Search Results (365)

Although fixed-size nanoparticles have achieved substantial therapeutic success, a single fixed size may not be optimal for the competing requirements of stability in circulation, tumor accumulation, deep tumor penetration, cellular uptake, and intra-tumoral retention. This review frames this fixed-property limitation as the need to switch structural states in response to successive biological barriers and analyzes original research articles published from 2021 to 2025 on large-to-small transformation, small-to-large transformation and assembly, or multistage assembly-disassembly-reassembly. Rather than treating the stimulus or material as an analytical endpoint, the framework maps each pre-, intermediate-, and post-transition state to its biological site and barrier-specific functions. Direction, intermediate structure, site, sequence, and the temporal characteristics were evaluated together with coupled changes in charge, morphology, stiffness, and surface interactions. Large-to-small transformations generally shift the carrier function from tumor accumulation to penetration or uptake, whereas small-to-large transformations support retention, depot formation, or organelle-localized activity. Multistage systems assign distinct functions to the sequential structural states. However, direct in vivo structural evidence and physiologically relevant kinetic measurements have been limited. Future designs should, therefore, verify that the required structure forms at the intended site and time, and directly connect structural transitions with delivery and therapeutic functions. Full article

With the advantages of high construction efficiency and design flexibility, modular buildings are now widely used in school and hotel construction fields. However, systematic design methods for relocatable modular gymnasiums combining modular box units with large-span roof structures remain limited. To expand the application scope of modular buildings, this paper proposes a novel structural system of modular box unit–grid combination gymnasium based on modular building technology. This system can realize the rapid assembly construction, dismantling, and reassembly of the gymnasium, and can potentially be deployed on temporarily vacant urban land subject to planning permissions, regulatory approvals, and site-specific conditions, thereby offering a possible solution to meet people’s fitness needs. First, the design concept of the novel combined gymnasium is introduced. Then, the calculation formula of modularized box unit wall design is obtained according to the principles of natural ventilation and thermal design of the building, which helps to adjust the wall when the gymnasium is relocated and facilitates the passive ventilation and solar shading of the building. Subsequently, the critical structural design scheme of the novel modular gymnasium is given. In addition, an introduction to the case study is also provided. Finally, the novel modular gymnasium building design proposal is obtained. The feasibility of the proposed design is further discussed with reference to existing experimental and numerical studies. However, full-scale repeated assembly tests, long-term durability evaluation, and year-round dynamic validation of natural ventilation are beyond the scope of the present study. The proposed system provides a preliminary design framework for relocatable modular gymnasiums and offers a potential solution for temporary gymnasium construction under appropriate planning, regulatory, and site-specific conditions. Full article

Acidic soils are widespread in global agroforestry systems and severely constrain crop production through proton stress, aluminum/manganese phytotoxicity, phosphorus fixation, and rhizosphere microbiome reassembly. Rhizosphere diazotrophs can theoretically contribute to plant nitrogen (N) nutrition and stress adaptation. However, their N-fixation efficiency and growth-promoting effects in acidic soils are often highly unstable, limiting the predictability of field applications. This narrative mechanistic review synthesizes and critically interprets evidence on the physicochemical filters governing diazotroph survival in acidic soils, nitrogenase regulation, root-exudate-mediated recruitment, multi-guild microbial interactions, and the conditional design of synthetic microbial communities (SynComs) and inoculant formulations. We further discuss the potential complementary roles of phosphate-solubilizing bacteria (PSB) and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and propose minimum reporting standards to improve field translatability. The synthesis indicates that effective diazotroph-mediated crop promotion depends on pH buffering, metal detoxification, carbon supply, phosphorus availability, host compatibility, and native microbiome receptivity. The proposed evidence-chain and microbiome-compatibility framework is a conceptual guide for evaluating these linked conditions rather than an empirically validated predictive model. Full article

