Microbially Induced Calcium Carbonate Precipitation (MICP) provides a biologically driven alternative to conventional cementitious processes, requiring fabrication methods responsive to the dynamics of living systems. This study introduces a submerged soft-casting approach, employing fabric mesh moulds to biocement sand aggregates through the biomineralisation activity of Sporosarcina pasteurii. Developed in “Water Kiln” bioreactors, the process replaces high-temperature curing with controlled liquid-phase mineralisation, generating cemented components assembled into the prototype column EmbryOme 1.

Rather than targeting structural material outputs, the research emphasises exploratory, process-oriented “formation finding,” where microbial activity, substrates, media, and moulds together shape macro form and microstructure. Fabric casts filled with sand and nutrient-rich bacterial suspensions were submerged in cementation solutions to induce calcium carbonate precipitation. Key variables, including mould design, calcium and nutrient concentrations, and media replacement frequency, were systematically adjusted to assess their effect on formation quality.

Optimal outcomes occurred at 0.3 M calcium chloride and urea with daily medium replacement, and smaller mesh sizes produced denser, more uniform crusts. Cementation remained primarily superficial, though glazing treatments enhanced surface hardness. These results underscore the role of design in tuning biological–material interactions, framing biofabrication as a process of negotiation with material agency, variability, and future architectural potential.

The Lamb–Oseen vortex is a model for practical vortical flows with a finite vortex core. Vortices with a Lamb–Oseen vortex velocity profile are stable according to the Rayleigh criterion in an infinite domain. Practical situations introduce boundary conditions over finite domains. Direct numerical simulations are performed on the evolution of perturbations to a viscous Lamb–Oseen vortex with uniform inlet axial velocity in a pipe of finite length. Linear stability boundaries are determined in the $(\textit{Re},\omega )$ plane. For a given swirl ratio $\omega$, the flow is found to become linearly unstable when the Reynolds number $\textit{Re}$ is above a critical value. The complete evolution history of the flow is followed until it reaches its final state. For small swirl ratios, the axisymmetric mode is linearly unstable and evolves to a final steady axisymmetric but non-columnar accelerated flow state after nonlinear saturation. For large swirl ratios, the spiral mode is linearly unstable. The spiral mode is found to force growth of an axisymmetric component due to nonlinear interaction. The flow evolves to a final unsteady spiral vortex breakdown state after it undergoes nonlinear saturation. The energy transfer between the mean flow and perturbations is studied by the Reynolds–Orr equation. The pressure work at the exit of the finite pipe is a major source of energy production. Finite-domain boundary conditions also modify the perturbation mode shapes, which can render the vortex core from absorbing energy to producing energy, and thus lead to instabilities. As the pipe length increases, the stability behaviour of the flow is found to approach that predicted by the classical Rayleigh criterion.

Upper limb motor dysfunction significantly impacts daily activities and quality of life for individuals with stroke. Existing assistive robots often struggle to balance portability, ease of use, and motion assistance. This research presents WELiBot, a novel wearable end-effector-type upper limb assistive robot, designed with a 4R-5R parallel mechanism and an arc-shaped guide rail to provide controlled assistance in lifting, reaching, and circumferential motions. The study introduces the conception of the robot design, focusing on its functional requirements and mechanical structure. The kinematic and static characteristics of WELiBot were analyzed to evaluate its feasibility and effectiveness. Based on this design, a prototype with a 1/4 arc-shaped guide rail was fabricated to test motion feasibility and assistance effects. To assess its performance, electromyography experiments were conducted with four healthy participants. The results showed a significant reduction in biceps brachii muscle activity, confirming the robot’s ability to reduce user effort. Future work will focus on attaching the guide rail to the body for improved usability and refining the control strategy to enhance motion assistance and adaptability in daily life support applications.

Visual exploration is a task in which a camera-equipped robot seeks to efficiently visit all navigable areas of an environment within the shortest possible time. Most existing visual exploration methods rely on a static camera fixed to the robot’s body to control its own movements. However, coupling the orientation of camera with robot’s body limits the extra degrees of freedom to obtain more visual information. In this work, we adjust the camera orientation during robot motion by using a novel camera view planning (CVP) policy to improve the exploration efficiency. Specifically, we reformulate the CVP problem as a reinforcement learning problem. However, two new challenges need to be addressed: 1) determining how to learn an effective CVP policy in complex indoor environments and 2) figuring out how to synchronize it with the robot motion. To solve the above issues, we create a reward function considering factors such as exploration area, observed semantic objects, and the motion conflicts between the camera and the robot’s body. Moreover, to better coordinate the policies of the camera and the robot’s body, the CVP policy takes the body actions and the egocentric 2D spatial maps with exploration, occupancy, and trajectory information into account to make motion decisions. Experimental results show that after using the proposed CVP policy, the exploration area is expanded by 21.72% and 25.6% on average in the small-scale indoor scene with few structured obstacles and large-scale indoor scene with cluttered obstacles, respectively.

