Search Results (6,489)

To address the task-grouping problem for air–ground integrated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm missions in three-dimensional (3D) environments, this study proposes a data-preprocessing and hybrid initialization clustering method based on 3D spatial features. A dual-modal prototype meta-heuristic optimization model, Dual-Prototype Metaheuristic K-Means (DPM-Kmeans), is constructed accordingly. First, to overcome spatial information loss in high-dimensional task allocation, a 3D spatial task data preprocessing technique and a hybrid initialization strategy based on the golden spiral distribution are designed. This ensures the diversity and environmental adaptability of the initial solutions. Second, a dual-modal prototype optimization framework incorporating row prototypes (local refinement) and column prototypes (global combination) was constructed using meta-heuristics and clustering algorithms. The prototype-driven replacement update mechanism simultaneously performs global and local search, balancing the algorithm’s exploration and exploitation capabilities while expanding the solution space. This effectively addresses premature convergence issues in complex search spaces. Simultaneously, a collaborative multi-constraint, dynamically weighted optimization model was constructed, incorporating task requirements and flight distance constraints to ensure that the grouping scheme approximates the global optimum. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to traditional K-means and mainstream meta-heuristic optimization algorithms, DPM-Kmeans achieves an overall improvement of 2–10% in Sum of Squared Errors (SSE), Silhouette Coefficient (SC), and Davies–Bouldin Index (DB) metrics. It exhibits superior convergence speed and solution quality, proving the method’s excellent scalability and robustness in multi-constraint, large-scale 3D scenarios. Full article

Angular Distribution Models (ADMs) are essential for converting observed radiances from satellite sensors to the energy-budget–relevant quantity of irradiance. In preparation for the NASA Libera mission, this study presents a data-driven framework to identify optimal groupings of International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP) surface types for Libera’s split-shortwave ADMs, in an effort to minimize the uncertainty associated with radiance-to-irradiance conversions while maintaining operational feasibility. Using data from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) Flight Model 5 (FM-5), K-means clustering is applied within angular bins to capture viewing-geometry-dependent radiometric behavior. These angular clustering solutions are then assessed via hierarchical consensus clustering to derive consistent surface groups. The analysis suggests seven surface groups (K = 7) optimize the surface clustering space. The resulting classifications are broadly consistent with historical CERES–TRMM ADM surface definitions, preserving radiometrically distinct surfaces such as water bodies and snowy surfaces while highlighting opportunities to consolidate vegetative IGBP surface classes. This study provides an objective and physically grounded basis for defining Libera ADM surface groups, ensuring a robust balance between model accuracy and operational simplicity. Full article

In low Earth orbit (LEO), special environments such as atomic oxygen (AO), alternating high and low temperatures, and high vacuum can seriously affect the reliability and service lifetime of moving parts of space equipment. Therefore, there is an increasingly urgent demand for long-life, high-performance lubricating protective coatings with the rapid evolution of astronautical technology. In this study, polyimide (PI) was modified by polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) with different numbers of functional groups to fabricate PI-based self-stratifying gradient composite lubricating coatings. The coating exhibited significantly enhanced AO resistance, and its vacuum tribological properties under alternating high and low temperature conditions were investigated. Results show that the mass loss of the gradient coating under AO exposure was significantly reduced by 78%, and the tribological properties of the coating under high and low temperature alternating conditions were significantly different. The friction coefficient was more stable and was smaller than that at high temperatures, and the wear rates of the POSS-modified coating also decreased by 77.5% and 50% for both high and low temperatures compared with that of the PI/PTFE coating. Full article

