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In bone tissue engineering, various approaches have been investigated to enhance osteogenic regeneration. Previous studies have predominantly employed scaffolds with aligned structures or reduced graphene oxide (RGO) to facilitate bone regeneration. However, current scaffold designs face limitations in combining structural guidance with effective electromagnetic stimulation. Additionally, delivering localized stimulation within scaffolds remains a challenge in maximizing the potential of these materials for bone regeneration. To address these limitations and strengthen previous approaches, this study presents a novel strategy in tissue engineering for enhanced osteogenic differentiation. RGO-incorporated nanofibers (RGO-NFs) were fabricated via electrospinning a 10% polycaprolactone (PCL) solution with RGO concentrations varying. The random fibers were deposited on a planar surface, while the aligned fibers were deposited on a rotating drum. The morphology and orientation of the fibers were confirmed through electron microscopy. X-ray diffraction spectrometry was employed to confirm the integration of RGO and PCL. All groups demonstrated optimal cell adhesion and viability. RGO-NFs exhibited higher osteogenesis-related protein expression than PCL-only scaffolds, further enhanced by pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) application. The application of PEMF stimulation within aligned RGO-NFs presents a potentially more efficient alternative to existing methods, offering a novel, non-invasive therapeutic strategy for bone defect regeneration.

In this study, we introduce a novel cleavage reaction lateral flow assay (LFA) based on pepsin activity against a pepsin-susceptible peptide (PSP) substrate to detect salivary pepsin. Two types of cleavage reaction LFAs, the within-tube and on-strip cleavage reactions, were prepared based on the PSP and pepsin reaction location. In the within-tube cleavage reaction LFA, samples were treated in the microtube within a heating block for 30 min separately and subsequently developed with running buffer in the LFA. For the on-strip cleavage reaction, samples were treated on the reaction zone of the strip within the heating zone of the multifunctional strip cassette for 10 min. After developing the running buffer in the LFA, the assay image was obtained using a universal mobile reader with a multifunctional strip cassette. The within-tube cleavage reaction LFA showed high sensitivity (limit of detection [LOD] 1.9 ng/mL), good specificity, and high reproducibility. This assay exhibited better linearity in the log concentration range of pepsin (4–500 ng/mL) than a commercially available dipstick assay. The on-strip cleavage reaction LFA showed a similar sensitivity (LOD 1.4 ng/mL) to that of the within-tube reaction assay. Therefore, we expect these cleavage reaction LFAs using PSP to be utilized as simple and effective tools to detect salivary pepsin.

Plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a common method for fabricating Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 (HZO) ferroelectric thin films that can be performed using direct-plasma (DP) and remote-plasma (RP) methods. This study proposed co-plasma ALD (CPALD), where DPALD and RPALD are applied simultaneously. HZO films fabricated using this method showed wake-up-free polarization properties, no anti-ferroelectricity, and high fatigue endurance when DPALD and RPALD started simultaneously. To minimize defects in the film that could negatively affect the low polarization properties and fatigue endurance, the direct plasma power was reduced to 75 W. Thus, excellent fatigue endurance for at least 109 cycles was obtained under a high total remanent polarization of 47.3 μC/cm2 and an applied voltage of 2.5 V. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy were used to investigate the mechanisms responsible for these properties. The HZO films fabricated by CPALD contained few lattice defects (such as nonstoichiometric hafnium, nonlattice oxygen, and residual carbon) and no paraelectric phase (m-phase). This was attributed to the low-carbon residuals in the film, as high-energy activated radicals were supplied by the adsorbed precursors during film formation. This facilitated a smooth transition to the o-phase during heat treatment, which possessed ferroelectric properties.

A novel algorithm to extract moving objects from video sequences is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm employs a flashing system to obtain an alternate series of lit and unlit frames from a single camera. For each unlit frame, the proposed algorithm synthesizes the corresponding lit frame using a motion-compensated interpolation scheme. Then, by comparing the unlit frame with the lit frame, we construct the sensitivity map, which provides depth cues. In addition to the sensitivity term, color, coherence, and smoothness terms are employed to define an energy function, which is minimized to yield segmentation results. Moreover, we develop a faster version of the proposed algorithm, which reduces the computational complexity significantly at the cost of slight performance degradation. Experiments on various test sequences show that the proposed algorithm provides high-quality segmentation results.

Deepfake (DF) involves utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) technology to synthesize or manipulate images, voices, and other human or object data. However, recent times have seen a surge in instances of DF technology misuse, raising concerns about cybercrime and the credibility of manipulated information. The objective of this study is to devise a method that employs remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) biosignals for DF detection. The face was divided into five regions based on landmarks, with automatic extraction performed on the neck region. We conducted rPPG signal extraction from each facial area and the neck region was defined as the ground truth. The five signals extracted from the face were used as inputs to an support vector machine (SVM) model by calculating the euclidean distance between each signal and the signal extracted from the neck region, measuring rPPG signal similarity with five features. Our approach demonstrated robust performance with an area under the curve (AUC) score of 91.2% on the audio-driven dataset and 99.7% on the face swapping generative adversarial network (FSGAN) dataset, even though we only used datasets excluding DF techniques that can be visually identified in Korean DF Detection Dataset (KoDF). Therefore, our research findings demonstrate that similarity features of rPPG signals can be utilized as key features for detecting DFs.

Ten years ago, in an article for The Christian Century, theologian Jonathan Tran heralded the work of three black theologians J. Kameron Carter, Willie J. Jennings, and Brian Bantum as inaugurating a “new black theology.” According to Tran, these three thinkers represented “ a major theological shift that [would] if taken as seriously as it deserve[d] change the face not only of black theol ogy but theology as a whole.” Now that ten years have passed, this paper asks: Has it? And arguing that it has not, I offer reflections on why it has not. At the center of my argument will be a critique of the way Carter and Bantum offered their revised un derstanding of racial identity and hybridity by reimagining the identity Jesus through mulatto/a bodies and persons. This, I will claim, is a dead end. It is a project that fails to do the very thing it sets out to do, and ultimately, collapses in on itsel f. My aim in making this critique is less refutation and more redirection. More specifically, I will hope to resolve some of the problematic impulses in their appeal to mulatto identity, and in so doing, clear the way for a new direction in Black Theology.