify if the data might be compatible with a linear model when factors such as measurement errors or utility judgments are accounted for. This contribution extends the theory of the FBST, allowing for its application in nonparametric settings and requiring, at most, simple optimization procedures to reach the desired conclusion. Full article

The concept behind this undertaking was to create environmentally friendly and sustainable air-conditioning systems supported by energy storage units, as well as to conduct comparative calculations of investment and operational costs to assess their economic viability. In order to meet sustainability requirements, detailed analysis was followed by a decision to utilise cold storage units in which energy is stored through the phase change of water into ice. Aiming to achieve high efficiency, strong reliability and enhanced operational dynamics, a multi-circuit model for coolant flow was developed, incorporating a variable-speed compressor drive. High functionality and performance were attained through the introduction of container vibrations, which resulted in the formation of ice slurry particles in spherical containers placed within an aqueous glycol solution serving as the heat exchange medium. The concept of this technology, along with its accompanying mathematical models, was validated, and the results of this work are presented in the article. To evaluate the competitiveness of air-conditioning systems, the developed solution based on cold storage technology is compared with a lithium-ion battery system and a conventional configuration powered directly by the grid. The results demonstrate that the cold-storage-based air-conditioning system outperforms both reference systems in terms of energy efficiency. An analysis of the full operational cycle indicates that the proposed solution consumes significantly less energy than systems using lithium-ion battery storage. The investment costs are almost twenty percent lower, while service, maintenance and disposal expenses are negligible. These attributes make it a competitive solution that is both economically and environmentally sustainable. In summary, the proposed technology fully satisfies the key principles of sustainability. It does not deplete natural resources, minimises the environmental impact, offers long-term reliability and contributes to lower energy bills and more responsible resource use. Full article

Propellers are essential aerodynamic components widely used in aerospace engineering, marine vessels, and aerial platforms. With the growing demand for high-thrust electric unmanned aerial vehicles, greater emphasis is being placed on improving propeller aerodynamic performance and efficiency to enhance flight endurance and payload capacity. Traditional design methods, mostly based on blade element theory, simplify the blade into two-dimensional planar elements, making it difficult to accurately capture the three-dimensional streamline characteristics during rotation. This mismatch between geometric design and actual flow limits further improvements in propulsion efficiency. This paper proposes a two-dimensional airfoil body-fitted design method to address this limitation. This method is based on blade element theory and vortex theory to obtain the chord length and pitch angle distribution under specific operating conditions. Based on these distributions, each blade element is bent to fit a virtual cylindrical surface at the corresponding position. This ensures that all points on the two-dimensional airfoil are equidistant from the hub center. The proposed design method is validated through numerical simulations. The results show that the propeller designed with the body-fitted method improves efficiency by 4.2% compared with the one designed using blade element theory. This work provides a new technical approach for propeller design and has practical value for improving propeller efficiency. Full article

Conventional fish population sampling methods such as electrofishing and netting, pose risks to fish and are often restricted to small, shallow headwater streams—especially where endangered species may be present. Additionally, non-capture surveying (e.g., snorkelling) can disturb fish and make observation more challenging. This study evaluates the effectiveness and reproducibility of remote underwater video (RUV) surveys in a shallow (<0.5 m deep), freshwater stream. Additionally, fish response to disturbances (e.g., shadows, noise, surface disruptions) were characterized. Fish abundance was estimated by maxN (maximum number of individuals observed in a single frame) and used multiple cameras placed in the same habitat (pool). Findings indicated a high consistency in maxN when fish numbers were low (<5 individuals), with increasing variability at higher numbers (>15 individuals). This suggests that single camera setups can reliably detect minimum abundance. Fish responses to four disturbances (e.g., shadows, noise, surface disruptions, mink) were noted throughout. Typically, these responses were short-lived, with fish returning to pre-disturbance maxN values within minutes, with the most significant response to researcher-induced disturbance occurring immediately after RUV deployment. Overall, RUVs proved effective for passive, non-capture fish monitoring in shallow, sensitive habitats, producing replicable data with minimal impact caused by researcher disturbance. This technique can be added to our toolboxes for studying small-bodied fishes in challenging environments. Full article

Primary spinal cord tumors are rare neoplasms representing 2–4% of central nervous system tumors. Despite their low incidence, their impact on neurological function is profound. Historically, tumor classification and management have relied primarily on histopathology. However, advances in molecular diagnostics have highlighted the critical role of genetic alterations in tumor behavior, prognosis, and treatment response. This narrative review summarizes current evidence on genetic mutations in primary intramedullary spinal cord tumors, focusing on their prognostic value and implications for clinical management. Emphasis is placed on the integration of genetic features into diagnostic criteria and clinical practice, as distinct molecular profiles define many spinal cord tumor subtypes. Integration of molecular diagnostics into spinal cord tumor management represents a paradigm shift from morphology-based to biology-driven practice. Genetic alterations inform prognosis, refine risk stratification, and increasingly guide therapeutic decision-making, including the use of targeted therapies and adjuvant radiation. Despite progress, challenges remain due to the rarity of these tumors, small sample sizes, and limited access to molecular testing. Ultimately, molecular precision promises to enhance survival and quality of life for patients with these rare but impactful tumors. Full article