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We report an enhanced sensitivity for detecting linear perturbations near hybrid (doubly degenerated) exceptional-diabolic (HED) singular points in a four mode bosonic system. The sensitivity enhancement is attributed to a singular response function, with the pole order determining the scaling of estimation error. At HED singular points, the error scaling exhibits a twofold improvement over non-HED singular points. The ultimate bound on estimation error is derived via quantum Fisher information, with heterodyne detection identified as the measurement achieving this optimal scaling.

Background Molecular imaging is pivotal in staging and response assessment of children with neuroblastoma (NB). [ 123 I]-metaiodobenzylguanidine (mIBG) is the standard imaging method; however, it is characterised by low spatial resolution, time-consuming acquisition procedures and difficult interpretation. Many PET catecholaminergic radiotracers have been proposed as a replacement for [ 123 I]-mIBG, however they have not yet made it into clinical practice. We aimed to review the available literature comparing head-to-head [ 123 I]-mIBG with the most common PET catecholaminergic radiopharmaceuticals. Methods We searched the PubMed database for studies performing a head-to-head comparison between [ 123 I]-mIBG and PET radiopharmaceuticals including meta-hydroxyephedrine ([ 11 C]C-HED), 18 F-18F-3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine ([ 18 F]DOPA) [ 124 I]mIBG and Meta -[18F]fluorobenzylguanidine ([ 18 F]mFBG). Review articles, preclinical studies, small case series (< 5 subjects), case reports, and articles not in English were excluded. From each study, the following characteristics were extracted: bibliographic information, technical parameters, and the sensitivity of the procedure according to a patient-based analysis (PBA) and a lesion-based analysis (LBA). Results Ten studies were selected: two regarding [ 11 C]C-HED, four [ 18 F]DOPA, one [ 124 I]mIBG, and three [ 18 F]mFBG. These studies included 181 patients (range 5–46). For the PBA, the superiority of the PET method was reported in two out of ten studies (both using [ 18 F]DOPA). For LBA, PET detected significantly more lesions than scintigraphy in seven out of ten studies. Conclusions PET/CT using catecholaminergic tracers shows superior diagnostic performance than mIBG scintigraphy. However, it is still unknown if such superiority can influence clinical decision-making. Nonetheless, the PET examination appears promising for clinical practice as it offers faster image acquisition, less need for sedation, and a single-day examination.

Ectodysplasin A (EDA) signaling is initially identified as morphogenic signaling regulating the formation of skin appendages including teeth, hair follicles, exocrine glands in mammals, feathers in birds and scales in fish. Gene mutation in EDA signaling causes hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (HED), a congenital hereditary disease with malformation of skin appendages. Interestingly, emerging evidence suggests that EDA and its receptors can modulate the proliferation, apoptosis, differentiation and migration of cancer cells, and thus may regulate tumorigenesis and cancer progression. More recently, as a newly discovered hepatocyte factor, EDA pathway has been demonstrated to be involved in the pathogenesis of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and type II diabetes by regulating glucose and lipid metabolism. In this review, we summarize the function of EDA signaling from skin appendage development to multiple other diseases, and discuss the clinical application of recombinant EDA protein as well as other potential targets for disease intervention.

