Search Results (3,202)

Diverse natural systems in the universe from stars to organisms have finite “life cycles” (durations of existence). In my review, I attempt to answer fundamental but little explored questions about birth-death cycles, including “why do they exist?”, “what do they have in common?”, and “how/why do they vary?” Various physical and biological systems have life cycles because they cannot avoid “death”, metaphorically speaking. Thus, if their type is to persist, they must replace themselves. All systems with life cycles are dissipative structures with a generative phase of growth and increasing order driven by energy uptake/use and a degenerative phase of degrowth and decreasing order driven by entropy production and accidental damage. Life cycles vary in rapidity and duration, often in relation to system size. The life cycles of living systems also differ from those of non-living systems in using information to regulate their birth and death, at least in part. Living systems are born via self-production, whereas non-living systems are “born” de novo. Thus, living systems perpetuate themselves by means of branching ancestor–descendant lineages, thereby enabling the cumulative evolution of their relatively high levels of diversity and complexity. Living systems (from cells to societies) are also extraordinary in having multi-layered compound cycles, i.e., “cycles within cycles”. Based on my comparative analysis of living and non-living systems across the universe, I propose a preliminary, multi-mechanistic theory of life cycles and their origins. Full article

Background: Parents of children with cancer experience significant psychological distress that is associated with poorer health outcomes. A recent review of caregiver interventions illustrated none targeting Latino parents of children with cancer and a significant need for culturally congruent intervention approaches. Aims: Following our first paper in this issue describing the development of a community co-developed intervention to address psychosocial outcomes in Spanish-speaking Latino families impacted by childhood cancer, this second paper describes the formative evaluation and exploratory analysis of preliminary efficacy in a single-arm pre–post trial. Methods: A total of 32 Spanish-speaking Latino parents/caregivers of children with cancer received the 12-session intervention targeting health literacy, culturally congruent care, and caregiver well-being. Quantitative measures of health literacy and emotional well-being were collected at baseline, post-intervention, and 3 months post-intervention and mixed methods formative evaluation data were collected immediately post-intervention. Results: Mixed methods formative evaluation showed that the intervention was useful, helpful, and relevant. Exploratory preliminary efficacy data using a non-parametric Friedman test showed that health literacy doubled from pre- (33%) to post-intervention (67%) and was sustained at 3 months (X²(2) = 12.52, p = 0.002; Cohen’s d = 0.65). Repeated measures ANOVA showed that emotional distress decreased significantly from baseline to immediately post-intervention with sustained treatment effects at 3 months post-intervention (F(2,62) = 4.37, p = 0.046; Cohen’s d = 0.42). Satisfaction scores were well above treatment acceptability (M = 39.13, SD = 2.80). Conclusions: Implementation of a community co-developed intervention with the goal of achieving cultural congruency was feasible, likeable, and relevant for Spanish-speaking Latino parents and caregivers of children undergoing treatment for cancer. Moreover, the exploratory analysis showed the intervention was associated with improvements in health literacy and emotional well-being and high levels of treatment satisfaction. 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

