bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Development of a New Multi-cavity Pneumatic-driven Earthworm-like Soft Robot
Authors: Tang Zhijie , Lu Jiaqi , Wang Zhen , Ma Gaoqian , Chen Weiwei , Feng Hao 
Published: May 2020

SUMMARYThis paper presents a soft robot which can imitate the crawling locomotion of an earthworm. Locomotion of the robot can be achieved by expanding and contracting the body that is made of flexible material. A link of the earthworm-like robot is combined with three modules, and a multi-cavity earthworm-like soft robot is combined with multiple links. The multiple links of the earthworm-like soft robot are fabricated by silicone in the three-dimensional printed customized molds. Experiments on a single module, two-links, and three-links show that the soft robot can move and bend on condition of modules extension and contraction in a specified gait. The development of the earthworm-like soft robot shows a great prospect in many complicated environments such as pipeline detection.
Monolingual and bilingual children's processing of coarticulation cues during spoken word recognition
Authors: DESMEULES-TRUDEL Félix , MOORE Charlotte , ZAMUNER Tania S. 
Published: May 2020

AbstractBilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues’ respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extended an investigation of the processing of coarticulation in two- to three-year-old English monolingual children (Zamuner, Moore & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) to a group of four- to six-year-old English monolingual children and age-matched English–French bilingual children. Using eye tracking, we found that older monolingual children and age-matched bilingual children showed more sensitivity to coarticulation cues than the younger children. Moreover, when comparing the older monolinguals and bilinguals, we found no statistical differences between the two groups. These results offer support for the specification of coarticulation in word representations, and indicate that, in some cases, bilingual children possess language processing skills similar to monolinguals.
Psychometric properties of Persian version of Cognitive Behavioural Avoidance Scale: results from student, general population and clinical samples in Iran
Authors: Moloodi Reza , Dobson Keith , Fata Ladan , Pourshahbaz Abbas , Mohammadkhani Parvaneh , Mootabi Fereshteh , Kami Maryam , Ziai Kaveh , Ghaderi Ata 
Published: May 2020

AbstractBackground:There is no published evidence about the psychometric properties of the Cognitive Behavioral Avoidance Scale (CBAS) in Eastern cultures.Aims:The current research evaluated the psychometric properties of a Persian version of the CBAS.Method:The research consisted of two studies. In Study 1, a university student sample (n = 702) completed the CBAS, the Beck Depression Inventory-II, the Thought Control Questionnaire and the Anxious Thoughts Inventory. In Study 2, a general population sample (n = 384) and a clinical sample (n = 152) completed the CBAS, the Young Compensation Inventory and the Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scale-21.Results:Exploratory factor analysis of the data from Study 1 suggested a four-factor solution for CBAS. The CBAS had acceptable internal consistency and test–re-test reliability, and showed significant correlations with depression symptoms and anxious thoughts. Confirmatory factor analysis of the data from Study 2 indicated good fit between the four-factor model and data. The CBAS had a significant relationship with depression, anxiety and stress symptoms, but no associations with schema compensatory behaviour strategy. Finally, the CBAS and its subscales successfully distinguished a clinical sample from a general population sample.Conclusions:The findings provide preliminary evidence for reliability and validity of the CBAS among Iranian student, general population and clinical samples.
Does a radiographer-led palliative radiotherapy pathway provide an efficient service for patients with symptoms of advanced cancer? The Northampton experience
Authors: Graveling M. , Jarral K. , Gore A. 
Published: May 2020

