Search Results (611)

Gout is a crystal-induced inflammatory arthritis driven by hyperuricemia and monosodium urate (MSU) crystal deposition, yet urate burden alone does not explain why only a subset of hyperuricemic individuals develops clinical disease, why acute flares are usually self-limited, or why gout clusters with renal and cardiometabolic comorbidity. This structured narrative review uses a gout-specific redox-switch framework, defined as a context-dependent shift in uric acid biology according to concentration, compartment, crystallization state, xanthine oxidoreductase (XOR) activity, inflammatory priming, and disease stage rather than as a binary molecular event. We integrate evidence on XOR-derived reactive oxygen species (ROS), mitochondrial stress, NLRP3 inflammasome signaling, neutrophil oxidative responses, neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), lipid peroxidation, and potential ferroptosis-related mechanisms. Evidence is classified into five categories: established, mechanistically supported, human-associative, conceptual, and emerging/unvalidated. The available human data support lipid-peroxidation and ferroptosis-associated molecular signatures, but do not yet establish ferroptotic cell death as a driver of gout. Therapeutic implications are therefore framed conservatively: urate-lowering therapy remains foundational, whereas redox-directed approaches require pathway specificity, disease-stage definition, and biomarker validation. The redox-switch concept is proposed as an organizing framework for mechanistic and translational research, not as a validated clinical algorithm. Full article

Intentional deceptive responding under laboratory instructions provides an experimental model for investigating the cognitive mechanisms involved in producing false responses, although it does not fully capture the complexity of real-world deception. Although deception has important implications for social functioning and has been widely studied, identifying reliable indicators that cannot easily be concealed remains a major challenge. In the present study, we investigated frontal EEG activity during intentional instructed deception and examined its association with stress-related and affective traits. The study included 86 healthy adults (M age = 26.97 years, SD = 9.42) who completed standardized self-report measures assessing depression (BDI), anxiety (BAI), perceived stress (PSS), and everyday deceptive behavior (LiES). A subsample of 48 participants subsequently completed a controlled truth–deception task while EEG activity was recorded from frontal scalp electrodes, providing an indirect measure of frontal electrophysiological activity. Absolute spectral power was analyzed across beta, alpha, theta, and delta frequency bands. The findings indicated that anxiety was positively associated with self-reported deceptive behavior, whereas depression and perceived stress were not significantly related to deception tendencies. EEG analyses suggested an increase in right-frontal scalp theta power during instructed deceptive responding, particularly through significant modulation of theta activity in the right hemisphere; however, later multilevel analysis showed it is a rather less specific activation appearing irrespective of the hemisphere. The increase remained significant when relative power was analyzed, indicating that the finding was robust to normalization of spectral power. Together, these findings suggest that instructed deceptive responding was associated with changes in frontal EEG oscillatory activity that are broadly consistent with mechanisms previously linked to executive control and conflict monitoring; however, because recordings were obtained using a low-density consumer EEG device during overt verbal responding, these interpretations should be considered exploratory. In this view, our study investigates habitual deceptive tendencies with affective traits and state-dependent EEG modulation during instructed deception, and our results could contribute to the understanding of emotion–cognition interactions in decisions involving uncertainty, social evaluation, and strategic information control. Full article

Although a popular measurement method in different fields, self-report measures have multiple shortcomings that stem from their very inherent reliance on the participant’s subjective judgment or recall. Given these limitations, in the domain of stress research, unobtrusive measures have been proposed as alternatives. Using a sample of 78 university students who participated in a disaster response simulation in a synthetic task environment, the present study sought to examine whether unobtrusive measures of stress (i.e., physiological, computer interaction, and facial data) can serve as valid substitutes for self-report measures (i.e., state anxiety, task load, and momentary stress). To that end, the study compared the extent to which features from these different modalities accurately (1) classified participants into the stress condition to which they were assigned as well as (2) predicted their performance on a complex synthetic task. The results indicated that the unobtrusive measures individually predicted task performance better than self-report measures, whereas self-report measures predicted the stress condition to which participants were randomly assigned (i.e., no-stress, low-stress, and high-stress) better. Therefore, in spite of their limitations, self-report measures cannot be systematically substituted by unobtrusive measures; this may depend on the outcome of interest. Future research is needed to examine the generalizability of the findings and explore the criterion-related validity of other modalities of stress. Full article