Researchers applying evolutionary theory to political psychology discover that in democracies, most citizens struggle to select political leaders based on their ideologies. Rather, they tend to concentrate on procedural fairness during public decision-making when evaluating their leaders. We re-examine such evolutionary propositions in China using eight Wason selection experiments. In autocracies, where accountability systems are weak or absent, little is known about how citizens judge politicians’ ideologies and their cheating behaviors. Our findings show that Chinese citizens are incapable of identifying political leaders’ ideological orientations; instead, they rely on a cheater-detection mechanism, evaluating leaders based on their adherence to procedural fairness. These results contribute to our understanding of democratic competence and the cognitive mechanisms of political judgment in autocratic contexts.

Globally, numerous infertile couples have been assisted by extensive research on mammalian fertilization and the rapid development of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). However, 5%–15% of the couples that are selected for in vitro fertilization (IVF) experience a total fertilization failure (TFF), where no zygotes develop despite oocytes and semen parameters appear to be normal. Notably, an essential early event in fertilization is the binding of spermatozoa to the oocyte’s external envelope, which followed by the spermatozoa-oocyte fusion. Meanwhile, oocyte activation is a crucial cellular process necessary to block polyspermy and start the development of the zygote. Improper membrane fusion of gametes has been demonstrated to be one of the mechanisms of TFF. Moreover, considering the large amount of research on sperm proteins in recent years, thus in this review, we characterize the role and molecular mechanisms of sperm proteins in the three key processes of gamete adhesion and fusion and oocyte activation, which would provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of sperm proteins in fertilization in mammals and a favourable reference for future studies in assisted reproduction due to FF.

Mamyshev oscillators (MOs) demonstrate extraordinarily superior performance compared with fiber laser counterparts. However, the realization of a fully fiberized, monolithic laser system without pulse degradation remains a key challenge. Here we present a high-energy MO using large mode area Yb-doped fiber and fiber-integrable interferometric super-Gaussian spectral filters that directly generates a nearly diffraction-limited beam with approximately 9.84 W average power and 533 nJ pulse energy. By implementing pre-chirp management with anti-resonant hollow-core fiber (AR-HCF), the adverse effects of super-Gaussian filtering on pulse quality are effectively mitigated, enabling pulse compression to 1.23 times the transform limit. Furthermore, AR-HCF is employed to provide negative dispersion to compensate for the positive chirp of output pulses, resulting in approximately 37 fs de-chirped pulses with approximately 10 MW peak power. This approach represents a significant step toward the development of monolithic fiber lasers capable of generating and flexible delivery of sub-50-fs pulses with tens of megawatts peak power.

This study investigates the spatial distribution of inertial particles in turbulent Taylor–Couette flow. Direct numerical simulations are performed using a one-way coupled Eulerian–Lagrangian approach, with a fixed inner-wall Reynolds number of 2500 for the carrier flow, while the particle Stokes number ($St$) varies from 0.034 to 1 for the dispersed phase. We first examine the issue of preferential concentration of particles near the outer-wall region. Employing two-dimensional Voronoï analysis, we observe a pronounced particle clustering with increasing $St$, particularly evident in regions of low fluid velocity. Additionally, we investigate the concentration balance equation, inspired by the work of Johnson et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 883, 2020, A27), to examine the particle radial distribution. We discern the predominant sources of influence, namely biased sampling, turbophoresis and centrifugal effects. Across all cases, centrifugal force emerges as the primary driver, causing particle migration toward the outer wall. Biased sampling predominantly affects smaller inertial particles, driving them toward the inner wall due to sampling within Taylor rolls with inward radial velocity. Conversely, turbophoresis primarily impacts larger inertial particles, inducing migration towards both walls where turbulent intensity is weaker compared with the bulk. With the revealed physics, our work provides a basis for predicting and controlling particle movement and distribution in industrial applications.

Let E be an elliptic curve defined over $\mathbb {Q}$ with good ordinary reduction at a prime $p\geq 5$ and let F be an imaginary quadratic field. Under appropriate assumptions, we show that the Pontryagin dual of the fine Mordell–Weil group of E over the $\mathbb {Z}_{p}^2$-extension of F is pseudo-null as a module over the Iwasawa algebra of the group $\mathbb {Z}_{p}^2$.

