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Effects of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programmes on community rates of HPV-related disease and harms from vaccination (Review)
Get PDFWISER EWSA King-Size Testbed Report
Get PDFThis report outlines the activities and outcomes of the Weather and Climate Information Services Early Warning for Southern Africa (WISER-EWSA) King-Size testbed. This second WISER EWSA testbed ran from October 1st, 2024 to April 30th, 2025, covering the Southern Africa rainy season in its entirety. It was the world’s first extended forecasting and nowcasting testbed, integrating daily operational activities with deep, sustained community engagement. The King-Size testbed enabled the project team and partner national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHS) -INAM, SAWS and ZMD- to better understand the operational capacity required to sustain long-term nowcasting, generating lessons that will influence future operationalisation. This initiative was also a major undertaking that involved 42 forecasters, 122 community observers and directly benefitted 795 people (381 women and 414 men), across Mozambique, Zambia and South Africa
Leeds Community Researchers: An Ongoing Journey
Get PDFA report based on discussions and workshop outputs from the Leeds Community Researchers Meet-Up held on Tuesday 15th July 2025.
Workshop facilitated by and written up by Dr Dominic Galliano.
The aim of this meet-up was to:
• Reflect on experiences as community researchers, with a lens of how a network can help in future. How do we do Community Research? Where have you been looking for support? What common challenges are you coming across?
• Explore the current landscape and opportunities. Funding, where is it? How can we coordinate and be better prepared? What are the current trends? Where are we headed?
• Plan our next steps. What does this network look like? How does it fit within the current landscape? Who else do we bring in? When do we meet again? How frequent would we want to meet? How can we fund this network going forward? What is the next bigger event
The association between implant design, age, sex and the rate of major reoperation in patients undergoing primary total hip replacement: A retrospective study of UK National Joint Registry and Hospital Episodes Statistics data
No full textBackground
Implant revision is an operation with exchange of implants, and is used as a standard outcome after total hip replacement (THR), but may not fully represent the patient experience after a THR. Major reoperation (hereafter referred to as ‘reoperation’) without revision of implants can also lead to increased patient morbidity and mortality, and most commonly occurs when the femur fractures around an implant (postoperative periprosthetic femoral fractures; POPFF) and is treated with fixation and the implant is left in place. Reliance on revision metrics that do not capture these reoperations has led to large-scale underreporting of reoperations in THR, and is likely to have affected implant performance estimates, which have guided national policy and implant selection. It is important to include these additional reoperations when estimating treatment success to guide innovation and clinical practice. We aimed to estimate the incidence of reoperation following primary THR.
Methods and findings
We performed a large national cohort study on a mandatory, prospective database, the National Joint Registry, linked to Hospital Episode Statistics. All linkable primary THRs using recently available implants, with highest safety ratings between 01/01/2010 and 31/12/2020, were included. Major reoperation was defined as the first revision for any cause or fixation of POPFF and was identified using a combination of procedural and diagnosis codes. We identified 372,967 THRs representing 2,127,464 prostheses years at risk with a median follow-up time of 5.39 years (range 0 to 12.1 years). A total of 8,043 reoperations were identified that had been surgically treated by revision for any cause or fixation of POPFF. The incidence of reoperation was 3.78% (95% confidence interval [CI 3.70%, 3.86%]) per 1,000 prostheses years in comparison to 3.00% (95% CI [2.93%, 3.07%]) per 1,000 prostheses years when using conventional revision only outcomes. Cumulative incidence of major reoperation at 10 years was 3.1% (95% CI [3.0%, 3.1%]). Cumulative reoperation estimates were stratified by age and sex. In men aged 68 years and older, collared cementless stems performed better than cemented stems and in women aged 75 years and older, the relationship was reversed. Residual differences in patient characteristics may affect the accuracy of the estimates.
Conclusions
Treatment failure after THR has been underrepresented by revision-only estimates. Major reoperation rates in older men were lowest with cementless collared stems, and in older women, reoperation rates were lowest with cemented polished taper stems made of stainless steel. These results prompt a review of the current implant guidance for hip replacements in older patients.
