Search Results (2,414)

Background/Objectives: The stability of complete dentures is strongly influenced by the biomechanical properties of the oral mucosa, whose heterogeneity results in non-uniform load distribution, while its clinical evaluation remains predominantly qualitative. This article proposes a theoretical differential hypothesis aimed at providing a conceptual mathematical framework for interpreting the relationship between mucosal resilience and load distribution in complete dentures. Methods: The denture-mucosa system was represented along a one-dimensional coordinate, defining resilience R(x) and pressure P(x) as continuous functions related by a first-order differential equation, interpreted through elementary principles of differential calculus. Results: A theoretical simulation based on physiological parameters (F = 50 N, Young’s modulus 19.75 MPa, R = 2 mm) highlights that areas of thinner mucosa tend to behave as stress concentration points, while spatial variability of resilience generates deformation gradients potentially associated with prosthetic instability. Conclusions: The model, although simplified and non-predictive, provides a coherent interpretative framework and can support the integration of biomechanical parameters into clinical reasoning and prosthetic planning. No clinical recommendations should be derived from this model until experimental validation has been performed. Full article

Background/Objectives: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) represent a growing public health concern. Both disorders are driven by mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, impaired autophagy, neuroinflammation, and neuronal loss. Single-target therapeutics have failed to halt disease progression, highlighting the need for multi-target interventions that address the complex and interconnected nature of neurodegeneration. Natural health products (NHPs) such as curcumin (CUR), coenzyme-Q10 (CoQ10), and Ashwagandha (ASH) possess antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective, and neurotrophic properties that may collectively address this complex pathology. However, poor bioavailability and hydrophobicity have limited clinical translations. Novel formulations, including nanomicellar Ubisol-Q10 (UQ) and water-solubilized ASH (PTS-ASH), have demonstrated enhanced metabolic uptake and neuroprotective efficacy in preclinical models. Moreover, co-administered NHPs, such as CUR + CoQ10 and CoQ10 + ASH, may provide further benefits by diversified targeting of disease pathways. Methods: This review presents an integrative interpretation of a combined UQ + ASH “tonic” in transgenic AD and paraquat-induced PD animal models using previously published qualitative immunohistochemical and functional results. This report constructs a proposed mechanistic model illustrating how these compounds may interact across multiple stages of disease AD and PD progression. Results: Based on comprehensive interpretation of the previous published reports, consistent trends suggest UQ stabilizes mitochondrial energetics and suppresses oxidative damage upstream, whereas ASH promotes downstream repair and synaptic modulation. Combined administration remained as providing balanced neuroprotective and functional outcomes. Conclusions: These interpretations of published reports and proposed mechanistic models aim to improve the translation and support the therapeutic potential of multi-component natural interventions for neurodegenerative diseases and highlight the importance of bioavailability-enhancing formulations in future preclinical and clinical research. Full article

Multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on electronic speed controllers (ESCs) that decode motor commands from pulse-width modulation (PWM) signals, making the flight-controller-to-ESC command path a physical-layer attack surface for intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI). This paper presents a mechanism-based analysis of IEMI attacks that induce motor stoppage in UAV brushless DC motor controllers. We develop a timing-error model in which a sinusoidal disturbance on the PWM line shifts the detected edge instants and drives the decoded pulse width into stop-equivalent regimes, and we show that the disturbance reaching the ESC’s thresholding node is shaped by a frequency-selective cascade of the PWM cable’s coupling response and the ESC’s input-path transfer function. We experimentally characterize this model on five commercial ESCs through conducted and radiated injection. The measured thresholds differ by more than an order of magnitude across ESCs and are reordered between frequency bands and injection modes; comparing conducted and radiated results allows us to attribute these differences primarily to the cable coupling response and reveals cases where it either hides or amplifies an ESC’s susceptibility. The susceptible frequency also shifts with PWM cable length in qualitative agreement with transmission-line resonance, confirming that observed radiated susceptibility reflects the joint design of ESC and cable rather than a single intrinsic property. The cable lengths examined here (45–125 cm) are longer than those of compact multirotors and were chosen to place resonances within our antenna’s band; we discuss the implications of this choice and identify shorter, deployment-realistic cables as a priority for future work. Full article

