bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Investigation of cathode properties of two-dimensional NbS2Cl2 for Li and Na-ion batteries using density functional theory
Authors: Raj Natarajan Arul , S Pujari Bhalchandra , Vaitheeswaran G , Kanchana V 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Exploring novel two-dimensional materials (2D) for electrode and electrochemical storage applications stands as a pivotal pursuit in advancing renewable energy technologies. While recent research has predominantly focused on anode materials, cathode materials have received comparatively lesser attention. This study delves into the potential cathode applications of the novel two-dimensional material NbS2Cl2 using density functional theory. Fundamental properties, encompassing electronic and thermodynamic attributes, were scrutinized to comprehend the material’s characteristics. Our investigation extended to examining the adsorption and diffusion properties of these electrode materials. Comprehensive calculations of mechanical and thermodynamic properties reaffirmed the stability of this system. Upon adsorption of Li/Na atoms, the conducting nature emerged, evident through charge density difference and projected density of states. Our findings notably reveal minimal diffusion barriers of 1.5 eV and 0.35 eV for Li and Na atoms. Moreover, the observed open circuit voltages for adsorbed Li and Na ions were 4.69 V and 2.62 V, respectively. The calculated theoretical capacity for adsorbed Li-ion on 2D-NbS2Cl2 is 400 mAh g−1, while for Na-ion adsorption, it is 353 mAh g−1, awaiting validation through future experimental verifications.
Excited-state downfolding using ground-state formalisms
Authors: Bauman Nicholas P 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Downfolding coupled cluster (CC) techniques are powerful tools for reducing the dimensionality of many-body quantum problems. This work investigates how ground-state downfolding formalisms can target excited states using non-Aufbau reference determinants, paving the way for applications of quantum computing in excited-state chemistry. This study focuses on doubly excited states for which canonical equation-of-motion CC approaches struggle to describe unless one includes higher-than-double excitations. The downfolding technique results in state-specific effective Hamiltonians that, when diagonalized in their respective active spaces, provide ground- and excited-state total energies (and therefore excitation energies) comparable to high-level CC methods. The performance of this procedure is examined with doubly excited states of H2, Methylene, Formaldehyde, and Nitroxyl.
Africa’s critical minerals can power the global low-carbon transition
Authors: Ouedraogo N S , Kilolo J M M 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
The global shift towards low-carbon economies and societies is expected to result in a substantial surge in the demand for critical minerals. Endowed with at least a fifth of the world’s reserves in a dozen minerals, Africa can play a pivotal role in facilitating the global transition away from fossil fuels. In this paper, we argue that, for this to happen, Africa needs to act now to convert its natural assets into sustainable comparative advantages for a resource-based industrialisation. This will require proactive measures to ensure strict compliance with the highest standards of governance and transparency, as well as to uphold social values such as safeguarding basic rights of affected individuals and communities and sound environmental management to avoid falling into a new resource curse. This also requires a renewed global raw material diplomacy in which Africa manages the geopolitics of critical minerals, identifying strategic global alliances to unleash economic potential, create local content in the mining sector, develop domestic productive capacity, and foster sustainable development.
Non local analytical and numerical modelling of re-entrant auxetic honeycomb
Authors: Bora Kaustav Moni , Varshney Shailendra Kumar , Kumar Cheruvu Siva 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Auxetic materials, characterized by their negative Poisson’s ratio, have been extensively studied for applications in energy absorption and mechanical reinforcement. Re-entrant honeycomb structures, a subtype of auxetic materials, have demonstrated superior mechanical characteristics. However, understanding the mechanical behavior of these structures at the nanoscale remained a significant challenge. To address this gap, the authors explored the influence of size on the deflection behavior of re-entrant auxetic honeycomb structures through non-local continuum mechanics. Their analytical model, incorporating the Euler-Bernoulli beam model and considering four non-dimensional geometrical parameters, was validated through numerical simulations and a comprehensive review of existing literature. The study aimed to provide valuable insights into the design and engineering of re-entrant auxetic honeycomb structures across diverse applications, contributing to the advancement of non-local elasticity theory and deepening the understanding of the mechanical behavior of auxetic structures at the nanoscale. The research laid a foundation for further exploration and optimization of re-entrant honeycomb structures, facilitating their effective utilization in fields such as MEMS/NEMS by leveraging the dimensionless parameters identified in the study.
