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To solve the problems of precise operation and real-time interaction during the spraying process of industrial robots, a new spraying method based on digital twin technology is proposed. In view of the limitations of traditional spraying processes in complex geometric shape processing, spraying uniformity control, and operational flexibility, this study built a highly simulated virtual environment based on digital twin and human–machine collaboration technology, allowing operators to guide the robot in real time for precise spraying operations. The use of multisensor fusion technology achieves a high degree of consistency between the physical and virtual environments, ensuring that the system can maintain high-precision spraying on complex workpiece surfaces. The experimental designed spraying tasks for different geometric shapes and evaluated the performance of the system’s interactive spraying method in terms of real-time feedback guidance and path planning. The results show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy and efficiency of the spraying process, especially showing obvious advantages when processing complex geometric workpieces, and provides a new technical approach for future high-precision manufacturing.
To explore cancer patients’ understanding of Advance Care Planning (ACP) and identify the main barriers hindering its effective implementation in clinical practice.
Methods
This qualitative descriptive study included Brazilian women with breast cancer aged 18–75 years, all with preserved functional status, recruited by convenience sampling. Exclusion criteria were difficulty using online calls or significant communication impairment. Data collection involved a sociodemographic questionnaire and a follow-up interview. After receiving an informational brochure, participants were contacted by video call 14 days later and asked, “How do you understand what ACP is?” Interviews were conducted confidentially at home, transcribed, and analyzed according to qualitative research reporting guidelines.
Results
Sixty-one women participated. Most had difficulty understanding ACP; nearly 40% could not define it. Main barriers included cultural resistance to discussing death, reliance on family members or physicians for decision-making, and lack of clear information. Many participants confused ACP with preventive care. A conceptual multilevel model was developed, showing how cultural taboos, family dependence, and systemic inertia interact to sustain barriers through a feedback loop in which cultural avoidance reinforces structural gaps and institutional neglect.
Significance of results
This study provides evidence on how ACP is understood and misinterpreted by cancer patients in a middle-income Latin American setting, an area that remains underrepresented in the literature. By demonstrating that misconceptions, cultural taboos, and systemic barriers operate through a reinforcing multilevel process, the findings offer a conceptual framework that explains why ACP remains marginal in routine oncology care. The model highlights critical points for intervention, including patient education, professional communication, and institutional support, and is directly applicable to similar sociocultural contexts characterized by strong family involvement and biomedical dominance. These results have clear implications, supporting the integration of ACP as a proactive, relational, and value-based process rather than a late end-of-life intervention.
Khasi nightshade (Solanum khasianum C.B. Clarke) is a perennial poisonous weed in tropical and subtropical regions that seriously threatens the development of grasslands. For a high-risk invasive weed, a comprehensive understanding of its seed germination characteristics is important for predicting its spread and developing effective management strategies. However, the impact of various abiotic factors on the germination of S. khasianum is not clear. The study first explored the effect of temperature, light, pH, osmotic stress, salt stress, high-temperature pretreatment and burial depth on the germination of S. khasianum. Seeds germinated at constant temperature of 30, 33, 35, and 38 C, and the germination rate (GR) ranged from 10% to 94%. The optimum germination temperature was 35 C, while germination was completely inhibited at 25 C or 40 C. The germination of S. khasianum was greatly promoted by alternating light and darkness (16/8, 12/12, 8/16 h), but was not sensitive to the time change of photoperiod. The GRs were more than 70% in the pH range of 4 to 10, and strongly acidic environment was more suitable for the germination. The GR gradually decreased with the osmotic potential from 0 to -0.2 MPa, and no germination occurred at -0.4 MPa. Accordingly, germination was also low in sodium chloride (NaCl) solution with concentration higher than 60 mM. Seeds of S. khasianum were not tolerant to high temperature, GR decreased significantly after exposure to 40 C for five minutes, and it decreased to 3% at 120 C. The emergence rate was the highest (93%) when the seeds were buried on the soil surface, while seedlings hardly appeared when the burial depth was more than 2 cm. This study revealed the possible adaptive mechanism of invasive S. khasianum, and will contribute to the effective prediction and management in grasslands.