Peers often serve as sources of support and protection in educational spaces. However, when cultural norms are perceived to be violated, the criticism of peers can create stressful and unwelcoming environments. Presently, little is known about the specific effect cultural invalidations (when the authenticity of one’s cultural identity is questioned by same-race peers) have on one’s identity development and sense of belonging. To address this gap, the current study qualitatively examined instances of cultural invalidations between Black undergraduate students and their same-race peers that led to feelings of inauthenticity and lack of belonging. Participants included 20 Black undergraduate students (50% female, 50% male) attending a predominantly White institution who participated in individual interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to address two research questions: (a) How do Black undergraduate students perceive and interpret experiences of cultural invalidations within their Black peer groups? (b) How do cultural invalidations experienced from Black peers relate to individuals’ sense of belonging? Two themes were identified regarding participants’ experiences of cultural invalidations: (a) colorism is a source of cultural invalidation, and (b) Blackness is not a monolith. Findings also revealed the negative implications of cultural invalidations on participants’ sense of belonging. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Full article

Genetically encoded biosensors represent cutting-edge biosensors due to their capabilities in real-time monitoring and precise control in living cells. However, the development of eukaryotic genetically encoded biosensors for new analytes is constrained by the shortage of signal–receptor pairs. Bacterial biosensors have been transferred to eukaryotes to expand the signal detection space, which has achieved remarkable success. However, due to the significant differences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic gene expression systems, optimizing bacterial biosensors has proven challenging. Successful cases indicate that developing orthogonal signal–receptor pairs directly from eukaryotic systems may offer a viable solution. Indeed, the potential of filamentous fungi—a highly diverse group of organisms that share conserved as well as specific signaling and metabolic pathways with yeast and mammalian cells—has been largely overlooked in biosensor development. In this review, we systematically examine biosensing systems in filamentous fungi, summarize their signal recognition receptors, signal transduction pathways, responsive transcription factors, and provide an overview of the biosensors and synthetic tools developed from them. Finally, we highlight the promise and challenges of biosensor development from filamentous fungi and discuss their potential applications. Full article

Sympatric species share identical geographical spaces, climatic conditions and survival pressures. Comparative chloroplast genomes among Anna and Lysionotus sympatric species enable exploration of genome-wide evolutionary dynamics of sympatric species. In this study, we assembled and annotated 10 complete chloroplast genomes, representing sympatric species distributed along the Sino-Vietnamese border. We conducted a comparison of chloroplast genomes, characterized their adaptive evolution and used multiple methods to clarify their phylogenetic relationships. Key findings included the following: 1. The number of CDs, rRNA and tRNA varied among different species, whereas they were relatively conserved between the two genera; 2. psaB-psaA, trnL-UAG and ndhD-psaC were identified as potential molecular markers for Anna species, with clpP and ycf1 proposed as effective molecular markers for Lysionotus species; 3. the types of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and large sequence repeats (LRSs) showed a higher conservation in Lysionotus compared with Anna; 4. the codon usage preferences of the two genera showed convergent evolutionary trends and natural selection played a dominant role, with ycf1 and atpH being confirmed as significantly positively selected genes; 6. phylogenetic analyses using multiple approaches (ML, BI and NJ) consistently verified that Anna and Lysionotus each formed a well-supported monophyletic group. This study offers molecular insights into adaptation and differentiation patterns among distinct plant genera inhabiting the same extreme habitat. Full article

Background/Objectives: People with advanced dementia experience difficulties in navigating, while wayfinding is essential for a level of autonomy. A properly designed building has the strength to facilitate this target group in wayfinding. While understanding their wayfinding needs and experiences, and the spatial characteristics (both facilitating and confusing) during the wayfinding process is crucial, this knowledge is still limited. This study mapped challenges that people with advanced dementia encounter on a route to an irregular destination in their familiar nursing home environment, specifically addressing confusing spatial characteristics. Methods: An observational study design with a mixed-method approach was applied. First, a navigation task was conducted to identify places of confusion on the way to the destination (n = 15 participants in four nursing homes). Affective states were captured by observations combined with biometric measurements. Second, both manual and space syntax floorplan analysis techniques were used to identify the spatial characteristics of potentially stressful spaces in nursing homes. Results: Nine participants reached the destination. The most observed wayfinding behaviors were looking at various things and stops on the route, and they were often accompanied by verbal navigational cues. Furthermore, most participants experienced some signs of stress or concentration. In total, eighteen confusing places in the nursing homes were identified. Conclusions: Regarding spatial characteristics supporting or hindering wayfinding skills for people with advanced dementia in nursing homes, this study confirmed some of the findings in the existing research (e.g., minimizing shifting directions for supporting wayfinding), contradicted the existing research (e.g., confusion arose at places with high visibility values), and added new findings (e.g., significantly widening corridors may be confusing). This study revealed that high-visibility areas and squares on the route confuse people with advanced dementia while wayfinding. Full article