Litigating Climate Change in the Global South
Authors: Lin Jolene , Peel Jacqueline 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
While climate change litigation in developed countries of the ‘Global North’ is a well-studied phenomenon, relatively few studies focus on climate case law emerging in the Global South, its distinctive characteristics, and the contribution it is making, and may make, to implementation of international climate laws like the Paris Agreement. The purpose of this book is to shed light on emerging and accelerating climate litigation in Global South developing countries. It is the first monograph-length work to provide a comprehensive assessment of this jurisprudence. The book examines which Global South countries are seeing climate cases, what is driving these trends, the coalitions of actors involved, and the early impacts the litigation is delivering towards goals of climate mitigation and adaptation. With growing scholarly and policy interest in the contribution of climate litigation to international climate governance, the book helps capture and analyse the richness of climate cases emerging in the Global South to provide a holistic picture of the role climate litigation plays in addressing the global problem of climate change.
Revisiting and Understanding Crown Liability from a Historical Constitutional Perspective
Authors: Fortin Marie-France 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
In this chapter, the evolution of the understanding of the king can do no wrong in light of this book’s model is outlined. A discussion of current legal thinking in relation to crown liability is presented, informed by the historical constitutional approach adopted in this book. An analysis of the king can do no wrong as an ahistorical basis for crown immunity is conducted. Dicey’s influence on the current understanding of crown liability and on the Crown Proceedings Act 1947 (and its Canadian counterpart, the Crown Liability and Proceedings Act) is discussed. A possible reorientation of our understanding of the crown and of crown liability is suggested, based on a historically informed understanding of the king can do no wrong. The chapter concludes by highlighting the divergence in constitutional thinking in the realms of judicial review, the prerogative, the law of public authorities’ liability, and crown liability.
Complicit Participation
Authors: Preston Carrie J 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Complicit participation is the prevailing framework through which white liberal allies participate in theatrical and other institutional efforts associated with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. This book argues that the current trend of inviting audiences to participate in antiracist theater can lead to intense emotional experiences and insight; but it can also assure participants that they are an enlightened group of allies who are battling racism from their seats in the theater—without the inconvenience of engaging in activism or giving up their privilege. The book addresses immersive, documentary, site-specific, experimental, street, and popular theater in chapters on Jean Genet’s The Blacks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field, and Claudia Rankine’s The White Card. The author analyzes her own complicit participation and that of other audience members and theater professionals in productions of these plays and their talkbacks or other audience engagement programs. While white allyship is often a shallow, even defensive performance that enables white supremacy, this does not mean we should abandon the work to dismantle institutionalized racism and advance social justice and equity. Instead, this book argues that recognizing the contradictions and complicities at the heart of allyship, inclusion, and diversity initiatives, as revealed in contemporary theater, can lay the groundwork for full and radical participation in antiracist efforts.
Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon and the Loudly Immersed Audiences of Nineteenth-Century Melodramas
Authors: Preston Carrie J 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
This chapter presents melodramatic audience participation in Dion Boucicault’s 1859 The Octoroon as part of the prehistory of immersive theater that is more frequently associated with modernist and especially postmodern performance than with the supposedly conservative, sentimental genre of melodrama. When Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins adapted Boucicault’s melodrama in his controversial 2016 play, An Octoroon, he recognized that melodrama was rarely used to promote transformative politics, but it developed strategies for involving audiences in political questions. For this reason, melodrama appeals to contemporary playwrights like Jacobs-Jenkins, who are deeply engaged with antiracist politics but refuse the tendency to offer solutions or easy answers. Nineteenth-century melodrama is part of the overlooked history of immersive or site-specific theater, and theater artists from Jacobs-Jenkins to George C. Wolfe, Lin-Manuel Miranda to Claudia Rankine, turn back to the participatory conventions of melodrama for their own political theater work.
Doing Time in Anna Deavere Smith’s Act II
Authors: Preston Carrie J 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, performed in 2016 at American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, may have inspired A.R.T.’s Act II “experiment in disrupting the role of spectator as passive observer.” After the first act of Smith’s unique monologue performances drawn from actual interviews, facilitators separated audiences into small groups and asked them to share their own experiences with racial oppression and privilege. Following these Act II discussions, audiences returned to the theater for a moving Coda, but were they inspired to engage in political activism? Or was it just another talkback? This chapter argues that Act II was actually twenty-five minutes of immersive theater, bookended by an adamantly documentary form, and advertised as activism.
