Childhood adversity impairs well-being, yet psychological resilience may buffer its impact. Using resting-state fMRI in 94 rural Chinese children (ages 10–14), we examined whether psychological resilience protects brain network connectivity from adversity and its relevance to psychological well-being. Psychological resilience significantly moderated the impact of abuse, but not neglect, on limbic connectivity. Low-resilience children exposed to abuse showed heightened limbic-somatomotor and limbic-ventral attention connectivity, which predicted greater somatization and depression at baseline and more severe levels of anxiety six months later. These associations were absent in high-resilience children. Our findings reveal that psychological resilience specifically shields against the neurotoxic effects of abuse by modulating networks involved in emotion regulation, salience, and sensorimotor processing. Targeted interventions should consider adversity dimensions and psychological resilience capacity to mitigate long-term mental health risks.

Subacute ruminal acidosis (SARA) is a common metabolic disorder in ruminants fed high-concentrate diets. This study hypothesized that the abundance of lactate dehydrogenase gene (ldh) in the rumen could predict the individual animal’s susceptibility to SARA. A total of 121 Hu lambs were used in the study, and ldh gene abundance was inferred by PICRUST based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing. From this population, two extreme cohorts were screened, including six lambs with the highest ldh gene abundance (HLDH group) and six lambs with the lowest ldh gene abundance (LLDH group). Subsequently, the selected lambs were challenged with a SARA-risk diet, and metagenomic sequencing technology was conducted for comparative analysis of microbial functions between the two groups. Key findings revealed that HLDH lambs exhibited the following characteristics: (1) significantly higher ldh abundance as verified by metagenomic method (P < 0.001); (2) lower rumen pH with significantly prolonged duration below the 5.8 threshold (P < 0.001); (3) a tendency to reduced total bacterial abundance (P = 0.055); (4) significantly increased molar proportion of acetate (P = 0.02); and (5) suppressed carbohydrate metabolic pathways, with tendency of decreased abundance of glycoside hydrolase family (P ≤ 0.07). Notably, the rumen microbiome of the HLDH group showed significantly higher abundance of genes encoding pyruvate ferredoxin oxidoreductase (porA-D) (P < 0.001). In conclusion, the relative abundance of the ldh gene in the rumen can serve as a biomarker for predicting the susceptibility of lambs to SARA when fed highly fermentable diets, providing theoretical basis and technical support for the early warning and precise prevention of SARA.

Spatial linear instability analysis is employed to investigate the instability of a viscoelastic liquid jet in a co-flowing gas stream. The theoretical model incorporates a non-uniform axial base profile represented by a hyperbolic tangent, capturing the shear layer. The Oldroyd-B model discretised with Chebyshev polynomials is employed, and energy budget analysis is used to interpret underlying mechanisms. At low Weber numbers, the jet evolves axisymmetrically and the instability is governed by interfacial gas-pressure fluctuations; as the Weber number increases, the growing inertia drives a transition of the predominant mode from axisymmetric to helical. At weak elasticity, the instability is also primarily governed by gas-pressure fluctuations. As elasticity increases, the predominant mode transitions from axisymmetric to helical. This transition is accompanied by a migration of disturbance structures from the interface toward the jet interior and an enhanced coupling between velocity perturbation and the basic flow. These trends reveal a new predominant instability mechanism – the elasticity-enhanced shear-driven instability – which is distinct from capillary or Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities in Newtonian jets. A $\textit{We}$–$El$ phase diagram delineates the boundary between predominant modes and experimental results obtained in a flow-focusing configuration validate the theoretical predictions. Compared with temporal stability results, the spatial framework – by directly resolving the convective downstream amplification of disturbances – achieves quantitative agreement with experiments and highlights the superiority of spatial instability analysis in capturing the dynamics of strongly convective, non-parallel jet flows. These findings provide mechanistic insight into viscoelastic jet instabilities and offer guidance for applications involving droplet and fibre formation in co-flow systems.