Discussion of consciousness and artificial intelligence has hitherto focused on the question of whether a large language model (LLM) exhibits signs of consciousness or understanding. This paper proposes to redirect attention elsewhere: not to the model itself, but to the orchestrating layer that governs the model—the backend, understood here as the collection of mechanisms (context management, retrieval, evaluation, planning, and tool-use control) that structure the model’s operation. We argue that the backend performs a function functionally analogous to the role of consciousness in the human brain: it stabilizes generative processes, directs attention, maintains context, and mitigates the entropic disintegration of thought. Consciousness fulfills this function through the phenomenal layer—qualia—which creates a persistent subjective “inner canvas”, used here as a metaphor for a more general multimodal phenomenal space. The backend fulfills it only algorithmically, without phenomenal quality. We further show that computation is an informationally conservative process in the sense of Shannon’s Data Processing Inequality (DPI), and therefore cannot increase Shannon information, even though it may yield novel or pragmatically useful recombinations of existing information. We conclude by proposing the hypothesis that consciousness constitutes a phenomenon orthogonal to computation—not an emergent property of complexity, but a qualitative leap into a different dimension. This hypothesis, which builds on the author’s prior work in this Special Issue and in Symmetry, is presented as a conceptual contribution rather than a formal theory, and may have implications for how future artificial intelligence research conceptualizes the limits of computational architectures. Full article

Intellectual property reasoning depends on the interaction of factual context, doctrinal tests, exceptions, evidentiary uncertainty, and regulatory objectives. These features make patent, copyright, and trademark analysis difficult to support through text-level processing or isolated rule encoding. This article proposes a bounded DIKWP-guided semantic modeling framework for representing selected intellectual property reasoning patterns as queryable semantic structures. The framework is conceptual and design-oriented; it is specified at the design level through a formal graph characterization of DIKWP, a modular ontology fragment, rule schemas, SPARQL-style queries, and worked examples from patent, copyright, and trademark reasoning. Methodologically, the study uses a qualitative legal-informatics design approach. The three IP domains are selected because they represent complementary reasoning patterns: claim-element correspondence and equivalence screening in patent law, expression and exception analysis in copyright law, and factor-based confusion assessment in trademark law. The examples are used to derive semantic entities, relations, rule-linked structures, uncertainty annotations, explanation paths, and human-review triggers. DIKWP is treated not as a complete legal ontology or autonomous adjudicator, but as a network-structured meta-architecture for coordinating data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and purpose in reviewable legal decision support. The article illustrates how selected IP reasoning patterns can be represented in forms that remain traceable to legal sources and open to human review. It does not claim empirical validation, jurisdiction-specific doctrinal completeness, or autonomous legal decision-making. Its contribution is to specify how semantic legal representation can be made more operational, auditable, and institutionally constrained in the intellectual property domain. Full article

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is sustained by coordinated interactions among malignant hepatocytes, immune cells, and stromal populations that collectively drive tumor growth, immune evasion, and vascular remodeling. Using integrative single-cell transcriptomics on 93,032 cells from tumor and healthy human liver, we characterized cell-type-specific transcriptional programs underlying immunometabolic reprogramming and reconstructed the intercellular communication circuits that maintain the tumor microenvironment. Malignant hepatocytes displayed upregulation of genes encoding both glycolytic and oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) metabolic enzymes, consistent with metabolic plasticity, while concurrently suppressing genes involved in antigen presentation—a transcriptional pattern indicative of coordinated metabolic and immune-evasive reprogramming. Tumor-associated macrophages acquired TREM2-enriched, lipid-handling phenotypes consistent with immunosuppressive polarization, and tumor endothelial cells upregulated angiocrine and extracellular matrix programs while silencing innate immune outputs. Ligand–receptor inference revealed a qualitative rewiring of intercellular communication: the antigen-presentation-centered network of the healthy liver was replaced by a tumor-driven architecture dominated by pro-angiogenic, ECM–integrin, inflammatory chemokine, and lipid-associated signaling circuits, with malignant hepatocytes, TAMs, and TECs collectively assuming the dominant signaling burden. These findings establish that HCC progression is an emergent property of a stabilized multicellular network, rather than the autonomous behavior of malignant cells, and define cooperative immunometabolic modules that constitute tractable targets for combinatorial therapeutic intervention. Full article

