Search Results (823)

Settlement-relevant load combinations play a critical role in the serviceability design of buildings, particularly for structures on soils with time-dependent deformation behavior. While permanent loads must be fully considered, the contribution of variable actions depends on their duration relative to soil response. This study investigates suitable settlement-relevant load combinations and their influence on the restrained load redistribution within buildings, based on parametric finite element analyses of wall-type and frame-type structures on sand, silt, and clay using PLAXIS 3D (Version 2024.3). Results show that structural stiffness significantly affects force redistribution due to settlements: stiffer structures exhibit greater redistribution, while soft soils generate higher absolute restraining forces but are less sensitive to load combinations. Based on these findings, the reduced characteristic load combination (including α_n) is recommended for coarse-grained, drained soils, as it balances safety and realistic deformation. For fine-grained, low-permeability soils, the quasi-permanent combination should be applied to capture long-term consolidation effects. Short-term load variations after consolidation have negligible impact and should be addressed through safety factors rather than separate settlement analyses. These recommendations provide a clear and practical framework for selecting settlement-relevant load combinations, enhancing reliability and efficiency in structural design. Full article

β-Hydroxy-β-methylbutyrate (HMB), a natural metabolite derived from the essential amino acid leucine, is primarily recognised for its anabolic and anti-catabolic effects on skeletal muscle tissue. Recent studies indicate that HMB may also play a role in influencing the structural organisation of extracellular matrix (ECM) components, particularly collagen, which is crucial for maintaining the mechanical integrity of connective tissues. In this investigation, bovine type I collagen was polymerised in the presence of two concentrations of HMB (0.025 M and 0.25 M) to explore its potential function as a molecular modulator of fibrillogenesis. The morphology of the resulting collagen fibres and their molecular architecture were examined using atomic force microscopy (AFM) and Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. The findings demonstrated that lower levels of HMB facilitated the formation of more regular and well-organised fibrillar structures, exhibiting increased D-band periodicity and enhanced stabilisation of the native collagen triple helix, as indicated by Amide I and III band profiles. Conversely, higher concentrations of HMB led to significant disruption of fibril morphology and alterations in secondary structure, suggesting that HMB interferes with the self-assembly of collagen monomers. These structural changes are consistent with a non-covalent influence on interchain interactions and fibril organisation, to which hydrogen bonding and short-range electrostatics may contribute. Collectively, the results highlight the potential of HMB as a small-molecule regulator for soft-tissue matrix engineering, extending its consideration beyond metabolic supplementation towards controllable, materials-oriented modulation of ECM structure. Full article

This study investigated the physicochemical and rheological properties of floury rice powder (FRP) with different particle sizes and their effects on the quality characteristics of gluten-free butter sponge cake. Soft rice grain (Baromi2 variety) was dry-milled and sieved into four fractions: FR1 (60 mesh overs), FR2 (60–80 mesh), FR3 (80–100 mesh), and FR4 (100 mesh throughs). FRP fractions were analyzed for chemical composition, swelling power, solubility, gelatinization, pasting viscosity, and viscoelastic property. Gluten-free cakes made using a whole-egg foam method were evaluated for morphological structure, baking loss, moisture, specific volume and firmness. With decreasing FRP particle size, there were increasing trends in solubility, pasting viscosity, resistance to deformation, viscoelastic attributes (G′ and G″), and gel rigidity. FR3 and FR4 cakes exhibited flat and puffy loaves compared to FR1 and FR2 cakes with loaf collapses. The finer FRP enhanced the morphological balances of the cakes. Increasing trends in specific volume and firmness were observed as FRP particle size decreased. These results paralleled the solubility, pasting, rheological, and gelling properties of FRP itself. Overall, the results suggest that the rheological and gelling properties of FRP may play a role in determining the quality of gluten-free sponge cakes. In addition, FRP with a particle size of 80–100 mesh appears most appropriate for gluten-free sponge cake. Full article

