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Rationale of Female UN Peacekeepers: T he Case of Indonesia
No full textAlthough female participation in UN peacekeeping has increased since the adoption of Resolution 1325 in 2000, numbers remain low. This article re-examines the rationale for enhancing womens roles—not as symbolic figures, but as contributors to operational effectiveness and catalysts for challenging gender biases in security. Focusing on Indonesia, which formally adopted gender mainstreaming in 2000 and a Women, Peace and Security National Action Plan in 2012, the study explores the structural and cultural barriers within a traditionally patriarchal military. Through comparative analysis and the narrative experiences of Indonesian female peacekeepers, the paper highlights both obstacles and opportunities. It contributes a nuanced framework for understanding gender in peacekeeping and offers policy recommendations to improve participation, using Indonesias gradual cultural shift as a key reference point
On-patient medical record and mRNA therapeutics using intradermal microneedles
No full textMedical interventions often require timed series of doses, thus necessitating accurate medical record-keeping. In many global settings, these records are unreliable or unavailable at the point of care, leading to less effective treatments or disease prevention. Here we present an invisible-to-the-naked-eye on-patient medical record-keeping technology that accurately stores medical information in the patient skin as part of microneedles that are used for intradermal therapeutics. We optimize the microneedle design for both a reliable delivery of messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and the near-infrared fluorescent microparticles that encode the on-patient medical record-keeping. Deep learning-based image processing enables encoding and decoding of the information with excellent temporal and spatial robustness. Long-term studies in a swine model demonstrate the safety, efficacy and reliability of this approach for the co-delivery of on-patient medical record-keeping and the mRNA vaccine encoding severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This technology could help healthcare workers make informed decisions in circumstances where reliable record-keeping is unavailable, thus contributing to global healthcare equity.Y
Phonetic Variation in Korean /n/: A Corpus Study
No full textThe purpose of this study is to examine the dynamic acoustic properties of the postconsonantal nasal /n/ in Korean, which may be associated with the phonetic variation arising from three different phonological inputs. The inputs of the three types of /n/ sounds are (i) a canonical as in /kamnamu/ →[kamnamu] a persimmon tree, an epenthesized or inserted /kaŋnam_jʌk/ →[kaŋnamnjʌk] Gangnam Station, and a nasalized /tɨŋɹok/ → [tɨŋnok] registration. In this study, we examine the temporal and spectral properties of these three types of /n/ sounds – both the temporal duration and the first and second formant frequency values – in corpus data. Consonantal duration varies as a function of a particular age group and is characterized by an increase in duration from canonical to inserted /n/. Significant spectral variation is observed within the female group, with the inserted and nasalized types characterized by a low F1 and a high F2, respectively. The results partially support the idea that grammatical knowledge may contribute to phonetic variation, thus suggesting that language users may require more time to process phonologically complex linguistic representations
Advancing Allogeneic NK Cell Immunotherapy through Microfluidic Gene Delivery
No full textChimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy has revolutionized cancer treatment, yet challenges such as manufacturing complexity, high costs, and safety concerns have spurred the development of alternatives like CAR-natural killer (NK) cell immunotherapies. CAR-NK cell therapies provide innate cytotoxicity with antigen-independent targeting, reducing safety risks while improving therapeutic efficacy. However, efficient genomic engineering and large-scale production of allogeneic NK cells remain significant obstacles. To address these challenges, a novel microfluidic gene delivery platform is developed, the Y-hydroporator, designed for allogeneic NK cell immunotherapy. This platform features a Y-shaped microchannel where NK cells experience rapid hydrodynamic stretching near the stagnation point, creating transient membrane discontinuities that facilitate the uptake of exogenous cargo. The Y-hydroporator achieves high delivery and transfection efficiency, processing approximate to 2 x 10(6) cells min(-1) while maintaining long-term cell viability (>89%) and functionality. Using this platform, human primary CAR-NK cells and NKG2A-knockout NK cells are successfully generated by delivering anti-CD19 CAR mRNA and CRISPR/Cas9 ribonucleoproteins, respectively. These engineered NK cells demonstrated enhanced cytotoxicity, underscoring the potential of the Y-hydroporator as a transformative tool for advancing allogeneic NK cell-based immunotherapies.Y
ASIMO: Agent-centric scene representation in multi-object manipulation
No full textVision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a generalizable way to control an agent because it is agnostic of specific hardware configurations. As visual observations are highly entangled, attempts for vision-based RL rely on scene representation that discerns individual entities and establishes intuitive physics to constitute the world model. However, most existing works on scene representation learning cannot successfully be deployed to train an RL agent, as they are often highly unstable and fail to sustain for a long enough temporal horizon. We propose ASIMO, a fully unsupervised scene decomposition to perform interaction-rich tasks with a vision-based RL agent. ASIMO decomposes agent-object interaction videos of episodic-length into the agent, objects, and background, predicting their long-term interactions. Further, we explicitly model possible occlusion in the image observations and stably track individual objects. Then, we can correctly deduce the updated positions of individual entities in response to the agent action, only from partial visual observation. Based on the stable entity-wise decomposition and temporal prediction, we formulate a hierarchical framework to train the RL agent that focuses on the context around the object of interest. We demonstrate that our formulation for scene representation can be universally deployed to train different configurations of agents and accomplish several tasks that involve pushing, arranging, and placing multiple rigid objects.N
Comparison of body composition change, measured with bioelectrical impedance analysis, between singleton and twin pregnancy: A prospective cohort study