Playing The White Card with Claudia Rankine
Authors: Preston Carrie J 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Claudia Rankine’s The White Card (2018) demonstrates that theater of racial justice, even with an Act II, cannot avoid contributing to the phenomenon the play documents so well—the tendency of art and media to turn Black suffering into spectacle. The play participates in the phenomenon, even as it reveals that the interest in depictions of Black suffering and death by liberal elites is yet another manifestation of white supremacy. The Act II talkback asked audiences to stay in the theater for a conversation about race, a conversation that gave audiences the opportunity to share, process, and perform their outrage at atrocity and their frustration with the more subtle forms of racism displayed by the well-intentioned white characters. In arguing that plays, theatrical institutions, and well-intentioned audience members are complicit in the systems they attempt to critique, this chapter reveals the infusion of white supremacy through every institution and the insidious, adaptable nature of both racism and diversity platforms. Recognizing the contradictions and complicities at the heart of allyship can begin to set the stage for full and radical participation in activist efforts.
Scoring alignments by embedding vector similarity
Authors: Ashrafzadeh Sepehr , Golding G Brian , Ilie Silvana , Ilie Lucian 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Sequence similarity is of paramount importance in biology, as similar sequences tend to have similar function and share common ancestry. Scoring matrices, such as PAM or BLOSUM, play a crucial role in all bioinformatics algorithms for identifying similarities, but have the drawback that they are fixed, independent of context. We propose a new scoring method for amino acid similarity that remedies this weakness, being contextually dependent. It relies on recent advances in deep learning architectures that employ self-supervised learning in order to leverage the power of enormous amounts of unlabelled data to generate contextual embeddings, which are vector representations for words. These ideas have been applied to protein sequences, producing embedding vectors for protein residues. We propose the E-score between two residues as the cosine similarity between their embedding vector representations. Thorough testing on a wide variety of reference multiple sequence alignments indicate that the alignments produced using the new $E$-score method, especially ProtT5-score, are significantly better than those obtained using BLOSUM matrices. The new method proposes to change the way alignments are computed, with far-reaching implications in all areas of textual data that use sequence similarity. The program to compute alignments based on various $E$-scores is available as a web server at e-score.csd.uwo.ca. The source code is freely available for download from github.com/lucian-ilie/E-score.
Increased number of excitatory synapsis and decreased number of inhibitory synapsis in the prefrontal cortex in autism
Authors: Vakilzadeh Gelareh , Maseko Busisiwe C , Bartely Trevor D , McLennan Yingratana A , Martínez-Cerdeño Verónica 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Previous studies in autism spectrum disorder demonstrated an increased number of excitatory pyramidal cells and a decreased number of inhibitory parvalbumin+ chandelier interneurons in the prefrontal cortex of postmortem brains. How these changes in cellular composition affect the overall abundance of excitatory and inhibitory synapses in the cortex is not known. Herein, we quantified the number of excitatory and inhibitory synapses in the prefrontal cortex of 10 postmortem autism spectrum disorder brains and 10 control cases. To identify excitatory synapses, we used VGlut1 as a marker of the presynaptic component and postsynaptic density protein-95 as marker of the postsynaptic component. To identify inhibitory synapses, we used the vesicular gamma-aminobutyric acid transporter as a marker of the presynaptic component and gephyrin as a marker of the postsynaptic component. We used Puncta Analyzer to quantify the number of co-localized pre- and postsynaptic synaptic components in each area of interest. We found an increase in the number of excitatory synapses in upper cortical layers and a decrease in inhibitory synapses in all cortical layers in autism spectrum disorder brains compared with control cases. The alteration in the number of excitatory and inhibitory synapses could lead to neuronal dysfunction and disturbed network connectivity in the prefrontal cortex in autism spectrum disorder.
Enhanced neural synchronization during social communications between dyads with high autistic traits
Authors: Peng Xinyue , Li Tianbi , Liu Guangfang , Ni Wei , Yi Li 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Autism is characterized by atypical social communication styles. To investigate whether individuals with high autistic traits could still have effective social communication among each other, we compared the behavioral patterns and communication quality within 64 dyads of college students paired with both high, both low, and mixed high-low (HL) autistic traits, with their gender matched. Results revealed that the high-high (HH) autistic dyads exhibited atypical behavioral patterns during conversations, including reduced mutual gaze, communicational turns, and emotional sharing compared with the low-low and/or HL autistic dyads. However, the HH autistic dyads displayed enhanced interpersonal neural synchronization during social communications measured by functional near-infrared spectroscopy, suggesting an effective communication style. Besides, they also provided more positive subjective evaluations of the conversations. These findings highlight the potential for alternative pathways to effectively communicate with the autistic community, contribute to a deeper understanding of how high autistic traits influence social communication dynamics among autistic individuals, and provide important insights for the clinical practices for supporting autistic people.
