Recent empirical results have linked the N400 ERP with predictive language comprehension processes based on statistical learning (SL). However, links between SL abilities and N400 on the level of individual differences have so far been underexplored. The present study tested SL performance in 29 participants using speech segmentation and artificial grammar learning tasks, followed by EEG recordings of their N400 responses to sentences varying in cloze probability (high, intermediate, low). Mixed-effects models revealed that better online SL performance (SL-ON) was associated with larger N400 amplitudes across conditions. Additionally, working memory showed a significant main effect and interacted with SL-ON in modulating N400 amplitude, while cloze probability also had a robust, independent effect on it. These results demonstrate that individual differences in SL abilities contribute to N400 response variability, supporting the view that the semantic operations reflected by the N400 may involve some form of statistical learning as well. Our findings also raise the possibility that SL and CP tap into distinct levels of predictive mechanisms in language comprehension.

Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) is an ultra-rare genetic disorder caused by mutations in ACVR1, most commonly the R206H variant. These mutations lead to heterotopic ossification (HO) in soft tissues, such as muscles, tendons, and ligaments. While people with FOP appear healthy at birth, they progressively develop HO starting in childhood, resulting in severe disabilities. Heterotopic ossification can be triggered by injuries, flare-ups, or occur spontaneously, and currently, there are limited medical or surgical treatment options available. To address these challenges, we generated a novel inducible Acvr1R206H knock-in mouse model (C57BL/6 background) that accurately replicates both injury- and non-injury-induced (spontaneous) HO. This model was engineered using an inducible CreERT2 system to express the R206H mutation following Cre-mediated recombination. As expected, muscle injury in these mice resulted in the formation of HO via endochondral ossification, a process in which cartilage is converted into bone. When induced by doxycycline administration employing the rt;tetO-Cre system the same Acvr1ARC-R206H floxed allele also led to the development of similar HO upon muscle injury. Furthermore, we developed a protocol to induce non-injury-induced HO in these mice and determined that HO progresses more slowly in the absence of injury. This mouse model holds great potential as a valuable tool to explore cellular processes underlying disease progression and to serve as pre-clinical model to test the efficacy of therapeutic interventions aimed at preventing HO in FOP.

Wildfires strongly alter soil properties, which in turn affect ecosystem recovery over extended periods, though long-term impacts are less certain. This study investigated a 14-year post-fire chronosequence in Chile’s mediterranean and temperate humid forests, revealing ecosystem-specific soil properties and nutrient recovery mechanisms. By analysing sites at successional stages, the chronosequence approach assessed temporal changes and ecosystem recovery, revealing long-term wildfire effects on soil dynamics and nutrients recovery. Wildfires raised soil bulk density to 0.9 g cm−3 in humid temperate and 1.2 g cm−3 in mediterranean ecosystems. Mediterranean soils experienced greater compaction from organic matter loss, soil aggregate destruction, ash-clogged pores, and topsoil erosion. Soil texture shifts were ecosystem-dependent: mediterranean soils increased 10–12 % in clay and silt through ash redistribution and aggregation, while temperate soils saw sand content rise by 0.74 % and 0.32 % yearly at 0–5 and 5–10 cm depths from thermal disaggregation and erosion. Ground vegetation recovers quickly, but physical soil properties like bulk density require over 14 years to return to pre-fire conditions. In humid temperate forests, ash input initially increased soil pH (4.8 to 5.8), reducing acidity, mitigating aluminium toxicity, while increasing nutrient availability. Base cation stocks increased in mediterranean woodlands (e.g., Ca: up to 0.41 Mg ha−1 y−1) due to ash retention, lower leaching, and ash infiltration into subsoil. Nutrient stocks in humid forests recovered slowly (Ca: 0.087–0.13 Mg ha−1 y−1) due to rainfall-driven leaching and low subsoil reserves. Carbon and N losses were restricted to the litter horizon in temperate forests, recovering via fire-resistant tree inputs, whereas mediterranean soils suffered severe C and N depletion from vegetation loss, erosion, and low N fixation. Fire effects and recovery are ecosystem-specific, shaped by landscape, geology, hydrology, and vegetation resilience. Understanding how fire regimes affect soil and nutrient recovery is vital for improving projections in fire-prone regions.

