Title
Topic
-
‘Psychophysics of Neon Color Spreading: Chromatic and Temporal Factors Are not Limiting’
“Neon color spreading (NCS) is an illusory color phenomenon that provides a dramatic example of surface completion and filling-in. Numerous studies have varied both spatial and temporal aspects of the neon-generating stimulus to explore variations in the strength of the effect. Here, we take a novel, parametric, low-level psychophysical approach to studying NCS. … There is no evidence in this study that the processes underlying NCS are slower than the low-level processes of simple flicker detection. These results point to relatively fast mechanisms, not slow diffusion processes, as the substrate for NCS.” Find the paper and authors list in Vision…
-
‘Confinement of Excited States in Two-Dimensional, In-Plane, Quantum Heterostructures’
“Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors are promising candidates for optoelectronic application and quantum information processes due to their inherent out-of-plane 2D confinement. In addition, they offer the possibility of achieving low-dimensional in-plane exciton confinement, similar to zero-dimensional quantum dots, with intriguing optical and electronic properties via strain or composition engineering. … Here, we report the observation of lateral confinement of excitons in epitaxially grown in-plane MoSe2 quantum dots (~15-60 nm wide) inside a continuous matrix of WSe2 monolayer film via a sequential epitaxial growth process.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
-
‘Red Light-Activated Depletion of Drug-Refractory Glioblastoma Stem Cells and Chemosensitization of an Acquired-Resistant Mesenchymal Phenotype’
“Glioblastoma stem cells (GSCs) are potent tumor initiators resistant to radiochemotherapy, and this subpopulation is hypothesized to re-populate the tumor milieu due to selection following conventional therapies. Here, we show that 5-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) treatment— a pro-fluorophore used for fluorescence-guided cancer surgery—leads to elevated levels of fluorophore conversion in patient-derived GSC cultures, and subsequent red light-activation induces apoptosis in both intrinsically temozolomide chemotherapy-sensitive and -resistant GSC phenotypes.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Photochemistry and Photobiology.
-
Understanding a tragedy: Miller reviews ‘A Day in the Life of Abed Salama’
Professor of law and international affairs Zinaida Miller reviews Nathan Thrall’s “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy,” for Just Security. The book analyzes the origins of a tragic school bus accident in 2012 — “the accident could be labeled accidental in only a literal and immediate sense: no one intended, planned, or desired it,” Miller writes. “And yet, the conditions that made a rainy day deadly were far from accidental.” “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” examines the various structural forces that at play that contributed to such an accident.
-
‘Strategic Behavior of Large Language Models and the Role of Game Structure Versus Contextual Framing’
“This paper investigates the strategic behavior of large language models (LLMs) across various game-theoretic settings, scrutinizing the interplay between game structure and contextual framing in decision-making. We focus our analysis on three advanced LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and LLaMa-2—and how they navigate both the intrinsic aspects of different games and the nuances of their surrounding contexts. Our results highlight discernible patterns in each model’s strategic approach. GPT-3.5 shows significant sensitivity to context but lags in its capacity for abstract strategic decision making.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature: Scientific Reports.
-
‘SepsisLab: Early Sepsis Prediction With Uncertainty Quantification and Active Sensing’
“Sepsis is the leading cause of in-hospital mortality in the USA. Early sepsis onset prediction and diagnosis could significantly improve the survival of sepsis patients. Existing predictive models are usually trained on high-quality data with few missing information, while missing values widely exist in real-world clinical scenarios. … The uncertainty of imputation results can be propagated to the sepsis prediction outputs, which have not been studied in existing works on either sepsis prediction or uncertainty quantification.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2024.
-
‘Fidelity of the Kitaev Honeycomb Model Under a Quench’
“We theoretically study the influence of quenched outside disturbances in an intermediately long-time limit. We consider localized imperfections, uniform fields, noise, and couplings to an environment within a unified framework using a prototypical but idealized interacting quantum device—the Kitaev honeycomb model. As a measure of stability we study the Uhlmann fidelity of quantum states after a quench. … Our work provides estimates for the intermediate long-time stability of a quantum device, offering engineering guidelines for quantum devices in quench design and system size.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Physical Review B.
-
‘Self-Help Groups and Opioid Use Disorder Treatment: An Investigation Using a Machine Learning-Assisted Robust Causal Inference Framework’
“This study investigates the impact of participation in self-help groups on treatment completion among individuals undergoing medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) treatment. Given the suboptimal adherence and retention rates for MOUD, this research seeks to examine the association between treatment completion and patient-level factors. Specifically, we evaluated the causal relationship between self-help group participation and treatment completion for patients undergoing MOUD.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.
