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Grain boundary (GB) strengthening of metallic materials faces limitations as grain sizes are reduced to the nanoscale, primarily due to the transition from the strengthening to the softening effects. Understanding the intrinsic mechanisms behind such pronounced transitions is essential for optimizing the mechanical properties of nanocrystalline (NC) alloys. In this work, the critical grain size responsible for this transition is determined for NC CoCrNi medium-entropy alloys using molecular dynamics simulation, and the underlying mechanisms concerning varying temperatures and strain rates are systematically investigated for the samples with the critical grain size. The transition from Hall-Petch (HP) strengthening to Inverse Hall-Petch (IHP) softening is established by decreasing the average grain sizes from 21 nm to 3 nm. The critical grain size for the current alloys is estimated to be 12 nm, and the underlying deformation mechanisms are illustrated as follows: In the IHP regime, GB-mediated deformation becomes dominant, leading to softening. Conversely, in the HP regime, dislocation slip dominates the deformation mode, contributing to strengthening. It is found that an increase in temperature from 77 K to 1100 K leads to a decrease in the average flow stress and Young's modulus. Meanwhile, the deformation mechanisms change from dislocation slip (77K–700K) to GB-mediated deformation (700 K–1100 K). Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms correlating to the critical strain rate are uncovered. It can be attributed to the shift in deformation mechanisms from dislocation slip at relatively low strain rate regimes (5 × 107 s−1-2 × 109 s−1) to dislocation drag at relatively high strain rate regimes (2 × 109 s−1-5 × 109 s−1). Our atomistic insights into the tensile response of NC CoCrNi may provide a crucial basis for designing superior properties to meet the growing demands of advanced engineering fields.

Abstract Background Risk stratification and personalized care are crucial in managing osteosarcoma due to its complexity and heterogeneity. However, current prognostic prediction using clinical variables has limited accuracy. Thus, this study aimed to explore potential molecular biomarkers to improve prognostic assessment. Methods High-throughput inhibitor screening of 150 compounds with broad targeting properties was performed and indicated a direction towards super-enhancers (SEs). Bulk RNA-seq, scRNA-seq, and immunohistochemistry (IHC) were used to investigate SE-associated gene expression profiles in osteosarcoma cells and patient tissue specimens. Data of 212 osteosarcoma patients who received standard treatment were collected and randomized into training and validation groups for retrospective analysis. Prognostic signatures and nomograms for overall survival (OS) and lung metastasis-free survival (LMFS) were developed using Cox regression analyses. The discriminatory power, calibration, and clinical value of nomograms were evaluated. Results High-throughput inhibitor screening showed that SEs significantly contribute to the oncogenic transcriptional output in osteosarcoma. Based on this finding, focus was given to 10 SE-associated genes with distinct characteristics and potential oncogenic function. With multi-omics approaches, the hyperexpression of these genes was observed in tumor cell subclusters of patient specimens, which were consistently correlated with poor outcomes and rapid metastasis, and the majority of these identified SE-associated genes were confirmed as independent risk factors for poor outcomes. Two molecular signatures were then developed to predict survival and occurrence of lung metastasis: the SE-derived OS-signature (comprising LACTB, CEP55, SRSF3, TCF7L2, and FOXP1) and the SE-derived LMFS-signature (comprising SRSF3, TCF7L2, FOXP1, and APOLD1). Both signatures significantly improved prognostic accuracy beyond conventional clinical factors. Conclusions Oncogenic transcription driven by SEs exhibit strong associations with osteosarcoma outcomes. The SE-derived signatures developed in this study hold promise as prognostic biomarkers for predicting OS and LMFS in patients undergoing standard treatments. Integrative prognostic models that combine conventional clinical factors with these SE-derived signatures demonstrate substantially improved accuracy, and have the potential to facilitate patient counseling and individualized management.

The structural synthesis of a group of parallel mechanisms can be established by an exhaustive enumeration of all feasible kinematic chains based on the screw theory. However, reliable kinematic limbs can provide mobility constraints for some unqualified supporting legs to guarantee the degrees-of-freedom feasibility of the parallel robots. A systematic design approach is presented for a family of planar single-loop parallel mechanisms with the consideration of infeasible kinematic chains. Different from the other design approaches for single-loop linkages, the fixed and moving platforms are predefined in this research to distinguish different kinematic limbs. The special parallelogram linkage mechanism is incorporated due to its equivalent translation capacity. Three categories of singularity configurations are investigated based on the detailed kinematic models. The reachable workspace is obtained through the spatial search methodology. Several novel kinematic error model associated performance indices are proposed in this work and examined on a translational parallel manipulator. Experiments are carried out and compared to testify the effectiveness of the kinematic analysis and proposed position-based controller.

Along with the development of speech and language technologies, the market for speech-enabled human-robot interactions (HRI) has grown in recent years. However, it is found that people feel their conversational interactions with such robots are far from satisfactory. One of the reasons is the habitability gap, where the usability of a speech-enabled agent drops when its flexibility increases. For social robots, such flexibility is reflected in the diverse choice of robots’ appearances, sounds and behaviours, which shape a robot’s ‘affordance’. Whilst designers or users have enjoyed the freedom of constructing a social robot by integrating off-the-shelf technologies, such freedom comes at a potential cost: the users’ perceptions and satisfaction. Designing appropriate affordances is essential for the quality of HRI. It is hypothesised that a social robot with aligned affordances could create an appropriate perception of the robot and increase users’ satisfaction when speaking with it. Given that previous studies of affordance alignment mainly focus on one interface’s characteristics and face-voice match, we aim to deepen our understanding of affordance alignment with a robot’s behaviours and use cases. In particular, we investigate how a robot’s affordances affect users’ perceptions in different types of use cases. For this purpose, we conducted an exploratory experiment that included three different affordance settings (adult-like, child-like, and robot-like) and three use cases (informative, emotional, and hybrid). Participants were invited to talk to social robots in person. A mixed-methods approach was employed for quantitative and qualitative analysis of 156 interaction samples. The results show that static affordance (face and voice) has a statistically significant effect on the perceived warmth of the first impression; use cases affect people’s perceptions more on perceived competence and warmth before and after interactions. In addition, it shows the importance of aligning static affordance with behavioural affordance. General design principles of behavioural affordances are proposed. We anticipate that our empirical evidence will provide a clearer guideline for speech-enabled social robots’ affordance design. It will be a starting point for more sophisticated design guidelines. For example, personalised affordance design for individual or group users in different contexts.

