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Substituting the central proline residue in a collagen mimetic peptide with δ-oxaproline affords a faster-folding analogue with equivalent triple helix stability. 

ABSTRACT Numerous management methods are deployed to try to mitigate the destructive impact of weedy and invasive populations. Yet, such management practices may cause these populations to inadvertently evolve in ways that have consequence on their invasiveness. To test this idea, we conducted a two‐step field mesocosm experiment; we evolved genetically diverse populations of the duckweedLemna minorto targeted removal management and then tested the impact of that evolution in replicated invasions into experimental resident communities. We found that evolution in response to management increased invasiveness compared to populations evolved without management. This evolution in response to management had little effect on the impact of the invader on the resident species. These results illustrate the potential eco‐evolutionary consequences of management practices. Mitigating evolution to physical removal, in addition to pesticides, may be important to the long‐term success of integrated pest management. 

Designing robots to support high-stakes teamwork in emergency settings presents unique challenges, including seamless integration into fast-paced environments, facilitating effective communication among team members, and adapting to rapidly changing situations. While teleoperated robots have been successfully used in high-stakes domains such as frefght- ing and space exploration, autonomous robots that aid high- stakes teamwork remain underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a rapid prototyping process to develop a series of seemingly autonomous robots designed to assist clinical teams in the Emergency Room. We transformed a standard crash cart—which stores medical equipment and emergency supplies into a medical robotic crash cart (MCCR). The MCCR was evaluated through feld deployments to assess its impact on team workload and usability, identifed taxonomies of failure, and refned the MCCR in collaboration with healthcare professionals. Our work advances the understanding of robot design for high-stakes, time-sensitive settings, providing insights into useful MCCR capabilities and considerations for effective human-robot collaboration. By publicly disseminating our MCCR tutorial, we hope to encourage HRI researchers to explore the design of robots for high-stakes teamwork. 

Cybersickness – discomfort caused by virtual reality (VR) – remains a significant problem that negatively affects the user experience. Research on individual differences in cybersickness has typically focused on overall sickness intensity, but a detailed understanding should include whether individuals differ in the relative intensity of cybersickness symptoms. This study used latent profile analysis (LPA) to explore whether there exist groups of individuals who experience common patterns of cybersickness symptoms. Participants played a VR game for up to 20 min. LPA indicated three groups with low, medium, and high overall cybersickness. Further, there were similarities and differences in relative patterns of nausea, disorientation, and oculomotor symptoms between groups. Disorientation was lower than nausea and oculomotor symptoms for all three groups. Nausea and oculomotor were experienced at similar levels within the high and low sickness groups, but the medium sickness group experienced more nausea than oculomotor. Characteristics of group members varied across groups, including gender, virtual reality experience, video game experience, and history of motion sickness. These findings identify distinct individual experiences in symptomology that go beyond overall sickness intensity, which could enable future interventions that target certain groups of individuals and specific symptoms. 

Synopsis Evolutionary increases in genome size, cell volume, and nuclear volume have been observed across the tree of life, with positive correlations documented between all three traits. Developmental tempo slows as genomes, nuclei, and cells increase in size, yet the driving mechanisms are poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we use a mathematical model of the somitogenesis clock to link slowed developmental tempo with changes in intra-cellular gene expression kinetics induced by increasing genome size and nuclear volume. We adapt a well-known somitogenesis clock model to two model amphibian species that vary 10-fold in genome size: Xenopus laevis (3.1 Gb) and Ambystoma mexicanum (32 Gb). Based on simulations and backed by analytical derivations, we identify parameter changes originating from increased genome and nuclear size that slow gene expression kinetics. We simulate biological scenarios for which these parameter changes mathematically recapitulate slowed gene expression in A. mexicanum relative to X. laevis, and we consider scenarios for which additional alterations in gene product stability and chromatin packing are necessary. Results suggest that slowed degradation rates as well as changes induced by increasing nuclear volume and intron length, which remain relatively unexplored, are significant drivers of slowed developmental tempo. 

Clean and renewable energy development is becoming frontier research for future energy resources, as renewable energy offers sustainable and environmentally friendly alternatives to non-renewable sources such as fossil fuels. Among various renewable energy sources, tremendous progress has been made in converting solar energy to electric energy by developing efficient organic photovoltaics. Organic photovoltaic materials comprising conjugated polymers (CP) with narrow optical energy gaps are promising candidates for developing sustainable sources due to their potentially lower manufacturing costs. Organic semiconductor materials with a high electron affinity are required for many optoelectronic applications. We have designed a series of organic semiconductors comprised of cyclopentadithiophene as a donor and thiadiazoloquinoxaline (TQ) as an acceptor, varying the π-conjugation and TQ-derivatives. We have employed density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent DFT (TDDFT) to evaluate the designed CP’s optoelectronic properties, such as optical energy gap, dipole moment, and absorption spectra. Our DFT/TDDFT result shows that the energy gap of CPs is lowered and redshifted in the absorption spectra if there is no insertion of conjugation units such as thiophene and selenophene between donor and acceptor. In addition, selenophene shows relatively better redshift behavior compared to thiophene. Our work also provides rational insight into designing donor/acceptor-based CPs for organic solar cells. 

Abstract Heterogeneity in brain activity can give rise to heterogeneity in behavior, which in turn comprises our distinctive characteristics as individuals. Studying the path from brain to behavior, however, often requires making assumptions about how similarity in behavior scales with similarity in brain activity. Here, we expand upon recent work (Finn et al., 2020) which proposes a theoretical framework for testing the validity of such assumptions. Using intersubject representational similarity analysis in two independent movie-watching functional MRI (fMRI) datasets, we probe how brain-behavior relationships vary as a function of behavioral domain and participant sample. We find evidence that, in some cases, the neural similarity of two individuals is not correlated with behavioral similarity. Rather, individuals with higher behavioral scores are more similar to other high scorers whereas individuals with lower behavioral scores are dissimilar from everyone else. Ultimately, our findings motivate a more extensive investigation of both the structure of brain-behavior relationships and the tacit assumption that people who behave similarly will demonstrate shared patterns of brain activity.