Soil salinization constrains global wheat production, but how organic–microbial amendments alleviate saline–alkali stress across plant tissues remains poorly characterized. In a single-season field trial, we compared three treatments—a non-saline control (CK), a saline–alkali control (SCK), and an organic fertilizer combined with a microbial inoculant applied to saline–alkali soil (SDM)—to evaluate effects on soil properties, the rhizosphere microbiome structure, leaf antioxidant defense, and grain quality. SDM improved soil nutrient availability: available phosphorus and potassium increased by 96.0% and 51.8%, respectively, relative to SCK, and rhizosphere microbiome shifts favored copiotrophic taxa (Flavobacterium, Devosia, Mortierella) over halotolerant genera (Arthrobacter, Filobasidium). In leaves, SDM induced a controlled antioxidant activation—peroxidase (POD) functioned as a key mediator of oxidative homeostasis, with activities exceeding CK yet remaining below extreme SCK levels—producing the lowest malondialdehyde content (−48.4% vs. SCK). At moderate concentrations, reactive oxygen species participated in developmental signaling rather than causing pathological damage, enabling grain soluble sugars and total starch to be restored to CK levels. These results reveal a coordinated soil–microbiome–plant response in which organic–microbial amendment enhances nutrient cycling, redirects community assembly toward nutrient-cycling functional guilds, and achieves oxidative homeostasis and grain quality restoration. Our findings offer a conceptual basis for the microbiome-informed management of saline–alkali wheat production. Full article

Hydrological seasonality is a major driver of microbial community dynamics in river ecosystems, yet how seasonal flow regimes regulate protistan diversity, community assembly, and functional organization remains poorly understood. In this study, environmental DNA metabarcoding targeting the 18S rRNA gene was employed to investigate seasonal variations in protistan communities across 17 sites along the Hongshuihe River, a subtropical tributary of the Pearl River, during flood and normal seasons. Flood events significantly altered environmental conditions and increased protistan alpha diversity, while community composition showed clear seasonal differentiation. Although dominant protistan lineages remained relatively stable, seasonal turnover was primarily associated with rare and low-abundance taxa, highlighting their critical role in maintaining biodiversity and driving community reassembly. Null model analyses revealed a seasonal shift in community assembly mechanisms, with deterministic processes, particularly heterogeneous selection, dominating during the flood season, whereas stochastic drift prevailed during the normal season. Distance–decay and variance partitioning analyses further demonstrated that environmental and spatial processes jointly regulated protistan community variation, with stronger environment–spatial coupling during flood periods. Functional trait analysis revealed an increased proportion of consumer taxa and a reduced contribution of phototrophic taxa during floods, suggesting a shift toward stronger heterotrophic pathways under hydrological disturbance. Collectively, our findings demonstrate that hydrological seasonality regulates riverine protistan communities through coordinated changes in rare taxa dynamics, assembly processes, and functional restructuring, emphasizing the importance of incorporating protistan diversity and functional traits into long-term river ecosystem monitoring. Full article

Endophytes are diverse microorganisms inhabiting plant tissues that can promote plant growth, enhance stress tolerance, or suppress pathogens. However, the ecological roles of endophytes after host senescence and death remain poorly understood. This review examines how a subset of endophytes helps maintain ecosystem function in living plants, senescent tissues, litter, and associated microbial environments. Mechanisms of endophyte-mediated plant protection in living plants include pathogen inhibition, host regulation, nutrient acquisition, and abiotic stress tolerance. We also investigate post-senescence persistence and potential roles in litter decomposition and nutrient cycling via microbial and functional legacies, priority effects, extracellular enzyme activities, and community reassembly. Vertical transmission and horizontal dispersal can move microorganisms among stages, whereas host filtering acts after arrival to determine which microorganisms establish within host tissues. However, a full same-strain life-history loop has not been established. We propose an open, non-linear ecological continuum for selected endophytes that connects endophytic colonisation, saprotrophic persistence, and potential new-host establishment. In the future, longitudinal, strain-resolved, multi-omics, and synthetic-community studies will be conducted to verify the cross-stage connections and offer a microbial framework for plant protection, litter management, and ecological restoration. Full article

Accurate pavement distress identification is essential for infrastructure maintenance. However, prevailing models frequently underperform in complicated environments due to extreme scale variations, atypical defect geometries, and severe background noise. To mitigate these limitations, this study presents BDC-YOLO, an upgraded detection network built upon the YOLOv8 baseline. The proposed architecture structurally incorporates three specialized mechanisms: Bi-level Routing Attention (BRA) to isolate relevant target features from background artifacts; Dynamic Snake Convolution (DySnakeConv) to capture the topological characteristics of elongated and irregularly shaped cracks; and Content-Aware ReAssembly of FEatures (CARAFE) to minimize information degradation during upsampling and refine multi-scale feature fusion. Evaluated on the RDDChina dataset, BDC-YOLO demonstrates superior accuracy over the baseline and comparative state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, the framework yields a mAP_0.5 of 88.9%, representing an absolute gain of 4.7% against the standard YOLOv8 model while achieving an inference speed of 175.4 FPS. Full article

