Search Results (1,036)

The uniaxial tensile test is a common and fundamental test in materials science and engineering, in which a specimen is subjected to controlled tension until failure. From this, the stress–strain curve and many property parameters of the material can be calculated, such as tensile strength, ultimate strength, maximum elongation, Young’s modulus, Poisson’s ratio, and yield strength. As fibrous materials, such as paper and paperboard, become more popular, accurately measuring their mechanical properties becomes essential for developing and applying these materials, especially in packaging. However, since they are anisotropic and inherently inhomogeneous due to the arrangement of the fibers, accurately determining their mechanical properties is not straightforward. This study investigated how several key factors influence the results of tensile tests on fiber-based materials: sample size and deformation measurement techniques using three fiber materials. This study also compared three different strain recording methods: digital image correlation (DIC), video extensometer, and conventional extensometer (Traverse). The DIC technique emphasized the effect of the inherent inhomogeneity of the paperboard on the overall mechanical properties obtained from tensile tests. The results indicated that sample size has a negligible effect on the stress–strain curve, and any apparent influence likely stems from slip at the grips during tensile testing. However, sample size does affect paperboard fracture to some extent. The study also provided recommendations for optimal specimen geometry and deformation recording methods to improve the accuracy and repeatability of tensile testing of fiber-based materials. Full article

Despite increasing efforts by the scientific community to raise awareness of breed-related health problems through educational campaigns, public information initiatives, and veterinary outreach programmes, brachycephalic dog breeds remain highly popular. As the number of brachycephalic dogs increases, the prevalence of associated health problems rises accordingly. Ethical and animal welfare considerations appear to play a limited role in breed selection. In German-speaking regions, extensive educational efforts have been undertaken in recent years to address the issue of so-called torture breeding, defined as intentional selection for extreme phenotypic traits that impair health, reduce welfare, and cause chronic suffering, particularly in brachycephalic breeds. The aim of this study was to determine the underlying reasons for the decision to buy and keep a brachycephalic dog. Although the veterinary profession is already improving education and communication, this qualitative study intended to find new starting points for targeted education against animal suffering and to explore the sociological background of the ownership of such dogs. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews with people with brachycephalic dogs were conducted throughout Switzerland (n = 16). The focus was on the animal–human relationship. The interviews were defined by systematically applied guidelines for the design of the interview process, while still allowing maximum openness (all possibilities for expression). The transcribed interviews were coded and analysed according to the Kuckartz methodology, which allows us to set certain focal points of analysis and to structure them according to codes. The results of this study indicate that, although awareness of torture breeding is present within the broader population, owners of brachycephalic dogs frequently rely on individualised arguments and rationalisations. These typically involve emphasising the perceived health, functionality, or exceptional characteristics of their own animal (e.g., claims that their dog is “healthy” or not affected by breed-related problems), thereby distancing their personal ownership experience from the general welfare concerns associated with the breed. This psychological pattern can be interpreted as cognitive dissonance, in which contradictory beliefs are harmonised through selective perception or re-evaluation. The results also show that brachycephalic dogs offer a very strong projection surface: their owners assign them a variety of social roles that go beyond the classic animal–human relationship—for example, as a substitute for children, a romantic partner, or a best friend. This qualitative study provides differentiated insights into the attitudes and motivations of owners of brachycephalic dogs and illustrates that traditional awareness campaigns have not been sufficient to effectively change problematic breeding practices and ownership patterns. In order to develop long-term effective solutions, interdisciplinary cooperation is therefore needed—for example, between veterinary medicine, animal welfare, communication science, psychology and law. In addition to individual education, new, target-group-specific communication strategies and consistent legal regulations are needed to protect animal welfare in the long term. This study is intended to serve as a catalyst for a broader ethical and social debate on the keeping of torture breed dogs. Full article

Forest parks are expected to balance ecological protection with high-quality ecotourism experiences, yet quantitative, multi-dimensional assessments at the regional scale remain limited. This study evaluates ecotourism experience quality across 37 national forest parks in Shaanxi Province, China, using a five-dimensional, 32-indicator framework (science popularization, landscape esthetics, ecological resources, cultural resources, and supporting conditions). Indicator weights were elicited through the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP), and park performance was ranked via TOPSIS; key constraints were diagnosed using an obstacle degree model. Results show that landscape esthetics received the highest criterion weight (0.245), followed by ecological resources (0.215) and supporting conditions (0.195). The mean experience score across parks was 0.559, with high-quality parks concentrated in the Guanzhong region. Obstacle analysis indicates that insufficient cultural resource protection and interpretation, inadequate public service facilities, and weak science-education functions are the most persistent barriers to improving experience quality. The proposed FAHP–TOPSIS–obstacle framework supports benchmarking and priority setting for sustainable management and targeted investments in forest parks. Full article

