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Embryotoxicity and mixture effects of legacy PFAS in a human iPSC-based 3D model
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Data is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. RNA sequencing data is available in: https://zenodo.org/records/17600724.Supplementary information is available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10565-026-10137-8#Sec26 .Humans are continuously exposed to a wide array of exogenous chemicals via dietary intake, environmental sources, and the use of personal care products. This includes per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a class of highly persistent compounds that have been associated with developmental effects in humans. This study assessed the effects of four legacy PFAS, namely PFOS, PFOA, PFNA and PFHxS, and mixtures thereof in the PluriLum assay, a 3D human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-based model for embryotoxicity testing. We established the individual embryotoxic potencies of PFAS, with PFNA exhibiting the highest potency, followed by PFOS, PFOA and PFHxS. The four PFAS were evaluated in three reconstituted mixtures, prepared either to reflect identical potencies (“equipotent mixture”) or the average serum concentrations reported for the European adult or child population (“real-life mixtures”). Comparing observed versus predicted mixture responses demonstrated concentration additivity throughout the entire range of tested concentrations. Studies on uptake in 3D embryoid bodies revealed the highest bioaccumulation of PFOS, followed by PFNA, PFOA, and PFHxS. Moreover, less than 2% of the nominally added PFAS could be recovered in the embryoid bodies. RNA sequencing showed that relatively few genes were affected by PFOS, PFNA and PFOA, however expression of genes related to focal adhesion and functional pathways associated with cardiac, cardiomyocyte and muscle tissue development was significantly changed. Notably, PFOS affected the greatest number of embryonic development pathways. In conclusion, the four tested PFAS significantly impaired cardiomyocyte differentiation, indicating embryotoxicity. The combined responses were consistent with the concentration addition principle, supported by shared functional pathways and indicative of common sites of molecular action.Open access funding provided by Technical University of Denmark. This work was supported by the Green Deal project PANORAMIX from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 101036631) and the Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC) project from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 101057014)
A communication-efficient distributed Retire with application to the analysis of multi-site air-quality distributed data
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The air-quality data from the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center is available from online site: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/dataset/501/beijing+multi+site+air+quality+data .Supplementary material:
Supplementary data are available online at: https://academic.oup.com/jrsssc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jrsssc/qlag005/8489473#supplementary-data .A multi-site city air-quality dataset should be considered distributed data as it is generated from multiple geographically dispersed sources, such as air quality sensors or monitoring stations. In various fields, distributed systems are increasingly employed to handle data collected from diverse sources, often resulting in datasets that are heavy-tailed, asymmetric, or heterogeneous. Robust expectile regression combines the computational efficiency of expectile regression with its robustness in handling heavy-tailed response distributions and outliers. This paper extends robust expectile regression to communication-efficient distributed systems and applies it to the analysis of multi-site air-quality datasets. The proposed distributed estimators achieve both computational and communication efficiency while delivering statistical performance comparable to global estimators, as demonstrated through both theoretical analysis and numerical experiments.This research was supported by the Research Project of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 25YJA910003); the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 25BTJ041); the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2024YFA1013502); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. U23A2064, 12531013); the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant No. LY24A010004); and the Chern Institute of Mathematics Visiting Scholar Program
Strain distributions for tensile and shear loading around multiple holes in a thermoplastic composite introduced by thermally assisted piercing
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The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials.A multiple thermally assisted piercing process has been developed as a method of making equally spaced holes in thermoplastic composites. The consequences for the mechanical properties of the composite of introducing a limited set of inline holes into cross-ply laminates have been investigated. Open-hole tension and Iosipescu shear testing has been carried out on specimens containing drilled or pierced holes aligned with the direction of loading; microscopy and digital image correlation techniques have also been used to investigate local changes in fiber orientation and strain distributions under load. The strain fields for inline holes in drilled and pierced specimens under tensile loading can be understood in terms of local changes to the modulus as a consequence of the piercing or drilling process; in addition, some features of the strain fields can be predicted with the aid of a shear‒lag model developed for modeling matrix cracking in cross-ply laminates. Although significant differences were found between the strain fields of the drilled and pierced specimens, no consistent improvement in strength was observed for the pierced composites compared to drilled composites for different holes spacings. Under shear loading, the pierced composites were found to have a significantly poorer response compared to drilled composites, which is related to the premature collapse of the holes in shear due to (a) localized fractures in regions of low fiber volume fraction and (b) intact fibers being pulled across the holes causing hole collapse.This project has received funding from the University of Surrey as part of the EPSRC under the grant number of EP/GO37388/1, European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 723360, and the Industrial Members of TWI Ltd. as part of the Core Research Programme. (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) (Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
Thematic ETFs as geopolitical safe havens
Full text linkAnalysis.This article examines the dynamic linkages between sector ETFs and the returns of various asset classes, including cryptocurrencies, energy commodities and major stock indices, over the period from 1 January 2023 to 22 September 2025. This period has been characterised by geopolitical developments affecting global financial markets, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and escalating tensions between Israel and Iran, which have increased regional uncertainty and disrupted global oil trade. The findings imply that the dynamics of the Total Connectedness Index (TCI) are mainly driven by contemporaneous, rather than lagged, effects. Defence (ITA) and technology (XLK) ETFs appear to act as emitters, but only to a moderate extent. The Energy ETF (XLE) exhibits a hybrid behaviour, alternating between the roles of emitter and receiver depending on market conditions, Thus, under some market conditions, defence and technology ETFs can act as partial safe havens