This paper formulates a self-organized dynamic fencing problem for multiple AUVs under finite target-sensing range and bounded nonuniform acoustic communication delays. Here, self-organization means that the fence is generated by local interactions without assigning fixed angular slots, virtual leaders, or persistent vehicle roles. A minimal observer-assisted attraction-repulsion fencing controller is proposed for AUV implementation, comprising target-AUV radial attraction–repulsion, AUV–AUV distance attraction–repulsion computed from timestamp-aligned delayed neighbor states, a state-only target-motion observer, and a label-free bearing-coverage repulsion that acts only on oversized target-centered angular gaps. To address acoustic delay without delaying physical execution, each AUV stores its own state history and evaluates pairwise relative geometry at the timestamp carried by the received neighbor packet. The resulting command is applied at the current time. The analysis shows that timestamp alignment converts acoustic delay into a bounded geometric perturbation and establishes collision avoidance, radial confinement, angular-gap contraction, target tracking, and packet-range preservation on a locally order-consistent regular fencing interval. The theorem does not claim global entry from arbitrary non-enclosing configurations. Numerical simulations, including a five-degree-of-freedom ocean-current robustness test without current feedforward compensation and an evasive-target stress test with four rapid finite-acceleration turns, demonstrate self-organized entry and maintenance of compact convex-hull fencing in the tested cases. Full article

To address the challenge of balancing junction temperature prediction accuracy and computational efficiency for high-power multi-chip IGBT modules in automotive applications during complex electro-thermal conversion processes, this study proposes an improved three-dimensional thermal network model based on equivalent power loss injection. Firstly, the effective heat conduction area of each packaging layer under actual heat flow distribution is extracted through three-dimensional finite element simulation, and the single-chip self-heating network parameters are constructed. Secondly, targeting the thermal cross-coupling effect among multiple chips, an elliptical thermal diffusion model is applied to accurately define the thermal coupling region, and a dynamic equivalent power loss compensation mechanism is introduced. Efficient decoupling of multi-heat-source interference is achieved without increasing the state-space dimension of the model. An experimental benchmarking results comparison indicates that the absolute error of junction temperature prediction by this model under steady-state operating conditions is 0.5 °C. Further comparative analysis under the full CLTC-P (China Light-duty Vehicle Test Cycle for Passenger Car) cycle verifies that the improved model not only overcomes the shortcomings of the traditional Foster model, which severely underestimates the transient peak junction temperature and alternating stress amplitude, but also effectively filters out non-physical overshoots caused by short-term ultra-narrow pulses, thus reasonably estimating the device’s maximum junction temperature within the real physical boundary. This method provides efficient theoretical support for accurate dynamic junction temperature predictions and reliability evaluations of electric vehicles under complex operating conditions. Full article

