Multi-dimensional spatial confinement strategies for high-performance electrocatalytic reduction of nitrate to ammonia

Retinotopic tuning of neural populations is a key organizing principle of human visual cortex. However, state-of-the-art models that predict neural recordings based on task-optimized Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) do not take this retinotopic organization into account. Furthermore, while retinotopic tuning in visual cortex has been studied extensively using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the temporal dynamics of processing information from distinct parts of the visual field are less well understood. Here, we reveal distinct temporal profiles for foveal and peripheral visual information processing by implementing multiple spatial sampling strategies on feature maps of CNNs into encoding models that predict human electroencephalography (EEG) responses. Using large, high-quality natural scene images, we show that processing of peripheral information precedes that of foveally sampled information. This temporal difference is best modeled when applying a differential spatial transform to CNN feature maps that is derived from empirical measurements of human retinal ganglion cells. We directly confirm this temporal difference experimentally by mutually exclusive stimulation of foveal and peripheral visual field regions. Last, we introduce a novel, data-driven method of recovering visual field information from neural data, highlighting and quantifying spatial, retinotopic information contained in temporally specific EEG recordings. Together, these results provide novel neural evidence for a temporal coarse-to-fine visual processing hierarchy in the processing of natural images that is directly linked to distinct spatial information sampling. Aligning the spatial sampling of humans and CNN encoding models not only improves predictions of neural responses but also demonstrates that EEG recordings contain a significant amount of temporally encoded retinotopic information. We make our large-scale EEG dataset including high-resolution natural scene images publicly available to enable future research into naturalistic visual processing.

Low-cost PM2.5 sensors have gained popularity due to their simplicity and low maintenance. However, calibration challenges often limit their accuracy and reliability. In South Asian countries, strong seasonal meteorological variation can require dynamic sensor calibration approaches. This study investigated sensor performance of TSI BlueSky low-cost PM2.5 sensors within a harmonized sensor network using linear regression (LR), multiple linear regression (MLR), and echo-state network (ESN) models across two distinct climatic zones in Sri Lanka. Results indicated that the harmonized sensors were generally in close agreement with one another, with 10% variability. The results of LR, MLR, and ESN indicate that all three models significantly enhance performance with increasing temporal averaging windows, especially from the simple LR model at 24-h averaging in the wet season (R2 = 0.60, MAE = 0.93 µgm-3, MAPE = 7.81%) and dry season (R2 = 0.85, MAE = 1.98 µgm-3, MAPE = 9.17%). Applying wet season calibration values to dry season data results in a significant mean absolute percentage error (26.57%). The effectiveness of calibration models developed in Colombo decreased when they were applied to PM2.5data from Kandy, suggesting that they have limited transferability across different climatic zones. Conversely, models that were specific to Kandy and incorporated temperature and relative humidity demonstrated a substantial increase in precision during both wet (R2 = 0.84, MAE = 1.78 µgm-3, MAPE = 11.71%) and dry (R2 = 0.92, MAE = 1.59 µgm-3, MAPE = 7.73%) seasons. These findings emphasize the critical need for both temporal and spatial calibration strategies to enhance PM2.5 estimation reliability for low-cost sensors.

Polarization converting metasurfaces (PCMSs) have emerged as promising platforms for multifunctional electromagnetic (EM) devices due to their ability to manipulate polarization and suppress radar cross section (RCS). This work proposes a PCM that exhibits efficient linear-to-linear polarization conversion at 3.81 GHz and 6.35 GHz. A single anisotropic meta-atom, when rotated appropriately, enables the implementation of both 1-bit and 2-bit coding metasurfaces without added structural complexity. At resonance frequencies, the 1-bit configuration achieves appreciable RCS suppression as a result of polarization conversion and phase cancellation effects. When the coding arrangement is extended from 1-bit to 2-bit, the metasurface achieves significantly deeper RCS reduction owing to finer phase quantization and improved wavefront manipulation. The results demonstrate that the proposed spatial configuration strategy effectively enhances scattering diffusion while maintaining a simple metasurface design.