Unsupervised Feature Space Analysis for Robust Motor Fault Diagnosis Under Varying Operating Conditions
Full text linkData Availability Statement:
The open-source datasets used in this study may be found at the following links: KAIST motor dataset: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/ztmf3m7h5x/6 (accessed on 28 October 2024). PU motor dataset: https://mb.uni-paderborn.de/en/kat/research/bearing-datacenter/data-sets-and-download (accessed on 9 February 2025).Reliable fault diagnosis of induction motors from current signals is critical for preventing failures in industrial systems. However, deep learning models often exhibit performance degradation when the torque load and other operating conditions change. Although a lot of research has been completed on supervised fault classification using current signals, the investigation of the behaviour of these datasets for unsupervised learning has not been done. This study quantifies and analyses the “shadowing effect” of operational variability, demonstrating that a baseline 1D-CNN achieving 100% accuracy under static 0 Nm loads drops to 53.19% accuracy when subjected to 4 Nm load in the KAIST dataset using a stator current. Similar trends were validated using the Paderborn University (PU) bearing dataset. Using 1D-CNN feature extraction followed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA), t-SNE, and hierarchical clustering, we show that standard linear mitigation strategies, such as removing high-variance principal components, are ineffective because fault and load features are deeply entangled. Hierarchical clustering analysis confirms that the feature space is organised by load dominance, with the primary tree split consistently occurring by torque load rather than fault type. Crucially, we identify that internal geometric metrics, such as “spread” and “diameter”, correlate with external purity metrics like the proposed “Dominance Score”. The findings establish a quantitative basis for developing unsupervised, load-invariant diagnostic models that utilise geometric stopping criteria to isolate fault clusters without using ground-truth labels.This work was financially supported via the UKAEA Fusion Opportunities in Skills, Training, Education and Research (FOSTER) program
Mounjaro: A Descriptive Content Analysis of Weight Loss Medication Representation on TikTok
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Feeding hungry students: geographies of on-campus free food provision across England
No full text......British Academy/ Leverhulme small research grant SRG23\230408
Advanced techniques to reveal the underlying physics of ultrasonic processing
Full text linkEditorial.We have initiated this Special Issue with the aim of collecting and compiling under one umbrella the most advanced experimental and numerical techniques used in understanding the physical phenomena across different length and time scale during ultrasonic processing, i.e. cavitation, shock waves, high-frequency oscillations, acoustic flows, and their interactions with liquid and solid phases. There are several teams in the world that are deeply involved in this type of research, and we expected to get some 20–25 papers published in this Special Issue. In our view, this type of research – namely the specialised techniques for quantifying the effects and mechanisms of ultrasonic processing – is underrepresented in the open literature. Contrary to our expectations, we have not received papers from many of the researchers that are active in this area, despite direct invitations. Apparently, the current research and financial environment does not stimulate publishing open access original or review papers even in such a highly reputed and ranked journal as Ultrasonics Sonochemistry, which is a pity. We only hope that this will change and as new techniques emerge they will be reported, aiding our deeper understanding of the underlying physics of ultrasonic processing
Termination of DNA replication drives genomic instability via multiple mechanisms
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Raw sequencing data can be accessed at the NIH Sequence Read Archive under accession number PRJNA1244804.Supplementary data are available online at: https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/54/2/gkaf1519/8427117?login=true#supplementary-data .Termination of DNA replication is a surprisingly complex process that contributes critically to genome stability and cell viability. And even though progress was made to establish the consequences that arise if termination is going awry, the precise molecular mechanisms of fork fusion events and the coordination with key factors that ensure that DNA replication is brought to a successful conclusion remain poorly understood. We therefore investigated replication termination in Escherichia coli, focusing specifically on the interplay between replication fork fusions and genomic stability, the Tus–ter replication fork trap, and key DNA-processing enzymes. By utilizing whole genome sequencing, immunoblotting, and recombination reporter assays, we demonstrate that local hyper-recombination is induced wherever forks meet and that the combined loss of factors such as RecG helicase and 3′ exonucleases causes extreme over-replication in the terminus region of the chromosome. Unexpectedly, cells lacking Tus exhibit elevated R-loop levels, revealing an unanticipated connection between the fork trap and R-loop metabolism. These findings underscore the complexity of replication termination and its central role in maintaining bacterial genome stability, while providing mechanistic insights with implications for understanding replication termination in more complex organisms and developing new antimicrobial strategies.The work was supported by Research Grants BB/N014995/1 and BB/W000393/1 from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to C.J.R. Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by Brunel University
Weaponized ecologies: how cinema addresses nature’s complicity in enforced disappearances
Full text linkEnforced disappearance is a global problem, which has devastated communities on every continent of the world. Sometimes resolved by the eventual discovery and excavation of clandestine graves, more often the meticulous searching for the abducted and denied offers no lasting resolution as the body is never recovered. Due to the global nature of the problem, it has also taken place in every known environmental setting, from familiar places of human habitation to those defined by ecological hostility and impenetrable environmental conditions. This article looks at how cinematic works (including Nostalgia for the Light, The Dupes and El Mar, La Mar) deal with the weaponization of various ecologies in the context of enforced disappearances and how this particular aesthetic register offers insights on material witnessing in the context of mass atrocities
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