Background/Objectives: Nurse–mother communication is central to maternal participation in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), yet high acuity and workflow rhythms can compress dialogue and weaken shared understanding. This study used Communication Accommodation Theory and the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping to explain multilevel drivers of communication barriers and to co-produce feasible improvement strategies. Methods: A dyadic qualitative design was conducted across four Level III NICUs. Data were triangulated from 37 semi-structured interviews (18 mothers and 19 nurses, recruited through purposive maximum-variation sampling), approximately 40 h of non-participant observation, and 12-unit documents. A team-based codebook thematic analysis was applied, integrating observational logs with interview and document data to refine patterns and mechanisms. Results: A context-produced pattern of interactional compression was identified. Mothers contributed 2 or fewer speaking turns in 21/30 logged bedside encounters and were present in 13/16 observed round episodes, speaking in 5/13 of those episodes. Interpretability and language access gaps were common: unexplained technical terms occurred in 24/46 logged interactions; teach-back prompts occurred in 7/18 education encounters; professional interpreters were present in 3/9 language-discordant events. Three participation configurations described coping-linked engagement: threat–compression (n = 8), convergence-to-coping (n = 6), and resource-scaffolded participation (n = 4). In co-production, stakeholders co-produced (i.e., collaboratively identified and prioritized) three mechanism-targeted changes: protected post-round question-and-answer time incorporating teach-back, standardized visual “mini-packs,” and 24/7 interpreter access. Conclusions: Nurse–mother communication in NICUs can be structurally compressed by workload rhythms and uneven interpretability supports. Co-produced organizational scaffolds may expand opportunities for accommodation, comprehension verification, and equitable maternal participation. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced an additional major stressor for families in the Caribbean, a region already shaped by environmental risk and socioeconomic vulnerability. This study examined changes in family resilience across pandemic phases among English-speaking Caribbean populations, drawing on Walsh’s family resilience framework, which emphasizes belief systems, organizational processes, and communication. Using a convergent parallel mixed methods design, quantitative and qualitative data were integrated from two studies conducted before and during pandemic restrictions and after restrictions were lifted. Survey data were collected from 198 families across English-speaking Caribbean nations, and in-depth interviews were conducted with 31 families from Grenada, Jamaica, and Trinidad. Quantitative analyses indicated a significant decline in family resilience during periods of heightened restrictions, followed by a return to pre-pandemic levels. Qualitative findings identified faith, family connectedness, communication, resourcefulness, and a positive outlook as key processes supporting adaptation during the crisis. Overall, results suggest that while family resilience at the population level was strained during the pandemic, it demonstrated recovery over time. Policies and interventions that strengthen communication supports and community- and faith-based resources may enhance family resilience and preparedness for future public health and environmental disruptions in the Caribbean. Full article

Arabic sign language (ArASL) is the primary communication medium for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people across Arabic-speaking communities. Most current ArASL recognition systems are based solely on visual features and do not incorporate linguistic or semantic information that could improve generalization and semantic grounding. This paper introduces CLIP-ArASL, a lightweight CLIP-style multimodal approach for static ArASL letter recognition that aligns visual hand gestures with bilingual textual descriptions. The approach integrates an EfficientNet-B0 image encoder with a MiniLM text encoder to learn a shared embedding space using a hybrid objective that combines contrastive and cross-entropy losses. This design supports supervised classification on seen classes and zero-shot prediction on unseen classes using textual class representations. The proposed approach is evaluated on two public datasets, ArASL2018 and ArASL21L. Under supervised evaluation, recognition accuracies of $99.25\pm 0.14\%$ and $91.51\pm 1.29\%$ are achieved, respectively. Zero-shot performance is assessed by withholding $20\%$ of gesture classes during training and predicting them using only their textual descriptions. In this setting, accuracies of $55.2\pm 12.15\%$ on ArASL2018 and $37.6\pm 9.07\%$ on ArASL21L are obtained. These results show that multimodal vision–language alignment supports semantic transfer and enables recognition of unseen classes. Full article

Ixodes ricinus is the most common and, epidemiologically speaking, the most important tick species in Slovakia, transmitting a wide range of zoonotic pathogens. The goal of the present study was to monitor selected tick-borne infectious agents in an urban environment in northern Slovakia where the conditions for their occurrence and survival are typically unfavourable. Ticks were collected by the flagging method during the period from March to November 2024 in the city of Žilina in five urban locations characterized by high human activity and suitable conditions for tick–host interactions. A total of 264 ticks of Ixodes ricinus were collected (67 females, 85 males, and 112 nymphs). A molecular analysis confirmed the presence of Borrelia spp. in 34.5% of samples, while the most frequently detected species was Borrelia afzelii. The other detected species included zoonotic piroplasms Babesia microti and Babesia venatorum (1.5%), as well as the bacteria Anaplasma spp. (2.65%) and Rickettsia spp. (0.4%). In four ticks (1.5%), the presence of coinfection caused by multiple pathogens was detected. These results confirm that urban ecosystems located in the northern regions of Slovakia also provide significant reservoirs of zoonotic pathogens and impose a potential risk for public health. Full article