Level of evidence
III (Retrospective cohort study)
Evaluation of hydrodynamic forces on offshore wind power piles induced by submarine landslides at various impact depths
Get PDFThe rapid growth of offshore wind farm construction requires reliable pile foundation designs that can withstand complex marine loads. However, current design practices for these foundations often neglect the potential threat of submarine debris flows, which can exert highly destructive forces. This study employs a CFD approach to simulate the effects of submarine debris flows on piles in intricate marine environments, with model accuracy validated against a series of laboratory experiments calculating lateral forces from debris flows. We investigate the impact of debris flows on piles across a range of Reynolds numbers, including variations in rheological properties, density, impact velocity, and initial debris flow heights. Our results reveal that the dominant force exerted by submarine debris flows on piles is primarily a horizontal drag force. We identify three distinct stages in the impact process and emphasize the peak drag force as the critical load on the pile. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of the mechanisms driving variations in drag force and highlights the nonuniform distribution of drag forces along the pile’s length. The debris flow height significantly influences not only the magnitude of the peak drag force but also the action point location of this force along the pile. Finally, we propose quantifiable methods for evaluating the peak drag force coefficient and its action point, enhancing the design resilience of pile foundations against submarine debris flows
Long-term mortality rate and clinical outcomes associated with femoro-popliteal drug–coated balloon angioplasty and drug-eluting stents in chronic limb-threatening ischaemia: an analysis of the BASIL-3 RCT
Get PDFIntroduction
In recent years there have been a plethora of new endovascular devices have entered the market, including paclitaxel (PTX) drug-coated balloons (DCB) and drug-eluting stents (DES) for treating patients with chronic limb-threatening ischaemia (CLTI). There have been concerns that the use of PTX is associated with increased all-cause mortality rate in this patient population.
Methods
In the BASIL-3 trial (ISRCTN14469736) UK patients with CLTI were randomized (1:1:1) to receive femoro-popliteal (FP) plain balloon angioplasty (PBA; with or without bailout bare metal stenting (BMS), DCB angioplasty (DCBA) (with or without BMS), or primary DES. Here, data from the DCBA and DES arms have been pooled into a single ‘drug technologies’ (DT) group and compared with PBA ± BMS. The primary outcome was overall survival (OS). Secondary outcomes included amputation-free survival (AFS), major amputations, major adverse limb events, major adverse cardiovascular events, reinterventions, and 30-day mortality and morbidity rates.
Results
Four hundred and eighty-one participants were randomized (PBA: n = 160; DT: n = 321). At a median follow-up in survivors of 5.6 years, OS was similar between the pooled DT and PBA groups (adjusted hazard ratio (HR): 0.83; 95% c.i.: 0.64 to 1.07). There was no evidence of a statistically significant difference in AFS between the groups (adjusted HR: 0.84; 95% c.i.: 0.66 to 1.06), or other secondary outcomes.
Conclusions
This further pooled analysis of the BASIL-3 RCT does not support the notion that the use of drug-eluting technologies, when compared to plain balloon angioplasty, increases all-cause mortality rate, or has other clinically important adverse effects, when used in patients with CLTI
FoggyFuse: Infrared and visible image fusion method based on saturation line prior in foggy conditions
No full textInfrared and visible image fusion is widely used to enhance image details and information. However, in foggy environments or military smoke bomb scenarios, the scattering and absorption of light significantly degrade the quality of both infrared and visible images, leading to poor fusion performance. Existing fusion methods struggle to effectively restore degraded image details, making them unsuitable for practical applications in such adverse conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a novel fusion architecture based on the saturation line prior (SLP). This method consists of three main modules: the Dehazing Module (DM), the Auxiliary Enhancement Module (AEM), and the Edge Enhancement Module (EEM). The DM optimizes SLP using weighted guided filtering to obtain refined transmission maps for visible images, which are then used to further enhance the infrared image. The AEM and EEM, combined with a non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST), further process the enhanced visible and infrared images. This approach effectively restores intricate details and achieves natural color reproduction in hazy environments, significantly improving the visual quality of fused images. Given the limited research in this area and the absence of relevant datasets, we constructed an infrared and visible image pair dataset, Foggy, specifically designed for foggy conditions. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art fusion techniques on the Foggy dataset
Sub-surface deformation of individual fingerprint ridges during tactile interactions