This article recovers the international thought of Jón Ólafsson—an Icelandic journalist, transatlantic migrant, and settler colonialist—to illuminate how visions of world order were articulated from the Northern European periphery at the fin de siècle. While scholars have emphasized the rise of Anglo-Saxonist ideas—particularly the notion of a racial-imperial union between the United States and Britain—as central to late nineteenth-century reimaginings of global politics, little attention has been paid to how such ideas were adapted beyond the English-speaking world itself. Tracing how Ólafsson reworked this paradigm for a transnational audience, the article argues that he expanded the imagined boundaries of the Angloworld through appeals to what he saw as Teutonic whiteness. The result was what might be termed a ‘Teutonisphere’: a vision of racial solidarity illustrating how great-power narratives were refracted, appropriated, and creatively reconfigured by intellectuals in peripheral regions. Cast as pristine exemplars of the Teutonic race, Icelanders were imagined as ideal agents to rejuvenate Anglo-Saxon colonization from the US frontier and Canadian prairies to the South African veldt.
This study investigates finite-wall effects in vortex ring–wall interactions on flat circular plates with diameters $1.5D_n \leqslant D \leqslant 10D_n$, where $D_n$ is the nozzle diameter. Flow visualisation experiments were conducted across a broad range of vortex Reynolds numbers, ${\textit{Re}}_{\varGamma } \approx 600$–$2800$, while particle image velocimetry measurements were performed over a focused range of ${\textit{Re}}_{\varGamma } \approx 1300$–$1900$. The formation length was fixed at $L/D_n = 2$, where $L$ is the length of the ejected fluid slug. The plate sizes examined span from those reproducing the canonical infinite-wall behaviour to plates smaller than the vortex ring’s diameter. Three distinct regimes are identified based on the relative plate size: (i) ‘infinite’ plates where edge effects are negligible; (ii) ‘quasi-infinite’ plates where boundary-layer separation dominates but weak edge-generated vorticity emerges; and (iii) ‘finite’ plates where boundary-layer roll-up over the edge replaces surface separation, yielding strong edge effects. These regimes are established through vorticity contour analysis and flow visualisation, supported by quantitative measurements of circulation, trajectory, vortex-core velocity, eccentricity and boundary-layer separation. Within the explored range, geometric extent rather than Reynolds number governs the interaction dynamics. Finite-edge effects manifest through enhanced and earlier secondary vorticity formation, stronger primary vortex decay and elongated rebound trajectories with larger orbital periods. When the plate diameter becomes smaller than the vortex ring diameter, edge clipping rapidly disrupts the coherent vortex structures. The results provide a canonical framework for understanding finite-surface interactions and for distinguishing edge-induced dynamics from curvature or confinement effects observed in previous studies.
Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, the ebullient Victorian foreign secretary and prime minister, is no stranger to historians; few stones in his life have been left unturned. One exception is Palmerston’s relationship with the Devonshire borough of Tiverton, which he represented in Parliament for thirty years. Palmerston’s biographers have traditionally downplayed the significance of the Tivertonians and this article offers a more sophisticated approach, by relating popular politics to the nascent historiographical subfields of celebrity and memory. It finds that, during Palmerston’s lifetime, the celebrity status that he used Tiverton to cultivate became a source of civic pride and a pillar of the borough’s identity. Then, after Palmerston’s death, the politics of celebrity became intertwined with the politics of memory. Control of the political space that Palmerston’s legacy occupied became a prerequisite for electoral success, as political debates mutated into bitter arguments over which faction had the better claim to his legacy. This article therefore seeks to illuminate new ways of reading Palmerston and to contribute to the growing body of work on Victorian celebrities and the political uses of the Victorian past.
