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Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of an 8-week proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) stretching in relieving pain and balancing knee loading during stepping over obstacles among older people with knee osteoarthritis, and further explore the improvements in gait patterns. Design: Thirty-two older adults (66~72 years) with KOA were recruited and randomly assigned into PNF or control groups. They received PNF stretching or health lecture series for 8 weeks. Final data analyses were conducted among 13 participants in the PNF and 14 in the control groups. At weeks 0 and 9, they were asked to step over an obstacle of 20% of their leg length. The pain scores and knee abduction moment (KAM) (primary outcomes) were analyzed by multivariate ANOVA, and the gait variables (secondary outcomes) were analyzed by two-way (group by pre-/post) ANOVAs with repeated measures. Results: Significant interactions were detected in the pain score, first and second peaks of KAM, and crossing velocity during stepping over obstacles, and significant between-group differences of these outcomes were detected at week 9. Conclusion: An 8-week PNF stretching could relieve pain and balance loading between knee compartments, as well as increase crossing velocity during stepping over obstacles. Trial registration: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry: ChiCTR2100042278. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehensive Summary: Stimulus‐sensitive surfaces with tunable morphologies exhibit a wide range of applications in the fields of surface science and engineering. Herein, a cost‐effective yet practical strategy is proposed to fabricate photo‐sensitive patterning surface on film/substrate wrinkle system based on an azo‐containing polyblend. By manipulating the stress field of the bilayer system globally and/or locally upon the stress relaxation triggered by the reversible cis‐trans isomerization of the azobenzene, heating/cooling triggered surface wrinkles on the polyblend films could be tailor‐made with visible‐light‐irradiation. Notably, upon selective photo‐irradiation, bespoke surface patterns may be cyclically generated or eliminated, allowing these reconfigurable patterned polyblend surfaces to be used as rewritable information storage media for non‐ink printing. The as‐prepared photo‐printed information patterns with high‐resolution are shown to be rewritable for multiple cycles and legible for over 90 d in dark ambient conditions. This study not only provides a versatile strategy for flourishing the stimulus‐sensitive systems, but also sheds light on the stress relaxation‐triggered morphological evolution of the wrinkling polyblend films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Password guessing is an important issue in user security and privacy protection. Using generative adversarial network (GAN) to guess passwords is a new strategy emerging in recent years, which exploits the discriminator's evaluation of passwords to guide the update of the generator so that password guessing sets can be produced. However, the sampling process of discrete data from a categorical distribution is not differentiable so that backpropagation does not work well. In this paper, we propose a novel password guessing model named G-Pass, which consists of two main components. The first is a new network structure, which modifies the generator from the convolutional neural network (CNN) to long short-term memory- (LSTM-) based network and employs multiple convolutional layers in the discriminator to provide more informative signals for generator updating. The second is Gumbel-Softmax with temperature control for training GAN on passwords. Experimental results show the proposed G-Pass outperforms PassGAN in password quality and cracking rate. Moreover, by dynamically adjusting one parameter during the training process, a trade-off between sample diversity and quality can be achieved with our proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the outbreak of e-mail message leakage events, such as the Hillary Clinton’s Email Controversy, privacy and security of sensitive e-mail information have become users’ primary concern. Encrypted email seems to be a viable solution for providing security, but it will greatly limit their operations. Public encryption with keyword search (PEKS) scheme is a popular technology to incorporate security protection and favorable operability functions together, which can play an important role in searching over encrypted email in a cloud server. In this paper, we propose a practical PEKS scheme named as public-key multi-keyword searchable encryption with hidden structures (PMSEHS). It could enable e-mail receivers to do the multi-keyword and boolean search in the large encrypted email database as fast as possible, without revealing more information to the cloud server. We also give comparative experiments, which demonstrate that our scheme has a higher efficiency in multi-keyword search for encrypted emails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stimulus-sensitive materials are of great fascination in surface and interface science owing to their dynamically tunable surface properties and/or morphologies. Herein, we have synthesized an azobenzene-containing polyimide (azo-PI) with enhanced chain flexibility for the fabrication of photosensitive surface patterns on a film/substrate wrinkle system or wrinkle-free devices. The phototriggered cis-trans isomerization kinetics of azobenzene groups in the novel azo-PI with various chain structures were systematically investigated. On the basis of the characteristics of stress relaxation that azobenzene reversible cis-trans isomerization induces in the wrinkled azo-PI film/substrate system, a variety of rewritable visual surface patterns with high resolution and a long legibility time (>30 days) could be easily constructed via visible-light irradiation, enabling the wrinkled azo-PI surfaces to be used as rewritable information storage media. Meanwhile, because of the visible-light irradiation strategy, these photoresponsive surfaces could find potential application in the fabrication of wrinkle-free flexible devices. This study not only sheds light on the influence of the azo-polymer chain structure on its photoresponsive behavior but also provides a versatile strategy for realizing tailor-made smart surface patterns on multilayer functional devices.