Get PDFThe human fingertip can detect small tactile features with a spatial acuity roughly the width of a fingerprint ridge. However, how individual ridges deform under contact to support accurate and high-precision tactile feedback is currently unknown. The complex mechanical structure of the glabrous skin, composed of multiple layers and intricate morphology within which mechanoreceptors are embedded, makes this question challenging. Here, we used optical coherence tomography to image and track sub-surface deformations of hundreds of individual fingerprint ridges across ten participants and four individual contact events at high spatial resolution in vivo. We calculated strain patterns in both the stratum corneum and viable epidermis in response to a variety of passively applied tactile stimuli, including static indentation, stick-to-slip events, sliding of a flat surface in different directions, and interaction with small tactile features, such as edges and grooves. We found that ridges could stretch, compress, and undergo considerable shearing orthogonal to the skin surface, but there was limited horizontal shear. Therefore, it appears that the primary components of ridge deformation and, potentially, neural responses are deformations of the ridge flanks and their relative movement, rather than overall bending of the ridges themselves. We conclude that the local distribution of mechanoreceptors across the ridges might be ideally suited to extract the resulting strain gradients and that the fingertip skin may possess a higher mechanical spatial resolution than that of a single ridge
Optical Signatures of Hydration-Controlled Hysteretic Spin-crossover in Single Crystals of an Fe(II) Complex
Get PDFThis study presents a comprehensive optical spectroscopic investigation of spin-crossover (SCO) behavior in the Fe(II) complex, [Fe(bppsipr)2](BF4)2 (where bppsipr = 4-(iso-propylsulfanyl)-2,6-bis(pyrazol-1-yl)pyridine), in both hydrated and dehydrated single-crystal forms. High-resolution single-crystal UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy is employed to monitor thermally driven spin-state switching at multiple temperature scan rates, revealing abrupt transitions with variable hysteresis widths. In the hydrated form, hysteresis width narrowed with decreasing scan rate due to reduced kinetic barriers and variation in cooperativity. In contrast, the dehydrated form displayed stronger scan-rate dependence, wider hysteresis, and metastable high-spin (HS) stabilization upon cooling, attributed to increased lattice rigidity, and elevated relaxation barriers. Notably, the mutual interplay between elastic and magnetic interactions differ between cooling (HS → LS) and heating (LS → HS) cycles across scan rates. Thermal annealing of the dehydrated crystal restored structural homogeneity, yielding narrower hysteresis and upward-shifted transition temperatures during cooling, without affecting the heating branch—indicating asymmetric energy dissipation dynamics (magnetic vs elastic) during HS → LS and LS → HS transitions. The hydrated compound also demonstrates efficient photoinduced LS → HS switching (LIESST) at 4 K, with metastable HS state relaxing sharply near T(LIESST). Time-resolved spectroscopy between 50-75 K revealed two-step HS → LS relaxation mechanism, involving initial stochastic LS nucleation followed by cooperative domain growth. In contrast, no photoresponse is observed in the dehydrated form within measurement timeframe, likely due to increased ΔE0HL and higher lattice stiffness. Partial LS recovery via reverse-LIESST (830 nm excitation) confirms bistability and domain sensitivity in the hydrated state. To model the photoinduced relaxation behavior, an advanced mechanoelastic framework is applied, integrating thermodynamic, elastic, and local structural factors including hydration-induced pressure and Jahn–Teller distortion. The model successfully reproduced the cooperative HS → LS relaxation kinetics and domain evolution, validating the significance of local pressure fluctuations, lattice inhomogeneities, and angular-strain in dictating SCO dynamics. Overall, this work highlights the critical influence of hydration-dehydration, lattice quality, and thermal history on spin-state cooperativity and bistability, offering deep insight into the molecular control of SCO behavior. The integrated experimental–theoretical approach offers valuable insights for designing next-generation photoresponsive SCO materials with tunable switching characteristics
What’s kickin’ in partial tidal disruption events?
Get PDFStars partially destroyed by a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in a partial tidal disruption event (TDE) can be ejected from the SMBH. Previous investigations attributed this positive-energy/velocity kick to asymmetries in the mass lost by the star near pericentre. We propose that asymmetric mass loss is not predominantly responsible for ‘kicking’ the star, and that these kicks instead arise from the combination of (a) the reformation of the core following an initial phase of quasi-ballistic motion, and (b) the differential shear between the unbound and marginally bound (to the SMBH) material during this phase. We predict that the kick speed vkick is weakly dependent on the stellar properties, and for SMBH masses M• 103 M, vkick is independent of SMBH mass, is not limited to the stellar escape speed vesc, and is related to the surviving core mass Mc approximately as vkick 0.45 (Mc/M) −1/3, where M is the original stellar mass. For M• 103 M, we find that the maximum-attainable kick speed depends on SMBH mass, satisfies vkick,max 0.4 vesc (M•/M) 1/6, and is reached for core masses that satisfy Mc/M 1.7 (M•/M) −1/2. This model predicts that massive stars with M f ew × 10 M could be ejected at speeds 1 − 2 × 103 km s−1 if stripped of 50 per cent of their mass
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