Abstract Prolonged association between mothers and their offspring is common in ungulates, with the level of maternal investment likely to play a central role in shaping this trait. Here we examined patterns of association between mothers and offspring over time, the apparent benefits of association to offspring, and costs to mothers. We analyzed 40 years’ worth of census data from an individually-monitored, food-limited population of red deer ( Cervus elaphus ) on the Isle of Rum, Scotland. Starting from birth, female calves associated more frequently with their mothers than male calves in their first year. Calves also associated less with their mothers if the mother did not conceive a new calf. Association frequency decreased with mother’s age and population density, and survival over the first year was not related to mother-calf association. Yearlings, now in their second year, were more often associated with their mothers if they were female, if there was no subsequent calf (or the subsequent calf died as a neonate), and if they were still being suckled. Increased association between mothers and yearlings was associated with increased survival to adulthood at 28 months, but suckling a yearling did not improve its probability of survival. For individuals that reached maturity, increased association in the yearling year was associated with slightly shorter adult life spans. The level of association between a calf and mother was not associated with the mother’s immediate survival or fecundity. Our findings suggest that juveniles born to poor-condition mothers benefit from prolonged association through improved yearling survival.

Mild and low alloy steels are used extensively for off-shore structures and for ship construction as well as for sheet piling and harbour-side facilities. Despite more than 60 years of effort, and some quite extensive, long term experimental test programs, the precise understanding of the mechanics of the marine corrosion of these steels and the influences of the various factors which are now known to be important has been slow to develop and, in the context of mathematical formulation, have been neglected by material scientists/engineers. The various factors of importance in marine corrosion and the models which have been proposed to describe time-dependent material loss as a function of time are reviewed.

Damped and driven oscillators are generally modeled with a nonautonomous second-order nonlinear ordinary differential equation including a sinusoidal driving forcing term, such as the forced Duffing equation and the forced Holmes–Rand equation. These equations have been extensively studied during the last century and the last two decades. In the early 1990s, Abarbanel, Rabinovich and Sushchik proposed replacing the sinusoidal forcing term with a “force controlled by the movements of the oscillator itself”, i.e. by the product of two variables: the first being the solution of the oscillator itself, while the second is the solution of a first-order nonlinear ordinary differential equation. They referred to the resulting autonomous dynamical system of two coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations as a “controlled nonlinear oscillator”. To that end, they introduced a change of variables and parameters to transform the “controlled nonlinear oscillator” that corresponds to a particular case of the forced Duffing equation into the Lorenz system. The aim of this work is to show that their idea can be further generalized and applied to many other dynamical systems, including the forced Holmes–Rand equation, Chua’s cubic circuit, Chen’s system and the forced Helmholtz oscillator. It is proved that a certain class of three-dimensional dynamical systems can be rewritten into the form of “generalized controlled nonlinear oscillators”, which can then be transformed into various Lorenz-like systems. Such a transformation could be very useful for the study of intermittent chaos.

Handheld paradigms offer an efficient and intuitive way for collecting large-scale demonstration of robot manipulation. However, achieving contact-rich bimanual manipulation through these methods remains a pivotal challenge, which is substantially hindered by hardware adaptability and data efficacy. Prior hardware designs remain gripper-specific and often face a trade-off between tracking precision and portability. Furthermore, the lack of online feasibility checking during demonstration leads to poor replayability. More importantly, existing handheld setups struggle to collect interactive recovery data during robot execution, lacking the authentic tactile information necessary for robust policy refinement. To bridge these gaps, we present TAMEn, a tactile-aware manipulation engine for closed-loop data collection in contact-rich tasks. Our system features a cross-morphology wearable interface that enables rapid adaptation across heterogeneous grippers. To balance data quality and environmental diversity, we implement a dual-modal acquisition pipeline: a precision mode leveraging motion capture for high-fidelity demonstrations, and a portable mode utilizing VR-based tracking for in-the-wild acquisition and tactile-visualized recovery teleoperation. Building on this hardware, we unify large-scale tactile pretraining, task-specific bimanual demonstrations, and human-in-the-loop recovery data into a pyramid-structured data regime, enabling closed-loop policy refinement. Experiments show that our feasibility-aware pipeline significantly improves demonstration replayability, and that the proposed visuo-tactile learning framework increases task success rates from 34% to 75% across diverse bimanual manipulation tasks. We further open-source the hardware and dataset to facilitate reproducibility and support research in visuo-tactile manipulation.

Abstract Through-wall pitting is the most common failure mode of concern for high-pressure pipelines as used in the oil and gas industry, both offshore and onshore, potentially allowing loss of containment and environmental pollution. Pipe burst under pressure is also of concern, particularly in high-safety class pipelines. Semiempirical models for predicting pipeline burst capacity vary in their fidelity. Mostly, this has been estimated by benchmarking burst capacity prediction models of undefined conservatism against burst pressure derived from finite element analysis (FEA) of steel pipes with wall defects, such as those caused by corrosion. The most recent of these comparative assessments is reviewed herein, and areas of concern are noted. This is followed by a statistical analysis for performance assessment of several burst capacity models, by comparing their predictions against FEA-generated data, for which both the modeling and the input data appear to have been correctly applied. The results of the analyses allow a more accurate ranking of burst capacity models, considering both predicted mean values and estimates of variability, and provide a basis for making logically consistent comparisons. They also form a basis for the application of safety factors to provide measures of the relative probability of pressure pipe bursts.