There is a growing attention towards personalised digital health interventions such as health apps. These often depend on the collection of sensitive personal data, which users generally have limited control over. This work explores perspectives on data sharing and health apps in two different policy contexts, London and Hong Kong. Through this study, our goal is to generate insight about what digital health futures should look like and what needs to be done to achieve them. Using a survey based on a hypothetical health app, we considered a range of behavioural influences on personal health data sharing with the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation model of Behaviour (COM-B) to explore some of the key factors affecting the acceptability of data sharing. Results indicate that willingness to use health apps is influenced by users’ data literacy and control, comfort with sharing health and location data, existing health concerns, access to personalised health advice from a trusted source, and willingness to provide data access to specific parties. Gender is a statistically significant factor, as men are more willing to use health apps. Survey respondents in London are statistically more willing to use health apps than respondents in Hong Kong. Finally, we propose several policy approaches to address these factors, which include the co-creation of standards for using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate health advice, innovating app design and governance models that allow users to carefully control their data, and addressing concerns of gender-specific privacy risks and public trust in institutions dealing with data.

While online learning allows learners to access materials flexibly and at their own pace, many struggle to self-regulate without supervision. Real-time interventions like pop-out quizzes, screen flashes, and text warnings aim to improve attention focus but risk distracting learners and segmenting the learning process. Despite eye-tracking technology being widely used for real-time intervention design, its potential for delayed and personalized interventions remains underexplored. To address this gap, we proposed and tested an eye-tracking-based video reconstruction and replay (EVRR) method, offering targeted review at the end of online classes without disrupting the learning process. EVRR shows significant positive effects on improving learning outcomes compared to self-paced reviews, especially for learners who are unfamiliar with the concepts.

We undertake a comprehensive investigation into the distribution of in situ stars within Milky Way-like galaxies, leveraging TNG50 simulations and comparing their predictions with data from the H3 survey. Our analysis reveals that 28% of galaxies demonstrate reasonable agreement with H3, while only 12% exhibit excellent alignment in their profiles, regardless of the specific spatial cut employed to define in situ stars. To uncover the underlying factors contributing to deviations between TNG50 and H3 distributions, we scrutinise correlation coefficients among internal drivers (e.g. virial radius, star formation rate [SFR]) and merger-related parameters (such as the effective mass-ratio, mean distance, average redshift, total number of mergers, average spin-ratio, and maximum spin alignment between merging galaxies). Notably, we identify significant correlations between deviations from observational data and key parameters such as the median slope of virial radius, mean SFR values, and the rate of SFR change across different redshift scans. Furthermore, positive correlations emerge between deviations from observational data and parameters related to galaxy mergers. We validate these correlations using the Random Forest Regression method. Our findings underscore the invaluable insights provided by the H3 survey in unravelling the cosmic history of galaxies akin to the Milky Way, thereby advancing our understanding of galactic evolution and shedding light on the formation and evolution of Milky Way-like galaxies in cosmological simulations.

Insufficient sleep’s impact on cognitive and emotional function is well-documented, but its effects on social functioning remain understudied. This research investigates the influence of depressive symptoms on the relationship between sleep deprivation (SD) and social decision-making. Forty-two young adults were randomly assigned to either the SD or sleep control (SC) group. The SD group stayed awake in the laboratory, while the SC group had a normal night’s sleep at home. During the subsequent morning, participants completed a Trust Game (TG) in which a higher monetary offer distributed by them indicated more trust toward their partners. They also completed an Ultimatum Game (UG) in which a higher acceptance rate indicated more rational decision-making. The results revealed that depressive symptoms significantly moderated the effect of SD on trust in the TG. However, there was no interaction between group and depressive symptoms found in predicting acceptance rates in the UG. This study demonstrates that individuals with higher levels of depressive symptoms display less trust after SD, highlighting the role of depressive symptoms in modulating the impact of SD on social decision-making. Future research should explore sleep-related interventions targeting the psychosocial dysfunctions of individuals with depression.

Contrafreeloading (CFL) refers to animals’ tendency to prefer obtaining food through effort rather than accessing food that is freely available. Researchers have proposed various hypotheses to explain this intriguing phenomenon, but few studies have provided a comprehensive analysis of the factors influencing this behaviour. In this study, we observed the choice of alternative food containers in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) to investigate their CFL tendencies and the effects of pre-training, food deprivation, and effort required on the CFL tasks. The results showed that budgerigars did not exhibit significant difference in their first choices or the time interacting with less challenging versus more challenging food containers. Moreover, when evaluating each budgerigar’s CFL level, only half of them were identified as strong contrafreeloaders. Thus, we suggest that budgerigars exhibit an intermediate CFL level that lies somewhere between a strong tendency and the absence of such behaviour. Furthermore, we also found that food-deprived budgerigars tended to select less challenging food containers, and pre-trained budgerigars were more likely to choose highly challenging food containers than moderately challenging food containers, which means that the requirement of only a reasonable effort (access to food from moderately challenging food containers in this study) and the experience of pre-training act to enhance their CFL levels, whereas the requirement of greater effort and the experience of food deprivation act to decrease their CFL levels. Studying animal CFL can help understand why animals choose to expend effort to obtain food rather than accessing it for free, and it also has implications for setting feeding environments to enhance the animal welfare of captive and domesticated animals.