Birds are a popular group of organisms for researchers and laymen alike, and citizen science data are widely used in understanding bird ecology. This study investigates the correlates of bird visits to a single tree in the suburb of Westville, located in the city of Durban (eThekwini Municipality), in coastal subtropical South Africa. Of the 416 bird species recorded locally (within the quarter-degree square where the tree is located), 47 visited the tree during the 108 observation hours spread over one year. Of the 636 bird visits, most were very brief (shorter than one minute), with birds departing in a direction different from the one from which they came, suggesting that the tree was most often used as a stopover. Feeding (mostly on insects) was observed during 112 visits, while other behaviors were rare. Bird activity was higher in spring/summer and in the early morning, with a weak second peak in the late afternoon. Larger birds used larger branches as perches and paid longer visits. There was a negative relationship between bird activity and butterfly activity, driven by different seasonal patterns, and this creates an opportunity for butterfly watching at a time of the year with low bird activity. These results are used to discuss potential directions for similar projects while harnessing citizen science. Full article

Hit Song Science aims to forecast a song’s success before release and benefits from integrating signals beyond audio content alone. We present DeepHits, an end-to-end multimodal network that combines (i) log-Mel spectrogram embeddings from a compact residual 2D-CNN, (ii) frozen multilingual BERT lyric embeddings, and (iii) structured numeric features including high-level Spotify audio descriptors and contextual metadata (artist popularity, release year). Evaluated on 92,517 tracks from the SpotGenTrack dataset, DeepHits achieves a macro-F1 of 52.20% (accuracy 82.63%) in the established three-class setting and a macro-F1 of 23.15% (accuracy 37.00%) in a ten-class decile benchmark. To contextualize fine-grained performance, we report capacity-controlled shallow baselines, including metadata-only and early/late fusion variants, and show that the deep multimodal model provides a clear gain over these references (e.g., metadata-only: macro-F1 20.92%; accuracy 34.22%). Ablation results indicate that removing metadata yields the largest degradation in class-balanced performance, highlighting the strong predictive value of artist popularity and release year. Overall, DeepHits provides a reproducible benchmark and modality analysis for fine-grained popularity prediction under class imbalance. Full article

During the years of the so-called Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975), with its economic recovery after World War II, France witnessed the development of a technologized consumer society and a technocratic approach to public planning, which fostered a futuristic outlook and a boom in paperback publishing. A major success story of this era was the Éditions Fleuve Noir science-fiction series, Anticipation, to which popular genre author Maurice Limat contributed numerous novels. Although marketed as science fiction and set far in the future and in outer space, Limat’s novels featuring the Chevalier Bruno Coqdor resemble more often those of a knight-errant from medieval romance. These works of space fantasy express medieval nostalgia but also engage the massive social changes occurring in France during this period while extrapolating France’s survival in the distant future. Full article

Background: Sport climbing, encompassing lead, bouldering, and speed disciplines, has transformed from a niche activity to a widely popular trend, notably after its Olympic debut at the Tokyo Games 2021. This recognition spurred an increase in publications. Despite the emerging scientific interest, terminology in climbing textbooks often relies on experiential rather than scientific understanding, leading to inconsistencies. This paper aims to standardize terminology by applying sports science frameworks, including biomechanics, training science, and sports medicine. Methods: The study reinterprets general sports science concepts for climbing-specific applications, proposing a structure of climbing skill that covers physical fitness components, biomechanical principles and techniques (body positioning), and specific components (hand and foot positioning). This integrated approach seeks to establish a coherent nomenclature, facilitating research, training, prevention, and rehabilitation within the climbing discipline. Results: Five primary climbing principles are proposed: optimal wall contact, maintained stability, center of mass shift, movement initiation from the legs and optimal climbing speed. Two technique categories—frontal and rotational—are defined in consideration of the spatial position of the pelvic frontal plane in relation to the wall surface. Each climbing technique can be described by applying the three-phase model of acyclic movements. Principles and techniques both aim to maximize efficiency in moving and resting on the climbing wall. Conclusions: A unified understanding of climbing principles and techniques is vital for progressing research, training programs, prevention strategies, and rehabilitation efforts in sport climbing. Adopting a comprehensive sports science framework promises enhanced clarity and efficacy in climbing practices, benefiting both theoretical analyses and practical applications. Full article