Objectives: The objective of this study was to compare occlusal and articular characteristics between young adults with and without a confirmed diagnosis of sleep bruxism, through a case-control study based on polysomnography. Methods: We conducted a case–control study with probabilistic sampling, including 20 participants with a polysomnography-confirmed diagnosis of sleep bruxism and 20 age- and sex-matched controls. A clinical oral examination was conducted to identify wear facets, joint sounds, and soft tissue indentations. Occlusal relationships were analyzed using mounted models on a semi-adjustable articulator, evaluating interferences during working, balancing, and protrusive movements, premature contacts, attrition, and dental inclinations. Results: Sleep bruxism showed a higher frequency of temporomandibular joint sounds (35% vs. 5%; p = 0.017; w = 0.375) and left-side balancing interferences (p = 0.04; d = 0.723). Multivariate analysis revealed a moderate correlation between bruxism and the combination of joint sound and occlusal inclination (COR = 0.39; 95% CI: 0.19–0.57; I² = 0.0%). Joint sound showed a weak association with REM-related bruxism (COR = 0.29; 95% CI: 0.05–0.51; I² = 21.7%) and a moderate association with non-REM bruxism (COR = 0.41). The correlation with occlusal inclination was stronger during REM sleep (COR = 0.41) than during non-REM sleep (COR = 0.35; I² = 0.0%), indicating consistent and clinically relevant associations. Conclusions: Occlusal and functional characteristics associated with sleep bruxism were identified, particularly joint sounds and dental inclinations, although no direct causal relationship was established. These findings suggest the presence of specific morphofunctional patterns that may play a role in the clinical expression of sleep bruxism. Full article

The soft tissue around dental implants plays a crucial role in achieving successful rehabilitation outcomes related to aesthetics, peri-implant health, and bone stability. These tissues, made up of mucosa and keratinized tissue, serve different functions based on specific clinical objectives. Improving mucosal thickness enhances soft tissue volume, emergence profile, and aesthetic results. Historically, autogenous connective tissue grafts (CTGs) have been considered the gold standard for soft tissue augmentation; however, this approach has drawbacks, including patient morbidity and limited availability. Due to these issues, developing connective tissue graft substitutes (CTGSs) has gained considerable interest in the field. CTGSs may provide a predictable and minimally invasive option for increasing soft tissue volume and quality. This paper aims to outline key strategies for managing soft tissues around implants across three distinct surgical stages. It highlights the anticipated outcomes and underscores the importance of connective tissue graft substitutes in achieving these goals. Full article

Digital transformation has become a central strategy for modernizing the public sector. This study analyzes the relationships between digital competencies, digital literacy, change management, soft skills, technology adoption, digitization of the public function, digital public services, e-governance, the digital divide, digital transformation, and state modernization in Peru. A quantitative, cross-sectional design was applied, using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling with data collected from 379 public servants in Metropolitan Lima. The results show that digital transformation and e-governance significantly influence state modernization. Digital competencies and digital literacy play an important role in facilitating technology adoption, while soft skills mediate the link between individual capacities and institutional processes. Digitization of the public function supports efficiency in administration and connects with the provision of digital public services, which in turn improves citizen access and trust. E-governance contributes to reducing the digital divide and reinforces the delivery of digital public services. The findings extend existing frameworks by integrating technological, organizational, and human dimensions into a single model. In practical terms, the study provides guidance for policymakers to strengthen digital competencies and literacy, implement structured change management programs, reinforce soft skills in civil service, advance the digitization of administrative functions, expand digital public services, and design inclusive policies to reduce the digital divide, thereby supporting sustainable state modernization. Full article

To address the challenges of autonomous pursuit-evasion in aerospace, particularly in achieving cross-domain generalizability and handling complex terminal constraints, this paper proposes a generalizable deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework. The core of the method is a self-play Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) architecture enhanced by two key innovations. First, a dynamics-agnostic curriculum learning (CL) strategy is employed to accelerate training and enhance policy robustness by structuring the learning process from simple to complex. Second, a transferable prediction-based reward function is designed to provide dense, forward-looking guidance, utilizing forward-state projection to effectively satisfy mission-specific terminal conditions. Comprehensive simulations were conducted in both multi-spacecraft and multi-drone scenarios. In the primary spacecraft validation, the proposed method achieved a 90.7% success rate, significantly outperforming baseline algorithms like traditional PPO and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). Furthermore, it demonstrated superior robustness, with a performance drop of only 8.3% under stochastic perturbations, a stark contrast to the over 18% degradation seen in baseline methods. The successful application in a multi-drone scenario, including an obstacle-rich environment, confirms the framework’s potential as a unified and robust solution for diverse autonomous adversarial systems. Full article

Sign language recognition technology serves as a crucial bridge, fostering meaningful connections between deaf individuals and hearing individuals. This technological innovation plays a substantial role in promoting social inclusivity. Conventional sign language recognition methodologies that rely on static images are inadequate for capturing the dynamic characteristics and temporal information inherent in sign language. This limitation restricts their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. The proposed framework, called SSTA-ResT, integrates ResNet, soft spatiotemporal attention, and Transformer encoders to achieve this objective. The framework utilizes ResNet to extract robust spatial feature representations, employs the lightweight SSTA module for dual-path complementary representation enhancement to strengthen spatiotemporal associations, and leverages the Transformer encoder to capture long-range temporal dependencies. Experimental results on the LSA64 Argentine Sign Language (ASL) dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 96.25%, a precision of 97.18%, and an F1 score of 0.9671. These results surpass the performance of existing methods across all metrics while maintaining a relatively low model parameter count of 11.66 M. This demonstrates the framework’s effectiveness and practicality for sign language video recognition tasks. Full article

Soft skills such as communication and collaboration are vital in both professional and educational settings, yet difficult to train and assess objectively. Traditional role-playing scenarios rely heavily on subjective trainer evaluations—either in real time, where subtle behaviors are missed, or through time-intensive post hoc analysis. Virtual reality (VR) offers a scalable alternative by immersing trainees in controlled, interactive scenarios while simultaneously capturing fine-grained behavioral signals. This study investigates how task design in VR shapes non-verbal and paraverbal behaviors during dyadic collaboration. We compared two puzzle tasks: Task 1, which provided shared visual access and dynamic gesturing, and Task 2, which required verbal coordination through separation and turn-taking. From multimodal tracking data, we extracted features including gaze behaviors (eye contact, joint attention), hand gestures, facial expressions, and speech activity, and compared them across tasks. A clustering analysis explored whether o not tasks could be differentiated by their behavioral profiles. Results showed that Task 2, the more constrained condition, led participants to focus more visually on their own workspaces, suggesting that interaction difficulty can reduce partner-directed attention. Gestures were more frequent in shared-visual tasks, while speech became longer and more structured when turn-taking was enforced. Joint attention increased when participants relied on verbal descriptions rather than on a visible shared reference. These findings highlight how VR can elicit distinct soft skill behaviors through scenario design, enabling data-driven analysis of collaboration. This work contributes to scalable assessment frameworks with applications in training, adaptive agents, and human-AI collaboration. Full article

Soft skills play a fundamental role in transversal competences in the field of training and employment, especially in university collectives with disabilities. Traditional methodologies are giving way to gamified and transmedia environments, which are more efficient in the educational process and more sustainable for institutions. This study compares two educational programmes, one based on MOOCs and the other in a gamified environment (Transwork), with the participation of 181 university graduates with some degree of disability and unemployed for more than five years. The gamified educational programme shows a significantly lower dropout rate and a higher employability rate (χ², p < 0.001), as well as an improvement in interpersonal skills such as teamwork and conflict management. This demonstrates that methodologies in gamified and transmedia environments promote social sustainability by enhancing autonomy and inclusion in vulnerable groups, as well as contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, especially those related to quality education, reducing inequality, and decent work. This improvement in the labour market integration of people with disabilities represents not only an advance in equity, but also a long-term saving in care costs, by promoting their autonomy and active participation in the labour market. Thus, the sustainability of the social system is reinforced through inclusive educational policies based on gamified environments. Full article

Emerging power electronic devices like soft open points (SOPs) and electric springs (ESs) play a vital role in enhancing active distribution network (ADN) efficiency. SOPs enable flexible active/reactive power control, while ESs improve demand-side management and voltage regulation. This paper proposes a two-stage stochastic programming model to optimize ADN’s operation by coordinating these fast-response devices with legacy mechanical equipment. The first stage determines hourly setpoints for conventional devices, while the second stage adjusts SOPs and ESs for intra-hour control. To handle ES nonlinearities, a hybrid data–knowledge approach combines knowledge-based linear constraints with a data-driven multi-layer perceptron, later linearized for computational efficiency. The resulting mixed-integer second-order cone program is solved using commercial solvers. Simulation results show the proposed strategy effectively reduces power loss by 42.5%, avoids voltage unsafety with 22 time slots, and enhances 4.3% PV harvesting. The coordinated use of SOP and ESs significantly improves system efficiency, while the proposed solution methodology ensures both accuracy and over 60% computation time reduction. Full article