Autonomous flight planners consume sensor-derived estimated states rather than simulator ground truth. Learned dynamics surrogates are queried over a planning horizon through architecture-native multi-step interfaces, so strong short-horizon accuracy can still yield unreliable long-horizon trajectory scores. We address this with a JSBSim sensor-interface evaluation protocol that assesses surrogate predictions from onboard sensing and lightweight estimation—inertial measurement unit (IMU), global navigation satellite system (GNSS)/air-data, barometric, and vertical-speed channels with delay, dropout, asynchronous refresh, and estimator filtering—and guides surrogate selection by a planning task. This paper contributes an evaluation-and-selection methodology for learned flight-dynamics surrogates used by autonomous planners; it is not a new flight-dynamics, guidance, or control method, and it does not propose a new neural architecture. The contribution is a transparent and auditable sensor-interface and estimator-conditioned protocol, instantiated on five surrogate families over a 20 s prediction horizon. We emphasize at the outset that under strict native-unit physical tolerances, all evaluated surrogates diverge on 90–100% of validation windows and none is field-ready; all results are comparative JSBSim stress-test evidence, not field-readiness evidence. Results reveal criterion-dependent ordering: long short-term memory (LSTM) networks are strongest on root-mean-square error (RMSE@1s/RMSE@20s), shared-threshold failure, and absolute fidelity, whereas the Transformer is favored under self-scaled divergence and capped-risk criteria. These aggregate scores combine heterogeneous simulator-coordinate units and are benchmark diagnostics rather than physical safety margins. Because different threshold families select different winners, our central conclusion is not that one surrogate is best, but that the choice of metric and threshold family is itself part of the benchmark assessment. In separately generated JSBSim candidate-screening episodes, Transformer has approximately 8% lower mean cost under abstract sensing corruption, whereas estimator-loop screening shifts toward LSTM; feedback-rich tracking remains exploratory at 40 episodes per scenario and has mixed cost and success endpoints. Cross-aircraft transfer degrades substantially. Surrogates should be assessed using sensing-aware, estimator-conditioned, task-specific long-horizon criteria, not short-horizon accuracy alone. Full article

This article proposes a general integrative model focusing on psychological control and psychological reserve. The former refers to internal psychological control and external psychological control. Internal psychological control refers to the management of physiological processes associated with arousal and panics. Here, the concept of internal psychological control is differentiated into two components: cognitive control/executive function and self-control/emotional regulation. External psychological control refers to the sense the person has of being able to manage, have agency in, and otherwise not be overwhelmed by the external context in which one is adapting functionally. Here, the concept of external psychological control is differentiated into two major sub-components: managing reactivity to external events, such as to daily stressors or extreme events, e.g., natural disasters, and proactively taking steps to have agency in and using predictive processing to adjust to context by mitigating the probability of experiencing overwhelming events. Psychological reserve refers to the fluid state reservoir of mental, cognitive, emotional, motivational, and stress management/coping space that is available for use in confronting ongoing and new stressors, challenges, or difficulties. Here, this article differentiates psychological reserve into phases of depletion and recovery. This article examines prior work on psychological control and reserve, demonstrating how they can be understood or modified based on the present sub-component differentiation of the concepts involved. The revised model is applied to understanding psychotherapeutic change mechanisms, a biopsychosocial model of the mechanisms, an integrated functional adaptational model, posttraumatic stress disorder, a unified model for psychotherapy and psychology generally, and clinical recommendations. Full article

Based on structures composed of discontinuous compression elements and continuous tensile elements, tensegrity mobile robots combine the load-bearing capacity of rigid structures with the deformability of flexible systems, demonstrating great application potential in fields such as disaster relief, pipeline inspection, planetary exploration, and operations in complex terrains. This paper systematically reviews the state of the art and development trends of tensegrity structures in mobile robotics. First, based on structural composition, existing tensegrity mobile robots are divided into four categories: rolling-gait robots, crawling-gait robots, hopping-gait robots, and multimodal locomotion robots. Their typical locomotion modes, representative advances, and application scenarios are analyzed. Second, this paper summarizes the key technological advancements of tensegrity mobile robots from aspects such as self-stress equilibrium, form-finding methods, actuation mechanisms, modelling and simulation, and control strategies, focusing on cable-actuated, rod-driven, flexible drive, position-based finite element modelling, central pattern generators, and reinforcement learning control. Furthermore, this paper points out that current research still faces many challenges, such as complex dynamic modelling and insufficient locomotion control accuracy. Finally, this paper discusses future development directions. This paper aims to provide a reference for the structural design, locomotion control, and engineering applications of tensegrity mobile robots. Full article