Let X be a compact Kähler manifold, and let $L \rightarrow X$ be a holomorphic line bundle equipped with a singular metric h such that the curvature $\mathrm {i}\Theta _{L,h}\geqslant 0$ in the sense of currents. The main result of this paper is the vanishing of $H^n(X,\mathcal {O}(\Omega ^p_X\otimes L)\otimes \mathcal {I}(h))$ for $p\geqslant n-\operatorname {nd}(L,h)+1$, which generalizes Bogomolov’s vanishing theorem and Watanabe’s result.

With increased global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals and degraded observation environments, the correctness of ambiguity resolution is disturbed, causing unexpected real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning solutions. This paper presents an improved fault detection and exclusion (FDE) method based on the generalized least squares (GLS) model. The correlated GLS model is constructed by regarding double-differencing (DD) integer ambiguities as the known parameters. Meanwhile, the validity of residuals as crucial components of fault detection could be enhanced by the iterative re-weighted least squares (IRLS) method rather than the least squares (LS) without robustness. A static test with artificial faults and a dynamic test with natural faults were carried out, respectively. By analyzing test statistics of the enhanced FDE algorithm and comparing its positioning errors with those from the classical LS, it is shown that our method can provide high-precision and high-reliability RTK solutions facing wrong DD fixed ambiguities due to observation faults.

Modern fluvial sediments provide important information about source-to-sink process and regional tectono-magmatic events in the source area, but many factors, e.g., chemical weathering, sedimentary cycles and source-rock types, can interfere with the establishment of the source-sink system. The Lalin River (LR) and the Jilin Songhua River (JSR) are two important tributaries of the Songhua River in the Songnen Plain in NE China. They have similar flow direction, topography and identical climate backgrounds, but have notably different parent-rock types in the headwater, which provides an opportunity to explore the influencing factors of river sediment composition. To this end, the point bar sediments in the two rivers were sampled for an analysis of geochemistry (including element and Sr-Nd isotopic ratios), heavy mineral and detrital zircon U-Pb dating. The results are indicative of the fact that the two rivers have the similar geochemical composition (e.g., elements and Sr isotopes) as well as chemical weathering (CIA = 51.41–57.60, CIW = 59.68–66.11, PIA = 51.95–60.23, WIP = 56.00–65.47, Rb/Sr = 0.38–0.42) and recycling (SiO2/Al2O3 = 5.79 and 5.03, ICV = 1.0 and 1.2, CIA/WIP = 0.81–1.03) characteristics, showing a major control of climate on the low-level weathering and recycling of the river sediments. However, there are significant differences in the detrital zircon U-Pb age (a significant Mesozoic age peak for the LR but an additional Precambrian peak for the JSR), Nd isotope ratio (−6.2812–8.5830 and −8.1149–10.2411 for the LR and the JSR, respectively) and to a certain extent heavy mineral composition (e.g., for the < 63 μm fraction, a dominance of hornblende and magnetite in the LR, but haematite-limonite in the JSR) in the two river sediments, indicating that source rocks largely control the composition of the river sediments. Some of the major tectono-magmatic events (e.g., crustal growth and cratonisation of the North China Craton, closure of the Paleo-Asian Ocean, subduction and rollback of the Paleo-Pacific plate) occurring in the eastern Songnen Plain are well documented in the JSR sediments but not in the LR, the difference of which is largely regulated by the source rocks in the source area.

Natural infection by Trichinella sp. has been reported in humans and more than 150 species of animals, especially carnivorous and omnivorous mammals. Although the presence of Trichinella sp. infection in wild boars (Sus scrofa) has been documented worldwide, limited information is known about Trichinella circulation in farmed wild boars in China. This study intends to investigate the prevalence of Trichinella sp. in farmed wild boars in China. Seven hundred and sixty-one (761) muscle samples from farmed wild boars were collected in Jilin Province of China from 2017 to 2020. The diaphragm muscles were examined by artificial digestion method. The overall prevalence of Trichinella in farmed wild boars was 0.53% [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.51–0.55]. The average parasite loading was 0.076 ± 0.025 larvae per gram (lpg), and the highest burden was 0.21 lpg in a wild boar from Fusong city. Trichinella spiralis was the only species identified by multiplex polymerase chain reaction. The 5S rDNA inter-genic spacer region of Trichinella was amplified and sequenced. The results showed that the obtained sequence (GenBank accession number: OQ725583) shared 100% identity with the T. spiralis HLJ isolate (GenBank accession number: MH289505). Since the consumption of farmed wild boars is expected to increase in the future, these findings highlight the significance of developing exclusive guidelines for the processing of slaughtered farmed wild boar meat in China.