ABSTRACT With the commencement of oil extraction from the Naftun oilfields in 1908, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company designated Abadan Island in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, Iran, as the pivotal locus for refining and exporting Iranian oil. This decision transformed the island into a company town while embedding it within the broader geopolitical and economic framework of British imperialism. From its inception, the oil company town of Abadan was conceived as a strategic hub in the British Empire rather than an isolated settlement. Its architecture and infrastructure were designed to standardise spaces, ensuring Abadan’s integration into imperial circuits, in preparation for imperial expansion, powered by oil’s strategic mobility. Two central elements of the project were the reconfiguration of property rights and the cultivation of a spatial imagination that reinforced colonial hierarchies. The result was a racially segregated “island within an island,” where expatriates enjoyed privileged environments while local and non-European labourers were confined to inferior living and working conditions. Drawing on archival materials, including maps, correspondence, and contractual records from British governmental and corporate sources, this paper examines the political, legal, and spatial strategies that shaped Abadan Island and its oil company town between 1908 and the 1930s. It argues that Abadan’s early urban form was a calculated imperial construct, rather than a conventional company town, and thus intended to materially situate a local oil site onto the British imperial map.

Sex differences in the use of spatial strategies in humans: An updated systematic review of the last decade.

From the emergency laws used to suppress resistance in Southern Italy during the country's unification in the mid-nineteenth century to the detention centres in Libya that Italy funds today, confinement has served as a persistent instrument of governance. Yet how carceral institutions produce the very categories that justify their own expansion remains among the least theorised feature. This article introduces the concept of carceral hegemony and its operative mechanism, constitutive power: the capacity of legal technologies, spatial strategies, and epistemic practices to produce the categories of the dangerous, the deviant, and the excludable that carceral governance then claims merely to manage. Drawing on four historical phases of Italian state formation, the article demonstrates that the populations to which carceral power claims to respond are not pre-given facts about the social world but are produced through governance itself. This has a direct implication for reform: interventions that accept those categories as given risk reproducing the very logic they seek to challenge.

Altered perivascular water diffusivity links childhood trauma and major depressive disorder: A multimodal integration of cognition, neuroimaging, and transcriptomics.

An aqueous Zn-ion battery (AZIB), with its safety and cost benefits, is a promising technology for grid-scale energy storage applications. However, side reactions, such as the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), occur synchronously with Zn plating, causing anode irreversibility and constituting a fundamental limitation of AZIBs. Herein, we propose a spatial decoupling strategy, using post-transition metal halide as an electrolyte additive to construct in situ microheterogeneity at the anode interface so as to decouple such synchronicity, promoting Zn plating while silencing the HER with solvating H2O "hopping" to the anchored halide anion. The work function of post-transitional metals and the polarizability of halide anions are key features in constructing such fast Zn2+ conducting channels. As a result, using InBr3 enhances the accumulated capacity of a Zn||Zn cell by 64 times from 0.074 to 4.8 Ah cm-2, the cycle life of a V2O5||Zn battery by 100 times from 10 to >1000 cycles, and the stable capacity of a Mn2V2O7||Zn battery by 70% from 83 to 141 mAh g-1. We further introduce a feature matrix predicting efficient post-transitional metal cation and halide anion combinations to enhance the reversibility of metal deposition-dissolution reactions. This framework can be generalized to advance other battery chemistries both practically and mechanistically.