In the context in which on-demand mobility services are rapidly gaining popularity in the transportation sector, this article provides a literature review focusing on the emerging research topics related to ride-hailing. Based on a comprehensive review of the existing scientific literature, ten main research areas are identified, covering aspects ranging from operational algorithms to macro-level policy impacts enforced by local authorities. Each topic is discussed and analyzed based on available published research. This work analyzes state-of-the-art research directions such as demand forecasting, passenger–driver matching algorithms, pricing strategies, electric vehicle integration, trust and security aspects, quality of service and user satisfaction, integration with public transportation, and robotaxi integration. The solutions identified pave the way for new, evolving technologies related to on-demand mobility services and ride-hailing, a domain at the intersection of data science, artificial intelligence, and futuristic urban planning. Finally, the main results of this work are focused on the integration of AI, the optimization of the latency–security trade-off, and the development of unified global transportation standards that better address the balance between technological efficiency, sustainability, environmental protection, and social equity. Full article

High-throughput sequencing generally results in a list of genes. Which functional groups of genes among the DEGs are meaningful underlying factors to the differential biological/biomedical conditions under investigation? The process to find answers to this question can be called biological functional class enrichment analysis (FunCEA). R is a robust platform for FunCEA due to its accessibility by general users and availability of well-developed R packages for enrichment analysis and visualization, as well as for knowledge databases. Bench scientists in biomedical sciences need accessible and easy-to-understand protocols for FunCEA. This R tutorial provides detailed R scripts or command lines for FunCEA, as well as for data processing and visualization of the enrichment results. It keeps bench scientists in mind and provides supportive and apprehensible descriptions of the R scripts for each task (enrichment analysis, enrichment data processing, and visualization). It describes detailed procedures for the two popular FunCEA methods, the so-called over-representation analysis (ORA) and functional class scoring (FCS). The introduced FunCEA here uses three basic knowledge databases: gene ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), and reactome. R codes for various visualizations (dot plot, term-gene network plot, enrichment map plot, ridge plot, and GSEA plot) are presented and annotated. Since all analyses are conducted in R, no commercial software is needed, yet clusterProfiler can directly access the latest KEGG knowledge database. Full article

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has marked a turning point in health informatics. AI has become a very helpful tool for health informatics applications, with numerous AI applications in health informatics being reported in the last years. The objective of this paper is to synthesize the common concerns and opportunities raised by recent popular reviews on AI and health informatics. The main methodological topics covered in this up-to-date review include traditional AI, GenAI, and LLMs. The literature search was conducted through the popular academic database Scopus, which covers over one hundred million records, including both computer science and healthcare. Among these popular reviews (measured by the number of citations that each one received), clinical decision support, patient care, electronic health records, hospital management, and remote patient monitoring are the most mentioned healthcare topics. Different from the majority of the existing reviews that narrowly cover on one to a few topics in healthcare, our review is designed with the objective to provide a broad coverage, such that practitioners may benefit from comprehensive insights covering the above mentioned five popular topics in AI health informatics applications. Based on an in-depth analysis of these reviews by human experts, the main AI tools used, their main challenges, and some future directions have been identified in our investigation. Patient privacy, cybersecurity, ethics, clinical accountability, engaging health professionals, benchmarks and standardization, as well as lack of explainability are the common concerns identified from the literature covered in this review. Full article

A pervasive trend across academia, social cognition, and general communication contexts is the interchangeable use of “information” and “knowledge”, particularly with reference to their forms—explicit knowledge, testimony, and expertise—conveyed by external sources. This raises a fundamental question: is the source perceived, considered, and validated as a reliable knowledge provider or merely as an information carrier? This study investigates seven academic and popular science sources by modelling their constructs of knowledge provision based on epistemological criteria and sociopsychological value, as manifested through the perspectives of university academics. The external sources examined include scientific journal articles, knowledge shared by university lecturers, scholarly monographs, textbooks and handbooks, popular science books and magazines, academic social networks and social media platforms. A quantitative investigation, supplemented by qualitative content analysis, collected assessments from sixty-six university academics in Latvia using the Epistemological Attitude Questionnaire towards Knowledge Sources. Statistical analysis, coupled with an examination and interpretation of academics’ perceptions, comprehension, use, and personal valuation of these sources, elucidated their profiles. The findings provide a holistic picture of these sources, detailing the value, qualities, functionality, and contributions of each type. Interpretations reveal that the designation of a form of “knowledge source” predominantly aligns with scientific and educational sources, whereas “information carriers” or socially functional sources primarily pertain to popular science and social media. Academic social networks, notably, occupy an intermediary position. This study offers critical academic insights into ongoing issues regarding these means of cognition. It prompts a scrutiny of both established traditional sources and contemporary mediums, both academic and popular, encouraging readers to evaluate these compiled images according to the delineated criteria of the theoretical framework. Full article