-
‘Cosmologically Consistent Analysis of Gravitational Waves From Hidden Sectors’
“Production of gravitational waves in the early Universe is discussed in a cosmologically consistent analysis within a first-order phase transition involving a hidden sector feebly coupled with the visible sector. Each sector resides in its own heat bath leading to a potential dependent on two temperatures and on two fields: one a standard model Higgs field and the other a scalar arising from a hidden sector 𝑈(1) gauge theory. A synchronous evolution of the hidden and visible sector temperatures is carried out from the reheat temperature down to the electroweak scale.” Find the paper and authors list in Physical Review D.
-
‘Native Capillary Electrophoresis–Mass Spectrometry of Near 1 MDa Non-Covalent GroEL/GroES/Substrate Protein Complexes’
“Protein complexes are essential for proteins’ folding and biological function. Currently, native analysis of large multimeric protein complexes remains challenging. Structural biology techniques are time-consuming and often cannot monitor the proteins’ dynamics in solution. Here, a capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (CE–MS) method is reported to characterize, under near-physiological conditions, the conformational rearrangements of ∽1 MDa GroEL upon complexation with binding partners involved in a protein folding cycle. … This study shows the CE–MS potential to provide information on binding stoichiometry and kinetics for various protein complexes.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Advanced Science.
-
‘Prevalence and Correlates of Irritability Among U.S. Adults’
“This study aimed to characterize the prevalence of irritability among U.S. adults, and the extent to which it co-occurs with major depressive and anxious symptoms. A non-probability internet survey of individuals 18 and older in 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia was conducted between November 2, 2023, and January 8, 2024. … In linear regression models, irritability was greater among respondents who were female, younger, had lower levels of education and lower household income. Greater irritability was associated with likelihood of thoughts of suicide in logistic regression models adjusted for sociodemographic features.” Find the paper and authors list…
-
‘Sophisticated Natural Products as Antibiotics’
“In this Review, we explore natural product antibiotics that do more than simply inhibit an active site of an essential enzyme. We review these compounds to provide inspiration for the design of much-needed new antibacterial agents. … Many of the compounds exhibit more than one notable feature, such as resistance evasion and target corruption. Understanding the surprising complexity of the best antimicrobial compounds provides a roadmap for developing novel compounds to address the antimicrobial resistance crisis by mining for new natural products and inspiring us to design similarly sophisticated antibiotics.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature.
-
‘Changes in Cerebral Vascular Reactivity Following Mild Repetitive Head Injury in Awake Rats: Modeling the Human Experience’
“The changes in brain function in response to mild head injury are usually subtle and go undetected. Physiological biomarkers would aid in the early diagnosis of mild head injury. In this study we used hypercapnia to follow changes in cerebral vascular reactivity after repetitive mild head injury. … The changes in vascular reactivity were not uniform across the brain. The prefrontal cortex, somatosensory cortex and basal ganglia showed the hypothesized decrease in vascular reactivity while the cerebellum, thalamus, brainstem, and olfactory system showed an increase in BOLD signal to hypercapnia.”Find the paper and list of authors in Experimental Brain Research.
-
‘Strategies to Optimize the Deployment of Roadway Maintenance Machines for Overnight Maintenance in Urban Rail Systems’
“This research investigates the effectiveness of several strategies to deploy roadway maintenance machines (RMMs) in preparation for overnight maintenance in rapid transit systems. Owing to the short windows of time available for maintenance activities in the overnight period (i.e., when revenue service is suspended), efficient deployment of RMMs is an important aspect of ensuring adequate productive time for crews at work locations. Four deployment strategies are investigated.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Transportation Research Record.
-
Caracoglia to model new wind turbine designs
Luca Caracoglia, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has received NSF funding for a project titled, “Modeling the Influence of Turbulence on Flow-Induced Instabilities of Large Flexible Structures With Innovative Applications in Wind Turbine Blades.” Caracoglia will be designing stochastic models to “promote safe design of next-generation offshore wind turbine structures by enabling slender and lighter blade designs,” the abstract states.
-
‘Mechanomemory of Nucleoplasm and RNA Polymerase II After Chromatin Stretching by a Microinjected Magnetic Nanoparticle Force’
With this paper, professor of bioengineering Ning Wang, working with Ph.D. students Fazlur Rashid and Sadia Kabbo, demonstrates a process of “mechanomemory” in the chromatin of cells. “The mechanics of chromatin and nucleoplasm regulate gene transcription and nuclear function,” they write. “However, how the chromatin and nucleoplasm sense and respond to forces remains elusive.” Their results imply that “the viscoelastic behavior of the chromatin … provide[s] concrete evidence that the chromatin does not behave like a pure liquid, as concluded in one study, nor like a solid, as concluded in another study.” Find the full paper in Cell Reports.
