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Mapping brain growth and sex differences across prenatal to postnatal development
Abstract The perinatal period, encompassing both prenatal and early postnatal stages, is a highly dynamic and foundational phase of brain development. Despite its significance, limited work has tracked brain growth continuously across prenatal to postnatal development. In this study, we analysed one of the largest perinatal MRI datasets from the Developing Human Connectome Project (798 scans from 699 unique individuals: 263 prenatal and 535 neonatal; 380 males and 319 females) to model age-related changes and sex differences in brain volumes from 21 to 45 weeks postconceptional age. We found that total brain volume grew at an increasing rate up until the early postnatal period, with white matter dominating mid-gestational growth and gray matter dominating late-gestational and postnatal growth. Subcortical gray matter structures showed distinct trajectories and earlier peak growth rates compared to cortical gray matter structures. Additionally, sex differences in brain growth patterns were observed, with males showing greater volumetric increases with age compared with females. The findings demonstrate the evolving structural dynamics of perinatal brain development as well as the importance of integrating prenatal and postnatal neuroimaging to map continuous early brain growth trajectories.
Eight millennia of continuity of a previously unknown lineage in Argentina
SARS-CoV-2 occurrence in cervids in the United States and US territories
Abstract SARS-CoV-2 was found in multiple cervid species throughout the United States from October 2021 through October 2023 and results reinforce findings of considerable viral spillover from people to cervids. Data demonstrate changes in viral and neutralizing antibody prevalence over time and as well as viral variants that differed from what was circulating in human populations. Continued monitoring can help pinpoint what is driving changes in prevalence and how those changes alter risk to both wildlife and human populations.
Correction: Maternal origins and genetic diversity of Sabahan swamp buffalo using mitochondrial cytochrome b gene
Plasma p-tau217, quantified by the fully automated LUMIPULSE G platform, outperforms p-tau181 in predicting amyloid pathology in cognitive complaints patients
Abstract Plasma phosphorylated tau (p-tau) biomarkers offer a minimally invasive alternative for detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology. We evaluated the diagnostic performance of plasma p-tau217 relative to p-tau181 using the fully automated LUMIPULSE platform. A total of 494 consecutively recruited patients with cognitive complaints from the Coimbra cohort were divided into exploratory and internal validation sets, and an external set of 100 well-characterized patients with mild cognitive impairment was obtained from Lisbon. Plasma biomarkers were assessed in relation to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) AD biomarkers and evaluated their ability to detect amyloid pathology, defined by the CSF Aβ42/40 ratio. In the exploratory dataset, plasma p-tau217 showed stronger correlations with CSF biomarkers and higher accuracy in identifying amyloid positivity than p-tau181 (AUC = 0.90 vs. 0.81, p < 0.001). Age and blood urea nitrogen had minimal influence on p-tau217’s performance. Applying the Youden-derived single p-tau217 cutoff achieved an overall agreement of 88% with CSF-defined amyloid status across both validation sets. In addition, we evaluated a two-cutoff framework (95% sensitivity/specificity), which reduced misclassification and confined fewer than 30% of individuals to an intermediate, confirmatory-testing zone. These findings support the potential of plasma p-tau217 as a scalable blood-based biomarker that can aid triage and diagnostic decision-making in AD.
Forecasting the number of sunspots for solar cycle 25 utilizing the facebook prophet model
Abstract The solar cycle, also referred to as the solar magnetic activity cycle, represents a nearly periodic change in solar activity occurring approximately every 11 years, as evidenced by the observation of sunspot numbers. The terms solar maximum and minimum denote the phases of peak and trough sunspot activity, respectively. Solar Cycle 25 commenced in December 2019, starting with a minimum smooth sunspot number of 1.8, and is projected to persist until the conclusion of December 2030. In this study, we employed the FB Prophet Prediction Model, utilizing sunspot data collected from January 1749 to March 2025 (spanning over 276.25 years), to forecast sunspot numbers for the latter half of Solar Cycle 25 (69 months). We forecast sunspot numbers for the remainder of Solar Cycle 25 and the entirety of Solar Cycle 26 (through 2036). This study employed the FB Prophet model on 276 years of sunspot data (January 1749–March 2025) to generate two forecasts: one for the remainder of Solar Cycle 25, and a second for the early portion of Solar Cycle 26, extending through 2036. Our model predicts that Solar Cycle 25 will peak in early 2025 and that Solar Cycle 26 will peak in mid-2034, both with a smoothed sunspot number of approximately 118. A comparison between our predicted outcomes and the NOAA published forecast data demonstrates the effectiveness and suitability of the FB Prophet Prediction model for predicting sunspot activity during Cycle 25. The coefficient of determination, commonly referred to as ( $$R^{2}$$ ), assesses the extent to which the model reflects the observed outcomes and signifies the percentage of variance in the dependent variable that can be forecasted based on the independent variables within the model. Its value is 89.23%, which demonstrates the model’s high level of predictive accuracy. This demonstrates the good agreement results and also confirms the effectiveness and suitability of the FB Prophet Prediction model for predicting sunspot activity during Cycle 25.
