Browse Articles

In this article, the authors created CuSbS₂ solar cells. They discovered that the cells' efficiency was affected by the formation of MoS₂. By incorporating a layer of single-walled carbon nanotubes, however, they were able to prevent MoS₂ formation and increase the device's efficiency.

Jazz music is a unique American art form that has spread around the world. Iyer and Iyer study this spread through a computational sociology project examining how jazz popularity is correlated with postmaterialism (an ideology that values self-expression) and political activity.

This study investigates skin tone bias in artificial intelligence models used for dermatological disease classification and evaluates a CycleGAN-based data augmentation approach to improve diagnostic performance on darker skin types. We generated synthetic dark-skinned images to enhance dataset diversity and compared model performance before and after augmentation. The results demonstrate that augmentation with synthetic dermatological images can help reduce disparities in diagnostic performance across skin tones, highlighting a practical strategy for improving fairness in dermatology AI systems.

Machine translation remains a challenging area in artificial intelligence, with neural machine translation (NMT) making significant strides over the past decade but still facing hurdles, particularly in translation quality due to the reliance on expensive bilingual training data. This study explores whether large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4, can be effectively adapted for translation tasks and outperform traditional NMT systems.

Physics‑Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a promising way to estimate blood‑flow behavior in arteries, especially near the vessel wall where traditional methods struggle. In this study, students tested how sensor density and placement affect PINN accuracy in modeling carotid artery flow and found that accuracy improves up to a moderate sensor density and depends strongly on how close sensors are placed to the arterial wall. Applying the optimized configuration to a patient‑specific carotid model produced velocity predictions closely matching computational fluid dynamics results, highlighting PINNs’ potential for future personalized cardiovascular assessment.

Here, seeking to identify the risk of coronary artery disease (CAD), a major cause of cardiovascular disease, the authors used Mendelian randomization. With this method they identified several traits such as blood pressure readings, LDL cholesterol and BMI as significant risk factors. While other traits were not found to be significant risk factors.

Phagocytes feed by forming food vacuoles. In this article the authors investigate the extent that exposure of non-nutritional food, such as India Ink, to Tetrahymena pyriformis affects the number of vacuole formation. These studies provide insight to how organisms budget their energy and metabolic processes during an energy shortage.

Wolbachia pipientis (Wolbachia) is a maternally inherited endosymbiotic bacterium that infects over 50% of arthropods, including pillbugs, and acts as a reproductive parasite in the host. In the common terrestrial pillbug Armadillidium vulgare (A. vulgare), Wolbachia alters the sex ratio of offspring through a phenomenon called feminization, where genetic males develop into reproductive females. Previous studies have focused on the presence or absence of Wolbachia as a sex ratio distorter in laboratory cultured and natural populations mainly from sites in Europe and Japan. Our three-year study is the first to evaluate the effects of the Wolbachia sex ratio distorter in cultured A. vulgare offspring in North America. We asked whether Wolbachia bacteria feminize A. vulgare isopod male offspring from infected mothers and if this effect can be detected in F1 offspring by comparing the male/female offspring ratios. If so, the F1 offspring ratio should show a higher number of females than males compared to the offspring of uninfected mothers. Over three years, pillbug offspring were cultured from pregnant A. vulgare females and developed into adults. We determined the Wolbachia status of mothers and counted the ratios of male and female F1 progeny to determine feminization effects. In each year sampled, significantly more female offspring were born to Wolbachia-infected mothers than those from uninfected mothers. These ratio differences suggest that the Wolbachia infection status of mothers directly impacts the A. vulgare population through the production of reproductive feminized males, which in turn provides an advantage for further Wolbachia transmission.

The Aromanian language and culture is quickly declining towards extinction. In this new research article, Ganea and Lascu provide evidence that, although the use of the Aromanian language is less prevalent among younger individuals, participants overwhelming support the preservation of Aromanian language and culture.

Iridescent materials reflect different colored depending on viewing angle. This specific effect can be achieved by biomimetic photonic materials. This project models the quantitative relationship between these material’s coloring and its nanostructure to facilitate personalized design of art materials.