Low-altitude UAV aerial imagery often has complex backgrounds with densely distributed small objects, posing challenges to accurate small-object detection. To address these problems, we propose a spatial–frequency response aware synergistic network for small-object detection in low-altitude UAV aerial imagery. A Frequency-Response-Aware Enhancement Module (FRAEM) is designed to effectively extract discriminative features. The module employs a deterministic stage-aware filtering strategy: Scharr-based edge-sensitive filtering is used in the shallow stage, whereas Gaussian smoothing is used in deeper stages, enabling complementary enhancement of hierarchical representations. A Detail Feature Fusion module (DFFusion) is then developed to improve the efficiency of multi-scale feature fusion. The existing Content-Aware Reassembly of Features (CARAFE) operator is employed for content-aware upsampling and feature alignment, after which DFFusion uses learnable scalar weighting to integrate high-resolution detail information with low-resolution contextual information. A Lightweight Adaptive Decoupled Head (LADH) is also designed to reduce complexity. LADH asymmetrically allocates computational capacity across the prediction tasks: the confidence branch retains stronger spatial processing, whereas the classification and regression branches use lightweight projections; depthwise separable convolution serves as an efficiency-oriented implementation choice. Experiments on the VisDrone2019 and DOTA-v2.0 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve balance between detection performance and model complexity over mainstream detection methods. Ablation experiments also prove the effectiveness of the proposed components. Full article

Residual creases generated during the leather spreading process exhibit highly variable morphologies and irregular feature distributions, causing significant challenges for feature extraction and leading to low localization accuracy. To address these issues, this paper proposes the Dynamic, Cross-Calibrated, and Edge-Enhanced YOLOv8n-Pose (DCE-YOLOv8n-Pose) algorithm. Instead of providing regional approximations, this framework outputs precise spatial coordinates for robotic grasping by integrating three synergistic components in a progressive network flow. First, dynamic snake convolution adaptively perceives the continuous geometric features of elongated creases; subsequently, an efficient multi-scale attention mechanism provides cross-dimensional weight calibration to suppress highly homochromatic background interference and correct spatial misalignments; finally, an edge-enhanced content-aware reassembly of features module preserves high-frequency gradients and prevents feature fracturing during multi-scale fusion. For comprehensive evaluation, a dataset comprising 700 original laboratory images was constructed. To prevent data leakage, the dataset was partitioned into training and validation sets based on individual leather specimens, ensuring that images of the same leather piece do not appear in both sets. Additionally, an independent test set of 500 images collected from an actual processing plant was designed for industrial validation. Experimental results indicate that, at an Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold of 0.5, the DCE-YOLOv8n-Pose model achieves a bounding box mean average precision (mAP@0.5) of 91.8% and a keypoint mAP@0.5 of 85.1%, with a keypoint precision of 87.9%. The computational load is maintained at 9.2 GFLOPs, alongside an inference speed of 114.3 FPS. Furthermore, consistent convergence across four independent training runs substantiates the model’s reliability in reducing missed detection rates and localization deviations. In conclusion, the proposed algorithm demonstrates practical applicability for the visual guidance of automated leather spreading equipment by balancing detection precision and inference speed, thereby offering an effective coordinate reference for subsequent robotic stretching operations. Full article

Plants and their endophytic microbiota form a functional holobiont, wherein host-dependent endophytes (HDEs) are proposed to serve as persistent microbial components associated with host continuity. Using long-term in vitro grapevine plantlets, we investigated HDE redistribution and reassembly across successive agar-based subcultures and during the transition to soil-based cultivation. Results showed that the initial tissue niche (shoot-tip versus root-base) imprinted a persistent compositional signature on HDE communities, with distinct cultivar-dependent effects. Numerous microbial amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) remained shared across agar-based and soil-based habitats, demonstrating high persistence of HDE-associated lineages. Bacterial communities exhibited marked plasticity, with plant-associated bacterial lineages contributing substantially to soil community assembly. Notably, 204 root-enriched bacterial ASVs, comprising 10.8–14.3% of the soil community, were recovered, revealing a robust “Root-Specific Legacy”. Bacterial HDEs showed higher redistribution potential (43.3%), whereas fungal transfer was significantly lower (10.4%). Functional profiling suggested habitat-associated functional patterns, with the anaerobic phenotype enriched in soil and predicted enhancements in membrane transport, nucleotide metabolism, glycan biosynthesis, and biosynthesis of secondary metabolites in roots. Cladosporium and Fusarium remained dominant in the fungal core taxa, and habitat transition altered their predicted trophic profiles. Our findings establish HDEs as a resilient biological reservoir capable of niche-specific expansion, contributing to the ecological reassembly of the plant holobiont. Full article