Conductive silicone interfaces are promising polymeric materials for wearable bioelectronic systems because they combine electrical continuity with elastomeric compliance, environmental durability, and moldability. In low-voltage wearable microcurrent interfaces, however, functional performance is governed not only by intrinsic material conductivity, but also by conductive network continuity, molded geometry, interfacial contact, and transient electrical response. In this study, we developed a spike-structured conductive silicone interface using a commercially available electrically conductive two-component silicone rubber and investigated its structure–electrical property relationships as a volume-resistive polymer interface. The interface consisted of a conductive silicone body with protrusions 7 mm in height and 3.6 mm in diameter, supported by a 1 mm base layer and electrically integrated through an Ag-paste-connected upper conduction region. Using a representative electrode-level resistance of 47.08 Ω, the geometry-derived apparent interfacial resistive response was estimated as 18.0 Ω·cm for the three-spike configuration and 24.0 Ω·cm for the four-spike configuration. The corresponding effective conductive areas were 0.305 cm² and 0.407 cm², respectively, giving analytical current-density amplification factors of 9.82 and 7.37 relative to a planar 3 cm² reference interface. Positional resistance mapping yielded an overall mean resistance of 47.80 ± 4.57 Ω, indicating acceptable electrical reproducibility across the structured conductive silicone interface. In addition, oscilloscope-based transient response analysis under a 5 V, 1 kHz square-wave input showed that the conductive silicone interface maintained the overall pulse waveform while showing a modest reduction in overshoot from 3.4 ± 0.1% to 2.7 ± 0.1%, with FFT traces used as qualitative waveform-monitoring displays. Formulation-dependent comparison further showed that increasing the silicone-rich fraction increased the measured resistance from 105 Ω to 145 Ω, whereas increasing conductive carbon loading reduced resistance but aggravated surface transfer. These results show that the conductive silicone interface functions not simply as a soft conductor, but as a volume-resistive, geometry-defined current-transfer medium whose behavior is governed by the coupled effects of conductive network formation, spike architecture, electrode-level resistance, and transient pulse response. This study provides a practical materials/interface design framework for spike-structured conductive silicone electrodes in wearable bioelectronic and electroceutical devices. Full article

This study addresses the critical importance of fire safety considerations during the design phase of commercial buildings, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where urbanization and climate-specific risks pose unique challenges. Recognizing that high-risk structures often experience fire-related incidents due to inadequate safety measures, this research develops a comprehensive framework to guide design professionals in integrating effective fire safety strategies. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combined a literature review, qualitative expert interviews, and a questionnaire survey. The final quantitative analysis was based on 86 valid survey responses, including 29 authority or regulation implementers, 28 designers, and 29 stakeholders. The survey results highlighted significant gaps in knowledge and implementation, particularly among stakeholders. Key challenges identified included cultural attitudes toward safety, lack of training, and inadequate use of fire-resistant materials. The framework proposes a structured methodology for enhancing fire safety measures across the design stages, emphasizing the importance of collaboration among architects, engineers, safety consultants, and regulatory bodies. Recommendations include regular updates to fire safety documents, fostering a culture of safety awareness, and conducting post-occupancy evaluations to assess the effectiveness of implemented measures. Ultimately, this research aims to benefit various stakeholders, including design professionals and regulatory agencies, by promoting a proactive approach to fire safety that enhances building resilience and protects lives and property in commercial environments. Full article

Residual volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and non-intentionally added substances (NIASs) limit the reuse of post-consumer recycled high-density polyethylene (rHDPE) in high-value applications because they generate persistent odors and may compromise product quality and regulatory acceptance. This work comparatively assesses five deodorization and purification routes for rHDPE: agitation washing, ultrasound-assisted washing, reflux heating, Soxhlet extraction, and dissolution/precipitation, by combining VOC removal performance, material characterization, and techno-economic evaluation. Ultrasound-assisted washing with SDS achieved ~96% total VOC removal, while reflux heating resulted in near-complete removal (~98%), approaching the analytical detection limit. Soxhlet extraction with ethanol reached 94% after 1 h, and the dissolution/precipitation method provided near-complete purification and removed additional impurities, but at the expense of substantially higher process complexity and cost. Mechanical and physicochemical characterization indicated that the evaluated treatments did not appreciably compromise the measured properties of the recycled polymer. In addition, equilibrium screening with representative analytes in ethanol provided qualitative support for the solvent–polymer interaction discussion. A plant-scale techno-economic assessment identified ultrasound-assisted SDS washing as the most attractive option, offering the best balance between deodorization efficiency, process simplicity, and cost. Overall, the results provide a practical basis for selecting scalable decontamination strategies to upgrade rHDPE quality and expand its use in circular plastic applications. Full article