Abstract Background and Aims: Atezolizumab (anti-PDL1) plus bevacizumab (anti-VEGFA) (atezo+bev) is one first-line standard-of-care (SOC) treatment for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (aHCC) with objective responses in ∼30% of cases. Clinical benefit is hindered in non-viral HCC, including metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH)-related cases, a raising HCC etiology. MASH-HCC tumors are enriched in TGFß signaling, which has been associated with resistance to atezo+bev. The bioavailability and the Treg-related immunosuppressive effect of the TGFß1 ligand is controlled by the TGFβ-anchoring receptor GARP. Hence, we hypothesize that GARP blockade might revert immune suppression and overcome resistance to aPDL1+aVEGF (SOC) in MASH-HCC. Method: We used an immune-genetic MASH-HCC model that combines diet-induced steatohepatitis with MYC and CTNNB1 overexpression (via hydrodynamic gene delivery), previously shown to drive atezo+bev resistance. After tumor onset, animals were treated with SOC+anti-GARP (triple combination), SOC alone or placebo until the end of the study. Spectral cytometry was conducted at day 14 to assess changes in the tumor microenvironment (n=5/arm). Remaining animals were followed for overall survival (OS) analysis (n=7/arm). GARP expression was correlated with molecular/immune features in three independent cohorts of HCC patients (n=559). Results: SOC+anti-GARP significantly extended OS compared to placebo (median of 68 vs 59 days, p=0.045), as opposed to SOC alone (p=0.21). From the immune perspective, the triple combination induced a shift from central memory (CD62L+CD127+) to tumor-resident (CD62L-CD69+) CD8+ T cells (p=0.031) accompanied by an increase in total CD8+ (p=0.0028) and CD4+ (p=0.016) T cells compared to placebo, suggesting a more locally active T-cell response. Accordingly, tumors from SOC+anti-GARP-treated mice presented increased infiltration of both effector (CD44+PD1+TIM3-) (p=0.036) and exhausted (PD1+TIM3+) CD8+ T cells (p=0.007). Among CD4+ T cells, the triple combination also increased antigen-experienced CD44+ (p=0.045) and showed a trend of the ratio between tissue-resident memory (CD69+CD103+) and Tregs (CD25+FOXP3+) (p=0.053) when compared to the rest. None of these changes were observed with SOC alone. In HCC patients, high GARP expression significantly correlated with immune exhaustion (fold-change vs rest >1.5 in 87% of cases), with an increase of Treg infiltration compared with other patients, highlighting a subset of patients that may benefit from this combination. Conclusions: Our findings highlight GARP as a promising therapeutic target whose blockade restores antitumor immune infiltration and extends survival OS when added to SOC in an immunotherapy-resistant murine model of MASH-HCC. Citation Format: Julia Huguet-Pradell, David Camell-Raventos, Elisa Fernández-Martínez, Anthony Lozano, Tiago de Castro, Marcus Zeitlhoefler, Ugne Balaseviciute, Albert Gris-Oliver, Daniela Sia, Roser Pinyol, Josep M Llovet. Anti-GARP reverts immune suppression and extends overall survival in a MASH-HCC murine model resistant to anti-PDL1+anti-VEGFA therapy [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2026; Part 2 (Late-Breaking, Clinical Trial, and Invited Abstracts); 2026 Apr 17-22; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2026;86(8_Suppl):Abstract nr LB154.

DNA extraction and determination of telomere lengths

Handheld paradigms offer an efficient and intuitive way for collecting large-scale demonstration of robot manipulation. However, achieving contact-rich bimanual manipulation through these methods remains a pivotal challenge, which is substantially hindered by hardware adaptability and data efficacy. Prior hardware designs remain gripper-specific and often face a trade-off between tracking precision and portability. Furthermore, the lack of online feasibility checking during demonstration leads to poor replayability. More importantly, existing handheld setups struggle to collect interactive recovery data during robot execution, lacking the authentic tactile information necessary for robust policy refinement. To bridge these gaps, we present TAMEn, a tactile-aware manipulation engine for closed-loop data collection in contact-rich tasks. Our system features a cross-morphology wearable interface that enables rapid adaptation across heterogeneous grippers. To balance data quality and environmental diversity, we implement a dual-modal acquisition pipeline: a precision mode leveraging motion capture for high-fidelity demonstrations, and a portable mode utilizing VR-based tracking for in-the-wild acquisition and tactile-visualized recovery teleoperation. Building on this hardware, we unify large-scale tactile pretraining, task-specific bimanual demonstrations, and human-in-the-loop recovery data into a pyramid-structured data regime, enabling closed-loop policy refinement. Experiments show that our feasibility-aware pipeline significantly improves demonstration replayability, and that the proposed visuo-tactile learning framework increases task success rates from 34% to 75% across diverse bimanual manipulation tasks. We further open-source the hardware and dataset to facilitate reproducibility and support research in visuo-tactile manipulation.

larvae can quickly ascend tubular surfaces via rolling, a capability not yet replicated by soft robots. Here, we present a single-piece soft robot capable of rolling along tubular structures by sequentially actuating its built-in axial muscles. We reveal that the sequential actuation generates distributed spinning torques along the robot's curved axis, enabling continuous non-coaxial rolling-distinct from current gravity-dependent rolling solutions. This non-coaxial rolling mechanism allows the robot to swiftly navigate tubular surfaces while conforming to their shapes and maintaining a stable grip. The robot's deformation and gripping force are actively adjusted to enhance its adaptability to various surfaces. We demonstrate that our robot can ascend pipes with varying geometries (e.g., varying-diameter, spiral-shaped, or non-cylindrical), traverse diverse terrains, pass through confined tunnels, and transition smoothly between planar rolling and pipe climbing. The robot's great adaptability and rapid movement underscore its potential for navigating scenarios with intricate surface geometries.