This article examines how the Government-General Museum of Korea (1915–1945) reconfigured Korean Buddhist visual culture, transforming objects embedded in living devotional practice into specimens of cultural heritage. Moving beyond existing scholarship on the colonial reorganization of Korean Buddhist institutions, it argues that the museum did not simply house Buddhist materials; rather, it produced a new mode of existence for them, one defined by a constitutive ambivalence in which the very apparatus that detached these objects from their devotional lives also “preserved” them as art-historical heritage. The argument develops through three case studies, each addressing a distinct register of the museum’s reconfigurative work: the acquisition and classification of the ten-story stone pagoda of Gyeongcheon temple, traced from monastic monument to cataloged specimen; the spatial reassembly of a Buddhist pantheon in the inaugural exhibition of 1915, staged within the emptied precincts of Gyeongbok Palace; and the photographic seriation of Unified Silla Buddhist material in the Album of Korean Antiquities. Drawing on theories of the exhibitionary apparatus, museum ritual, and mechanical reproduction, the article demonstrates that the religious identity of the colonial-modern “Buddhist object” was not simply erased but rearchived as an esthetic and art-historical attribute. It concludes that this reconfiguration was not discarded but strategically reappropriated by the postcolonial Korean state, which re-coded the colonial categories for national ends even as it continued to administer Buddhist objects through them. Full article

Background/Objectives: The long-spined sea urchin Diadema antillarum is a keystone herbivore whose grazing maintains Caribbean coral reefs; basin-wide mass mortalities in 1983–1984 and 2022 have made genomic resources a conservation priority, yet no nuclear genome existed for the species. We aimed to generate the first nuclear reference and to resolve the high heterozygosity that complicates genome assembly in broadcast-spawning marine invertebrates. Methods: For the assembly, we combined PacBio HiFi, Oxford Nanopore, and Illumina sequencing. Genome size and heterozygosity were estimated by k-mer profiling. We compared standard and haplotype-aware assembly strategies (hifiasm), evaluated completeness with BUSCO, and annotated repeats using a species-specific RepeatModeler library. Results: k-mer profiling estimated a haploid genome of ~703 Mb with 2.52% heterozygosity. Standard assembly then produced an inflated 1.75 Gb assembly (98.4% BUSCO-complete but 84.4% duplicated), indicating retention of both haplotypes. Haplotype-aware reassembly separated this into a collapsed primary assembly (1.03 Gb) and two phased haplotypes (0.95 and 0.89 Gb), each comparable in size to the chromosome-level congener D. antillarum (886 Mb). BUSCO completeness reached 99.0%, with single-copy orthologs rising to 85–90%, and reference-free consensus quality reached QV 44.5 (Merqury; initial assembly). This genome is repeat-rich (42.84% repetitive; 29.96% unclassified). Conclusions: We provide the collapsed primary assembly together with both phased haplotypes as a haplotype-resolved reference for D. antillarum, establishing a foundation for immunogenomic, comparative, and population-genetic studies and for monitoring and restoration of this ecologically critical species. More broadly, the study shows that haplotype-aware assembly is essential for resolving such highly heterozygous genomes and delivers the genomic foundation needed to guide the conservation of this keystone Caribbean reef species. Full article