AbstractAim:To investigate whether a radiographer-led radiotherapy pathway can provide an efficient service for patients requiring treatment for symptomatic skeletal metastases.Materials and Methods:A retrospective review of 425 courses of palliative radiotherapy was conducted. Data was analysed assessing diagnosis, dose/fractionation, time from referral to treatment, gender, age, inpatient/outpatient status and referring clinic location for radiographer- and clinical oncologist-led cohorts.Results:Patients aged ≥70 years were more likely to be planned by radiographers (n = 162/57, p < 0·001). Patients were more likely to be treated with 8 Gy in single fraction than with 20 Gy in five fractions (n = 279/136, p = 0·012). The median referral to treatment time in 8-Gy single-fraction prescriptions was 3 days for radiographer-led versus 7 days for clinical oncologist-led cohorts. In all patients and in 20 Gy in five-fraction prescriptions, it was 4 versus 8 days. A comparison of all prescriptions (p < 0·001), 8 Gy in single-fraction (p < 0·001) and 20 Gy in five-fraction prescriptions (p = 0·001) showed radiographer-led procedures as enabling faster access to treatment in each category.Findings:A radiographer-led service can facilitate faster access to treatment than a clinical oncologist-led pathway for an appropriately selected patient caseload.
The relative importance of regional institutions and external finance for small business investment: evidence from Vietnam
Authors: Nguyen Bach 
Published: May 2020

AbstractThis study examines the relative importance of local institutions and external finance on small business investment. Utilising the institutional theory, we argue that local institutions and external finance have heterogeneous effects on firm investment. More importantly, they may interact and moderate each other. Analysing a set of 1.3 million observations of small businesses operating in Vietnam (2006–2016) obtained from the Annual Enterprise Survey data from the Vietnam Statistics Office, we find that local institutional settings and external finance are important determinants of firm investment. Moreover, local institutions are able to moderate the effects of external finance on firm investment. As such, this study asserts that conventional models cannot discern whether institutions or external finance are more important to firm investment. Rather, the relative importance of institutions and external finance should be investigated from the perspective of their interaction.
Interpretation of Oxygen Isotopes in Phanerozoic Ophiolites and Sedimentary Rocks
Authors: Kanzaki Yoshiki 
Published: May 2020

AbstractTwo reactive transport models were developed to integrally simulate fluxes of oxygen isotopes from hydrothermal alteration of oceanic crust and weathering of continental rocks for a better understanding of the regulation of oxygen isotopes in the ocean. The hydrothermal alteration model consists of three boxes to represent pillow basalt, sheeted dike, and gabbro sections and simulates the steady‐state δ18O of solid rocks and porewaters in three individual sections along the spreading direction. The continental weathering model similarly calculates steady‐state δ18O profiles along the uplift direction. The two models were run in concert to simulate the evolution of seawater δ18O during the Phanerozoic, reflecting the relevant forcing factors to the corresponding parameter values of the models as functions of time. The seawater δ18O was calculated to have evolved from less than −5‰ in the early Paleozoic to between −2 and 0‰ for the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, as a result of declines in atmospheric CO2 and land area of igneous and high‐grade metamorphic rocks. The transition of seawater δ18O is similar to the δ18O trend that is commonly recorded in authigenic sedimentary rocks such as carbonates and cherts. The simultaneously simulated δ18O values for altered continental and oceanic rocks are decoupled from seawater δ18O because of kinetic inhibition and solid‐rock buffering at respective low and high temperatures and are similar to the shale and ophiolite δ18O records. Overall consistency between the simulation and observations supports the dynamic behavior of oceanic δ18O over the Phanerozoic eon.
Bioinformatic prediction of potential T cell epitopes for SARS-Cov-2
Authors: Kiyotani Kazuma , Toyoshima Yujiro , Nemoto Kensaku , Nakamura Yusuke 
Published: May 2020