The durability of bonding between the denture base and reline materials plays a critical role in the long-term success of removable prostheses. This study aimed to compare the bond strength of denture base resins fabricated by heat-polymerization, CAD-CAM milling, and 3D printing techniques after thermocycling and different surface treatments. A total of 216 specimens (10 × 10 × 20 mm) were prepared from three base materials and subjected to surface treatment via no treatment (control), alumina air abrasion, or an Er/YAG laser. Two reline materials (hard and soft) were applied according to manufacturers’ instructions. All samples underwent 5000 thermal cycles and were tested using a tensile bond strength test. SEM analysis was performed to evaluate failure modes. The highest bond strength was observed in the milled resin group combined with alumina air abrasion and the hard reline material, reaching up to 12.41 MPa. Statistically significant effects were found for the material type, surface treatment, and reline material (p < 0.001). The results indicate that material properties, surface preparation, and reline type critically influence bond performance. Milled PMMA bases and hard relining agents, particularly when combined with air abrasion, offer superior bonding outcomes. Full article

Wearable systems are increasingly adopted for health monitoring and wellness promotion. Among the most relevant biosignals, the electrocardiogram (ECG) plays a key role; however, in wearable settings (e.g., during physical activity), it is often corrupted by electromyogram (EMG) interference. This study presents a novel adaptive algorithm, template masking (TM), which integrates the stationary wavelet transform (SWT) with template matching for denoising the ECG from EMG. The method identifies the optimal wavelet and decomposition level to maximise detail sparsity. To mitigate EMG interference, after alignment in the SWT domain with a template, the detail coefficients are multiplied by a binary mask and smoothed. TM was compared with soft and hard thresholding on (1) simulations combining clinical ECGs (MIT-BIH database) and synthetic EMGs with different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), and (2) experimental signals including ECGs acquired with dry electrodes corrupted by EMGs (SimEMG database, also varying SNRs), as a potential wearable scenario. In both cases, TM yielded significantly lower reconstruction errors at SNRs below 5 dB ($p<0.01$) and significantly outperformed thresholding in the sensitivity of R-peaks estimation ($p<0.001$). These results demonstrate the potential of TM, highlighting the value of adaptive denoising algorithms. Full article

Enhanced Giant Magneto-Impedance (GMI) effects of composite materials play a crucial role in producing devices with a good soft magnetic property. To improve this soft magnetic property, graphene is introduced to increase the conductivity of composite materials. However, the quality of graphene layers restricts the enhancement of GMI effects. There are few reports on the direct growth of graphene on Fe_73.5Si_13.5B₉Cu₁Nb₃ (FINEMET). In this paper, the composite ribbons of FINEMET coated with as-grown graphene are prepared by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), which is much better than previous results obtained by methods such as the transfer method or electroless plating in quality. The Ni layer, with good magnetic conductivity, is induced to the FINEMET as an auxiliary layer by the magnetron sputtering method for high-quality graphene-layer growth due to its high carbon dissolution rate. The results show that the growth temperature of the as-grown graphene layer on the FINEMET with the best GMI ratio could reach as high as 560 °C. Moreover, it was found that an Ni layer thickness of 300 nm has a crucial impact on GMI, with the maximum ratio reaching 76.8%, which is 1.9 times that of an initial bare FINEMET ribbon (39.7%). As a result, the direct growth of graphene layers on FINEMET ribbons by the CVD method is a promising way to light GMI-based devices. Full article

Carbohydrates are a primary nutrient for plant growth, and sugar transporter proteins play a crucial role in sugar allocation. In this study, hexose transporter genes encoding in the genome of colored calla lily ‘Jingcai Yangguang’ (Zantedeschia elliottiana cv. Jingcai Yangguang) were identified, and their expression patterns following infection by Pectobacterium carotovora subsp. Carotovora were investigated. Additionally, the transport characteristics of three hexose transporters, ZeSTP7, ZeSTP15, and ZeSTP17, were determined. The results showed that the sugar transporter protein family in Z. elliottiana comprises 18 members, most of which possess 12 transmembrane domains. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that the ZeSTP gene family was divided into five subgroups. Tandem gene duplication events were identified on the 16 chromosomes of Z. elliottiana, with multiple tandemly duplicated genes detected. Comparative analysis of synteny between species identified ZeSTP8 and OsSTP22 as homologous gene pairs, while OsSTP6 (OsMST6) was identified as a homologous gene pair with both ZeSTP14 and ZeSTP17. Following infection by P. carotovora subsp. carotovora, the transcript levels of ZeSTP7, ZeSTP15, and ZeST17 were all significantly elevated. Yeast mutant hexose complementation tests indicated that ZeSTP7 could transport glucose and galactose, whereas ZeSTP15 and ZeSTP17 exhibited limited transport capacity in this respect. This study provides a systematic identification and analysis of hexose transporter genes at the genome-wide level, highlighting the role of ZeSTP genes in the response of colored calla lily to soft rot and laying a theoretical foundation for further understanding the functions of sugar transporter genes. Full article