Along with increasing product complexity and quality requirements, the consistent consideration of inevitable production-induced variations within the product development process becomes a decisive factor for the market success of products. Consequently, various tolerancing approaches have emerged over the last few decades. However, tolerancing is considered complex in education, research, and industry, as it is a highly interdisciplinary task that takes place at different levels of detail, ranging from Robust Design to tolerance specification to manufacturing process design. This contribution proposes a novel approach that allows a holistic and structured description of tolerancing and fosters a common understanding among all involved stakeholders from design, manufacturing, and inspection. This is achieved by categorizing it into several distinct elements: activities, methods, tools, models and data, information, and knowledge. This ensures clarity and supports the utilization of existing approaches. While this contribution focuses on tolerancing in product design, the linkage to subsequent product realization stages and further engineering domains is also addressed in the proposed description scheme. An exemplary classification of research papers and a description of a practical development process of a technical system with its different tolerancing activities illustrate the benefits of the proposed description scheme.

Electroencephalography is an accessible, portable, noninvasive and safe means of evaluating a patient’s brain activity. It can aid in diagnosis and management decisions for post-cardiac arrest patients with seizures, myoclonus and other non-epileptic movements. It also plays an important role in a multimodal approach to neuroprognostication predicting both poor and favorable outcomes. Individuals ordering, performing and interpreting these tests, regardless of the indication, should understand the supporting evidence, logistical considerations, limitations and impact the results may have on postarrest patients and their families as outlined herein.

Alcohol use is influenced by genetic and environmental factors. We examined the interactive effects between genome-wide polygenic risk scores for alcohol use (alc-PRS) and social support in relation to alcohol use among European American (EA) and African American (AA) adults across sex and developmental stages (emerging adulthood, young adulthood, and middle adulthood). Data were drawn from 4,011 EA and 1,274 AA adults from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism who were between ages 18–65 and had ever used alcohol. Participants completed the Semi-Structured Assessment for the Genetics of Alcoholism and provided saliva or blood samples for genotyping. Results indicated that social support from friends, but not family, moderated the association between alc-PRS and alcohol use among EAs and AAs (only in middle adulthood for AAs); alc-PRS was associated with higher levels of alcohol use when friend support was low, but not when friend support was high. Associations were similar across sex but differed across developmental stages. Findings support the important role of social support from friends in buffering genetic risk for alcohol use among EA and AA adults and highlight the need to consider developmental changes in the role of social support in relation to alcohol use.

The modern Japanese nation-state that was established from 1868 onwards was marked by a strong tendency towards the separation of state and religion: religions were protected as a private matter, but the public sphere was resolutely kept free of them. This was mainly done so that competing religions would not get in the way of state-sanctioned emperor worship. The latter, although imbued with elements from Shinto, was carefully defined as non-religious, so that emperor worship could be prescribed without harm to the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion. This secularist approach to policing religions was broadly shared among Japanese elites—but it did not remain unopposed.

From around the turn of the twentieth century, dissatisfaction with the separation of the religious and the secular spheres began to be voiced, especially by pan-Asianist activists, who sought to combine the spiritual unity of Asia with the political liberation of Asian countries from Western colonialism and imperialism. Although Japanese pan-Asianism has conventionally been seen as a purely political movement, one cannot explain it fully without taking into account its spiritual dimension, which up to the 1920s drew its primary inspiration from India. This article will show how pan-Asianist activists in Japan opposed mainstream secularism and discuss what their vision for a unified Asia was. In doing so, it will focus on the Japanese reception of the Frenchman Paul Richard, an important political activist-cum-spiritual seeker who was a central node in the network of Indian and Japanese pan-Asianists in the early twentieth century.