Basaltic rocks occur widely on the terrestrial planets and differentiated asteroids, including the asteroid 4 Vesta. We conducted a shock recovery experiment with decaying compressive pulses on a terrestrial basalt at the Chiba Institute of Technology, Japan. The sample recorded a range of pressures, and shock physics modeling was conducted to add a pressure scale to the observed shock features. The shocked sample was examined by optical and electron microscopy, electron back‐scattered diffractometry, and Raman spectroscopy. We found that localized melting occurs at a lower pressure (∼10 GPa) than previously thought (>20 GPa). The shocked basalt near the epicenter represents “shock degree C” of a recently proposed classification scheme for basaltic eucrites and, as such, our results provide a pressure scale for the classification scheme. Finally, we estimated the total fraction of the basaltic eucrites classified as shock degree C to be ∼15% by assuming the impact velocity distribution onto Vesta. Plain Language Summary Basaltic rocks occur on numerous planetary bodies, including Mars, the Moon, and the asteroid Vesta. Shock metamorphic features in meteorites from such bodies are the ancient imprints of past impact events. We can extract information about the bombardment histories experienced by such bodies if we have an accurate method to link the degree of metamorphism to the impact conditions. Although two such methods for basaltic rocks have been published, one of these does not have a scale that relates the shock features and peak pressures. In this study, we designed an impact experiment with a terrestrial basalt sample to add a pressure scale to one of these methods. We found that basaltic materials are more easily melted than previously expected. The shock features of our shocked sample match “shock degree C.” The required pressure for producing the materials classified into this shock degree is 1–2 × 105 times greater than atmospheric pressure. Our results may provide insights into impact processes on Vesta. We estimate that the total fraction of meteorites from Vesta classified into shock degree C is ∼15%. Key Points We investigated the shock effects in basaltic rocks with impact experiments and shock physics modeling We added a pressure scale to the shock degree classification for basaltic eucrites, allowing us to link our results with the Stöffler table Localized melting occurs from 10 GPa rather than 20 GPa as previously thought

Psychological interventions, especially those leveraging mobile and wireless technologies, often include multiple components that are delivered and adapted on multiple timescales (e.g., coaching sessions adapted monthly based on clinical progress, combined with motivational messages from a mobile device adapted daily based on the person’s daily emotional state). The hybrid experimental design (HED) is a new experimental approach that enables researchers to answer scientific questions about the construction of psychological interventions in which components are delivered and adapted on different timescales. These designs involve sequential randomizations of study participants to intervention components, each at an appropriate timescale (e.g., monthly randomization to different intensities of coaching sessions and daily randomization to different forms of motivational messages). The goal of the current manuscript is twofold. The first is to highlight the flexibility of the HED by conceptualizing this experimental approach as a special form of a factorial design in which different factors are introduced at multiple timescales. We also discuss how the structure of the HED can vary depending on the scientific question(s) motivating the study. The second goal is to explain how data from various types of HEDs can be analyzed to answer a variety of scientific questions about the development of multicomponent psychological interventions. For illustration, we use a completed HED to inform the development of a technology-based weight loss intervention that integrates components that are delivered and adapted on multiple timescales.

A leading philosopher seeks to recover \"common sense\" as a meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy With her previous books on Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers not only secured a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but also inspired a rethinking of critical theory, political thought, and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines. Here, Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading of Whitehead. Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the growing group of scholars who use Stengers's work on Whitehead as a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse domains of inquiry: environmentalism and ecology, animal studies, media and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, feminism, and capitalism. On the other hand, the significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead. Instead, it lies in Stengers's recovery of the idea of \"common sense\" as a meeting place-a commons-where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today-when climate disaster looms all around us, when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.

In this work, we discuss the challenges related to the preliminary investigation of high repetition rate (HRR) experiments in the field of high energy density (HED) physics, and we present the results of preparation experiments done at the Prague Asterix Laser System (PALS) laser facility conducted with the aim of defining the needed developments in target design, real-time diagnostics and data collection needed to meet HRR requirements. Although the PALS laser facility is not an HRR facility, it has served as a valuable test bed for advancing diagnostic techniques and refining target design in preparation for HRR experimental platforms. HRR operation will result in improved statistical errors of the experimental results, in particular for experiments related to equation of state studies in extreme conditions.

•Events represent experiences or processes that unfold in time, often having distinct phases.•Event markers are identified time points usually associated with a phase transition of an event.•The critical linkage of experimental data to external reality and processes is achieved by creating appropriate event markers and associating these markers with informative metadata.•The HED (Hierarchical event Descriptor) system provides a framework and tools for making this association in a machine-actionable, analysis-ready way.•Without appropriate event design (appropriate event markers and informative annotation) neuroimaging data will not be usable to its full potential by the broader community. Event-related data analysis plays a central role in EEG and MEG (MEEG) and other neuroimaging modalities including fMRI. Choices about which events to report and how to annotate their full natures significantly influence the value, reliability, and reproducibility of neuroimaging datasets for further analysis and meta- or mega-analysis. A powerful annotation strategy using the new third-generation formulation of the Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED) framework and tools (hedtags.org) combines robust event description with details of experiment design and metadata in a human-readable as well as machine-actionable form, making event annotation relevant to the full range of neuroimaging and other time series data. This paper considers the event design and annotation process using as a case study the well-known multi-subject, multimodal dataset of Wakeman and Henson made available by its authors as a Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) dataset (bids.neuroimaging.io). We propose a set of best practices and guidelines for event annotation integrated in a natural way into the BIDS metadata file architecture, examine the impact of event design decisions, and provide a working example of organizing events in MEEG and other neuroimaging data. We demonstrate how annotations using HED can document events occurring during neuroimaging experiments as well as their interrelationships, providing machine-actionable annotation enabling automated within- and across-experiment analysis and comparisons. We discuss the evolution of HED software tools and have made available an accompanying HED-annotated BIDS-formated edition of the MEEG data of the Wakeman and Henson dataset (openneuro.org, ds003645). [Display omitted]

In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot optimization with Hybrid Euclidean Distance with Large Language Models (HED-LM) to improve example selection for sensor-based classification tasks. While few-shot prompting enables efficient inference with limited labeled data, its performance largely depends on the quality of selected examples. HED-LM addresses this challenge through a hybrid selection pipeline that filters candidate examples based on Euclidean distance and re-ranks them using contextual relevance scored by large language models (LLMs). To validate its effectiveness, we apply HED-LM to a fatigue detection task using accelerometer data characterized by overlapping patterns and high inter-subject variability. Unlike simpler tasks such as activity recognition, fatigue detection demands more nuanced example selection due to subtle differences in physiological signals. Our experiments show that HED-LM achieves a mean macro F1-score of 69.13 ± 10.71%, outperforming both random selection (59.30 ± 10.13%) and distance-only filtering (67.61 ± 11.39%). These represent relative improvements of 16.6% and 2.3%, respectively. The results confirm that combining numerical similarity with contextual relevance improves the robustness of few-shot prompting. Overall, HED-LM offers a practical solution to improve performance in real-world sensor-based learning tasks and shows potential for broader applications in healthcare monitoring, human activity recognition, and industrial safety scenarios.

Aims/hypothesis Compromised pancreatic sympathetic innervation has been suggested as a factor involved in both immune-mediated beta cell destruction and endocrine dysregulation of pancreatic islets. To further explore these intriguing findings, new techniques for in vivo assessment of pancreatic innervation are required. This is a retrospective study that aimed to investigate whether the noradrenaline (norepinephrine) analogue 11 C-hydroxy ephedrine ( 11 C-HED) could be used for quantitative positron emission tomography (PET) imaging of the sympathetic innervation of the human pancreas. Methods In 25 individuals with type 2 diabetes and 64 individuals without diabetes, all of whom had previously undergone 11 C-HED-PET/CT because of pheochromocytoma or paraganglioma (or suspicion thereof), the 11 C-HED standardised uptake value (SUV mean ), 11 C-HED specific binding index (SBI), pancreatic functional volume (FV, in ml), functional neuronal volume (FNV, calculated as SUV mean  × FV), specific binding index with functional volume (SBI FV, calculated as SBI × FV) and attenuation on CT (HU) were investigated in the entire pancreas, and additionally in six separate anatomical pancreatic regions. Results Generally, 11 C-HED uptake in the pancreas was high, with marked individual variation, suggesting variability in sympathetic innervation. Moreover, pancreatic CT attenuation (HU) ( p <0.001), 11 C-HED SBI ( p =0.0049) and SBI FV ( p =0.0142) were lower in individuals with type 2 diabetes than in individuals without diabetes, whereas 11 C-HED SUV mean ( p =0.15), FV ( p =0.73) and FNV ( p =0.30) were similar. Conclusions/interpretation We demonstrate the feasibility of using 11 C-HED-PET for non-invasive assessment of pancreatic sympathetic innervation in humans. These findings warrant further prospective evaluation, especially in individuals with theoretical defects in pancreatic sympathetic innervation, such as those with type 1 diabetes. Graphical Abstract