-
‘Strategic Behavior of Large Language Models and the Role of Game Structure Versus Contextual Framing’
“This paper investigates the strategic behavior of large language models (LLMs) across various game-theoretic settings, scrutinizing the interplay between game structure and contextual framing in decision-making. We focus our analysis on three advanced LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and LLaMa-2—and how they navigate both the intrinsic aspects of different games and the nuances of their surrounding contexts. Our results highlight discernible patterns in each model’s strategic approach.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Scientific Reports.
-
‘Lipid Nanoparticles Target Haematopoietic Stem Cells’
In this review, University Distinguished Professor of pharmaceutical sciences and chemical engineering Mansoor Amiji, with co-author Dimitrios Bitounis, discuss “a novel class of non-viral lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-based formulations for the in vivo delivery of genetic therapies to HSC [haematopoietic stem cells] in the bone marrow with the potential to treat blood disorders,” which have the potential to overcome clinical risks that “require removal of the patients own HSC, their curative modification, and transplantation back to the patient.”
-
‘Sweet and sensitive CE-MS method for quantitative characterization of native N-glycomes’
The Ivanov Lab has published a blog post detailing their “development of innovative sample preparation and nanoflow-based liquid phase separation techniques coupled with mass spectrometry for molecular (e.g., proteomic, glycomic) profiling of amount-limited biological and biomedically-relevant samples,” they write. “By minimizing the number of sample preparation steps and employing more efficient, low volume (nL-/pL-level)-based analytical techniques, we aim to detect, identify, structurally characterize, and quantify more molecular features (e.g., proteins and glycans) at lower sample amounts compared to conventional techniques.” Find the blog post and full list of authors in Springer Nature’s Chemistry Research Community.
-
‘Methods for assessing and removing non-specific photoimmunotherapy damage in patient-derived tumor cell culture models’
“Tumor-targeted, activatable photoimmunotherapy (taPIT) has been shown to selectively destroy tumor in a metastatic mouse model. However, the photoimmunoconjugate (PIC) used for taPIT includes a small fraction of non-covalently associated (free) benzoporphyrin derivative (BPD), which leads to non-specific killing in vitro. Here, we report a new treatment protocol for patient-derived primary tumor cell cultures ultrasensitive to BPD photodynamic therapy (BPD-PDT). … The modifications in the protocol suggested here improve in vitro taPIT experiments that lack in vivo mechanisms of free BPD clearance (i.e., lymph and blood flow).”Find the paper and full list of authors at Photochemistry and Photobiology.
-
Wegst presents primer on ‘Freeze casting’
“When solutions and slurries are directionally solidified, complex dynamics of solvent crystal growth and solvent templating determine the final hierarchical architecture of the freeze-cast material. With continuous X-ray tomoscopy, it is now possible to study in situ intricate and otherwise elusive ice crystal growth and solvent-templating phenomena. … The freeze casting process is attractive because the features of the final hierarchical material architecture … can be custom designed for a given application … [and] can be tailored for applications in, for example, biomedicine, environmental engineering, catalysis, power conversion, and energy generation and storage.Find the paper and full list of authors…
-
‘Experimentally Probing the Effect of Confinement Geometry on Lipid Diffusion’
“The lateral mobility of molecules within the cell membrane is ultimately governed by the local environment of the membrane. … Here, we prepare model lipid systems on substrates patterned with confined domains of varying geometries constructed with different materials to explore the influences of physical boundary conditions and specific molecular interactions on diffusion. We demonstrate a platform that is capable of significantly altering and steering the long-range diffusion of lipids by using simple oxide deposition approaches, enabling us to systematically explore how confinement size and shape impact diffusion.”Find the paper and authors list in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B.
-
‘Rapidly Changing Range Limits in a Warming World: Critical Data Limitations and Knowledge Gaps for Advancing Understanding of Mangrove Range Dynamics’
“Climate change is altering species’ range limits and transforming ecosystems. For example, warming temperatures are leading to the range expansion of tropical, cold-sensitive species at the expense of their cold-tolerant counterparts. In some temperate and subtropical coastal wetlands, warming winters are enabling mangrove forest encroachment into salt marsh, which is a major regime shift that has significant ecological and societal ramifications. Here, we synthesized existing data and expert knowledge to assess the distribution of mangroves near rapidly changing range limits in the southeastern USA.”Find the paper and full list of authors in Estuaries and Coasts.
-
‘Effects of Aerobic Exercise on Cognitive Function in Adults With Major Depressive Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’
“Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a highly prevalent psychiatric disorder that impairs the cognitive function of individuals. Aerobic exercise stands out as a promising non-pharmacological intervention for enhancing cognitive function and promoting brain health. … Twelve randomized trials including 945 adults with MDD were included. Results indicated that aerobic exercise significantly improved overall cognitive function … and the sub-domains of memory … and executive function. … Significant benefits in cognitive function were found from moderate-to-vigorous (mixed) intensity … aerobic exercise conducted 3 times per week.”Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology.