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Marble slabs, typically used as façade panels to externally cover buildings, might permanently deform after a certain time of environmental exposure. This phenomenon, called bowing, is generally accompanied by a reduction of strength which increases with increasing degree of bowing. In the present paper, a theoretical model to calculate the progressive bowing of marble slabs submitted to temperature cycles is briefly recalled and applied to a specific Carrara marble sample. The marble is investigated by a microscopic analysis of thin sections cut along three orthogonal directions. The digital photographs are treated by an image analysis code which is capable of extracting grain size and shape distributions. In this way the anisotropic microstructure of the marble is quantified and taken into account in the numerical analyses. The influence of size distribution of grains as well as of their distribution of optic axis orientation on the slab bowing is discussed with the attempt of offering a quantitative tool for a better understanding of in situ bowing measurements.

Purpose Congenital posteromedial bowing (CPMB) of tibia is a rare, usually self-resolving condition that is present at birth. The data on the long-term outcome of lengthening, choice of fixator, outcome in early and late age groups, and complications is sparse, hence the need for this study. Methods This retrospective study included 93 patients with 94 affected legs from 1991 to 2023. The patients were categorized into early (under 10 years) and late (10 years or above) intervention groups. Eighteen patients with nineteen lengthening episodes who attained skeletal maturity made the basis of this study and will be discussed in detail. Results The outcome for the lengthening group at maturity was satisfactory, with 5.53 cm of average length gained per lengthening episode, a mean LLD of 0.31 cm at final follow-up, a mean age of 23.63 years (range 14–38 years), and an average follow-up of 12.51 years (range 3–28 years) post-lengthening, but the procedure was associated with difficulties like ankle stiffness, tibial valgus, pin tract infections, and fractures through regenerate. Conclusion This study represents a large single-centre series on CPMB. We recommend that surgery for lengthening should be done at an older age, close to skeletal maturity, wherever possible to reduce the risk of repeat lengthening procedures. Based on our experience, we recommend the use of a circular fixator. Uniplanar distractors should have an adequate number and spread of Schanz screws in each segment to reduce the risk of valgus malalignment of distracting segments of bone.

The fracture behaviour of artificial metamaterials often leads to catastrophic failures with limited resistance to crack propagation. In contrast, natural materials such as bones and ceramics possess microstructures that give rise to spatially controllable crack path and toughened material resistance to crack advances. This study presents an approach that is inspired by nature’s strengthening mechanisms to develop a systematic design method enabling damage-programmable metamaterials with engineerable microfibers in the cells that can spatially program the micro-scale crack behaviour. Machine learning is applied to provide an effective design engine that accelerate the generation of damage-programmable cells that offer advanced toughening functionality such as crack bowing, crack deflection, and shielding seen in natural materials; and are optimised for a given programming of crack path. This paper shows that such toughening features effectively enable crack-resisting mechanisms on the basis of the crack tip interactions, crack shielding, crack bridging and synergistic combinations of these mechanisms, increasing up to 1,235% absorbed fracture energy in comparison to conventional metamaterials. The proposed approach can have broad implications in the design of damage-tolerant materials, and lightweight engineering systems where significant fracture resistances or highly programmable damages for high performances are sought after. Due to the complex, stochastic nature, fracture is a key challenge of artificial materials causing catastrophic failures. The authors overcame this by designing metamaterials that program damage and translate crack-resisting mechanisms

