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Previous research on gender differences in young people's digital development has shown that boys and girls differ in frequency and type of internet use, but vital gaps in the literature remain. In recent years, gender is increasingly considered to be a multidimensional concept with a growing number of young people identifying as non-binary (i.e. genderfluid, an umbrella term for gender identities that are not conforming to the male/female dichotomy). Non-binary youth more frequently engage with a variety of digital risks such as misinformation, cyberbullying, and co-rumination than binary youth. Despite this, no research so far has investigated how digital development differs between non-binary and binary youth. In this online survey study among adolescents in six European countries (N=6,221), we focus on differences in digital skills and digital activities. Non-binary youth tend to make greater use of the internet for content creation and mental and physical health information than boys and girls. They also report greater content creation skills than boys and girls. Disparities in terms of entertainment and social relationship use are also found. Furthermore, findings on digital skills indicate that non-binary youth closely mirror boys in this regard. We conclude with recommendations for future research that should help bolster our understanding of how digital contexts may predict the development and well-being of non-binary youth.

Invocations of solidarity often appear to be merely rhetorical. In contrast, in this essay we seek to show that solidarity can be a potent force for systemic change. We focus on a particular kind of solidarity—experiential solidarity—which is rooted in shared and lived experiences. In doing so, we de-center the role of states as targets and agents of solidarity and foreground the communities that are actively “doing” human rights by fostering bottom-up social change and collective self-actualization. Our approach to solidarity recasts human rights entitlements across spatial, temporal, relational, and intersectional scales and brings different duty-bearing actors to the fore, thereby emphasizing the transformative potential of collective action. Our account bolsters the agency of non-state actors in pursuing rights-based protection of migrants, thereby enabling strategic and forward-looking action in a politically and emotionally charged domain.

Improved RNA virus understanding is critical to studying animal and plant health, and environmental processes. However, the continuous and rapid RNA virus evolution makes their identification and characterization challenging. While recent sequence-based advances have led to extensive RNA virus discovery, there is growing variation in how RNA viruses are identified, analyzed, characterized, and reported. To this end, an RdRp Summit was organized and a hybrid meeting took place in Valencia, Spain in May 2023 to convene leading experts with emphasis on early career researchers (ECRs) across diverse scientific communities. Here we synthesize key insights and recommendations and offer these as a first effort to establish a consensus framework for advancing RNA virus discovery. First, we need interoperability through standardized methodologies, data-sharing protocols, metadata provision and interdisciplinary collaborations and offer specific examples as starting points. Second, as an emergent field, we recognize the need to incorporate cutting-edge technologies and knowledge early and often to improve omic-based viral detection and annotation as novel capabilities reveal new biology. Third, we underscore the significance of ECRs in fostering international partnerships to promote inclusivity and equity in virus discovery efforts. The proposed consensus framework serves as a roadmap for the scientific community to collectively contribute to the tremendous challenge of unveiling the RNA virosphere.

Acid sulfate soils pose significant challenges to rice production due to their negative impact on root development and nutrient uptake, reducing rice yield and quality. The excessive use of fungicides by farmers to control rice diseases has exacerbated the issue, as it contributes to environmental pollution and poses health risks. Our study aimed to isolate indigenous bacteria from rice grown in acid sulfate soils with potential biocontrol activity against common fungal pathogens in Vietnam. Using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, a total of 91 bacterial strains were identified up to the genus level. Bacillaceae were predominant on healthy rice plants, whereas Pseudomonas spp. also occurred on plants infested with the rice blast pathogen Pyricularia oryzae. Genome sequencing, protein orthology, and multilocus sequence analyses revealed the presence of six taxonomic groups of Bacillaceae: Rossellomorea marisflavi (basionym: Bacillus marisflavi), Priestia megaterium (basionym: Bacillus megaterium), Priestia koreensis (basionym: Bacillus koreensis), Bacillus thuringiensis, Bacillus altitudinis, and Bacillus siamensis. Dual-culture assays showed that most strains had antifungal activity against Pyricularia oryzae, Rhizoctonia solani AG2-1, and Bipolaris oryzae, whereas only B. siamensis and two B. thuringiensis strains were active against Rhizoctonia solani AG1-IA. R. marisflavi strains were in general inactive. Genome mining identified various biosynthetic gene clusters associated with specialized metabolite production, some of which were linked to potential antimicrobial activity. Production of these metabolites was confirmed by chemical analysis. These results suggest that indigenous Bacillaceae strains from acid sulfate soils could be used as biocontrol agents for the sustainable management of rice diseases under acidic conditions.