The purpose of this study was to examine possible pathways by which genetic risk associated with externalizing is transmitted in families. We used molecular data to disentangle the genetic and environmental pathways contributing to adolescent externalizing behavior in a sample of 1,111 adolescents (50% female; 719 European and 392 African ancestry) and their parents from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism. We found evidence for genetic nurture such that parental externalizing polygenic scores were associated with adolescent externalizing behavior, over and above the effect of adolescents’ own externalizing polygenic scores. Mediation analysis indicated that parental externalizing psychopathology partly explained the effect of parental genotype on children’s externalizing behavior. We also found evidence for evocative gene-environment correlation, whereby adolescent externalizing polygenic scores were associated with lower parent–child communication, less parent–child closeness, and lower parental knowledge, controlling for parental genotype. These effects were observed among participants of European ancestry but not African ancestry, likely due to the limited predictive power of polygenic scores across ancestral background. These results demonstrate that in addition to genetic transmission, genes influence offspring behavior through the influence of parental genotypes on their children’s environmental experiences, and the role of children’s genotypes in shaping parent–child relationships.

Type I/II interferons (IFNα,β/IFNɣ) are cytokines that activate signal-transducer-and-activator-of-transcription-1 (STAT1). The STAT1 N-terminal domain (NTD) mediates dimerization and cooperative DNA-binding. The STAT1 DNA-binding domain (DBD) confers sequence-specific DNA-recognition. STAT1 has been connected to growth inhibition, replication stress and DNA-damage. We investigated how STAT1 and NTD/DBD mutants thereof affect fibrosarcoma cells. STAT1 and indicated mutants do not affect proliferation of resting and IFNα-treated cells as well as checkpoint kinase signaling, and phosphorylation of the tumor-suppressive transcription factor p53 ensuing ɣ-irradiation. Of the STAT1 reconstituted U3A cells those with STAT1 NTD mutants accumulate the highest levels of the replication stress/DNA-damage marker S139-phosphorylated histone H2AX (ɣH2AX). This is similarly seen with a STAT1 NTD/DBD double mutant, indicating transcription-independent effects. Furthermore, U3A cells with STAT1 NTD mutants are most susceptible to apoptotic DNA fragmentation and cleavage of the DNA repair protein PARP1. These data provide novel insights into the relevance of the STAT1 NTD.

We investigate the phonotactic behaviour of nasal consonants in a database of over 200 languages. Our findings challenge the common classification of nasals as intermediate between obstruents and liquids on the sonority hierarchy. Instead, we propose that there are two types of nasal consonants, one group with lower sonority than liquids and one with higher sonority. We propose that these two types of nasals differ in the presence or absence of a value for the feature [±continuant].

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at sub-millimeter waves has the potential to image the shadow of the black hole in the Galactic Center, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), and thereby test basic predictions of the theory of general relativity. We investigate the imaging prospects of a new Space VLBI mission concept. The setup consists of two satellites in polar or equatorial circular Medium-Earth Orbits with slightly different radii, resulting in a dense spiral-shaped uv-coverage with long baselines, allowing for extremely high-resolution and high-fidelity imaging of radio sources. We simulate observations of a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics model of Sgr A* for this configuration with noise calculated from model system parameters. After gridding the uv-plane and averaging visibilities accumulated over multiple months of integration, images of Sgr A* with a resolution of up to 4 μ as could be reconstructed, allowing for stronger tests of general relativity and accretion models than with ground-based VLBI.

Vowel nasalisation in American English has been the subject of a long discussion as to whether it is a phonological process or whether it should better be analysed as phonetic coarticulation. As a predictable allophonic process, vowel nasalisation also provides a testing ground for theories of lexical representation, since if it turns out that language users store this predictable information in long-term memory, there is no reason to assume any kind of phonological underspecification. In this article, experimental studies on this phenomenon are reviewed with these two questions in mind: is the phenomenon a phonological process at all and is this predictable information, i.e. vowel nasalisation, stored in the mental lexicon. The majority of studies provide evidence supporting the phonological view and underspecified lexical representations.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of Islam for prewar Japanese pan-Asianists. Yet, by considering Islam solely as a political factor, this strand of scholarship has largely overlooked the religious dimension of Japanese pan-Asianism. The existence of six different complete translations of the Qur'ān into Japanese, however, amply bespeaks a genuinely religious interest in Islam, an impression that is corroborated by a look at the sociopolitical contexts of the translations and the biographical backgrounds of the translators. While explicitly anti-modern, anti-Western, and anti-Christian notions were at work in these broadly pan-Asianist Japanese appropriations of Islam, an analysis of the terminology used in the translations shows that, ironically, Christian precedents were not easily overcome.