The 10-item Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ10) is a self-report questionnaire used in clinical and research settings as a diagnostic screening tool for autism in adults. The AQ10 is also increasingly being used to quantify trait autism along a unitary dimension and correlated against performance on other psychological/medical tasks. However, its psychometric properties have yet to be examined when used in this way. By analysing AQ10 data from a large non-clinical sample of adults (n = 6,595), we found that the AQ10 does not have a unifactorial factor structure, and instead appears to have several factors. The AQ10 also had poor internal reliability. Taken together, whilst the AQ10 has important clinical utility in screening for diagnosable autism, it may not be a psychometrically robust measure when administered in non-clinical samples from the general population. Therefore, we caution against its use as a measure of trait autism in future research.

Corrosion is an important problem that engineers and scientists must overcome to avoid the collapse of structures, chemical processing plants, and metallic objects, which can lead to not only economic loss but also environmental and human losses. One of the simplest and most widely used methods to quantify corrosion rates (CRs) is the immersion test. The usual approach that has been used to date, to quantify the CR by this method, is to assume that the initial surface area of the corroding object remains constant over time. It is shown that such approximations underestimate the true CR and that they may lead to significant errors. A formula to calculate the CR considering changes in the area is presented in this work. The formula herein can be used to accurately quantify the CR by the immersion test and improve the quality of experimental data and the analysis and modeling of corrosion phenomena.

Organo-modified clay nanoparticles were mixed at 1 and 5 wt% concentrations with a molten blend of 75 wt% of polylactide (PLA) and 25 wt% poly[(butylene adipate)-co-terephthalate] (PBAT). Three mixing strategies were used to control the localization of nanoclay. Small amplitude oscillatory shear (SAOS) and stress growth tests were conducted to clarify the nanoclay interactions with the blend components and its effect on the molecular relaxation behavior. SAOS and weighted relaxation spectra properties were determined before and after pre-shearing at a rate of 0.01 s−1. Molecular relaxation and its characteristics were influenced by PLA degradation, PBAT droplet coalescence, and nanoclay localization.

The ten-item short form of the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ-10) has been used to efficiently assess autistic traits in the general population; however, the psychometric properties of the AQ-10 in terms of its internal reliability and its unifactorial structure have recently been questioned. In the present study (N = 797), whether the internal reliability is increased when the AQ-10 is applied with six rather than the conventional four response categories has been investigated. Moreover, correlational and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to examine the reason for potential inhomogeneity within the AQ-10. The results suggest that the internal reliability of the AQ-10 was slightly increased but is still unsatisfactory, likely due to the incompatibility of items from two subdimensions: attention to detail and imagination. With six of the AQ-10 items, crucial aspects of the autistic personality may be measured, but other important aspects would be neglected; thus, the measure requires further psychometric development.

Elderly care is becoming a relevant issue with the increase of population ageing. Fall injuries, with their impact on social and healthcare cost, represent one of the biggest concerns over the years. Researchers are focusing their attention on several fall-detection algorithms. In this paper, we present a deep-learning solution for automatic fall detection from RGB videos. The proposed approach achieved a mean recall of 0.916, prompting the possibility of translating this approach in the actual monitoring practice. Moreover to enable the scientific community making research on the topic the dataset used for our experiments will be released. This could enhance elderly people safety and quality of life, attenuating risks during elderly activities of daily living with reduced healthcare costs as a final result.

Previous research has demonstrated that unique names increased in Japan, which shows a rise in uniqueness-seeking and individualism. To increase the validity of the prior findings, it is important to confirm the robustness of their results. Therefore, this study examined another indicator of historical changes in names in Japan. Specifically, I investigated whether the rates of common names decreased in Japan between 2004 and 2018. The dataset used in the previous study was analyzed. The results consistently showed that the rates of common names decreased for both boys and girls for the period. These results were consistent with the previous research, which further increases the validity of the finding that Japanese culture became more individualistic.

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used in learning and can be experienced with a head-mounted display as a 3D immersive version (immersive virtual reality [IVR]) or with a PC (or another computer) as a 2D desktop-based version (desktop virtual reality [DVR]). A research gap is the effect of IVR and DVR on learners’ skill retention. To address this gap, we designed an experiment in which learners were trained and tested for the assembly of a procedural industrial task. We found nonsignificant differences in the number of errors, the time to completion, satisfaction, self-efficacy, and motivation. The results support the view that DVR and IVR are similarly useful for learning retention. These insights may help researchers and practitioners to decide which form of VR they should use.

COVID-19 is causing a significant burden on medical and healthcare resources globally due to high numbers of hospitalisations and deaths recorded as the pandemic continues. This research aims to assess the effects of climate factors (i.e., daily average temperature and average relative humidity) on effective reproductive number of COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China during the early stage of the outbreak. Our research showed that effective reproductive number of COVID-19 will increase by 7.6% (95% Confidence Interval: 5.4% ~ 9.8%) per 1°C drop in mean temperature at prior moving average of 0–8 days lag in Wuhan, China. Our results indicate temperature was negatively associated with COVID-19 transmissibility during early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan, suggesting temperature is likely to effect COVID-19 transmission. These results suggest increased precautions should be taken in the colder seasons to reduce COVID-19 transmission in the future, based on past success in controlling the pandemic in Wuhan, China.