Equimolar crystals of a high-entropy Ca_0.25Sr_0.25Ba_0.25Nd_0.25F_2.25 (CaSrBaNdF₉) fluoride solid solution were grown from a melt by the Bridgman technique, and their optical, electrical, and thermal properties were studied for the first time. This solid solution crystallizes in a fluorite-type structure (space group Fm-3m with lattice parameter a = 5.807 Å), is transparent over a wide spectral range, and has a refractive index of n_D = 1.5035(5). In terms of ionic conductivity (σ_dc increases monotonically from 3.7 × 10⁻⁵ to 3.9 × 10⁻⁴ S/cm in the studied temperature range of 643–810 K), it significantly exceeds the parameters of binary and ternary NdF₃-based single crystals, such as M_1−xNd_xF_2+x (M = Ca, Sr, Ba; x = 0.24–0.25) and Ca_0.58Sr_0.21Nd_0.21F_2.21. The grown multicomponent material is a hard (H_V~3.6 GPa) isomorphic-capacious crystalline matrix for various applications in solid-state ionics, optics and photonics, and opens up prospects for the development of new functional isotropic optical crystalline materials in quaternary CaF₂–SrF₂–BaF₂–RF₃ and higher-order complex fluoride systems nMF₂–mRF₃, where n + m ≥ 4, M and R are ions of alkaline earth and rare earth elements, respectively. Full article

A spread in $\mathrm{PG}(n,q)$ is a set of lines such that each point is in exactly one line. A parallelism is a partition of the set of lines of $\mathrm{PG}(n,q)$ to spreads. A deficiency one parallelism is a parallelism with exactly one missing spread. Most of the results on parallelisms are for $\mathrm{PG}(3,q)$. $\mathrm{PG}(5,2)$ is the smallest projective space of a dimension greater than 3. All point-transitive and all cyclic parallelisms of $\mathrm{PG}(5,2)$ are known. Parallelisms with some definite automorphism groups have been constructed too. No transitive deficiency one parallelisms are known. The present work concerns deficiency one parallelisms of $\mathrm{PG}(5,2)$. We present all parallelisms of $\mathrm{PG}(5,2)$ which are invariant under a group of order 30 and show that the full automorphism group of a possible transitive deficiency one parallelism of $\mathrm{PG}(5,2)$ cannot have a normal subgroup of order 15. Full article

Social media platforms serve as critical channels for autism support groups to communicate and seek assistance. This study employed Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to analyze discourse patterns within the Autism Bar on Baidu Tieba, a major Chinese social media. A dataset of 14,151 posts was collected through web crawling, with 12,667 posts retained after preprocessing. The analysis revealed two key findings: (1) The discourse among autism support communities on Baidu Tieba focuses on four central themes: intervention and therapy, early educational journey, early symptom detection and family interaction, and access to educational resources and community support. (2) Sociocultural factors exert a significant influence on autism-related discourse, particularly in shaping societal attitudes toward individuals with autism and the formation of support networks. Traditional Chinese cultural values, such as collectivism and familial centrality, impact the behavioral patterns and decision-making processes of families with autistic children. This study has demonstrated the unique needs and challenges faced by the autism support community, while also informing strategies to promote social media platforms as spaces for support and information exchange. The findings have practical implications for designing targeted interventions and support mechanisms for individuals with autism and their families. Full article