Understanding root architectural plasticity under water deficit is essential for improving rice drought tolerance. However, whether drought-tolerant and drought-sensitive cultivars differ in qualitative spatial strategies or merely in the magnitude of plastic responses remains unresolved, and conventional destructive phenotyping cannot capture three-dimensional dynamics. We developed WSroots, an L-system-based three-dimensional model, and quantified root development in drought-tolerant HY73 and drought-sensitive Longliangyou Huazhan (LLYHZ) under polyethylene glycol-6000 (PEG6000) osmotic stress at 0, 50, 125 and 200 g kg-1 for 28 days in hydroponic culture. HY73 maintained 25-30% of root length at 35-60 cm depth with only 25.2% total length reduction at 200 g kg-1 PEG6000, whereas LLYHZ concentrated 65-70% of roots in the 0-15 cm surface layer with 39.6% reduction. Root diameter declined less in HY73 (9.3%) than in LLYHZ (14.8%), indicating superior structural resilience. Calibration accuracy reached a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.986 (HY73) and 0.949 (LLYHZ). The two cultivars employ qualitatively distinct strategies - deep exploration versus shallow expansion - rather than quantitative gradients of the same response. Deep-rooting maintenance is therefore a key target for drought-resilient rice breeding. WSroots provides a transferable framework for virtual phenotyping and irrigation design that can be extended to soil-based systems through water potential equivalence. © 2026 Society of Chemical Industry.

ABSTRACT Time perception research emphasizes psychological mechanisms, whereas museum space studies often rely on behavioral indicators, leaving subjective time less directly linked to spatial design. This study asks how interior design decisions and spatial strategies shape visitors’ subjective temporal experience in horological museums beyond circulation efficiency, and whether this pattern holds across the two national contexts of South Korea and China. We test the Chrono-Spatial Experience Model (CSEM) using survey data from two museums in Seoul and Yantai. Exploratory factor analysis identifies four dimensions of indoor temporal experience: spatial rhythm (SR), time efficiency and wayfinding (TEW), temporal recovery and comfort (TRC), and temporal immersion (TI). The two museums show comparable levels of SR and TI but rely on different supports: Polaris exhibits stronger TRC, whereas the Time Museum relies more on TEW. SR is the strongest predictor of TI in both museums; TEW is more predictive in the Time Museum, while Polaris shows higher TRC mainly as a profile difference rather than a TI predictor. The findings suggest that different spatial strategies and wayfinding logic can create similar temporal immersion. This study offers a practical framework linking subjective time to design-relevant variables, with cross-cultural insights for museum design.

The article explores emerging forms of nuclear tourism through a geographical lens, moving beyond the dark tourism paradigm to introduce curated darkness as a framework for understanding how affect, multisensoriality, and performativity shape visitors’ spatial and embodied experiences. Focusing on decommissioned Cold War bunkers in Central and Eastern Europe as layered geopolitical landscapes, the study examines curatorial, spatial, and narrative strategies that construct affective atmospheres of fear – merging memory, spectacle, and territorial imaginaries. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography across four bunker sites located in diverse geopolitical contexts, the paper highlights how multisensory design (darkness, soundscapes, spatial confinement, and tactile cues) mediates visitors’ embodied engagement with catastrophe, survival, and the uncanny. Conceptually, the paper advances curated darkness to capture the performative, affective, and sensory dynamics of heritage landscapes. Analytically, it integrates multisensoriality into geographical approaches to tourism and heritage; methodologically, it demonstrates how collaborative autoethnography can bring important insights into studies of affective tourism environments. By situating post-conflict and post-industrial sites within broader spatial economies of remembrance and spectacle, the study expands dark tourism scholarship and calls for a re-theorization of visitor experience through the geography of affect and curation. Ultimately, it argues that nuclear heritage landscapes are geopolitically charged, multisensory terrains where curatorship, storytelling and affect converge, rendering the experience of history both spatially impressive and politically resonant.

Near-infrared-II (NIR-II) fluorescence imaging offers high contrast and reduced scattering but lacks morphological context, posing challenges for precise pathological localization. Conventional fusion using heterogeneous camera arrays suffers from perspective-induced parallax and registration errors. Here, we present a background-enhanced NIR-II single-pixel imaging system for high-fidelity fluorescent localization and dynamic tracking. By employing a shared spatial encoding strategy with parallel silicon and InGaAs detectors, the system eliminates geometric distortions between background and fluorescence images, enabling precise localization without additional alignment algorithms. To address weak signal intensity in dynamic scenes, we further employed a bowl-shaped detector to enhance light collection efficiency, yielding a ~7-fold signal-to-noise ratio improvement. This enabled dynamic fluorescence tracking at 10 fps (sampling rate = 3.05%) with a physical pixel of 128 × 128. This work proposes what we believe to be a novel NIR-II imaging architecture that achieves precise localization and dynamic tracking of fluorescent signals within an anatomical background, offering a new solution for future surgical navigation.