Recent academic and activist critiques raise important points about the ways in which coloniality, migration and racialization are often overlooked in global health research and practice. In particular, these critiques highlight how such structural forces perpetuate inequalities and exclusions, as well as processes of epistemic violence in global health. While agreeing with these critical interventions, this paper argues for a focus on care and the importance that concrete acts and systems of care in postcolonial, migratory and racialized contexts have on the suffering and vulnerability of individuals and communities. Drawing on case studies from multiple different geographic and social contexts, we argue that the perspective of racialization can highlight how multi-layered inequalities in global healthcare are shaped by the intertwined processes of coloniality and migration; thereby explaining the contextual, structural vulnerability of specific groups of people to certain health conditions and their exclusion from adequate healthcare resources. We argue that social scientists and critical global health scholars and practitioners can play a central role in bringing the three strands of research – coloniality, migration and racialization – into conversation to explore their potential for jointly advancing the care and well-being of individuals and communities in different geographical and social contexts.

In quantum metrology, a major application of quantum technologies, the ultimate precision of estimating an unknown parameter is often stated in terms of the Cramér-Rao bound. Yet, the latter fails to completely characterize the distribution of estimates in the nonasymptotic regime. Optimizing metrology protocols with respect to the Cramér-Rao bound can therefore lead to surprisingly poor finite-sample performance. This can be avoided by quantifying the quality of a metrology protocol by the probability of obtaining an estimate with a given accuracy. Using this intrinsically single-shot quantity naturally accommodates the finite-sample regime. We show that the fundamental limits of this figure of merit can be quantified through a multihypothesis testing problem between quantum states. Building on this connection, we derive an analogue of the Cramér-Rao bound that contains explicit corrections relevant to the finite-sample regime. We apply the finite-sample metrology framework to the example task of phase estimation with an ensemble of spin-1/2 particles, giving unambiguous evidence that large quantum Fisher information does not guarantee that a metrology protocol has a good finite-sample performance. Overall, analyzing the probability of success allows the reliable study of quantum metrology in the finite-sample regime and opens up a plethora of new avenues for research at the interface of quantum information theory and quantum metrology.

Representations are a foundational component of any modeling protocol, including on molecules and molecular solids. For tasks that depend on knowledge of both molecular conformation and 3D orientation, such as the modeling of molecular dimers, clusters, or condensed phases, we desire a rotatable representation that is provably complete in the types and positions of atomic nuclei and roto-inversion equivariant with respect to the input point cloud. In this paper, we develop, train, and evaluate a new type of autoencoder, molecular O(3) encoding net (Mo3ENet), for multi-type point clouds, for which we propose a new reconstruction loss, capitalizing on a Gaussian mixture representation of the input and output point clouds. Mo3ENet is end-to-end equivariant, meaning the learned representation can be manipulated on O(3), a practical bonus. An appropriately trained Mo3ENet latent space comprises a universal embedding for scalar, vector, and tensorial molecule property prediction tasks, as well as other downstream tasks incorporating the 3D molecular pose, and we demonstrate its fitness on several such tasks.

