Relationship between shyness in children and constricted cognitive control as measured by the Stroop Color-Word Test.

103 4th and 5th graders, rated as either shy or nonshy by their teachers, were administered the Stroop Color-Word Test. Results support the hypothesis that shy Ss would have slower reading rates, which indicates high interference proneness (constricted control), whereas nonshy Ss would have more rapid reading rate, which indicates low interference proneness (flexible control). To determine if the procedures for identifying shy Ss also inadvertently differentiated Ss on cognitive skills (verbal ability), and not simply cognitive styles, a subsample of 32 Ss were administered the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT). Results indicate no significant difference between shy and nonshy Ss' group mean stanine scores on the language section of the SAT. Final classroom grades in reading, spelling, and English were also calculated for these 2 groups. Results indicate that the GPA of the shy group exceeded the GPA of their nonshy peers; however, differences were not significant. It appears, therefore, that the results were not confounded by differences in language ability or academic achievement and that these variables do not account for the distractibility findings. Results support the assumption that shy children are unable to maintain effective performance in the presence of interfering or distracting stimuli. (12 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interactions of Fullerene‐Polyglycerol Sulfates at Viral and Cellular Interfaces

Understanding the mechanism of interactions of nanomaterials at biointerfaces is a crucial issue to develop new antimicrobial vectors. In this work, a series of water‐soluble fullerene‐polyglycerol sulfates (FPS) with different fullerene/polymer weight ratios and varying numbers of polyglycerol sulfate branches are synthesized, characterized, and their interactions with two distinct surfaces displaying proteins involved in target cell recognition are investigated. The combination of polyanionic branches with a solvent exposed variable hydrophobic core in FPS proves to be superior to analogs possessing only one of these features in preventing interaction of vesicular stomatitis virus coat glycoprotein (VSV‐G) with baby hamster kidney cells serving as a model of host cell. Interference with L‐selectin‐ligand binding is dominated by the negative charge, which is studied by two assays: a competitive surface plasmon resonance (SPR)‐based inhibition assay and the leukocyte cell (NALM‐6) rolling on ligands under flow conditions. Due to possible intrinsic hydrophobic and electrostatic effects of synthesized compounds, pico‐ to nanomolar half maximal inhibitory concentrations (IC₅₀) are achieved. With their highly antiviral and anti‐inflammatory properties, together with good biocompatibility, FPS are promising candidates for the future development towards biomedical applications.     

A Parametric Study of the Vacuum Arc Remelting (VAR) Process: Effects of Arc Radius,Side-Arcing,and Gas Cooling

Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B - Main modeling challenges for vacuum arc remelting (VAR) are briefly highlighted concerning various involving phenomena during the process such as...     

New insights into tricalcium silicate hydration in paste

The knowledge of the aqueous phase composition during the hydration of tricalcium silicate (C₃S) is a key issue for the understanding of cement hydration. A new in situ method of computing calcium ion concentration from the measurement of the electrical conductivity on paste was coupled to isothermal calorimetry and BET measurements to get new insights on the early hydration of C₃S. Ion concentrations of the aqueous phase are mainly dependent on the degree of hydration and the water to C₃S ratio. In the case of C₃S paste, the calcium and silicon concentrations determined at low degrees of hydration can be related to the equilibrium curve of C-S-H having C/S = 1.27 and named C_1.27SH_y. It is expected that C_1.27SH_y thermodynamically controls the aqueous phase composition at this early stage. Indeed, the formation of C_1.27SH_y is quasi-immediate when C₃S is in contact with water inducing a very rapid increase of the specific surface area that remains constant during the induction period. At higher degrees of hydration, the aqueous phase composition departs from the C_1.27SH_y equilibrium curve. C_1.27SH_y appears to be a metastable C-S-H that could be related to an intermediate phase previously reported. The quasi-immediate precipitation of C_1.27SH_y on C₃S surface explains why calcium and silicon concentrations remain low during early hydration even though C₃S is strongly undersaturated. This also agrees with the control of the end of the induction period by the nucleation and growth of more stable C-S-H.     

Sialyl-LacNAc-PNA⋅DNA Concatamers by Rolling-Circle Amplification as Multivalent Inhibitors of Influenza A Virus Particles

The surfaces of influenza A virus (IAV) particles are packed with hundreds of homo-trimeric hemagglutinins (HAs). Monovalent sugars have low affinity for HA, but distance-optimized bivalent sialyl-LacNAc (SLN) conjugates bind it with 10³-fold enhanced potency. Herein, we describe the oligomerization of distance-optimized bivalent binders by branched and linear hybridization on long repetitive DNA templates. The most effective complexes fully inhibited IAVs at a DNA template concentration of 10⁻⁹ m . Although a 10⁻² m concentration of free trisaccharide ligand is required for full inhibition of the virus, DNA templating enables a 10⁴-fold reduction in the amount of sugar required. Notably, hybridization-induced rigidification of the DNA templates increased the serospecificity. Cryo-TEM analysis revealed that both spaghetti-type linear forms and cotton-ball-like clusters are able to bridge several adjacent HA molecules on the IAV surface. Programmed self-assembly of ligand–nucleic acid conjugates on long DNA templates might provide generic access to target-specific, high-affinity binders of proteins on globular objects such as cells and viruses.     

Semantic segmentation of corrosive critical designs in body-in-white structures for corrosion simulation

Scaling finite element method (FEM) based corrosion simulations to whole body-in-white structures lead to extremely high computational costs. As corrosion only appears in corrosive critical areas, the FEM is restricted to these. The objective is a semantic segmentation of corrosive critical designs, which are part edges and flanges in body-in-white structures. Different deterministic as well as Machine Learning and Deep Learning approaches are proposed and compared with respect to their ability to segment critical designs based on the geometry and the spatial relations of the parts only. The deterministic edge detection provides a fast and highly accurate way to segment part edges, whereas the described deterministic flange detection is not suitable for capturing the full diversity of flange structures. As the feature-based Machine Learning approach evaluates more properties in a more flexible way, the performance of the flange detection is significantly increased and even the edge segmentation obtains slightly better results. The evaluation of graph structures with a Geometric Deep Learning method fails as the train set is too small to sufficiently represent the complex and various structures in the test set.