X-linked hypophosphataemia in children is characterised by elevated serum concentrations of fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF23), hypophosphataemia, rickets, lower extremity bowing, and growth impairment. We compared the efficacy and safety of continuing conventional therapy, consisting of oral phosphate and active vitamin D, versus switching to burosumab, a fully human monoclonal antibody against FGF23, in paediatric X-linked hypophosphataemia. In this randomised, active-controlled, open-label, phase 3 trial at 16 clinical sites, we enrolled children with X-linked hypophosphataemia aged 1–12 years. Key eligibility criteria were a total Thacher rickets severity score of at least 2·0, fasting serum phosphorus lower than 0·97 mmol/L (3·0 mg/dL), confirmed PHEX (phosphate-regulating endopeptidase homolog, X-linked) mutation or variant of unknown significance in the patient or a family member with appropriate X-linked dominant inheritance, and receipt of conventional therapy for at least 6 consecutive months for children younger than 3 years or at least 12 consecutive months for children older than 3 years. Eligible patients were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive either subcutaneous burosumab starting at 0·8 mg/kg every 2 weeks (burosumab group) or conventional therapy prescribed by investigators (conventional therapy group). Both interventions lasted 64 weeks. The primary endpoint was change in rickets severity at week 40, assessed by the Radiographic Global Impression of Change global score. All patients who received at least one dose of treatment were included in the primary and safety analyses. The trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT02915705. Recruitment took place between Aug 3, 2016, and May 8, 2017. Of 122 patients assessed, 61 were enrolled. Of these, 32 (18 girls, 14 boys) were randomly assigned to continue receiving conventional therapy and 29 (16 girls, 13 boys) to receive burosumab. For the primary endpoint at week 40, patients in the burosumab group had significantly greater improvement in Radiographic Global Impression of Change global score than did patients in the conventional therapy group (least squares mean +1·9 [SE 0·1] with burosumab vs +0·8 [0·1] with conventional therapy; difference 1·1, 95% CI 0·8–1·5; p<0·0001). Treatment-emergent adverse events considered possibly, probably, or definitely related to treatment by the investigator occurred more frequently with burosumab (17 [59%] of 29 patients in the burosumab group vs seven [22%] of 32 patients in the conventional therapy group). Three serious adverse events occurred in each group, all considered unrelated to treatment and resolved. Significantly greater clinical improvements were shown in rickets severity, growth, and biochemistries among children with X-linked hypophosphataemia treated with burosumab compared with those continuing conventional therapy. Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical and Kyowa Kirin International.

Radio relics are typically found to be arc-like regions of synchrotron emission in the outskirts of merging galaxy clusters, bowing out from the cluster center. In most cases they show synchrotron spectra that steepen toward the cluster center, indicating that they are caused by relativistic electrons being accelerated at outward traveling merger shocks. A number of radio relics break with this ideal picture and show morphologies that are bent the opposite way and show spectral index distributions that do not follow expectations from the ideal picture. We propose that these “wrong way” relics can form when an outward traveling shock wave is bent inward by an infalling galaxy cluster or group. We test this in an ultra-high-resolution zoom-in simulation of a massive galaxy cluster with an on-the-fly spectral cosmic-ray model. This allows us to study not only the synchrotron emission at colliding shocks, but also their synchrotron spectra to address the open question of relics with strongly varying spectral indices over the relic surface.

Benton Bros made a £282,000 pre-tax loss shortly before it sold off its haulage division earlier this year, newly filed accounts showed. The Lincolnshire firm managed to stem its losses after recording a £448,000 pre-tax loss in 2023, but turnover also reduced by 11.8% to £9.4m in the year ending 31 January 2025. However, it said it had increased its gross profit margin to 8.9% from 7.2% in the previous year. The company provided logistics and transport solutions to the construction and distribution sectors.

In materials science and engineering, a significant amount of research has been carried out using indentation techniques in order to characterize the mechanical properties and microstructure of a broad range of natural and engineered materials. However, there are many unresearched or partly researched areas, such as, for example, the investigation of the shape of the indentation load–displacement curve, the associated mechanism in porous materials with clastic texture, and the influence of the texture on the constitutive behavior of the materials. In the present study, nanoindentation is employed in the analysis of the mechanical behavior of a benchmark material composed of plaster of Paris, which represents a brand of highly porous-clastic materials with a complex structure; such materials may find many applications in medicine, production industry, and energy sectors. The focus of the study is directed at the examination of the influence of the porous structure on the load–displacement response in loading and unloading phases based on nanoindentation experiments, as well as the variation with repeating the indentation in already indented locations. Events such as pop-in in the loading phase and bowing out and elbowing in the unloading phase of a given nanoindentation test are studied. Modulus, hardness, and the elastic stiffness values were additionally examined. The repeated indentation tests provided validations of various mechanisms in the loading and unloading phases of the indentation tests. The results from this study provide some fundamental insights into the interpretation of the nanoindentation behavior and the viscoelastic nature of porous-clastic materials. Some insights on the influence of indentation spacing to depth ratio were also obtained, providing scope for further studies.