Introduction: Suicide rates among individuals working in agriculture remain disproportionately high in the United States. Although farming-related stressors and coping strategies are documented, gaps remain in understanding how farmers sustain themselves psychologically amid chronic stress and why elevated suicide risk persists despite apparent resilience. Purpose: This study sought to explore the major stressors of farming, coping strategies used by farmers, and their barriers to help-seeking, with the goal of informing suicide prevention and mental health interventions. Methods: Fourteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with Kentucky farmers recently receiving a suicide prevention intervention. Participants were purposively sampled and interviewed via telephone or Zoom. Interviews were transcribed, modified verbatim, and then analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: Farmers described chronic stressors, including financial volatility, time scarcity, uncontrollable weather, loneliness, and feeling misunderstood or undervalued by the general public. Despite these stressors, many participants initially denied being stressed. Their coping strategies centered on meaning-making rather than stress elimination, including faith, gratitude, nature-based reflection, occupational pride, and community ties. However, prominent barriers to help-seeking included stigma, self-reliance, and privacy concerns. Conclusions: The findings suggest that farmer resilience is primarily enacted through their resourcefulness, including enduring stressors and reframing their thoughts, which enabled their continued functioning despite chronic stress. However, their resourcefulness often obscures their distress and delays help-seeking. These findings may help explain why elevated suicide risk persists among farmers even with strong coping narratives. Interventions that leverage existing strengths while addressing stigma, trust, and structural stressors are needed to better support farmer mental health and suicide prevention. Full article

This paper introduces Steady State, a noncommercial, physical, two-player educational board game designed to model behavioral processes involved in time management from a behavior-analytic perspective. Although time management has been widely discussed in psychological and educational contexts, operationalized models are still needed to examine task allocation, postponement, and self-management under controlled conditions. The game models self-management under limited resources by arranging explicit response-consequence relations involving energy and stress tokens, task demands, reinforcement contingent on task completion, and weekly differential reinforcement for balanced engagement across domains. It also embeds self-monitoring prompts. A demonstrative pilot using an alternating treatments design (12 sessions with one dyad) compared the full contingency-based game (Condition A) with a procedural comparison condition in which the main response-consequence relations were minimized and stochastic outcomes were emphasized (Condition B). Embedded performance indices, including task postponements, energy remaining at the end of the session, stress accumulation, and planning time, varied more clearly with individual strategy in Condition A, whereas patterns in Condition B were more strongly constrained by stochastic outcomes. We discuss limitations and priorities for more controlled replication. The pilot was designed not to test educational effectiveness or transfer to everyday time management, but to determine whether the game generates measurable and behaviorally interpretable in-game variability. Full article

Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) is a complex and multifactorial condition characterized by insulin resistance, visceral obesity, dyslipidemia, hypertension, and chronic low-grade inflammation, all of which contribute to increased cardiovascular risk. Central to its pathophysiology is metainflammation, a persistent inflammatory state closely linked to oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. This review aims to provide an integrated and updated overview of the interplay between metainflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and organokine signaling in the development and progression of MetS and its cardiovascular complications. Current evidence indicates that mitochondrial dysfunction plays a pivotal role by promoting excessive production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), impairing ATP synthesis, and disrupting redox balance, thereby exacerbating insulin resistance and endothelial dysfunction. In parallel, dysregulated secretion of organokines—including adipokines, myokines, hepatokines, cardiokines, osteokines, and renokines—alters interorgan communication and amplifies pro-inflammatory and atherogenic pathways. Additionally, gut microbiota contributes to metabolic homeostasis through the production of short-chain fatty acids, whereas dysbiosis is associated with worsening metabolic parameters. Collectively, these interconnected mechanisms establish a self-perpetuating cycle that drives metabolic dysfunction and cardiovascular disease progression. This review highlights the central role of the metainflammation–mitochondrial dysfunction axis and emphasizes the importance of organokine-mediated crosstalk as a key regulator of systemic metabolism. Targeting these pathways may represent a promising strategy for the prevention and management of MetS and its associated complications. Full article