Gambling marketing is frequently visible in the United Kingdom, especially around the national sport, soccer. Previous research has documented the frequency with which gambling marketing logos can be seen in domestic club soccer, and also the frequency of television advertising around international tournaments. The present research investigates the frequency and content of television advertising during the men’s 2020 Euro soccer tournament, a high-profile tournament shown since the industry’s voluntary “whistle-to-whistle ban” on gambling advertising came into effect. Overall, 113 gambling adverts were recorded (4.5 adverts per relevant match). Financial inducements were the most frequently shown category (56.6%), followed by adverts raising awareness of a given operator’s brand (19.5%), adverts featuring the odds on specific complex bets (18.6%), and adverts promoting safer gambling (5.3%). Adverts featured a range of safer gambling messages, with the “when the fun stops, stop” message featuring in 56.6% of adverts. This research indicates that gambling advertising remains a frequent part of the experience of watching live televised soccer in the UK, and shows how the content of this advertising was comparable to what has been seen in the previous literature.

Telomeres are repeating DNA sequences found on the ends of chromosomes, which shorten with age and are implicated in senescence. Cross-species analyses of telomere shortening rates (TSR) and telomere lengths are important for understanding mechanisms underlying senescence, lifespan and life-history strategies of different species. Whittemore et al. (2019) generated a new dataset on variation in TSR, lifespan and body mass. In phylogenetically uncorrected analyses they found that TSR negatively correlates with lifespan. We re-ran analyses of their dataset using appropriate phylogenetic corrections. We found a strong phylogenetic signal in the association between TSR and body mass. We were able to corroborate Whittemore et al.’s major findings, including while correcting for body mass in a multivariate analysis. Since laboratory mice have different telomere lengths and potentially different telomere dynamics than wild mice, we removed mice from the analysis, which attenuates most associations.

This study investigated the effects of pretreatment with antioxidants, kaempferol, and zinc gluconate on serum biochemical changes and impairment in body weight gain following noise-exposure in Wistar rats. Thirty-five animals were evenly grouped into five cohorts: Groups II, III, IV, and V were exposed to noise stress, induced by exposing rats to 100 dB (4 hr/day) for 15 days, from days 33 to 48 after starting the drug treatments. Treatment with kaempferol and/or zinc mitigated noise-induced deficits in body weight gain, and levels of serum lipid and protein fractions. The combined treatment significantly (p < .05) decreased malondialdehyde concentration in kaempferol + zinc gluconate treated group, compared to the group administered deionized water + noise. This result demonstrates that biochemical dyshomeostasis and lipid peroxidation may be involved in the molecular mechanism underlying noise stress and the assortment of kaempferol and zinc gluconate produced an improved mitigating outcome in Wistar rats.

Developing agents capable of commonsense reasoning is an important goal in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Because commonsense is broadly defined, a computational theory that can formally categorize the various kinds of commonsense knowledge is critical for enabling fundamental research in this area. In a recent book, Gordon and Hobbs described such a categorization, argued to be reasonably complete. However, the theory’s reliability has not been independently evaluated through human annotator judgments. This paper describes such an experimental study, whereby annotations were elicited across a subset of eight foundational categories proposed in the original Gordon-Hobbs theory. We avoid bias by eliciting annotations on 200 sentences from a commonsense benchmark dataset independently developed by an external organization. The results show that, while humans agree on relatively concrete categories like time and space, they disagree on more abstract concepts. The implications of these findings are briefly discussed.

Statistical learning—the skill to pick up probability-based regularities of the environment—plays a crucial role in adapting to the environment and learning perceptual, motor, and language skills in healthy and clinical populations. Here, we developed a new method to measure statistical learning without any manual responses. We used the Alternating Serial Reaction Time (ASRT) task, adapted to eye-tracker, which, besides measuring reaction times (RTs), enabled us to track learning-dependent anticipatory eye movements. We found robust, interference-resistant learning on RT; moreover, learning-dependent anticipatory eye movements were even more sensitive measures of statistical learning on this task. Our method provides a way to apply the widely used ASRT task to operationalize statistical learning in clinical populations where the use of manual tasks is hindered, such as in Parkinson’s disease. Furthermore, it also enables future basic research to use a more sensitive version of this task to measure predictive processing.

Understanding individual differences in attitudes to autism is crucial for improving attitudes and reducing stigma towards autistic people, yet there is limited and inconsistent research on this topic. This is compounded by a lack of appropriate measures and multivariate analyses. Addressing these issues, using up-to-date measures and multiple linear regression, we examined the relative contributions of participant age, sex, autism knowledge, level of contact with autistic people, and autistic traits to attitudes towards autistic people. We found that greater autism knowledge and higher levels of contact, but no other variables, were uniquely predictive of attitudes towards autistic people. We conclude that, in addition to public awareness campaigns to raise knowledge of autism, it may be important to increase contact between autistic and non-autistic people to improve public attitudes towards autistic people.