This study aimed to translate, culturally adapt, and validate the Arabic version of the 6-Item Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6). The LSNS-6 was translated, culturally adapted, and administered, alongside the Medical Outcomes Study Social Support Survey (MOS-SSS), to 327 Arabic-speaking adults aged 60 years and older. Internal consistency was examined using Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tested the hypothesized two-factor structure (Family and Friends), and measurement invariance was evaluated across key sociodemographic and lifestyle variables. Convergent validity was assessed through correlations with MOS-SSS domains. Item response theory (IRT) analyses examined item discrimination and threshold parameters. Latent class analysis (LCA) explored whether the LSNS-6 could identify subgroups with distinct patterns of social connectedness and perceived support. The Arabic LSNS-6 demonstrated good internal consistency (α = 0.83; ω = 0.84) and supported the expected two-factor structure with satisfactory model fit (CFI = 0.963; TLI = 0.931; SRMR = 0.03). Convergent validity was evidenced by moderate correlations with overall perceived social support (r = 0.51). IRT analyses indicated strong discrimination for most items, and LCA identified four distinct latent classes. Overall, the Arabic LSNS-6 is a reliable and valid tool for assessing social isolation among older Arabic-speaking adults. Full article

Despite the centrality of scalar implicature (SI) in pragmatic development, the neurocognitive trajectory of SI processing in Mandarin-speaking children remains underexplored, with existing frameworks inadequately accounting for developmental constraints and cross-linguistic variation. This ERP study maps the neurocognitive trajectory of scalar implicature (SI) processing in Mandarin preschoolers (N = 49). Behavioral accuracy improved with age (p < 0.001) but was not modulated by contextual felicity. Neural dynamics revealed developmental shifts: 4-year-olds exhibited heightened P200 amplitudes in infelicitous contexts, indicating attentional overloading. Differences in P200 amplitude between younger and older children indexed developmental shifts in attentional allocation. The N400 showed contextual sensitivity, whereas the Late Positive Component (LPC) showed only marginal context effects, suggesting protracted inferential adjustments. We propose the Cognitive-Dynamic Relevance Model (CDRM), challenging existing frameworks by integrating gradual recalibration mechanisms with resource constraints. Mandarin children demonstrate delayed SI maturation, attributable to reduced SI frequency in child-directed speech and quantifier ambiguity. Findings underscore cross-linguistic variation in pragmatic development, with neurocognitive markers preceding behavioral mastery. Full article

Background: Cancer health disparities among Latinos in the United States are pervasive and manifest in higher morbidity and mortality among pediatric cancer patients and their parents/caregivers. There is a need to engage in culturally congruent approaches to develop interventions that effectively mitigate cancer health disparities among Latino caregivers. Aims: The purpose of this manuscript is to present the methodological process of adopting a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to develop a culturally congruent intervention to address psychosocial cancer health disparities in Spanish-speaking Latino families impacted by childhood cancer. Materials and Methods: We established two partnerships with Spanish-speaking parents of children previously treated for cancer and whose children were currently undergoing cancer treatment to collaboratively identify psychosocial intervention targets. A total of 22 meetings were held with community collaborators (n = 13) that followed CBPR principles. All meetings were audio recorded, transcribed, and coded using an inductive approach. Results: The intervention framework identified three psychosocial outcomes: caregiver health literacy, culturally congruent care, and emotional well-being. A 12-session intervention addressing the three outcomes was developed integrating cultural values and bilingual and bicultural community and healthcare providers. Conclusions: A CBPR approach was adopted to address disparities in quality of life in Spanish-speaking caregivers of children with cancer, which resulted in a multicomponent intervention that addresses the informational, practical, and psychosocial needs of Latino caregivers. The intervention can help mitigate disparities in well-being for Latino families impacted by childhood cancer by incorporating culturally relevant strategies to optimize health. Full article

This study investigates how second language (L2) learners acquire morphologically complex English words, focusing on affixal neutrality—whether suffixes preserve the phonological form and semantic transparency of the base (e.g., -ness in happiness) or trigger phonological/orthographic changes (e.g., -ity in activity). Drawing on linguistic theories of morphological decomposition and lexical representation, we examine how this property influences different dimensions of derivational knowledge. Fifty-four Mandarin-speaking secondary school EFL learners completed three receptive tasks targeting relational knowledge (morphological relatedness), syntactic knowledge (category awareness), and distributional knowledge (contextual appropriateness). Lexical items varied in affixal neutrality, and participants’ accuracy and response times were analysed across three L2 proficiency levels. Affixal neutrality significantly affected performance in the relational knowledge task, with neutral suffixes facilitating accuracy and faster responses. Effects were attenuated in syntactic and distributional tasks, suggesting domain-specific sensitivity to neutrality. L2 Proficiency was associated with higher accuracy across all three domains but did not substantially affect processing speed. These findings highlight the selective role of a theoretically motivated morphological property in L2 lexical acquisition and show how linguistic concepts such as affixal neutrality can form the basis of targeted hypotheses, bridging theoretical linguistics and empirical research in second language learning. Full article