Understanding early school leaving (ESL) remains a key issue on political and academic agendas. Most research focuses on the experiences of young people who intend to leave or have left school early without a qualification from secondary education. In addition, most studies focus on regular secondary schools. We aim to add to this literature by studying how school staff in regular secondary and adult education schools explain ESL, and to understand how both groups' views differ. We also study whether school climate has an effect on the explanations of ESL given by staff. We analysed survey data collected in Flanders (northern part of Belgium) among 780 staff members using exploratory factor analysis and multilevel modelling. Findings indicate that staff in adult education have moderate views on the causes of ESL compared to staff in regular education. Staff in adult education have a strong focus on student-focused explanations for ESL, rather than on contextual or systemic explanations. Future research could delve deeper into the impact of school characteristics, conduct more cross-comparative research and/or include more views on diversity. Policymakers could prioritise the follow-up of ESL, including feedback mechanisms to inform school staff on reasons why individual students decided to leave school early.

Objectives Lateral ankle sprains (LAS) are among the most common injuries in professional football (soccer). Despite this, the severity and possible long-term consequences of LAS remain trivialised. This multicentre observational study in German elite football provides insights into time-loss and recurrence rates after LAS. Time-loss and recurrence rates are outcome measures vital for the future evaluation of rehabilitation protocols.Methods 798 male football players representing 34 teams from 13 professional German football clubs participated in this study during the 2021–2022 season, followed by a 12-month follow-up period. Data collection and reporting were carried out in accordance with the UEFA recommendations for the standardised collection of data on football injuries. Time-loss, recurrence rate and standardised severity grades (I–III) after LAS were recorded for professionals, U23, U19 and U17, respectively.Results A total of 187 ankle injuries were reported, with 115 out of the total being analysed. The overall time-loss was 29.89 days, with significant differences between youth elite players and professionals (32.96 vs 15.53 days lost; p

Smart cities deploy various sensors such as microphones and RGB cameras to collect data to improve the safety and comfort of the citizens. As data annotation is expensive, self-supervised methods such as contrastive learning are used to learn audio-visual representations for downstream tasks. Focusing on surveillance data, we investigate two common limitations of audio-visual contrastive learning: false negatives and the minimal sufficient information bottleneck. Irregular, yet frequently recurring events can lead to a considerable number of false-negative pairs and disrupt the model’s training. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel method for generating contrastive pairs based on the distance between embeddings of different modalities, rather than relying solely on temporal cues. The semantically synchronized pairs can then be used to ease the minimal sufficient information bottleneck along with the new loss function for multiple positives. We experimentally validate our approach on real-world data and show how the learnt representations can be used for different downstream tasks, including audio-visual event localization, anomaly detection, and event search. Our approach reaches similar performance as state-of-the-art modality- and task-specific approaches.

Background: People with single-sided deafness (SSD) or asymmetric hearing loss (AHL) have particular difficulty understanding speech in noisy listening situations and in sound localization. The objective of this multicenter study is to evaluate the effect of a cochlear implant (CI) in adults with single-sided deafness (SSD) or asymmetric hearing loss (AHL), particularly regarding sound localization and speech intelligibility with additional interest in electric-acoustic pitch matching. Methods: A prospective longitudinal study at 7 European tertiary referral centers was conducted including 19 SSD and 16 AHL subjects undergoing cochlear implantation. Sound localization accuracy was investigated in terms of root mean square error and signed bias before and after implantation. Speech recognition in quiet and speech reception thresholds in noise for several spatial configurations were assessed preoperatively and at several post-activation time points. Pitch perception with CI was tracked using pitch matching. Data up to 12 months post activation were collected. Results: In both SSD and AHL subjects, CI significantly improved sound localization for sound sources on the implant side, and thus overall sound localization. Speech recognition in quiet with the implant ear improved significantly. In noise, a significant head shadow effect was found for SSD subjects only. However, the evaluation of AHL subjects was limited by the small sample size. No uniform development of pitch perception with the implant ear was observed. Conclusion: The benefits shown in this study confirm and expand the existing body of evidence for the effectiveness of CI in SSD and AHL. Particularly, improved localization was shown to result from increased localization accuracy on the implant side.