Investigation of closed form solitons for the stochastic Chavy-Waddy-Kolokolnikov equation in bacterial aggregation
A 90-day safety study of meat from MSTN gene-edited Mongolian cattle in mice
Abstract The knockout (KO) of the myostatin (MSTN) gene can increase muscle production in Mongolian cattle; however, the safety of MSTN-KO beef has not been evaluated. In this study, we fed mice varying concentrations of MSTN-KO beef and monitored physiological and tissue changes. Compared with the control group fed with wild-type beef, mice fed with MSTN-KO beef did not show significant changes, including weight gain, food intake, and organ weight. Furthermore, most blood parameters of the experimental groups remained stable. Serum metabolomics analysis confirmed that MSTN-KO beef had a limited impact on the mice’s overall metabolism, with only 24 differential metabolites identified. Our findings from this 90-day trial show no toxic effects of MSTN-KO Mongolian beef on mice. This directly addresses the long-standing lack of toxicity data for such gene-edited beef. Notably, this is the first study to fill the research gap, and the evidence generated in this work actively supports the safety assessment of MSTN-modified animal-derived foods.
Correction: Fabricating high-purity graphite disk electrodes as a cost-effective alternative in fundamental electrochemistry research
Yttrium-90 radioembolization for primary and metastatic liver tumors exhibiting arterial-phase hypovascularity
Experimental and numerical study on interfacial impact load transfer mechanism
Discrete thermal analysis of the E–type shell–and–tube heat exchanger
Prediction of baseline oral microbiota for clinical classification post Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 infection
Fatigue characteristics and mechanical evaluation of basalt fiber reinforced composite material concrete under freeze-thaw cycles
Systematic maps reveal how human chromosomes are organized
Federated reinforcement learning–driven multi-task optimization for robust and ethical edge internet of things security
YOLO11-WLBS: an efficient model for pavement defect detection
Abstract Pavement defects pose serious threats to traffic safety, pavement durability, and operational efficiency. To achieve accurate and real-time identification of pavement defects, this study proposes an enhanced lightweight model, YOLO11-WLBS, which integrates four improved modules—Wavelet Transform Convolution, Lightweight Adaptive Extraction, Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network, and Simple Attention—into the YOLO11 framework. Each module’s contribution is verified through ablation experiments. The proposed model achieves a precision of 0.947, recall of 0.895, F1-score of 0.895, mAP@0.5 of 0.944, and mAP@0.5–0.95 of 0.703, demonstrating high accuracy and efficiency. Compared with the baseline YOLO11, YOLO11-WLBS improves precision by 6.4%, recall by 15.8%, and mAP@0.5 by 12.2%, while reducing parameters by 25.5%. The model maintains excellent detection performance under extreme lighting and blurring conditions and exhibits strong generalization in cross-dataset applications. These results indicate that YOLO11-WLBS provides an efficient and robust solution for intelligent pavement defect detection and offers practical potential for real-time deployment on edge devices in pavement maintenance and infrastructure monitoring systems.
Co-transmission of radio frequency reference and data signal over multi-core fiber
Anti-PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor-induced cardiotoxicity is associated with dysfunctional metabolism, muscle wasting and autophagy
Abstract Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs)have significantly improved overall survival rates in many aggressive cancers. Despite the recent clinical success, a rapidly increasing number of patients suffer from ICI-induced cardiotoxicity with often fatal outcomes, nonspecific symptoms and uninvestigated underlying pathological mechanisms. Therefore, this study explored metabolic, muscle wasting, and autophagic pathways and their roles in ICI-induced cardiac remodeling and dysfunction. Female C57BL/6 wildtype and LC3 transgenic (autophagy reporter) mice were randomly assigned to control (CON) and ICI-treated (ICI) groups. Mice underwent 4 weeks of ICI treatment (200 µg/mouse, intraperitoneally, twice/week). Echocardiography assessed ICI-induced changes in cardiac structure and function. At euthanasia, cardiac tissue was collected for Western Blot analysis of metabolic and muscle wasting signaling pathways and confocal fluorescent microscopy of autophagic flux. ICI treatment reduced tumor burden (-48% mass, P < 0.05) and led to significantly decreased cardiac function (-20%) and remodeling, including left ventricular dilation (+ 50%) and thinning of posterior cardiac walls ( P < 0.05), indicative of dilated cardiomyopathy. Exploratory protein level analysis revealed dysfunctional muscle wasting (Atrogin1, MuRF1) disrupted AKT and FoxO1 signaling, and altered autophagic flux ( P < 0.05). In this model, ICI-induced cardiotoxicity was characterized by severe cardiac remodeling and dysfunction, associated with dysfunctional metabolism, muscle wasting, and autophagy. To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to explore underlying pathological mechanisms, adding novel and impactful insight to the still unclear characteristics of ICI-induced cardiotoxicity and supporting the critical need to further investigate side effects of immunotherapies to optimize clinical treatment of cancers.