Energy-aware distributed manufacturing has become a key focus in modern production systems due to the growing demand for sustainable and efficient operations. This study investigates the energy-aware distributed flexible job shop scheduling problem with job priority, where multiple factories cooperate to process prioritized jobs under energy consumption considerations. Considering job priorities is essential for reflecting the practical importance and urgency of different customer orders, which directly affects scheduling fairness and production responsiveness. The proposed bi-objective model aims to simultaneously minimize total weighted tardiness and total energy consumption, accounting for both processing and idle power. To effectively solve this complex NP-hard problem, a knowledge-guided deep reinforcement learning approach is developed. Domain knowledge is integrated into a double deep Q-network to guide the adaptive selection of local search operators, while a co-evolutionary mechanism maintains global exploration and accelerates convergence. Extensive computational experiments are conducted on 24 benchmark instances, which are categorized into five groups according to factory scale, with the maximum problem size reaching 160 jobs × 6 machines × 5 factories, together with a real-world case study. Compared with four state-of-the-art multi-objective baseline algorithms (NSGA-II, MOPSO, MOEA/D, and SPEA2), the proposed D2QN-COEA demonstrates substantial performance advantages. On average, it achieves an HV improvement of 23.1% compared with the best-performing baseline on each instance, while GD and IGD are reduced by 70.8% and 63.7%, respectively. When averaged across all four baseline algorithms, D2QN-COEA yields improvements of 203.4% in HV, 83.9% in GD, 79.9% in IGD, and 70.8% in Spacing, confirming its superior convergence accuracy and solution diversity. The results confirm that embedding domain knowledge into deep reinforcement learning enhances optimization robustness and provides an intelligent solution for energy-efficient distributed scheduling in modern manufacturing systems. Full article

This article addresses a key evidence gap in urban safety policy in Colombia: the absence of publicly accessible microdata that jointly measure victimization, perception of security, and probability of sanctions among socioeconomically vulnerable residents. It aims to provide a clean, linkable dataset that enables analysis of variations in these issues across demographic and territorial groups in Cali (recently classified as the 29th most dangerous city worldwide, with 1028 and 1065 homicides in 2024 and 2025, respectively). It reports face-to-face survey data collected from 22 July to 16 August 2024, at Sistema de Identificación de Potenciales Beneficiarios de Programas Sociales (SISBEN) service points. The final dataset includes 2139 adults (aged 18–95 years) and combines (i) primary responses on perceived safety (e.g., public space safety and surveillance cameras), perceived likelihood of sanction, victimization, and self-protection measures with (ii) selected sociodemographic and household characteristics drawn from SISBEN IV records. Individual-level linkage was implemented using respondent identification at interviews, yielding an integrated anonymized file suitable for replication and secondary analysis. The dataset enables distributive analyses of insecurity (e.g., by sex, age, and ethnicity—including Afro-descendant populations) within a policy-relevant target group and supports evaluation and targeting of local interventions by providing individual-level indicators. Full article

Guided bone regeneration (GBR) relies on barrier membrane integrity to prevent soft-tissue ingrowth. Although collagen membranes are widely used, their limited longevity can compromise space maintenance, underscoring the need for strategies that enhance membrane stability without impairing the regenerative potential. We hypothesized that thermal denaturation of platelet-poor plasma (PPP), combined with heat-induced modifications of collagen fibrils, could generate a volume-stable, plasma-rich composite that preserves membrane structure and restricts cellular penetration. To test this proof-of-principle concept, collagen membranes were soaked in PPP and either kept at room temperature or subjected to thermal treatment (75 °C/10 min) prior to implantation in rat calvarial defects. Bone regeneration and membrane behavior were evaluated after three weeks using micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) and histology. Micro-CT suggested only minor numerical differences in mineralized tissue between groups; however, these data should not be overinterpreted because micro-CT cannot differentiate mineralization formed within the collagen membrane from mineralization adjacent to it. Consistent with this limitation, histology demonstrated that mineral deposition and early bone formation extended into the structure of room-temperature PPP membranes, whereas mineralized tissue in the thermally treated group was predominantly located outside the membrane, indicating reduced osteoconductive integration within the membrane. Together, these findings support that thermal denaturation of PPP shifts early composite membrane behavior toward barrier-dominant characteristics at the expense of intramembranous mineralization. Full article