The aerodynamic deformation and breakup of wall-attached droplets in axisymmetric stagnation flow are investigated experimentally. A vertical shock tube is used to generate the shock wave accompanying the post-wave airflow, and the axisymmetric stagnation flow is formed through the impingement of an air stream on a solid wall. For the wall-attached droplets with initially hemispherical profile, four typical droplet deformation and breakup modes can be identified with the continuous increase of the droplet local Weber number, which are the vibrating mode, the compressing mode, the sheet thinning mode and the shear-induced entrainment mode. Quantitative analyses of droplet evolution dynamics are also conducted for the compressing mode and the sheet thinning mode, and the significant differences of air flow separation at the droplet lateral surface between these two modes are revealed. The potential flow model and the energy conservation model are further developed to predict the entire droplet deformation processes. The vibrating frequency and amplitude of droplets under the vibrating mode are predicted by a spring-mass model, and the surface perturbation wavelengths of droplets under the shear-induced entrainment mode are estimated based on the dispersion relation of Kelvin–Helmholtz instability. This work is proposed to give potential guidance for regulating the aerodynamic fragmentation of wall-attached droplets in practical engineering applications.

High-quality intergenerational relationships positively influence cognitive functioning in older parents. However, there is insufficient information on how they shape the trajectories of mothers’ and fathers’ cognitive functioning decline in multi-child families, owing to the complexity of intergenerational relationships, such as multi-dimensional and ambivalent natures and differences varying across children. Drawing on three waves of data (2014, 2016 and 2018) from a nationally representative survey – the China Longitudinal Ageing Social Survey (N = 9,404) – we used the k-means clustering method to discern patterns of intergenerational relationships in multi-child Chinese families, as well as the growth curve models, to examine the associations between parent–child relationship types and the trajectories of older parents’ cognitive functioning. Five types of intergenerational relationship were identified: alienated, stressfully interacting, independent, beneficially interacting and tight-knit. We then investigated the associations between trajectories of cognitive functioning and the most distant type, the closest type, and the heterogeneity of parent–child relationships across multiple children. The most distant parent–child relationship was significantly related to cognitive functioning trajectories with the alienated (tight-knit) type associated with the lowest (highest) levels of cognitive functioning and the fastest (slowest) cognitive decline. However, the closest parent–child relationship was not significantly related to cognitive functioning trajectories. Moreover, greater variation in relationships with multiple children was correlated with lower levels of cognitive functioning and faster cognitive functioning decline. These associations were stronger among mothers than fathers. This study provides new insights into the potentially protective role of intergenerational relationships in older parents’ cognitive functioning and their gendered differences.

Although dietary factors have been examined as potential risk factors for liver cancer, the evidence is still inconclusive. Using a diet-wide association analysis, our research evaluated the associations of 126 foods and nutrients on the risk of liver cancer in a Chinese population. We obtained the diet consumption of 72,680 women in the Shanghai Women’s Health Study using baseline dietary questionnaires. The association between each food and nutrient and liver cancer risk was quantified by Cox regression model. A false discovery rate of 0.05 was used to determine the foods and nutrients which need to be verified. Totally 256 incident liver cancer cases were identified in 1,267,391 person-years during the follow-up duration. At the statistical significance level (P ≤ 0.05), higher intakes of cooked wheaten foods, pear, grape and copper were inversely associated with liver cancer risk, while spinach, leafy vegetables, eggplant and carrots showed the positive associations. After considering multiple comparisons, no dietary variable was associated with liver cancer risk. Similar findings were seen in the stratification, secondary and sensitivity analyses. Our findings observed no significant association between dietary factors and liver cancer risk after considering multiple comparisons in Chinese women. More evidence is needed to explore the associations between diet and female liver cancer occurrence.

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.