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1. Losing Focus: The Brain Speaks

   Baraty, Damian (October 2018, RET: Leveraging our Collective Impact)

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2. Winning the Battle, Losing the War

   https://doi.org/10.5840/tpm20208941  

   Jenkins, Ryan (January 2020, The Philosophers' Magazine)
3. Losing flow in free‐flowing Mediterranean‐climate streams

   https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2737  

   Carlson, Stephanie M; Ruhí, Albert; Bogan, Michael T; Hazard, Cleo Wölfle; Ayers, Jessica; Grantham, Theodore E; Batalla, Ramon J; Garcia, Celso (June 2024, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment)

   Stream drying is happening globally, with important ecological and social consequences. Most examples of stream drying come from systems influenced by dam operations or those with highly exploited aquifers. Stream drying is also thought to be driven by anthropogenic climate change; however, examples are surprisingly limited. We explored flow trends from the five recognized Mediterranean‐climate regions of the world with a focus on unregulated (non‐dammed or non‐diverted) streams with long‐term gauge records. We found consistent evidence of decreasing discharge trends, increasing zero‐flow days, and steeper downward discharge trends in smaller basins. Beyond directional trends, many systems have recently undergone shifts in flow state, including some streams that have transitioned from perennial to intermittent flow states. Our analyses provide evidence of stream drying consistent with climate change but also highlight knowledge gaps and challenges in empirically and statistically documenting flow regime shifts. We discuss the myriad consequences of losing flow and propose strategies for improving detection of and adapting to flow change. 

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4. Winning or losing: Children’s proportional reasoning across motivational contexts

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2023.101390  

   Hamamouche, Karina; Cordes, Sara (October 2023, Cognitive Development)
5. Losing Focus: Can It Be Useful in Robotic Laser Surgery?

   https://doi.org/10.31256/HSMR2023.68  

   Pacheco, Nicholas; Garje, Yash; Rohra, Aakash; Fichera, Loris (June 2023, THE HAMLYN SYMPOSIUM ON MEDICAL ROBOTICS)

   Lasers are an essential tool in modern medical practice, and their applications span a wide spectrum of specialties. In laryngeal microsurgery, lasers are frequently used to excise tumors from the vocal folds [1]. Several research groups have recently developed robotic systems for these procedures [2-4], with the goal of providing enhanced laser aiming and cutting precision. Within this area of research, one of the problems that has received considerable attention is the automatic control of the laser focus. Briefly, laser focusing refers to the process of optically adjusting a laser beam so that it is concentrated in a small, well-defined spot – see Fig. 1. In surgical applications, tight laser focusing is desirable to maximize cutting efficiency and precision; yet, focusing can be hard to perform manually, as even slight variations (< 1 mm) in the focal distance can significantly affect the spot size. Motivated by these challenges, Kundrat and Schoob [3] recently introduced a technique to robotically maintain constant focal distance, thus enabling accurate, consistent cutting. In another study, Geraldes et al. [4] developed an automatic focus control system based on a miniaturized varifocal mirror, and they obtained spot sizes as small as 380 μm for a CO2 laser beam. Whereas previous work has mainly dealt with the problem of creating – and maintaining – small laser spots, in this paper we propose to study the utility of defocusing surgical lasers. In clinical practice, physicians defocus a laser beam whenever they wish to change its effect from cutting to heating – e.g., to thermally seal a blood vessel [5]. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work has studied the problem of robotically regulating the laser focus to achieve controlled tissue heating, which is precisely the contribution of the present manuscript. In the following sections, we first briefly review the dynamics of thermal laser-tissue interactions and then propose a controller capable of heating tissue according to a prescribed temperature profile. Laser-tissue interactions are generally considered hard to control due to the inherent inhomogeneity of biological tissue [6], which can create significant variability in its thermal response to laser irradiation. In this paper, we use methods from nonlinear control theory to synthesize a temperature controller capable of working on virtually any tissue type without any prior knowledge of its physical properties. 

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