Climate warming is altering plant range limits in drylands, where water limitation, soil salinity, and thermal extremes jointly constrain species niches. Yet it remains unclear whether dryland legumes with contrasting life forms respond differently to future climates, a problem that remains poorly resolved. We used ENMeval-optimized MaxEnt models to estimate the current and future potential distributions of three ecologically important legumes in arid Xinjiang: Alhagi camelorum, a perennial semi-shrub; Glycyrrhiza inflata, a perennial herb; and Trigonella arcuata, an annual herb. Models were evaluated under four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for 2061–2080 and 2081–2100 and showed high discriminatory performance with test AUC values of 0.910–0.947. Under the current climate, G. inflata formed a concentrated core in the Tarim Basin oases, T. arcuata showed a fragmented northern-biased distribution, and A. camelorum was widely dispersed across both northern and southern Xinjiang. The strongest predictors differed among species: minimum temperature of the coldest month for G. inflata (45.9% contribution), precipitation seasonality for T. arcuata 76.8%, and NDVI for A. camelorum 34.0%. Bootstrap-based niche analyses further quantified these differences: A. camelorum and G. inflata had similar niche breadths, Levins’ B2 = 0.329 and 0.315, respectively, whereas T. arcuata had the narrowest niche breadth, B2 = 0.225; 95% CI: 0.162–0.241. Pairwise niche overlap was generally low, particularly between G. inflata and T. arcuata (Schoener’s D = 0.019; Hellinger’s I = 0.038). Projections based on BCC-CSM2-MR indicated species-specific and scenario-dependent suitability shifts across both future periods. G. inflata showed the largest projected net gains across periods and scenarios; A. camelorum showed moderate but consistently positive gains, whereas T. arcuata showed weaker and more uncertain responses, including significant net losses under SSP1-2.6. These asymmetric trajectories suggest species-specific responses among the three legumes and provide hypotheses for how life-form-related ecological strategies may shape dryland habitat shifts. Given this limited replication, these trajectories should be treated as species-specific hypotheses rather than evidence for life-form effects. Future SDM assessments should broaden taxonomic sampling and incorporate key functional traits to improve forecasts of dryland community reassembly and conservation planning. Full article

This article thoroughly documents the focus, long-term monitoring, and survey of the condition of a unique early Gothic wooden ceiling from the 13th century in Zvíkov Castle in the Czech Republic. Through long-term monitoring of climatic parameters, wood moisture, and the movement of ceiling beams, this paper described how wood constantly works, that is, swells and shrinks during a single annual cycle. At the interface of the ceiling beams and the masonry, the ambient temperature ranged from 2.75 °C to 31.75 °C, and the relative humidity of the air from 38 to 93%. The condition of the walled-in beam ends was assessed by resistance drilling and endoscopy. Out of a total of 16 beam ends, 7 ends are completely degraded by brown rot fungus. The condition of the ceiling structure is not good, even in the case of the boards covering the ceiling. Here, the sapwood parts are additionally damaged by the beetle Anobium punctatum which, in combination with rot, has broken down the wood into crumbling matter. High static load due to a massive embankment 35–50 cm thick, two layers of fired paving, and occasional loading causes the wood to deteriorate over time and requires urgent stabilization. The final section reflects on the approach to sustainably securing the uniquely preserved structure. Finding the optimal solution represents a challenging decision-making task between a conservation intervention of external support with minimal intervention in the existing structure and the structural restoration of individual elements, requiring disassembly and reassembly of the structure. Full article

IPv4 fragmentation attacks, including tiny fragment injection, teardrop offset manipulation, and fragment flooding exploit the RFC 791 reassembly process to evade firewalls and network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). Detection is challenging because widely used flow-level datasets (UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS2017), lack the packet-level fragment header information required for direct RFC 791 validation. This study investigates whether fragmentation-related traffic can be identified using only flow-level statistical features. The proposed framework introduces four contributions: (1) a direction-corrected proxy labeling scheme, where flows are labeled as fragmented when ${CV}_L$ < 0.70, validated on a controlled 3000-flow Scapy dataset with $F_1$ = 0.873 and ROC-AUC = 0.895 against verified packet-level ground truth; (2) a dual-model Random Forest architecture with feature separation to prevent circular self-prediction; (3) RFC 791-inspired statistical heuristics applied as a post-inference filter; and (4) a six-configuration ablation study with a reproducible protocol. The study distinguishes fragmentation-like statistical signatures from confirmed packet-level fragmentation. The benchmark model $M_{frag}$ achieves $F_1$ ≈ 0.998 on synthetic data, while external PCAP validation yields $F_1$ = 0.873. Unlike most flow-level NIDS research, the framework is validated against both controlled Scapy-generated traffic and the MAWI real-world backbone trace, establishing a practical performance bound ($F_1$ = 0.82 for the full hybrid framework). The attack classification model $M_{attack}$ achieves $F_1$ = 0.974 on dataset-provided labels. Results show that flow-level analysis can provide useful indicators of fragmentation-related activity when packet-level evidence is unavailable, while highlighting the limitations of statistical detection. Full article