Technology for anticipating wind speed can improve the safety and stability of power networks with heavy wind penetration. Due to the unpredictability and instability of the wind, it is challenging to accurately forecast wind power and speed. Several approaches have been developed to improve this accuracy based on processing time series data. This work proposes a method for predicting wind speed with high accuracy based on a novel weighted ensemble model. The weight values in the proposed model are optimized using an adaptive dynamic grey wolf-dipper throated optimization (ADGWDTO) algorithm. The original GWO algorithm is redesigned to emulate the dynamic group-based cooperative to address the difficulty of establishing the balance between exploration and exploitation. Quick bowing movements and a white breast, which distinguish the dipper throated birds hunting method, are employed to improve the proposed algorithm exploration capability. The proposed ADGWDTO algorithm optimizes the hyperparameters of the multi-layer perceptron (MLP), K-nearest regressor (KNR), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) regression models. A dataset from Kaggle entitled Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2012 is employed to assess the proposed algorithm. The findings confirm that the proposed ADGWDTO algorithm outperforms the literature’s state-of-the-art wind speed forecasting algorithms. The proposed binary ADGWDTO algorithm achieved average fitness of 0.9209 with a standard deviation fitness of 0.7432 for feature selection, and the proposed weighted optimized ensemble model (Ensemble using ADGWDTO) achieved a root mean square error of 0.0035 compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. The proposed algorithm’s stability and robustness are confirmed by statistical analysis of several tests, such as one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Wilcoxon’s rank-sum.

Density functional theory is employed to investigate the origins of bandgap bowing character in transition-metal-dichalcogenide ternary alloyed monolayers (TMD-MLs). The available experimental photoluminescence (PL) data in literature have confirmed the existence of bowing character in the common-anion ternary alloys (e.g. Mo1−x W x S2) and its complete absence in the common-cation ternary alloys (e.g. MoS2(1−x)Se2x ). Our theoretical modeling of bandgap energy versus alloy composition, \\(E_g(x)\\), in these respective alloys have yielded trends and bowing parameters in excellent agreement with the available PL data (i.e. B = 0.26 eV and zero, respectively). Calculated band structures showed that the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) states in TMD-ML to be fully attributed to the metal atoms and to follow the symmetry of the irreducible representations A 1′ (singlet \\(d_z^2\\) state) and E′ (doublet of \\(d_x^2-y^2\\) and d xy states) of the point group D 3h , respectively. Consequently, in case of common-cation TMD-ML alloys, \\(E_g(x)\\) is linear and the bowing is absent. Whereas, in case of common-anion TMD-ML alloys, \\(E_g(x)\\) is quadratic and the bowing is present because of the existence of competition between the cations (i.e. metal atoms) in contributing to HOMO/LUMO states. Our theoretical findings are corroborated with the available experimental data and have direct impact in TMD-based photonic nano-device applications.

Numerous experimental and theoretical methods have focused on the bow–string interaction in bowed string instruments, including several artificial bowing setups. The current research aims to present an experimental approach to reproduce bowing techniques using a robotic arm. First, optical motion capture is used to track the 3D kinematics of the bow. The cello bow and corpus are equipped with reflective markers. The cello is mounted on a playing platform. The recorded 3D trajectories of the bow markers are used to control the motion of the robotic arm. This process requires converting the 3D data between the coordinate frames of the two systems. This conversion is described in detail in this paper. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, an experienced cellist was asked to play an adapted piece on the cello, which was then repeated using the robotic arm. The robotic arm is capable of accurately reproducing the bow velocity, but even minimal variations in position can compromise proper bow–string contact. To illustrate this, the study compares two similar robotic situations and discusses the challenges of adapting the robot’s coordinates as a function of a given playing parameter or the sound produced.