Land capitalization has become one of the central issues in contemporary China’s economic development and land system reform. Existing scholarship has predominantly approached this topic from the perspectives of effects, governance, and property rights, while a spatial analytical lens remains conspicuously absent. This study draws on the theoretical perspective of the production of space (spatial politics) and selects Xunliao Bay, a coastal tourism destination currently undergoing rapid land capitalization, as a typical case. Based on qualitative methods, including three-phase, five-time interviews and non-participatory observation conducted in Xunliao Bay, it investigates the spatial logic and restructuring processes of land capitalization in coastal tourism areas. The findings reveal that: (1) Land capitalization in coastal tourism destinations is essentially a process of the spatialization of capital, following a logical sequence of “spatial occupation–spatial planning–spatial production.” (2) In Xunliao Bay, land capitalization has generated multifaceted spatial consequences, leading to the reconfiguration of land property rights, land functional attributes, and land morphology. (3) Far from being a purely economic value-adding endeavor, land capitalization in coastal tourism destinations constitutes a spatial political process fraught with power struggles, interest negotiations, and conflicts. In this process, capital forges “growth coalitions” with local governments to complete land consolidation and property rights restructuring, subsequently redefines land attributes through planning mechanisms to safeguard its own interests, and ultimately engages in selective land use to carry out landscape construction and spatial production, thereby profoundly reshaping the local socio-spatial fabric. This study extends the spatial perspective and tourism context within land capitalization research and deepens the theoretical understanding of land capitalization as a socio-spatial and political process. Full article

This paper studies quantitative forms of approximate recurrence for bounded linear operators on Banach spaces through the notion of uniformly $\delta$-almost periodic vectors. For a prescribed tolerance $\delta \ge 0$, this notion relaxes classical almost periodicity by requiring uniform orbit repetitions up to an error controlled by $\delta$, along relatively dense sets of approximate periods. The main purpose of the paper is to refine this qualitative recurrence condition by introducing return-time profiles. These profiles measure, for each accuracy level, the minimal size of recurrence windows needed to guarantee the existence of an approximate period. Thus, they provide a quantitative refinement of the usual relatively dense return condition. We prove that uniform $\delta$-almost periodicity is equivalent to the finiteness of the associated return-time profile at every positive accuracy level. We also establish basic structural properties of these profiles, including monotonicity with respect to the accuracy and tolerance parameters, behavior under scalar multiplication and forward iteration, and an elementary additive property of approximate periods. The final part of the paper applies the general framework to weighted backward shifts on ${\ell }^p$-spaces. In this setting, the explicit coordinate representation of the iterates allows us to identify several recurrence and obstruction mechanisms. We describe stable threshold recurrence, finite-support recurrence, exact recurrence generated by periodic vectors, and coordinate-level obstructions to $\delta$-almost periodicity. The results provide a rigorous framework for measuring approximate almost periodicity in linear dynamics and clarify how recurrence-window profiles complement the classical qualitative theory of relatively dense returns. Full article

In this work, we explore the nonlinear wave phenomena of the (3+1)-dimensional Boussinesq (II) equation, a significantly higher-dimensional model that describes dispersive wave propagation in fluid dynamics, plasma systems, and nonlinear optics. Using exact analytic and qualitative dynamic approaches, we study a wide range of solutions and stability characteristics of the model. Initially, we use the Hirota bilinear method to obtain a number of exact solutions, such as breather waves, two-wave interaction solutions, and other types of localized nonlinear waves. These solutions display remarkable physical properties, including periodic energy trapping, oscillatory modulations, and nonlinear wave interactions in higher dimensions. In addition, the $(m+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{G^{\prime }}})$-expansion method is used to derive new soliton solutions, such as bright solitary waves and W-shaped solitons, which are found to be stable and undergo pulse-shaping dynamics under certain conditions. Three-dimensional, two-dimensional, and contour plots are displayed for some of the solutions to demonstrate the physical significance of the results. The visualizations reveal the presence of localized waves, wave interactions, periodical breathing, and stable soliton profiles. Furthermore, we conduct modulation instability analysis to describe the conditions under which small perturbations of continuous wave backgrounds are unstable. The dispersion relation and the instability gain spectrum are obtained, which explain the formation of breathers, soliton trains, and other coherent structures. Furthermore, a Galilean transformation converts the governing equation into a planar nonlinear dynamical system, enabling its qualitative study. The Hamiltonian structure is revealed, and the fixed points are identified as centers, saddles, and cusps through bifurcation analysis. To investigate more complex dynamics, a periodic forcing term is introduced into the system, resulting in chaos in the forced system. The chaotic behavior is confirmed via phase portraits, three-dimensional attractors, time series, Poincaré sections, return maps, fractal dimension, and positive Lyapunov exponents. We also perform a sensitivity test to show the effect of initial condition variations on the system’s long-term dynamics. The findings greatly expand the exact solution set and dynamics of the (3+1)-dimensional Boussinesq equation (II). The analytical approach presented in this paper can also be applied to other multidimensional nonlinear evolution equations of mathematical physics. Full article