Background: Children growing up in alcohol-affected families are exposed to chronic stress, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), emotional insecurity, and environmental instability, all of which may influence neurodevelopmental processes. Numerous EEG markers have been proposed as indicators of attentional regulation, emotional functioning, and stress responsivity; however, their relative diagnostic and practical value remains unclear. The aim of the present study was to verify whether commonly reported EEG markers remain valid indicators of neurofunctional difficulties in children from alcohol-affected families, to establish their hierarchy of importance, and to determine how identified neurofunctional profiles may inform the sequencing of educational interventions and the development of individualized support plans used by educators and social workers. Methods: The study included children aged 6–10 years from alcohol-affected families (n = 20) and a control group from non-dysfunctional family environments (n = 25). Resting-state EEG recordings were conducted under eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions, with analyses focused on the eyes-open condition. Quantitative EEG (qEEG) indices included global, frontal, prefrontal, and midline Theta–Beta Ratio (TBR), frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA), temporal beta stress and parietal beta2 tension. EEG preprocessing was performed using EEGLAB and included artifact rejection, filtering, epoch segmentation, and spectral power analysis. Group differences were analyzed using Welch’s t-tests with Benjamini–Hochberg correction for multiple comparisons. Results: The analyzed EEG markers differed in their ability to distinguish children from alcohol-affected families and controls. The strongest effects were observed for Theta–Beta Ratio (TBR) measures, particularly in frontal and prefrontal regions, indicating impairments in attention regulation, executive functioning, and self-control. Elevated temporal beta stress and parietal beta2 tension reflected increased physiological arousal and chronic stress. In contrast, frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA), commonly associated with depressive emotional processing, was not significant after correction for multiple comparisons. The obtained findings enabled the establishment of a hierarchy of neurofunctional markers, with attentional and executive-function indicators demonstrating greater importance than markers related to depressive symptomatology. Conclusions: The EEG profile of children from alcohol-affected families is characterized primarily by chronic stress, heightened physiological activation, and impaired attention regulation rather than by neurophysiological patterns associated with depression. The results suggest that educational difficulties in this group may stem mainly from deficits in attention control, inhibitory processes, and cognitive flexibility. Consequently, educational interventions should prioritize learning strategies, attentional training, and self-regulated learning skills. The identified hierarchy of EEG markers may also support the development of individualized educational plans and social-support programs, including participation in structured extracurricular activities and interventions aimed at strengthening executive and learning-related competencies. However, given the pilot nature of the present study and the relatively small sample size, these findings should be considered preliminary. Replication in larger, more diverse, and independent cohorts is necessary to confirm the stability, reliability, and generalizability of the identified neurofunctional profile and the proposed hierarchy of qEEG markers before they can be recommended for broader educational and social applications. Full article

Anxiety disorders affect more than 301 million people worldwide and remain the most prevalent class of mental health conditions. Detection methods have traditionally relied on subjective self-reports, which fail to capture the dynamic physiological signatures of anxiety in daily life. In this longitudinal study, continuous wearable monitoring was conducted with 67 working professionals over nine months, yielding 44,443 h of multimodal data segmented into 890,494 five-minute windows. An unsupervised approach was applied, and ten distinct autonomic states were identified through spectral clustering without the use of emotion labels during clustering. Among these, a rare dysregulated state was discovered, characterized by extreme peripheral cooling ($d=-6.77$), tachycardia ($d=+4.41$), and heightened electrodermal activity, showing a 31-fold enrichment for self-reported anxiety ($p=0.0022$). Beyond this extreme signature, anxiety was expressed heterogeneously across four physiological phenotypes ranging from acute dysregulation to mild perturbation. External validation with the WESAD dataset confirmed generalizability, while the absence of the rare state in laboratory stress paradigms highlighted its specificity to ecological anxiety. By integrating unsupervised discovery with post hoc self-report validation, this work advances our theoretical understanding of autonomic affect and provides a methodological foundation for scalable workplace mental health monitoring. Full article