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is widely used in biomedical applications due to its biocompatibility, chemical stability, flexibility, and resistance to degradation in physiological environments. However, its intrinsic inertness limits further (bio)functionalization, and its hydrophobic recovery compromises the longevity of conventional surface modifications. To address these challenges, we developed a nanoprecipitation method for the straightforward colloidal deposition, covalent thermal crosslinking, and surface anchoring of a chemically tunable, biocompatible polyacrylamide with reactive hydroxyl groups, enabling further surface modifications. This polymer incorporates ∼6 % bioinspired catechol units, introduced via an elegant one-pot Kabachnik-Fields reaction, to facilitate thermally induced network formation and enhance adhesion to plasma-activated PDMS. The resulting uniform coatings exhibited tunable dry layer thicknesses up to 44 ± 7 nm and effectively suppressed PDMS chain rearrangement even after steam autoclaving, ensuring long-term stability in aqueous and ambient environments for at least 90 days. The bioactive post-modification potential was demonstrated in a proof-of-concept study by immobilizing the photosensitizer rose bengal at surface concentrations of 20 or 40 μg cm−2. The coating exhibited antimicrobial activity against S. aureus, achieving a 4-log reduction (99.99 %) in colony-forming units after 30 min of irradiation at 554 nm (342 J cm−2), even when bacteria were suspended in liquid, without direct surface contact. In contrast, antimicrobial activity against E. coli was only observed with minimized liquid volume, bringing the motile bacteria into close contact with the surface. This work established a straightforward and versatile strategy for the stable and bioactive functionalization of PDMS surfaces for application in non-invasive surface decontamination.

Metal coordination is ubiquitous in Nature and central in many applications, ranging from nanotechnology to catalysis and environmental chemistry. Complex formation results from the subtle interplay between different thermodynamic, kinetic, and mechanistic contributions, which remain largely elusive to standard experimental methodologies and challenging for typical modeling approaches. Here, considering some prototypical metal complexes between Cd(II) and Ni(II) with various amine ligands, we present a comprehensive atomistic-level description of their chemical equilibrium, complex formation, and ligand exchange dynamics in aqueous solution, providing an excellent agreement with available association constants and formation rates spanning several orders of magnitude. This is achieved through an effective molecular simulation approach that combines finely tuned interatomic potentials with state-of-the-art enhanced sampling and kinetics techniques. Worthy of note, the nature of the chelate effect, a fundamental concept in coordination chemistry, is fully unravelled through the comparative analysis of the ligand binding reactions of monodentate and bidentate ligands in octahedral complexes. Results provide a complete picture illustrating all the concurrent contributions to this phenomenon, such as entropy, dissociation rates, and ligand binding mechanisms, in some cases contradicting previously held beliefs. This study represents a step forward for the in silico design and applications of coordination complex systems.

Many chirality-sensitive light–matter interactions are governed by chiral electron dynamics. Therefore, the development of advanced technologies making use of chiral phenomena would critically benefit from measuring and controlling chiral electron dynamics on their natural attosecond timescales. Such endeavours have so far been hampered by the lack of characterized circularly polarized attosecond pulses, an obstacle that has recently been overcome1,2. Here we introduce chiroptical spectroscopy with attosecond pulses and demonstrate attosecond coherent control over photoelectron circular dichroism (PECD)3,4, as well as the measurement of chiral asymmetries in the forward–backward and angle-resolved photoionization delays of chiral molecules. We show that co-rotating attosecond and near-infrared (IR) pulses can nearly double the PECD and even change its sign compared with single-photon ionization. We demonstrate that chiral photoionization delays depend on both polar and azimuthal angles of photoemission in the light-propagation frame, requiring 3D momentum resolution. We measure forward–backward chiral-sensitive delays of up to 60 as and polar-angle-resolved photoionization delays of up to 240 as, which include an asymmetry of about 60 as originating from chirality in the continuum–continuum transitions. Attosecond chiroptical spectroscopy opens the door to quantitatively understanding and controlling the dynamics of chiral molecules on the electronic timescale.