AbstractTo control and prevent the current COVID-19 pandemic, the development of novel vaccines is an emergent issue. In addition, we need to develop tools that can measure/monitor T-cell and B-cell responses to know how our immune system is responding to this deleterious virus. However, little information is currently available about the immune target epitopes of novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) to induce host immune responses. Through a comprehensive bioinformatic screening of potential epitopes derived from the SARS-CoV-2 sequences for HLAs commonly present in the Japanese population, we identified 2013 and 1399 possible peptide epitopes that are likely to have the high affinity (<0.5%- and 2%-rank, respectively) to HLA class I and II molecules, respectively, that may induce CD8+ and CD4+ T-cell responses. These epitopes distributed across the structural (spike, envelope, membrane, and nucleocapsid proteins) and the nonstructural proteins (proteins corresponding to six open reading frames); however, we found several regions where high-affinity epitopes were significantly enriched. By comparing the sequences of these predicted T cell epitopes to the other coronaviruses, we identified 781 HLA-class I and 418 HLA-class II epitopes that have high homologies to SARS-CoV. To further select commonly-available epitopes that would be applicable to larger populations, we calculated population coverages based on the allele frequencies of HLA molecules, and found 2 HLA-class I epitopes covering 83.8% of the Japanese population. The findings in the current study provide us valuable information to design widely-available vaccine epitopes against SARS-CoV-2 and also provide the useful information for monitoring T-cell responses.
Phase imaging with an untrained neural network
Authors: Wang Fei , Bian Yaoming , Wang Haichao , Lyu Meng , Pedrini Giancarlo , Osten Wolfgang , Barbastathis George , Situ Guohai 
Published: May 2020

AbstractMost of the neural networks proposed so far for computational imaging (CI) in optics employ a supervised training strategy, and thus need a large training set to optimize their weights and biases. Setting aside the requirements of environmental and system stability during many hours of data acquisition, in many practical applications, it is unlikely to be possible to obtain sufficient numbers of ground-truth images for training. Here, we propose to overcome this limitation by incorporating into a conventional deep neural network a complete physical model that represents the process of image formation. The most significant advantage of the resulting physics-enhanced deep neural network (PhysenNet) is that it can be used without training beforehand, thus eliminating the need for tens of thousands of labeled data. We take single-beam phase imaging as an example for demonstration. We experimentally show that one needs only to feed PhysenNet a single diffraction pattern of a phase object, and it can automatically optimize the network and eventually produce the object phase through the interplay between the neural network and the physical model. This opens up a new paradigm of neural network design, in which the concept of incorporating a physical model into a neural network can be generalized to solve many other CI problems.
Controlling angular dispersions in optical metasurfaces
Authors: Zhang Xiyue , Li Qi , Liu Feifei , Qiu Meng , Sun Shulin , He Qiong , Zhou Lei 
Published: May 2020

AbstractAlthough metasurfaces have shown great potential for manipulating light, most previously realized meta-devices suffer from uncontrolled angular dispersions, making them unfavorable for many applications. Here, we propose a general strategy to realize optical metasurfaces with desired angular dispersions based on carefully controlling both the near-field couplings between meta-atoms and the radiation pattern of a single meta-atom. Utilizing such a strategy, we experimentally demonstrate a series of optical meta-devices with predesigned angular dispersions, including two incident-angle-insensitive absorbers, one incident-angle-selective absorber, and one multifunctional meta-polarizer whose functionality changes from a perfect mirror to a half-waveplate as the excitation angle varies. Finally, we design a gradient meta-device using meta-atom arrays with purposely controlled angular dispersions and numerically demonstrate that it can exhibit distinct wavefront-control functionalities when illuminated at different incident angles. Our findings establish a new platform for achieving angle-multiplexed functional meta-devices, significantly expanding the wave-manipulation capabilities of optical metasurfaces.
Digital synthesis of histological stains using micro-structured and multiplexed virtual staining of label-free tissue
Authors: Zhang Yijie , de Haan Kevin , Rivenson Yair , Li Jingxi , Delis Apostolos , Ozcan Aydogan 
Published: May 2020