Background: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a chronic disorder of brain–gut interaction closely linked to psychological stress and highly prevalent among university student populations, yet data from Bahrain remain scarce. This study estimated the frequency of self-reported IBS-like symptoms among university students in Bahrain and examined their associations with sex, age, qualification level, body mass index (BMI), psychological stress, and lifestyle behaviors. Methods: A cross-sectional, online questionnaire-based survey was conducted among 310 students at the University of Bahrain in October 2021. A self-administered 16-item instrument, based on the Rome III symptom domains and used as a symptom-screening rather than a diagnostic tool (face validity only; no formal psychometric validation was performed), assessed sociodemographic characteristics, self-reported IBS-like symptoms, stress and anxiety, and lifestyle behaviors. Data were analyzed using chi-square tests and one-way ANOVA; effect sizes were quantified using Cramér’s V (chi-square) and partial eta-squared (η², ANOVA); the significance threshold was α = 0.05 (two-tailed). Results: Self-reported IBS-like symptoms were common: 52.9% (95% CI 47.3–58.4) reported recurrent abdominal pain, 58.1% (95% CI 52.5–63.4) abdominal bloating, and 80.3% (95% CI 75.5–84.4) reported interference with academic activities. Most participants perceived their mental state (84.8%) and examinations (73.2%) to worsen symptoms, yet only 48.7% correctly identified IBS. Exploratory subgroup analyses suggested differences by qualification level, with diploma-level students reporting higher rates of abdominal pain (p < 0.001; Cramér’s V = 0.22), bloating (p < 0.05; Cramér’s V = 0.13), and perceived psychological impact on symptom severity (p < 0.001; Cramér’s V = 0.19) compared with bachelor- and master-level counterparts. The substantial female over-representation (79%) precluded formal sex-based inference; all findings should be interpreted in this context. Conclusions: Self-reported IBS-like symptoms were commonly endorsed, and participants frequently perceived psychological stress to worsen symptoms. Diploma-level students may represent a previously unrecognized potentially at-risk subgroup warranting further investigation and, if confirmed, targeted stress-focused health-promotion strategies, particularly through brief psychoeducation modules integrated within diploma-program curricula, and dedicated prospective research. Future studies should incorporate validated Rome IV diagnostic criteria, multivariable regression modeling, and biomarker assessment to elucidate underlying brain–gut mechanisms. Full article

This study addresses a critical challenge in surface engineering: developing robust nanocomposite layers on high-performance thermoplastics without inducing macroscopic thermal degradation. While cold gas dynamic spraying (CGDS) of polymers is often described in the literature as a deposition process based on purely mechanical anchoring of particles into polymer surface, our work establishes a multi-scale, hybrid physical–chemical adhesion framework. Using a coupled 3D thermoplasticity finite element model with a Mie–Grüneisen equation of state and Johnson–Cook criteria, we evaluate the supersonic impact dynamics ($V_0=1000 \mathrm{m}/\mathrm{s}$) of single-walled (5,0) CNTs impacting a PEEK substrate at oblique angles (0–20°). The core scientific lies in bridging continuum mechanics with quantum-chemical statistics. By applying Weibull weakest-link theory to a 37-bond monomer model, we demonstrate that compliant $C_{arom}-O$ ether bonds selectively absorb impact energy, covering 8.37% of their dissociation barrier. This non-uniform energy sharing yields a 0.23% monomer activation probability, generating a high free-radical density of ~1100 ${\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{m}}^{-2}$ beneath the particle plume. This localized “chemical nano-welding” network provides exceptional chemical adhesion, while the remaining 99.77% of intact chains ensure structural rigidity, reinforced by a mechanical “self-locking” field (residual compressive stresses up to 0.9 GPa). This study provides a scientific foundation for designing functional coatings tailored for engineering, aerospace, and biomedical applications. Full article