Delaying cover crop termination until planting (i.e., planting green) in no-till production systems is likely to mediate the fate of herbicides that provide soil residual activity. In a planting green scenario, there is currently limited knowledge of how the interaction between physiochemical properties of cover crop residues and sorption properties of herbicides influence the washoff potential of residual herbicides from cover crop residues. We conducted field- and laboratory-based experiments using herbicide washoff assay methods to evaluate the interaction between lignin (%) of cereal rye (Secale cereale, L.) and herbicide lipophilicity (Kow) on washoff potential across herbicide application timings. We contrasted herbicides with intermediate lipophilicity (atrazine, pyroxasulfone , and S-metolachlor) to less (mesotrione) and highly lipophilic (pendimethalin) herbicides. When applied into living cereal rye, washoff of atrazine and pyroxasulfone were greater than mesotrione and S-metolachlor. Pendimethalin had the least washoff potential. When applied into fresh- to aged-cereal rye residues (0 to 84 days after termination), pendimethalin washoff was below the detection threshold. Washoff of mesotrione, pyroxasulfone, and atrazine declined as lignin (%) in cereal rye residues increased, whereas a positive relationship between S-metolachlor recovery and lignin (%) was observed. Results of our study partially support the hypotheses that (1) herbicide lipophilicity, measured via log Kow values, can be a useful indicator of washoff potential among residual herbicides used in cover crop systems, and (2) washoff potential declines as cover crop residues age within herbicide application windows.
Following Entman’s observation that policy frames define social problems, diagnose causes and suggest remedies, we examined the strategies that 12 U.S. governors (from states matched according to population size and density, demographic composition, per capita incomes, geographic proximity, and COVID-19 incidence) used to frame COVID-19 policy agendas. After scraping the governors’ statements about COVID-19 from press releases issued from January 2020 to May 2023 (N = 14,629), we leveraged ChatGPT (GPT) to identify and assess the intensity of public health, economic stability, and civic vitality frames. Subsequent analysis explored differences in the framing strategies according to the governors’ political party and gender. In the process, this study underscores the importance of AI prompt engineering to realize GPT’s transformative potential to facilitate communication research by efficiently identifying and assessing the content of policy frames.
This Element reconsiders the historical, theoretical, racial, ableist, and editorial problem of genealogy by analyzing to-be-spoken genealogies in two plays in the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio: the 'Salic Law' speech in Henry V and the 'seven sons' scene in Henry VI, Part Two. Both passages also exist in a significantly variant version in The Chronicle history of Henry the fift (1600) and The First Part of the Contention (1594). The differences between the two versions of the biological/bloodline genealogy have been central to the long-dominant theory of 'bad quartos'. That theory assumes that early modern chroniclers and playwrights shared the values of modern archival historians: they assume that Shakespeare prioritized accuracy over acting. The authors offer an alternative reading of genealogies written to be performed onstage as 'documentary effects', adapted for changing audiences in a new multimedia entertainment industry. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Captivity is a complex phenomenon in international politics with a broad range of purposes, functions, and consequences. Existing scholarship suggests that states use captivity, for example, to facilitate hostage or prisoner exchanges, to extract material rewards, or, in the case of human shields, for deterrence purposes. This article argues that states may use captivity to deter not only traditional military threats emanating from other states, but also perceived threats to regime security posed by non-state actors, including individuals, and that emotions are central to this process. The argument is illustrated through three empirical vignettes that show how the Chinese government has detained foreign academics, publishers, and NGO workers engaged in activities seen as threatening regime security. Detention is interpreted as attempts to deter such actors. While fear is often seen as key to successful deterrence, the article indicates that paying attention to other emotions can help better understand deterrence failure. Specifically, because captivity, and deterrence, involve the denial of the captive’s agency and may trigger feelings of humiliation and shame, it can backfire as the target of deterrence efforts might seek to act to regain agency.
The confession, as its name suggests, presents the personal, and often private, experience of the author, as we see in Rousseau’s well-known confessions which intend to expose his private self to public scrutiny. Bell’s confessional writing, however, is employed as a rhetorical means to serve his public purpose of political theorizing, since what the author intends to emphasize is not his private world, or even his personal experience as “a minor bureaucrat,” but to explore “the inner workings of Chinese academia and to draw implications for China’s broader political system” (3). Instead of a chronological reckoning of the history of the author’s life as an academic leader, Dean from Shandong has singled out several interconnected topics as a series of recollection of events Bell experienced in his five-year deanship to illustrate what he perceived as the important aspects of the Chinese culture in general and academic life in particular. The first-person narration, with its self-mocking style, foreshadows his intention behind the narrative, namely, his way of doing political theorizing as a political scientist. According to Northrop Frye, the confession is “introverted” and “thematic.”1 Bell’s confessions seem to be more thematic than introverted, “I invoke my personal experience only if it sheds light on social and political life in contemporary China, with its contradictions, diversity, and charm” (18).