Generative AI (GenAI) is accelerating design space exploration and multimodal prototyping in industrial design (ID), bringing new efficiencies and possibilities to early-stage ideation and cross-media expression. Yet many studies do not clearly define stage-wise human–GenAI roles, preserve constraints as traceable cross-stage artifacts, or provide verifiable stage-wise evaluation, undermining traceability in both concept convergence and concept-to-engineering handover. To address these issues, this paper proposes GID-HGCC, a GenAI-driven human–GenAI co-creation ID framework that links four core stages: requirements confirmation, concept generation, concept evaluation, and 3D modeling. First, it specifies stage-wise responsibilities and defines the corresponding inputs and outputs. Second, it establishes a traceable cross-stage artifact flow—“structured prompts–candidate concepts–evaluation outputs–3D engineering issue list”—to support continuous constraint transmission and explicit documentation. Third, it integrates a multi-dimensional evaluation criteria system with IVIFNs–CRITIC–TOPSIS for concept ranking, and further strengthens convergence reliability via preference–consistency diagnostics. The framework is validated through a case study on a portable passive cervical spine rehabilitation training device. Expert preferences over stage-wise co-creation artifacts exhibit an overall medium-to-high level of consistency, and the Top-5 overlap between each expert and the group ranking ranges from 0.80 to 1.00. These results demonstrate that GID-HGCC offers an operational reference for constraint-guided human–GenAI co-creation in ID, improving traceability and handover reliability from requirements confirmation to engineering refinement. Full article

Peripheral nerve regeneration is most rapid during the early post-injury period but gradually slows over time, often limiting functional recovery. Electrical stimulation (ES) delivered via percutaneous needle electrodes has been shown to modulate the local neural microenvironment and promote axonal regeneration; however, the optimal temporal window and duration of stimulation remain unclear. This study aimed to evaluate the time-dependent effects of needle-based ES on peripheral nerve regeneration in a rat model of sciatic nerve transection, using a well-established silicone nerve conduit as a stable and reproducible non-biodegradable repair model. Female Sprague–Dawley rats underwent sciatic nerve transection and repair. Postoperatively (PO), animals were randomly assigned to control (C) needle insertion or needle-based ES groups, receiving stimulation for either 3 weeks (C-3W-PO and ES-3W-PO, respectively) or 7 weeks (C-7W-PO and ES-7W-PO, respectively). Functional recovery was evaluated using cold plate latency and rotarod performance tests. Electrophysiological assessments included measurements of nerve conduction velocity (NCV), compound muscle action potential amplitude, and muscle action potential (MAP) area. Histomorphometric analysis of regenerated nerve tissue quantified total nerve cross-sectional area, endoneurial space, axon number, and axon density. Retrograde labeling with fluoro-gold (FG) was used to quantify reinnervated motor neurons. Immunohistochemical analyses of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) and macrophage-associated markers were conducted to assess sensory neuropeptide expression and immune cell infiltration within the regenerated nerve. ES significantly improved both sensory and motor recovery in a duration-dependent manner. Behavioral data showed increased cold pain thresholds and improved motor coordination in ES groups, with the most pronounced functional gains observed in the ES-7W-PO group. Electrophysiological measures revealed higher NCV, amplitude, and MAP area in ES-treated animals, with the most pronounced improvements at 7 weeks. Morphologically, ES enhanced nerve regeneration, as evidenced by increased total and endoneurial areas, axonal counts, and axon density. FG-labeled neuron counts were significantly elevated in ES groups, indicating enhanced motor reinnervation. At 3 weeks, ES induced higher CGRP expression and macrophage density, suggesting transient activation of sensory-associated and pro-regenerative immune responses during the early post-injury phase. These findings demonstrate that ES accelerates peripheral nerve repair in rats and that sustained stimulation across the early regenerative window yields superior structural and functional outcomes. Full article