This study addresses a critical gap by examining the specific barriers and demands faced by secondary school teachers who are deeply engaged in climate change education. Using a qualitative design complemented by quantitative descriptive indicators (code frequencies and co-occurrence counts derived from qualitative data), the study also includes an in-depth analysis of a focus group with 16 teachers at an international environmental campus (82 speaking turns, 136 coded segments). Moving beyond commonly identified challenges, the findings illuminate how structural constraints—such as curricular overload and the lack of interdisciplinary institutional support—intersect with high levels of personal commitment to climate change education. A central finding is the demotivating effect of unrewarded personal effort, whereby additional work related to climate action remains institutionally unrecognized. Moreover, teachers highlighted the difficulty of integrating climate change into non-scientific subjects, pointing to a disciplinary gap in available support. These insights, emerging from a highly committed community of practitioners, underline that effective teacher professional development must address not only general pedagogical needs but also the specific systemic and motivational barriers shaping sustainability-oriented climate change education. Full article

Background: Pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) and lung cancer (LC) are major causes of global respiratory morbidity and mortality. Increasing evidence suggests that tuberculosis may induce persistent pulmonary alterations that extend beyond microbiological cure, potentially facilitating lung carcinogenesis. This review synthesizes current epidemiological and mechanistic evidence linking PTB to subsequent LC development. Methods: A structured narrative appraisal of the literature was conducted using PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, MDPI Journals, and Google Scholar, focusing on studies published between 2020 and 2025. Eligible publications included cohort studies, meta-analyses, observational reports, and mechanistic investigations addressing the TB–LC association. Studies were thematically categorized into epidemiological evidence, pathogenic mechanisms, diagnostic challenges, and therapeutic implications. Results: Population-based studies consistently demonstrate a two- to threefold increased risk of LC among individuals with prior PTB, independent of smoking and other major confounders. Mechanistically, the post-tuberculous lung is characterized by chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, fibrotic remodeling, immune checkpoint activation (including PD-1/PD-L1 signaling), dysregulated microRNA expression, and metabolic reprogramming. Clinically, overlapping radiological and histopathological features may delay cancer diagnosis. A history of TB may also influence therapeutic decisions, particularly regarding immune checkpoint inhibitors due to potential infection reactivation. Conclusions: PTB may represent an independent risk factor for LC through sustained structural and immunological remodeling. Structured post-TB surveillance and risk-adapted screening strategies may be warranted in selected high-risk populations. Full article

Generally speaking, traditional theism has stressed God’s immutability as an aspect of his transcendent reality. By contrast, modern and postmodern thought foreground the highly mutable nature of the divine across time and place, reckoning God as just a subjective concept immanent in human minds without any objective referent. Here I outline a new kind of metamodern theology that would synthesize elements from these different paradigms, suggesting a God both mutable and immanent but also ontologically real in his own right. I call this a developmental, emergent, participatory theology of harmonization—or the DEPTH model for short. After unpacking the meaning of each of these elements individually, I show how they hang together as a coherent, naturalistic theological framework with promising new interpretative possibilities and suggest directions for future work. Full article

In Industry 4.0 environments, operators and production managers frequently query industrial databases for production monitoring, quality control, and equipment maintenance using natural language. Existing Chinese NL2SQL systems often process semantic, program, and schema information in a single encoder, which leads to semantic-program interference and frequent structural or schema errors in the generated SQL. We present CIR-SQL, a dual-model framework that separates intent recognition from SQL generation via structured intermediate representations, decoupling semantic understanding from program synthesis. CIR-SQL employs a seven-category intent classification system (simple_select, count_query, filter_query, max_min_query, sort_query, join_query, group_by_query) and leverages large language models for intent recognition and structured information extraction. A three-level hierarchical backtracking strategy (SQL, context, intent) further improves robustness by correcting different error types. The architecture is particularly suited to Industry 4.0 scenarios where Chinese-speaking operators interact with complex industrial databases containing production data, quality metrics, and equipment status information. Full article