No full textObjectives: To determine the difference of body composition change measured by bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) between singleton and twin pregnancy. Study design: A prospective study was performed in pregnant women admitted to maternal-fetal intensive care unit in Seoul National University Bundang Hospital from June to August 2023. Twenty one patients were enrolled (9 singleton and 12 twin pregnancies) and underwent BIA at the admission. Maternal obstetric baseline characteristics were reviewed. Results: There was no statistical difference between singleton and twin pregnancies in terms of maternal age and gestational ages at the tests and other obstetric complications. The phase angle was significantly lower in twin pregnancies than in singleton pregnancies (5.1° vs. 6.2°, p = 0.007) and the difference was more distinct in the lower extremities (right; left; both; p < 0.05). The mean values of total body water (TBW), intracellular water (ICW), and extracellular water (ECW) measured in the whole body, trunk, and extremities were not statistically different between the twin and singleton pregnancy groups; however, the ratio of ECW to TBW was significantly higher in twin pregnancies than in singleton pregnancies (0.40 vs. 0.39, p = 0.001). All ECW/TBW ratios measured in the trunk and extremities presented with the same results as ECW/TBW ratios measured in the whole body (all: p < 0.05). The T-score was significantly higher in the twin group than in the singleton group (4.4 vs. 1.2, p = 0.001). Conclusions: Twin pregnancies had a lower phase angle and higher ECW/TBW ratio compared to singleton pregnancies.Y
Electronic commensuration of a spin moiré superlattice in a layered magnetic semimetal
No full textSpin moire superlattices (SMSs) have been proposed as a magnetic analog of crystallographic moire systems and a source of electron minibands offering vector-field moire tunability and Berry curvature effects. However, it has proven challenging to realize an SMS in which a large exchange coupling J is transmitted between conduction electrons and localized spins. Furthermore, most systems have carrier mean free paths l(mfp) shorter than their spin moire lattice constant a(spin), inhibiting miniband formation. Here, we discover that the layered magnetic semimetal EuAg4Sb2 overcomes these challenges by forming an interface with J similar to 100 milli-electron volts transferred between a Eu triangular lattice and anionic Ag2Sb bilayers hosting a two-dimensional electron band in the ballistic regime (l(mfp) >> a(spin)). The system realizes an SMS with a(spin) commensurate with the Fermi momentum, leading to a marked quenching of the transport response from miniband formation. Our findings demonstrate an approach to magnetically engineering moire superlattices and a potential route to an emergent spin-driven quantum Hall state.Y
REALFRED: An Embodied Instruction Following Benchmark in Photo-Realistic Environments
No full textSimulated virtual environments have been widely used to learn robotic agents that perform daily household tasks. These environments encourage research progress by far, but often provide limited object interactability, visual appearance different from real-world environments, or relatively smaller environment sizes. This prevents the learned models in the virtual scenes from being readily deployable. To bridge the gap between these learning environments and deploying (i.e., real) environments, we propose the ReALFRED benchmark that employs real-world scenes, objects, and room layouts to learn agents to complete household tasks by understanding free-form language instructions and interacting with objects in large, multi-room and 3D-captured scenes. Specifically, we extend the ALFRED benchmark with updates for larger environmental spaces with smaller visual domain gaps. With ReALFRED, we analyze previously crafted methods for the ALFRED benchmark and observe that they consistently yield lower performance in all metrics, encouraging the community to develop methods in more realistic environments. Our code and data are publicly available (Homepage: https://github.com/snumprlab/realfred).N
All-Solid-State Batteries with Extremely Low N/P Ratio Operating at Low Stack Pressure
No full textAll-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) are emerging as promising candidates for next-generation energy storage systems. However, their practical implementation faces significant challenges, particularly their requirement for an impractically high stack pressure. This issue is especially critical in high-energy density systems with limited negative-to-positive electrode capacity ratios (N/P ratios), where uneven lithium (Li) stripping induces the formation of interfacial voids. This study addresses these challenges by introducing an anode with a novel structural design that operates effectively under practically viable conditions while significantly reducing the N/P ratio to less than one. The approach entails the integration of a lithiophilic magnesium (Mg) film beneath a thin layer of the silicon-graphite (SiGr) active materials. This structure facilitates the deposition of excess Li beneath the SiGr layer during overcharging, which enables stable cycling even at room temperature and at a low stack pressure of 3 MPa. By mitigating the poor contact that is characteristic of ASSBs with a low stack pressure, and simultaneously increasing the energy density by lowering the N/P ratio, the design significantly advances the key electrochemical properties of ASSBs.N
MimiQ: Low-Bit Data-Free Quantization of Vision Transformers with Encouraging Inter-Head Attention Similarity
No full textData-free quantization (DFQ) is a technique that creates a lightweight network from its full-precision counterpart without the original training data, often through a synthetic dataset. Although several DFQ methods have been proposed for vision transformer (ViT) architectures, they fail to achieve efficacy in low-bit settings. Examining the existing methods, we observe that their synthetic data produce misaligned attention maps, while those of the real samples are highly aligned. From this observation, we find that aligning attention maps of synthetic data helps improve the overall performance of quantized ViTs. Motivated by this finding, we devise MimiQ, a novel DFQ method designed for ViTs that enhances inter-head attention similarity. First, we generate synthetic data by aligning head-wise attention outputs from each spatial query patch. Then, we align the attention maps of the quantized network to those of the full-precision teacher by applying head-wise structural attention distillation. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms baselines, setting a new state-of-the-art for ViT-DFQ.N