Let X be a smooth proper rigid analytic space over a complete algebraically closed field extension K of $\mathbb {Q}_p$. We establish a Hodge–Tate decomposition for X with G-coefficients, where G is any commutative locally p-divisible rigid group. This generalizes the Hodge–Tate decomposition of Faltings and Scholze, which is the case $G=\mathbb {G}_a$. For this, we introduce geometric analogs of the Hodge–Tate spectral sequence with general locally p-divisible coefficients. We prove that these spectral sequences degenerate at $E_2$. Our results apply more generally to a class of smooth families of commutative adic groups over X and in the relative setting of smooth proper morphisms $X\rightarrow S$ of seminormal rigid spaces. We deduce applications to analytic Brauer groups and the geometric p-adic Simpson correspondence.
Constitutional democracies face significant threats. Such threats are countered by various theories of militant democracy and non-militant democratic self-defence, using a wide range of repressive, educational and social policy tools. The article introduces an alternative perspective on democratic self-defence policies, emphasising integration as a key component in maintaining the resilience of the constitutional community and draws on Rudolf Smend’s integration theory. It explores how constitutional design through its structures, powers, procedures, rituals and symbols shapes community cohesion and strengthens the constitutional order by deliberately using emotions.
Monocrotaline (MCT) induces lung injury and pulmonary hypertension (PH) by a mechanism that is in part due to oxidative stress. The purpose of this study was to determine how MCT affected nutrient antioxidants retinol and alpha-tocopherol in a rat lung and liver. Rats were fed a purified diet (AIN-93G) one-week prior to a subcutaneous injection of MCT (60 mg/kg) and remained on the diet throughout the study. Three weeks after injection, the animals were euthanized, and the lungs and livers were analyzed for retinol, alpha-tocopherol, phospholipid (PL), and cholesterol content. Lung retinol concentrations were significantly lower in MCT-treated rats, 2.0 ± 1.2 (nmol/g lung) vs. vehicle control (VEH), 5.8 ± 1.4 (P < 0.01). However, liver retinol concentrations were not significantly different, 3.3 ± 1.3 vs. 2.5 ± 0.9 nmol/g liver. Alpha-tocopherol was significantly greater in MCT-treated rats in the lung, 145 ± 24 vs. 99 ± 13 nmol/g lung (P < 0.001), and liver, 107 ± 30 vs. 47.7 ± 4.8 nmol/g liver (P < 0.001). Phospholipid and cholesterol were significantly lower in the lung of the MCT-treated group, but not significantly different in the liver. In conclusion, retinol along with phospholipid, and cholesterol were decreased in the lungs whereas alpha-tocopherol was elevated in the lungs and liver in response to MCT. These findings along with others suggest a novel mechanistic link between MCT-induced oxidative stress, lung vitamin A depletion, inflammation and the impairment of alveolar cell proliferation and repair. Pulmonary retinol is important in the pathogenesis of MCT-induced lung injury.
Rice (Oryza sativa L.) agriculture of the southern United States is plagued by strong biotic competition with several species in the Echinochloa genus. Despite clear genomic differences between barnyardgrass (Echinochloa crus-galli (L.) P. Beauv.] and junglerice (Echinochloa colona (L.) Link], the two major Echinochloa agricultural weeds are nearly indistinguishable phenotypically. This inability to reliably differentiate the species has led farmers to treat the group as a single species, often resulting in ineffective weed control efforts. In this study, we first develop a simple chloroplast-anchored PCR-based restriction enzyme assay to differentiate between E. colona and the other Echinochloa species of agricultural concern. Applying this assay, we identify a strong bias towards E. colona in 2024 rice field collections from eastern Arkansas. Finally, we evaluate anecdotal reports of interspecific hybridization between species and find no evidence. Despite the drawbacks of the maternally inherited nature of the chloroplast, the availability of this species determinant assay will help USDA and academia extension agents and stakeholders to make educated, species-specific decisions about precision chemical weed control and field management.