Introduction: Ureteroscopy has become increasingly chosen as a treatment of choice for patients with kidney stone disease and laser as the energy source for stone lithotripsy is a key part of this. Our aim was to analyse a national database to evaluate the burden of adverse events related to laser fibers and laser machines. Methods: Search was performed of the Manufacturer User and Facility Device Experience (MAUDE) database in the United States for all events related to holmium laser fibers and holmium laser machines during ureteroscopy between 2012-2021. Information collected included the following: problem, timing, prolonged anaesthesia, early termination of procedure, injury and retained parts. Results: 699 holmium laser fiber events were reported and these had been manufactured by 13 different companies. The commonest problems were breakage outside the patient while in use (26.3%) and breakage of the laser fiber tip (21.2%). Manufacturers concluded root cause to be device failure in 8.9%. 29% of issues occurred before the laser had been activated. 5.2% of cases had to be cancelled as a result of an event. Significantly more injuries were sustained intra-operatively by operating staff compared to patients (6% vs. 0.2%, p < 0.001). All these injuries were superficial burns to the skin with the hand being the most affected body part (88.1%). Zero ocular injuries were reported. Only eight events were related to laser machines and all involved sudden hardware failure but no patient injury. Conclusions: Laser fibers are fragile. Most adverse events are due to operator error. Direct patient injury from laser fiber is scarce but operating staff should be aware of the risk of sustaining minor burns. Laser machines rarely incur problems and, in this study, did not result in any safety issues beyond need to abort the procedure due to lack of spare equipment.

This exploratory study adopts a mixed-methods approach to examine the dynamics of political communication during refugee crises in German-language X (formerly Twitter), focusing on the Syrian and Ukrainian refugee influxes of September 2015 and March 2022. Using the X API, we collected 551,873 tweets related to the Syrian crisis and 236,034 tweets related to the Ukrainian crisis. The retweet networks associated with both crises were segmented into attitudinal communities by labeling them based on their position toward refugees. These networks were analyzed for polarization, community interactions and activity, influential users, and the dynamic networked framing of the crises. Our social network analysis highlighted that the online anti-refugee community exhibited greater dynamism despite being smaller in size than the pro-refugee community. Elite news media saw a decline in influence, highlighting the lack of intermediary sources between polarized users. While overall networked framing was positive about refugees during both crises, the framing of Ukrainian refugees was more complex and multifaceted. Our results underscore the disrupted state of public discourse on controversial topics and the need to reduce destructive polarization on social media.

We examine the intricate relationship between media usage, personality traits, and perceived threat towards refugees. Using a diverse sample from six European countries (N = 9,085), we explore the moderating impact of Dark Triad traits on television news consumption. Our findings align with prior studies, indicating that public television news consumption is associated with lower perceived threat, while commercial news consumption shows the opposite pattern. These results likely stem from the divergent framing of migration in the media: public outlets emphasize compassion and integration, while commercial outlets lean towards sensationalism and fear-inducing narratives. Additionally, our study uncovers intriguing insights into the Dark Triad traits. While psychopathy is linked to heightened perceived threat, Machiavellianism and narcissism exhibit a negative association. Surprisingly, the positive relationship between commercial news consumption and perceived threat weakens among individuals high in Machiavellianism. These individuals, driven by self-interest and strategic thinking, may view refugees as potential resources rather than threats. Notably, we find no moderation effect of Dark Triad traits on public service news consumption. This suggests that sensationalized content resonates more with individuals high in these traits, while public service news, focusing on diverse perspectives, has a weaker impact on threat perceptions., Author(s): David De Coninck [sup.1] [sup.2] , Manou Swinnen [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.5252.0, 0000 0004 1936 973X, Institute for Pedagogy, Education and Socialization Research, LMU Munich, , Munich, Germany [...]