While quantum key distribution (QKD) based on two-dimensional (qubit) encoding is a mature, field-tested technology, its performance is lacking for many cryptographic applications. High-dimensional encoding for QKD enables increased achievable key rates and robustness as compared to the standard qubit-based systems. However, experimental implementations of such systems are more complicated, expensive, and require careful security analysis as they are less common. In this work, we present a proof-of-principle high-dimensional time-phase BB84 QKD experiment using only one single-photon detector per measurement basis. We employ the temporal Talbot effect to detect QKD symbols in the control basis and show experimentally obtained simplistic key rates for the two-dimensional and four-dimensional cases, including in an urban fiber network. We present a comparison of a simplistic secret key rate obtained from a standard security proof with the one derived from a recently devised proof using a tunable beam splitter to display security issues stemming from asymmetric detection efficiencies in the two bases. Our results contribute to the discussion of the benefits of high-dimensional encoding and highlight the impact of security analysis on the achievable QKD performance.

This article critically interrogates the unequal structures of life-saving inclusion and life-shortening exclusion that underpin modern citizenship regimes. By connecting the coloniality of citizenship framework with critical and reflexive migration studies on the nexus of death, migration, and citizenship, it introduces the concept of the necropolitics of statelessness. Bringing the works of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Orlando Patterson, Sylvia Wynter, and Frantz Fanon into dialogue with each other and with the work of Caribbean human rights professionals and activists, the article captures how the racialized and gendered exclusion from national membership produces deadly effects. To illustrate and support this argument, two interconnected case studies from the Caribbean are spotlighted: the 1937 Parsley Massacre, which targeted Haitians and those presumed to be of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, and the 2013 La Sentencia ruling, which rendered Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless and disposable. The necropolitics of statelessness is thus conceptualized as an extreme manifestation of the coloniality of citizenship, highlighting how colonial histories of violence and their present-day legacies perpetuate conditions where stateless individuals – whose very humanity is systematically denied – are subject to sovereign death-making power.

Neuromodulators control mood, arousal, and behavior by inducing synaptic plasticity via G-protein-coupled receptors. While long-term presynaptic potentiation requires structural changes, mechanisms enabling potentiation within minutes remain unclear. Using the Drosophila neuromuscular junction, we show that octopamine, the invertebrate analog of norepinephrine, potentiates evoked neurotransmitter release on the timescale of one minute via a G-protein-coupled pathway involving presynaptic OAMB receptors and phospholipase C. This fast potentiation correlates with elevated signals of the release factor Unc13A and the scaffolding protein Bruchpilot. Live, single-molecule imaging of endogenously tagged Unc13 revealed its instantly reduced motility and increased concentration in synaptic nanoclusters with potentiation. Presynaptic knockdown of Unc13A fully blocked fast potentiation. Moreover, deleting its N-terminal localization sequence mislocalized the protein fragment to the cytosol, but still allowed for rapid plasma membrane recruitment by diacylglycerol (DAG) analog phorbol esters and octopamine, implicating a role of more C-terminal domains. A point mutation of endogenous Unc13 in its DAG-binding C1 domain blocked plasticity-induced nanoscopic enrichment and synaptic potentiation. The mutation increased basal neurotransmission but reduced Unc13 levels, revealing a gain of function and potential homeostatic compensation. The mutation also blocked phorbol ester–induced potentiation, decreased the calcium sensitivity of neurotransmission, and caused short-term synaptic depression. Homeostatic potentiation induced by postsynaptic receptor block mirrored octopamine-induced Unc13 recruitment and required presynaptic OAMB receptors, indicating overlapping machinery. Thus, rapid Unc13 immobilization and nanoscale compaction are salient features of fast presynaptic potentiation.

Background

Family climate substantially influences children’s socio-emotional development. We examined mothers’ mental representations of their children and their relationships in three groups of mothers with young children (0–6 years): mothers (1) with a borderline personality disorder (BPD) (2), with a depressive or anxiety disorder but no BPD (AD/D), or (3) without a current mental disorder (CON). We expected both clinical groups to show more negative mental representations – more expressed emotion reflecting a critical attitude toward the child in general, more hostile attributions to child misbehavior in particular, and a less balanced view of the child (i.e., lower narrative coherence) – than CON mothers. We also expected mothers with BPD to have more impaired mental representations than mothers with AD/D.