AbstractHistological staining is a vital step in diagnosing various diseases and has been used for more than a century to provide contrast in tissue sections, rendering the tissue constituents visible for microscopic analysis by medical experts. However, this process is time consuming, labour intensive, expensive and destructive to the specimen. Recently, the ability to virtually stain unlabelled tissue sections, entirely avoiding the histochemical staining step, has been demonstrated using tissue-stain-specific deep neural networks. Here, we present a new deep-learning-based framework that generates virtually stained images using label-free tissue images, in which different stains are merged following a micro-structure map defined by the user. This approach uses a single deep neural network that receives two different sources of information as its input: (1) autofluorescence images of the label-free tissue sample and (2) a “digital staining matrix”, which represents the desired microscopic map of the different stains to be virtually generated in the same tissue section. This digital staining matrix is also used to virtually blend existing stains, digitally synthesizing new histological stains. We trained and blindly tested this virtual-staining network using unlabelled kidney tissue sections to generate micro-structured combinations of haematoxylin and eosin (H&E), Jones’ silver stain, and Masson’s trichrome stain. Using a single network, this approach multiplexes the virtual staining of label-free tissue images with multiple types of stains and paves the way for synthesizing new digital histological stains that can be created in the same tissue cross section, which is currently not feasible with standard histochemical staining methods.
Adaptive optics two-photon microscopy enables near-diffraction-limited and functional retinal imaging in vivo
Authors: Qin Zhongya , He Sicong , Yang Chao , Yung Jasmine Sum-Yee , Chen Congping , Leung Christopher Kai-Shun , Liu Kai , Qu Jianan Y. 
Published: May 2020

AbstractIn vivo fundus imaging offers non-invasive access to neuron structures and biochemical processes in the retina. However, optical aberrations of the eye degrade the imaging resolution and prevent visualization of subcellular retinal structures. We developed an adaptive optics two-photon excitation fluorescence microscopy (AO-TPEFM) system to correct ocular aberrations based on a nonlinear fluorescent guide star and achieved subcellular resolution for in vivo fluorescence imaging of the mouse retina. With accurate wavefront sensing and rapid aberration correction, AO-TPEFM permits structural and functional imaging of the mouse retina with submicron resolution. Specifically, simultaneous functional calcium imaging of neuronal somas and dendrites was demonstrated. Moreover, the time-lapse morphological alteration and dynamics of microglia were characterized in a mouse model of retinal disorder. In addition, precise laser axotomy was achieved, and degeneration of retinal nerve fibres was studied. This high-resolution AO-TPEFM is a promising tool for non-invasive retinal imaging and can facilitate the understanding of a variety of eye diseases as well as neurodegenerative disorders in the central nervous system.
Ultrafast optical response and ablation mechanisms of molybdenum disulfide under intense femtosecond laser irradiation
Authors: Pan Changji , Jiang Lan , Sun Jingya , Wang Qingsong , Wang Feifei , Wang Kai , Lu Yongfeng , Wang Yeliang , Qu Liangti , Cui Tianhong 
Published: May 2020

AbstractNumerous valuable studies on electron dynamics have focussed on the extraordinary properties of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2); however, most of them were confined to the level below the damage threshold. Here the electron dynamics of MoS2 under intense ultrafast laser irradiation was investigated by experiments and simulations. Two kinds of ablation mechanisms were revealed, which led to two distinct types of electron dynamics and final ablation morphology. At a higher fluence, the emergence of superheated liquid induced a dramatic change in the transient reflectivity and micro-honeycomb structures. At a lower fluence, the material was just removed by sublimation, and the ablation structure was relatively flat. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopic (XPS) measurements demonstrated that thermal decomposition only occurred at the higher fluence. Furthermore, a theoretical model was developed to deeply reveal the ultrafast dynamics of MoS2 ablation. The simulation results were in good agreement with the temporal and spatial reflectivity distribution obtained from the experiment. The electron and lattice temperature evolution was also obtained to prove the ablation mechanism. Our results revealed ultrafast dynamics of MoS2 above the damage threshold and are helpful for understanding the interaction mechanism between MoS2 and intense ultrafast lasers, as well as for MoS2 processing applications.
Dynamic simulation of articulated soft robots
Authors: Huang Weicheng , Huang Xiaonan , Majidi Carmel , Jawed M. Khalid 
Published: May 2020