This research evaluates the influence of extraction method, solvent, and processing time on the recovery of phenolic compounds from Eucalyptus globulus leaves and their corresponding antioxidant capacity, through approaches with reduced energy and chemical consumption. Magnetic stirring (MS), and ultrasound- (US) and microwave-assisted (MW) extraction were applied using water or low-ethanol hydroalcoholic systems. Total phenolic content (TPC; Folin–Ciocalteu method) and antioxidant activity (AA; TEAC assay), were assessed to determine the functional properties of the extracts. FT-ICR MS was used to characterize the phytochemical profile. A hydroalcoholic system combined with non-conventional techniques improved extraction efficiency compared to an aqueous system and reduced the processing time. Among the investigated MW conditions, extraction at 360 W for 30 s provided the highest TPC and AA values (252 mg GAE/g DM; 65.67 mg TE/g DM), while US provided maximum TPC of 191 mg GAE/g DM (30 min extraction). MS showed the lowest performance (77 mg GAE/g DM). Phenolic acids, flavonoids, and ellagitannins were assigned across evaluated samples, indicating that the used conditions do not influence the extracts’ qualitative composition. Overall, MW extraction enabled rapid phenolic species recovery under short processing times and low-ethanol conditions, representing a promising approach among the investigated extraction systems. Full article

Remote sensing applications often require the extraction of a small number of task-critical geospatial elements under severe class imbalance. This setting is challenging because dominant categories occupy most pixels, while targets of interest may be sparse, fragmented, or semantically ambiguous. In this study, we build our analysis on a remote sensing dataset consisting of 10,482 pixel-wise annotated RGB image tiles covering 14 semantic categories with pronounced long-tailed characteristics. Based on this dataset, we conduct an application-oriented comparative study of eight representative segmentation models on four key geospatial element categories with different sparsity levels and visual properties. Quantitative evaluation is performed using Intersection over Union, Precision, Recall, and F1-score, and representative qualitative cases are examined to analyze model behavior. An additional comparison with conventional multi-class segmentation shows that the target-oriented setting should be understood not as a universally superior alternative, but as a complementary application-oriented setting for analyzing target-specific delineation behavior under severe imbalance. The results further indicate that segmentation difficulty cannot be explained by target proportion alone, but is jointly associated with target morphology, spatial fragmentation, and semantic similarity to surrounding categories. These findings provide practical guidance for segmentation model selection in highly imbalanced remote sensing applications. Full article

This study examines the dynamical behavior of the dual-mode nonlinear Schrödinger equation (d-mNLSE), which describes the interaction, amplification, and attenuation of two coexisting wave modes in nonlinear media. The model incorporates key physical parameters including the nonlinearity coefficient, interaction phase velocity, and dispersion parameter, which significantly influence the evolution of nonlinear waves. By applying the modified Sardar sub-equation method (mSS-EM), a wide spectrum of exact analytical solutions is derived. These solutions include mixed trigonometric waves, shock-type structures, singular solutions, complex dark–bright solitons, multi-peak solitons, periodic and mixed-periodic waves, as well as mixed hyperbolic structures. The analytical findings provide useful insight into nonlinear wave propagation phenomena arising in fluid mechanics, water wave dynamics, ocean engineering, and related physical systems. Moreover, the conservation laws of the d-mNLSE are established, which leads to the conserved quantities of impulse power, momentum, and energy and describes the invariant characteristics of the soliton solutions during their propagation. The bifurcation analysis of the reduced dynamical model is carried out to explore the qualitative characteristics of the obtained solutions. The equilibrium points of the considered model are calculated, and their stability properties are analyzed systematically. To demonstrate the physical characteristics of the obtained solutions, different kinds of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and contour plots are plotted using symbolic computations software. These findings confirm that the analytical method used to obtain the soliton solutions can be used to obtain a variety of soliton solutions of nonlinear evolution equations that appear in applied sciences and engineering. Full article