Renal Replacement Therapies generally associated to the Artificial Kidney (AK) are membrane-based treatments that assure the separation functions of the failing kidney in extracorporeal blood circulation. Their progress from conventional hemodialysis towards high-flux hemodialysis (HFHD) through the introduction of ultrafiltration membranes characterized by high convective permeation fluxes intensified the need of elucidating the effect of the membrane fluid removal rates on the increase of the potentially blood-traumatizing shear stresses developed adjacently to the membrane. The AK surrogate consisting of two-compartments separated by an ultrafiltration membrane is set to have water circulation in the upper chamber mimicking the blood flow rates and the membrane fluid removal rates typical of HFHD. Pressure drop mirrors the shear stresses quantification and the modification of the velocities profiles. The increase on pressure drop when comparing flows in slits with a permeable membrane and an impermeable wall is ca. 512% and 576% for $ \mathrm{CA}22/5\%{\mathrm{SiO}}_2 $ and $ \mathrm{CA}30/5\%{\mathrm{SiO}}_2 $ membranes, respectively.

There is dearth information on the role of fisetin as an antistress agent in ameliorating heat stress in broiler chickens. Here, we experimentally compared probiotic, an antioxidant and antistress agent, with fisetin, an antioxidant agent with little or no report on its antistress effect. Sixty-day-old broiler chickens (Arbo Acre breed) were allotted into 4 groups of 15 birds each as follows; control, fisetin, probiotic, and fisetin + probiotic groups, respectively. All administrations were performed orally through gavage for the treatment groups. The environmental and cloacal temperature (CT) parameters were measured bi-hourly at Days 21, 28, and 35 from 7:00 to 7:00 hr, during the period of study. The environmental parameters exceeded the thermoneutral zone for broiler chickens. The probiotic-supplemented group had the least overall mean CT values all through the experimental period. Based on our findings, fisetin was not a potent antistress agent in mitigating heat stress in birds.

Reducing negative attitudes toward older adults is an urgent issue. A previous study has conducted “stereotype embodiment theory”-based interventions (SET interventions) that present participants with the contents of SET and related empirical findings. I focus on the subjective time to become older (the perception of how long people feel it will be before they become old) as a mechanism for the effect of SET interventions. I make the SET intervention group and the control group in which the participants are presented with an irrelevant vignette. The data from 641 participants (M = 31.97 years) were analyzed. Consequently, the SET intervention shortened the subjective time to become older and reduced negative attitudes toward older adults. When considering SET interventions, it would be useful to focus not only on the self-interested motives to avoid age discrimination but also on the subjective time to become older.

Philippine natural bentonite is characterized using X-ray diffractometer (XRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM), chemical analysis, thermogravimetric-differential scanning calorimetry (TG-DSC), and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analysis. The cation exchange capacity (CEC) was also measured. XRD shows that the mineral is composed primarily of mordenite, hectorite, and montmorillonite. SEM shows the flaky and porous structure of the bentonite powder. Chemical analyses show that SiO2 (47.90 wt%) and Al2O3 (14.02 wt%) are the major components of the clay. TG-DSC shows that the mineral contains 15.55% moisture. IR transmittance spectrum shows the common vibration bands present in the sample which include O–H stretching of inter-porous water, symmetric and asymmetric stretching of hydroxyl functional groups, asymmetrical stretching of internal tetrahedra (O–Si–O and O–Al–O), symmetrical stretching of external linkages, and so on. The measured CEC were found to be 91.37 and 43.01 meq/100 g according to the ammonium acetate method and barium acetate method, respectively.

Technical challenges associated with telomere length (TL) measurements have prompted concerns regarding their utility as a biomarker of aging. Several factors influence TL assessment via qPCR, the most common measurement method in epidemiological studies, including storage conditions and DNA extraction method. Here, we tested the impact of power supply during the qPCR assay. Momentary fluctuations in power can affect the functioning of high-performance electronics, including real-time thermocyclers. We investigated if mitigating these fluctuations by using an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) influenced TL assessment via qPCR. Samples run with a UPS had significantly lower standard deviation (p < 0.001) and coefficient of variation (p < 0.001) across technical replicates than those run without a UPS. UPS usage also improved exponential amplification efficiency at the replicate, sample, and plate levels. Together these improvements translated to increased performance across metrics of external validity including correlation with age, within-person correlation across tissues, and correlation between parents and offspring.

RNA interference (RNAi) is a technique used in many insects to study gene function. However, prior research suggests possible off-target effects when using Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) sequence as a non-target control. We used a transcriptomic approach to study the effect of GFP RNAi (GFP-i) in Nasonia vitripennis, a widely used parasitoid wasp model system. Our study identified 3.4% of total genes being differentially expressed in response to GFP-i. A subset of these genes appears involved in microtubule and sperm functions. In silico analysis identified 17 potential off-targets, of which only one was differentially expressed after GFP-i. We suggest the primary cause for differential expression after GFP-i is the non-specific activation of the RNAi machinery at the injection site, and a potentially disturbed spermatogenesis. Still, we advise that any RNAi study involving the genes deregulated in this study, exercises caution in drawing conclusions and uses a different non-target control.