AbstractSoft robots are primarily composed of soft materials that can allow for mechanically robust maneuvers that are not typically possible with conventional rigid robotic systems. However, owing to the current limitations in simulation, design and control of soft robots often involve a painstaking trial. With the ultimate goal of a computational framework for soft robotic engineering, here we introduce a numerical simulation tool for limbed soft robots that draws inspiration from discrete differential geometry based simulation of slender structures. The simulation incorporates an implicit treatment of the elasticity of the limbs, inelastic collision between a soft body and rigid surface, and unilateral contact and Coulombic friction with an uneven surface. The computational efficiency of the numerical method enables it to run faster than real-time on a desktop processor. Our experiments and simulations show quantitative agreement and indicate the potential role of predictive simulations for soft robot design.
Future ocean biomass losses may widen socioeconomic equity gaps
Authors: Boyce Daniel G. , Lotze Heike K. , Tittensor Derek P. , Carozza David A. , Worm Boris 
Published: May 2020

AbstractFuture climate impacts and their consequences are increasingly being explored using multi-model ensembles that average across individual model projections. Here we develop a statistical framework that integrates projections from coupled ecosystem and earth-system models to evaluate significance and uncertainty in marine animal biomass changes over the 21st century in relation to socioeconomic indicators at national to global scales. Significant biomass changes are projected in 40%–57% of the global ocean, with 68%–84% of these areas exhibiting declining trends under low and high emission scenarios, respectively. Given unabated emissions, maritime nations with poor socioeconomic statuses such as low nutrition, wealth, and ocean health will experience the greatest projected losses. These findings suggest that climate-driven biomass changes will widen existing equity gaps and disproportionally affect populations that contributed least to global CO2 emissions. However, our analysis also suggests that such deleterious outcomes are largely preventable by achieving negative emissions (RCP 2.6).
Universality and quantum criticality in quasiperiodic spin chains
Authors: Agrawal Utkarsh , Gopalakrishnan Sarang , Vasseur Romain 
Published: May 2020

AbstractQuasiperiodic systems are aperiodic but deterministic, so their critical behavior differs from that of clean systems and disordered ones as well. Quasiperiodic criticality was previously understood only in the special limit where the couplings follow discrete quasiperiodic sequences. Here we consider generic quasiperiodic modulations; we find, remarkably, that for a wide class of spin chains, generic quasiperiodic modulations flow to discrete sequences under a real-space renormalization-group transformation. These discrete sequences are therefore fixed points of a functional renormalization group. This observation allows for an asymptotically exact treatment of the critical points. We use this approach to analyze the quasiperiodic Heisenberg, Ising, and Potts spin chains, as well as a phenomenological model for the quasiperiodic many-body localization transition.
Self-cross-linked arrays enabled flexible mechanical sensors for monitoring the body tremor
Authors: Wang Xuewen , Fu Wei , Gao Guanhui , Mehay Mandeep Singh , Zheng Lu , Wang Hong , Zhao Wu , Loh Kian Ping , Zhang Ting , Huang Wei , Liu Zheng 
Published: May 2020

AbstractThin-film electronics played an important role in flexible healthcare sensor applications. The common status of their constituent blocks are solid film and network structures. However, the solid film could only sustain bend in a narrow range due to cracks, and the network structure decreased the sensitivity of flexion sensors due to the strong interactions between nanowires. New materials and technologies are urgently required for flexible sensing electronics, to produce the reliable data for assessment of the human body. Here, we report on a novel three-dimensional (3D) carbon nanorods array (CNA) that is characterized as vertically aligned nanorods and self-cross-linked junctions. We also demonstrate the CNA-based flexible healthcare sensors in monitoring the Parkinsonian tremors. Comparing with two-dimensional (2D) carbon nanotube networks and solid thin films, such self-cross-linked geometries are highly resistant to crack and fragmentation under strain. In the meantime, it shows high sensitivity and good stability (~10,000 times) to detect the flexions. These CNA-based flexible devices are capable of recording low-frequency vibrations (<6 Hz) and make it excellent to monitor the rest tremor of the human body, which is an initial symptom of Parkinson’s disease. The 3D self-cross-linked CNA film shows great potential in the fabrication of cost-effective and durable flexible sensors for early diagnosis of disease by monitoring the health-related rest tremors.