Habitat and Peritumoral Radiomics with Clinical Variables for Predicting Lymphovascular Invasion in Gastric Cancer: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Both innate superiority and negative frequency-dependent advantage (NFDA) hypotheses have been proposed to explain the left-hander advantage in interactive sports such as fencing. However, empirical evidence on the specific technical and tactical patterns potentially underlying this advantage remains limited. Therefore, this study analyzed match performance of elite female épéeists at the 2017-2019 World Championships using notational analysis. We examined the prevalence and winning rates of left- and right-handed fencers across tournament stages, as well as the distributions of performed and scored actions in terms of technique, target area, and piste zone. Results revealed that left-handers were consistently overrepresented relative to population prevalence, and their winning rates increased up to the semifinals (80%) but matched right-handers in the finals (50%). Technique use was highly consistent across all handedness matchups, with attacks being the most frequent action. While the inner upper body remained the primary target overall, asymmetrical matchups (left-vs.-right and right-vs.-left) were associated with a shift toward the outer upper body and lower body; this pattern was attenuated in left-handers facing left-handers. Crucially, left-handers consistently demonstrated a more invasive spatial strategy across all matchups, showing a greater tendency to operate and score in the opponent's middle zone. Taken together, the left-hander's advantage in elite female épée appears to be underpinned by an interplay between context-dependent target adaptation, aligning with the NFDA account, and a generalized proactive spatial exploitation, as proposed by the innate superiority account.

ABSTRACTMigration patterns in birds are shaped by ecological and physiological constraints that differ between sexes, seasons and among breeding regions, resulting in complex temporal and spatial strategies. Understanding this variation is crucial for revealing how individuals optimise their annual cycles. As very little is known about the individual migratory behaviour of pied avocets (Recurvirostra avosetta), this study investigated how spatiotemporal migration patterns of avocets breeding in northern Europe vary seasonally, sexually, and spatially. We captured 122 adults on their nests in three countries using walk‐in traps and equipped them with lightweight (6–9 g) solar‐powered GPS loggers. Avocets spent an extended post‐breeding period (on average until early November) in the Wadden Sea before commencing autumn migration. While most individuals followed the East Atlantic Flyway, four deviated via an inland route across the Alps to Italian wintering sites. On average, avocets travelled 1503 ± 996 km within 13.3 ± 19.8 days, resulting in a mean migration speed of 470.8 ± 554.0 km day−1. The main wintering range was concentrated in France and Portugal, with the Tejo Estuary being the most frequently used site. Migration tactics differed between seasons and sexes: autumn migration lasted longer and involved fewer but extended stopovers, whereas spring migration was faster, with more but shorter stopovers. Females migrated significantly further (1928 km vs. 1277 km in males) and wintered at more southern latitudes, while males remained longer in the Wadden Sea in autumn and tended to arrive at breeding sites earlier in spring. Avocets breeding in the Wadden Sea tended to winter further south than those from the Baltic Sea (Poland), most of which first moved to the Wadden Sea before continuing migration. Our findings highlight the central role of the Wadden Sea as a key fuelling area in the annual cycle of pied avocets from northern Europe.

The human small intestine (SI) plays a central role in nutrient processing, host–microbe interactions, and immune regulation, yet remains poorly characterized due to the lack of minimally disruptive sampling methods. Here, we present a protocol for deploying, recovering, and analyzing samples collected using an ingestible device that enables multi-region, lumen-targeted SI sampling during normal digestion. The device incorporates a ∼30-cm collapsible tube wound into pH- or time-responsive layers that sequentially unfurlin situ, typically capturing three spatially ordered samples with high yield and reliable retrieval. This protocol outlines study design, participant handling, device recovery, contamination control, and standardized workflows for analyses, including cell quantification, culturomics, sequencing, and metabolomics. We further describe benchmarking approaches for evaluating spatial resolution and strategies for assay prioritization when sample volume is limiting. By reducing participant burden and facilitating integration with stool, saliva, and clinical metadata, this approach enables longitudinal and large-cohort studies linking SI microbial ecology and host physiology to human health.