Background: Squash, a high-intensity sport with growing global popularity and an upcoming 2028 Olympic debut, is known to pose a wide range of potential health risks. However, epidemiological research of squash-related injuries and illnesses lacks consistency regarding reporting metrics and methodological standardisation. Therefore, this study aimed to systematically review the global literature to identify the incidence, prevalence, and anatomical distribution of reported squash-related health issues, calculate a pooled injury rate, and highlight research gaps. Methods: Following PRISMA guidelines (PROSPERO ID: CRD420251081709), a search conducted across MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science (from inception to 12 June 2025) yielded 12 studies, and a random-effects model estimated the pooled injury rate. Results: The pooled injury rate approximated 0.74 injuries per 365 athlete-days (95% CI: 0.26–2.07) and 2.01 injuries per 1000 athlete-days (95% CI: 0.72–5.67); however, extremely high heterogeneity (I² = 99.65%) revealed significant methodological inconsistencies. Lower limb soft tissue injuries were most common, though regional patterns varied substantially. Additionally, risks from cardiovascular strain and hyperthermia were noted within the literature, alongside a generally poor uptake of protective equipment and a significant research gap on squash-related illnesses. Conclusions: Lack of standardisation hinders risk assessment and prevention within squash; therefore, future research requires an international consensus on injury surveillance, particularly as squash enters its Olympic era. Full article

Current research in the field of memory and forgetting has reshaped our understanding in psychology and cognitive science. Philosophical research, particularly a systematic investigation into non-Western modes of thinking, is still lagging. Common themes in popular culture today, such as memory editing or selective forgetting, are not limited to fantasies alone, as they are becoming increasingly prevalent in reality. This invites questions on the morality of such practices. The focus of this paper is the classical Patañjalian approach to memory and forgetting. By engaging classical Indian philosophies and relating the arguments to contemporary research, I explore the core issues of memory and forgetting in Patañjali’s philosophy. Full article

Organic fruit and vegetable production in the United States is increasingly popular, driven by consumer interest in foods associated with healthier lifestyles and environmentally friendly practices. This review synthesizes evidence on the production of this subsector from 1960 to 2021, using major literature databases (Agricola, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar), to summarize health and environmental implications, economic importance, research trends, and persistent challenges. The production of fruits and vegetables is frequently reported to exhibit favorable quality and safety attributes, including higher antioxidant capacity and lower levels of cadmium, pesticides, and other chemical residues, supporting its relevance to nutrition and human health. This type of practice is also described as contributing to environmental restoration and preservation through improved soil conditions, reduced reliance on synthetic inputs, enhanced nutrient cycling, and climate-smart benefits such as increased soil organic matter and lower energy intensity. Nevertheless, it faces constraints that increase costs and limit scalability, including high labor demand, limited effectiveness and availability of some organic pest control tools, perishability, post-harvest losses, certification burdens, and market access regulations. Despite these barriers, data indicate growth: from 2007 to 2021, acreage increased by more than 100%, farm-gate value rose from $685 million to $1913 million, and the number of participating farms increased by more than 100%. Moreover, it accounts for 0.9% of the total value of the agricultural production in the U.S. Overall, the outlook for U.S. organic fruit and vegetables is encouraging, supported by expanding consumer demand, government support, and improved conditions for international trade. Full article

Sports drinks are becoming increasingly popular, especially among young, physically active individuals. The influence of acidic drinks on dental restorative materials, including composites and glass ionomers, is an important concern in conservative dentistry. Acidic conditions can cause material degradation, which may reduce their longevity and clinical performance. We aimed to examine the effect of sports drink exposure on the colour stability of composite and glass ionomer materials. This systematic review was conducted based on records published from 1 January 2005 to 31 December 2024, according to the PRISMA statement guidelines, using the databases PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Embase. Based on the established inclusion and exclusion criteria, 17 studies were selected for this review, of which 12 were included in a meta-analysis. The meta-analysis demonstrated a statistically significant increase in colour change (ΔE) for microhybrid composites and nanocomposites after immersion in sports drinks for one month (SMD = 3.04; 95% CI: 0.67 to 5.41, and SMD = 3.00; 95% CI: 1.08 to 4.92, respectively). No such significant differences were observed for nanohybrid materials (SMD = 1.64; p-value = 0.579). Despite the findings of this systematic review, the extent of material degradation observed in in vitro studies cannot be directly translated to clinical oral conditions, as factors such as salivary buffering capacity and variable exposure to sports drinks influence outcomes. Full article