Atypical neural encoding of faces in individuals with autism spectrum disorder
Authors: Wang Yue , Cao Runnan , Chakravarthula Puneeth N , Yu Hongbo , Wang Shuo 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience pervasive difficulties in processing social information from faces. However, the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying social trait judgments of faces in ASD remain largely unclear. Here, we comprehensively addressed this question by employing functional neuroimaging and parametrically generated faces that vary in facial trustworthiness and dominance. Behaviorally, participants with ASD exhibited reduced specificity but increased inter-rater variability in social trait judgments. Neurally, participants with ASD showed hypo-activation across broad face-processing areas. Multivariate analysis based on trial-by-trial face responses could discriminate participant groups in the majority of the face-processing areas. Encoding social traits in ASD engaged vastly different face-processing areas compared to controls, and encoding different social traits engaged different brain areas. Interestingly, the idiosyncratic brain areas encoding social traits in ASD were still flexible and context-dependent, similar to neurotypicals. Additionally, participants with ASD also showed an altered encoding of facial saliency features in the eyes and mouth. Together, our results provide a comprehensive understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying social trait judgments in ASD.
A multimodal interface for speech perception: the role of the left superior temporal sulcus in social cognition and autism
Authors: Kausel Leonie , Michon Maëva , Soto-Icaza Patricia , Aboitiz Francisco 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Multimodal integration is crucial for human interaction, in particular for social communication, which relies on integrating information from various sensory modalities. Recently a third visual pathway specialized in social perception was proposed, which includes the right superior temporal sulcus (STS) playing a key role in processing socially relevant cues and high-level social perception. Importantly, it has also recently been proposed that the left STS contributes to audiovisual integration of speech processing. In this article, we propose that brain areas along the right STS that support multimodal integration for social perception and cognition can be considered homologs to those in the left, language-dominant hemisphere, sustaining multimodal integration of speech and semantic concepts fundamental for social communication. Emphasizing the significance of the left STS in multimodal integration and associated processes such as multimodal attention to socially relevant stimuli, we underscore its potential relevance in comprehending neurodevelopmental conditions characterized by challenges in social communication such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Further research into this left lateral processing stream holds the promise of enhancing our understanding of social communication in both typical development and ASD, which may lead to more effective interventions that could improve the quality of life for individuals with atypical neurodevelopment.
Early autism diagnosis based on path signature and Siamese unsupervised feature compressor
Authors: Yin Zhuowen , Ding Xinyao , Zhang Xin , Wu Zhengwang , Wang Li , Xu Xiangmin , Li Gang 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder has been emerging as a growing public health threat. Early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is crucial for timely, effective intervention and treatment. However, conventional diagnosis methods based on communications and behavioral patterns are unreliable for children younger than 2 years of age. Given evidences of neurodevelopmental abnormalities in autism spectrum disorder infants, we resort to a novel deep learning-based method to extract key features from the inherently scarce, class-imbalanced, and heterogeneous structural MR images for early autism diagnosis. Specifically, we propose a Siamese verification framework to extend the scarce data, and an unsupervised compressor to alleviate data imbalance by extracting key features. We also proposed weight constraints to cope with sample heterogeneity by giving different samples different voting weights during validation, and used Path Signature to unravel meaningful developmental features from the two-time point data longitudinally. We further extracted machine learning focused brain regions for autism diagnosis. Extensive experiments have shown that our method performed well under practical scenarios, transcending existing machine learning methods and providing anatomical insights for autism early diagnosis.
Differential neural correlates underlying visuospatial versus semantic reasoning in autistic children
Authors: Degré-Pelletier Janie , Danis Éliane , Thérien Véronique D , Bernhardt Boris , Barbeau Elise B , Soulières Isabelle 
Published: May 2024

Abstract
While fronto-posterior underconnectivity has often been reported in autism, it was shown that different contexts may modulate between-group differences in functional connectivity. Here, we assessed how different task paradigms modulate functional connectivity differences in a young autistic sample relative to typically developing children. Twenty-three autistic and 23 typically developing children aged 6 to 15 years underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while completing a reasoning task with visuospatial versus semantic content. We observed distinct connectivity patterns in autistic versus typical children as a function of task type (visuospatial vs. semantic) and problem complexity (visual matching vs. reasoning), despite similar performance. For semantic reasoning problems, there was no significant between-group differences in connectivity. However, during visuospatial reasoning problems, we observed occipital–occipital, occipital–temporal, and occipital–frontal over-connectivity in autistic children relative to typical children. Also, increasing the complexity of visuospatial problems resulted in increased functional connectivity between occipital, posterior (temporal), and anterior (frontal) brain regions in autistic participants, more so than in typical children. Our results add to several studies now demonstrating that the connectivity alterations in autistic relative to neurotypical individuals are much more complex than previously thought and depend on both task type and task complexity and their respective underlying cognitive processes.