ABSTRACTEnergy budgets are a fundamental constraint on animal movement, shaping both spatial use and behavioral strategies. When energy is plentiful and risks are low, animals often benefit by investing more in movement. Yet, how movement patterns shift under extreme energetic limitations remains poorly understood. In this study, we used the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), a species with pronounced energetic constraints, as a model to examine movement adaptations under the dual challenges of dietary specialization and very low energy utilization efficiency. We tracked eight reintroduced pandas with global positioning system (GPS) collars over 474 days. Principal component analysis of 10 movement parameters revealed two independent behavioral axes: an Exploration–Exploitation axis (51.48% of variance) and a Tortuosity‐Consistency axis (21.25% of variance). Both axes showed significant initial repeatability (R = 0.16–0.26) that diminished over time and stabilized near 0.2. Notably, initially exploratory individuals gradually reduced their space‐use range, while exploitative individuals maintained more consistent space use, leading to decreased among‐individual variation during the early acclimation period after release. This pattern aligns with the panda's bamboo diet and low energy expenditure reported in previous studies. Building on this, we propose a conceptual “Diet‐Energy Utilization Constraint” hypothesis to guide future research into how dietary specialization and energy efficiency influence movement adaptation post‐release.

ABSTRACT Participatory approaches considering diverse age groups are increasingly recognised as essential for inclusive urban landscape design. Yet, limited research explores how contextual urban features shape design preferences across these groups. To address this gap, this study engages children, young people, middle-aged adults, and older adults in a participatory model‑making co‑design process to examine how adjacent elements, such as schools, health facilities, commercial units, bus stops, and exposure to major roads, affect park design visions. The aim is to investigate how contextual factors influence collaborative park design preferences across different age groups. Findings reveal both shared and age-specific spatial strategies. Seating areas along the edge facing a healthcare centre were favoured across all groups, while young people envisioned an additional café located in a more secluded corner and older participants proposed a health station within the park deliberately distanced from the adjacent clinic. These insights illustrate how contextual urban elements influence users’ spatial imaginations and needs, reflected in two response types: measures addressing surroundings and features engaging adjacent uses. By drawing attention to diverse user groups, the study advocates for inclusive, user-informed, and context-aware landscape design approaches and highlights the potential of incorporating diverse user expectations to enrich urban park design.

Small-sized high-entropy alloy nanoparticles (HEA NPs) have recently emerged as promising candidates for applications in energy and catalysis, owing to their tunable composition, multi-element synergistic effects, and exceptional structural stability. Nevertheless, achieving controlled synthesis of uniformly small HEA NPs remains challenging, as the high temperatures required for solid-solution formation inevitably induce particle sintering. Herein, a spatial confinement strategy combined with rapid microwave heating is developed to synthesize ultrasmall PtRuFeCoNi HEA NPs (sub-5nm) embedded in hierarchically porous carbon nanofibers (PtRuFeCoNi-PCNFs). The spatial confinement effect, attributed to the micro-, meso-, and macropores of the PCNFs, is crucial for the high dispersion of HEA NPs, while also enhancing the exposure of active sites and accelerating mass transport during electrochemical processes. PtRuFeCoNi-PCNFs exhibit superior trifunctional electrocatalytic activity for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), oxygen evolution reaction (OER), and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), with an ORR half-wave potential of 0.837V, and low overpotentials of 270 and 13mV at 10mA cm-2 for OER and HER, respectively. When applied in Zn-air batteries and water splitting electrolyzers, PtRuFeCoNi-PCNFs achieve high efficiency and outstanding durability. This study provides a novel perspective on designing and synthesizing high-performance HEA NPs for energy and catalytic applications.