Methods

Data were collected as part of an intervention study (at the pre-intervention assessment). To assess parental attributions, 172 mothers with BPD, 69 mothers with AD/D, and 96 CON mothers provided responses to vignettes and participated in a five-minute speech sample coded for expressed emotion and narrative coherence.

Results

BPD was associated with more criticism (OR = 3.17 and OR = 3.93) in comparison with CON mothers and mothers with AD/D, and with lower narrative coherence (OR = 5.45) compared with CON mothers but not compared with mothers with AD/D (OR = 1.41). Only narrative coherence remained significantly associated with group membership after education was controlled for. Mothers with BPD also showed more hostile attributions than CON mothers, with the AD/D group in between.

Conclusion

Without controlling for maternal education, critical attitudes toward the child in general were specifically associated with BPD, hostile attributions were less clearly associated, and narrative coherence was transdiagnostically associated with mental disorders in general. Once education was controlled for, disorder-specific associations were no longer observed, while transdiagnostic associations were maintained. Early interventions may specifically aim to decrease levels of criticism, help mothers increase non-hostile attributions of child misbehavior, and support mothers in building more coherent mental representations of their children.

Trial registration

This study was pre-registered at the German Registry of Clinical Studies (DRKS-ID: DRKS00020460).

Using Chinese panel data, we examine whether citizen well-being impacts the formation of political trust, which is key to regime stability. Through a quasi-experimental method, we demonstrate how an improvement in subjective well-being directly leads to increased political trust. In a supplementary analysis, we also demonstrate how low political trust is predictive of actions that undermine regime stability. These findings suggest that any government, even an authoritarian one, has an incentive to foster the happiness of its citizens.

Transfer RNA (tRNA) plays an essential role in protein translation, and tRNA modifications are important to their function. Recently, nanopore direct RNA sequencing (dRNA-seq) has shown promising results in the detection of complex tRNA modifications. However, its wider adoption in the tRNA field has been limited by a lack of (de)multiplexing solutions. Here, we present WarpDemuX-tRNA: an extension to the WarpDemuX method specifically optimized for multiplexed nanopore tRNA sequencing. Using consensus-based signal analysis using (soft) dynamic time warping and barycenter averaging, our approach improves barcode feature generation and achieves more robust barcode identification. WarpDemuX-tRNA outperforms the original method and achieves 99% precision and 95% recovery for four barcodes, while reducing computational complexity and runtime to 6 min per one million reads. WarpDemuX-tRNA is an open-source and free-to-use solution to high-throughput nanopore tRNA sequencing, facilitating more accessible, cost-effective, and high-throughput studies of tRNA modifications and their regulatory mechanisms.

We investigate the existence and uniqueness of solutions to first-order Stieltjes differential problems, focusing on the role of the Stieltjes derivative and its kernel. Unlike the classical case, the kernel of the Stieltjes derivative operator is nontrivial, leading to non-uniqueness issues in Cauchy problems. We characterize this kernel by providing necessary and sufficient conditions for a function to have a zero Stieltjes derivative. To address the implications of this nontrivial kernel, we introduce a function space which serves as a suitable framework for studying Stieltjes differential problems. We explore its topological structure and propose a metric that facilitates the formulation of existence and uniqueness results. Our findings demonstrate that solutions to first-order Stieltjes differential equations are, in general, not unique, underscoring the need for a refined analytical approach to such problems.

Here, we present the first fully varve-based chronology for the deposits of the deep-water Lake Shira (Chulym-Yenisei Basin, South Siberia), derived from a new sediment core. The very well-preserved varves show typical properties of the clastic-biogenic and endogenic types that can be subdivided into four sublayers representing winter–early spring, late spring, early summer and late summer–autumn. The analysed sediment section of 147 cm length comprises 2491 varve years with a total counting error of 1.6 % (i.e. ±40 years), making the new sediment core from Lake Shira a unique high-resolution archive for multi-proxy studies of past climate/environmental change and human-environment interactions. Direct comparison of nine AMS radiocarbon (14C) dates based on sediment bulk organic fractions with an age-depth model based on varve counting made it possible to examine the 14C reservoir effect in the lake. The reservoir effect is a common issue when estimating the age of environmental proxies from lacustrine sedimentary archives in Inner Asia. Although a constant reservoir effect is commonly used to correct the 14C dates from a single core or lake basin, our results from Lake Shira demonstrate that it varies significantly over the last 2500 years, ranging from 240 ± 30 to 1045 ± 30 years. The spatiotemporal variability of the reservoir effect can considerably reduce the accuracy of age-depth models based solely on the bulk organic sediment fraction. Where varved sediment is unavailable, as is usually the case, lignin phenols, terrestrial plant remains and purified pollen concentrates should be considered as alternative dating materials.

Oesophagostomum spp. and Ascaris suum represent the most common porcine nematodes and anthelmintic resistance (AR) to various anthelmintics has been reported for Oesophagostomum. However, the current AR status for worm populations on German farms and practical methods facilitating reliable AR detection are missing. Herein, the efficacy of benzimidazoles (BZ) (fenbendazole, 5 mg/kg body weight, single dose) was analysed on 13 farms with outdoor access. The Faecal Egg Count Reduction Test (FECRT) estimates for strongyles on the farms (range 99.8–100 %) exceeded the target efficacy (99 %) of the new W.A.A.V.P. guideline for Oesophagostomum dentatum. Deep amplicon sequencing was used for the first time for porcine nematodes and revealed no polymorphisms associated with BZ-resistance in codons 134, 167, 198 and 200 of the isotype-1 β-tubulin gene. Nemabiome analysis using ITS-2 deep amplicon sequencing, based on two pre- and post-treatment samples, showed a significant increase (p < 0.001) of Oesophagostomum quadrispinulatum after BZ treatment. For A. suum, the interpretation of FECRT estimates can be hindered due to coprophagy-associated false-positive egg counts in pigs. Therefore, two FECRT analysis for A. suum were pursued, the first analyses included all EPG data, the second considered EPGs <200 pre- and post-treatment as negative. An in ovo larval development assay (LDA) was developed for the in vitro analysis of BZ-susceptibility in A. suum. Computed EC50 values ranged from 1.50 to 3.36 μM thiabendazole (mean 2.24 μM). An EC50 of 3.90 μM thiabendazole (mean EC50 + 3 × SD) as provisional cut-off for detection of resistant populations is suggested. In conclusion, no AR was detected in Oesophagostomum using the FECRT and β-tubulin deep amplicon sequencing. For A. suum the FECRT results were ambiguous, in some cases even when excluding the low egg counts from calculations. With the in ovo LDA all investigated A. suum populations were identified as susceptible to BZ.

Metal-metal bonds between metal cations are ubiquitous in coordination complexes, whereas similar bonding characteristics between non-metal and metal cations are not. Here, we report an X-ray crystal structure of a centrosymmetric complex [Ag(m-O3SCF3)2{(4MePyNO)2I}]2 (1-AgI), where the iodine(I) cation forms an unusual 3-centre 4-electron [O–I–O]+ halogen bond with two oxygen atoms from two 4-methylpyridine N-oxide (4MePyNO). The iodine(I) atoms from two [4MePyNO−I−ONPyMe4]+ cations, which, together with the two silver(I) atoms from the paddlewheel [Ag(m-O3SCF3)2]22− structure, establish two unique I+–Ag+ bonds at 2.863(2) Å. This bond length is characteristic of bimetallic coordination bonds such as Au+−Ag+ [2.8553(6) Å], Cu+−Ag+ [2.8616(9) Å], and Pt2+−Ag+ [2.8602(4) Å]. Density Functional Theory calculations unambiguously support the existence of the I+–Ag+ coordination bond between non-metal and metal cations in complex 1-AgI.