This paper summarizes the structure and findings from the first Workshop on Troubles and Failures in Conversations between Humans and Robots. The workshop was organized to bring together a small, interdisciplinary group of researchers working on miscommunication from two complementary perspectives. One group of technology-oriented researchers was made up of roboticists, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers and dialogue system experts. The second group involved experts from conversation analysis, cognitive science, and linguistics. Uniting both groups of researchers is the belief that communication failures between humans and machines need to be taken seriously and that a systematic analysis of such failures may open fruitful avenues in research beyond current practices to improve such systems, including both speech-centric and multimodal interfaces. This workshop represents a starting point for this endeavour. The aim of the workshop was threefold: Firstly, to establish an interdisciplinary network of researchers that share a common interest in investigating communicative failures with a particular view towards robotic speech interfaces; secondly, to gain a partial overview of the “failure landscape” as experienced by roboticists and HRI researchers; and thirdly, to determine the potential for creating a robotic benchmark scenario for testing future speech interfaces with respect to the identified failures. The present article summarizes both the “failure landscape” surveyed during the workshop as well as the outcomes of the attempt to define a benchmark scenario.

The mobile platform of the parallel robot designed for picking and placing operations is usually equipped with one or two extra degree(s) of freedom to enable flexible grasping orientations. However, additional motors indicate extra loads for the moving platform, and the total payload performance shrinks. This paper proposes a spatial picking-and-placing manipulator, in which one actuator that is supposed to be installed on the mobile platform is placed far away from the mobile platform. The platform has a large workspace along one direction. The comprehensive analytical inverse and forward kinematic solutions of this robot are derived. The reachable workspace of the parallel manipulator module is then explored. The novel performance level index is designed to normalize the performance index and demonstrate the performance rank for any pose. A mathematical proof is provided for this novel index. The manipulability index is taken as an example to examine the level indicator. A multi-objective optimization is implemented to pursue optimal performance; then, the initial design and optimized results are compared in detail. A sample trajectory is provided to verify the correctness of the kinematic mathematical model of the parallel mechanism.

Abstract Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common primary malignant bone tumor in children and adolescents. Although activator of HSP90 ATPase activity 1 (AHA1) is reported to be a potential oncogene, its role in osteosarcoma progression remains largely unclear. Since metabolism reprogramming is involved in tumorigenesis and cancer metastasis, the relationship between AHA1 and cancer metabolism is unknown. In this study, we found that AHA1 is significantly overexpressed in osteosarcoma and related to the prognosis of osteosarcoma patients. AHA1 promotes the growth and metastasis of osteosarcoma both in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, AHA1 upregulates the metabolic activity to meet cellular bioenergetic needs in osteosarcoma. Notably, we identified that isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1) is a novel client protein of Hsp90-AHA1. Furthermore, the IDH1 protein level was positively correlated with AHA1 in osteosarcoma. And IDH1 overexpression could partially reverse the effect of AHA1 knockdown on cell growth and migration of osteosarcoma. Moreover, high IDH1 level was also associated with poor prognosis of osteosarcoma patients. This study demonstrates that AHA1 positively regulates IDH1 and metabolic activity to promote osteosarcoma growth and metastasis, which provides novel prognostic biomarkers and promising therapeutic targets for osteosarcoma patients.

OS (Osteosarcoma) is the most common malignant tumor in adolescents, and lung metastasis limits its therapeutic outcome. The present study aimed to establish a highly metastatic human OS cell line directly from lung metastases and characterize its biological functions. In this study, epithelioid tumor cells with large nucleo-cytoplasmic ratio and abundant organelles were obtained by the tissue mass adherent and repeated digestion adherent method and named ZOSL-1 cells. ZOSL-1 cells had the potential to proliferate in vitro with a doubling time of 39.28 ± 3.04 h and migrate with or without a matrix. ZOSL-1 cells were tumorigenic in vivo, and had the ability to develop lung metastasis after intratibial injection. ZOSL-1 cells expressed the osteogenic-related genes osteocalcin and osteopontin. In addition, the expression of ZOSL-1 in Fas cell surface death receptor (FAS), CD44 molecule (CD44), GNAS complex locus (GNAS), scavenger receptor class B member 1 (SCARB1), C-X-C motif chemokine receptor 4 (CXCR4), cadherin 11 (CDH11), neurofibromin 2 (NF2) and ezrin (EZR) genes may be related to its transfer efficiency. Taken together, these results indicated the high metastatic capability and important biological functions of ZOSL-1 cells. ZOSL-1 establishment provided a relevant model for the study of osteosarcoma lung metastasis.

This article proposes a new reconfigurable parallel mechanism using a spatial overconstrained platform. This proposed mechanism can be used as a machine tool. The mobility is analyzed by Screw Theory . The inverse kinematic model is established by applying the closed-loop equation. Next, the dynamic model of the presented mechanism is established by Lagrange formulation. To control the presented mechanism, some controllers have been used. Based on this dynamic model, the fuzzy-proportion integration differentiation (PID) controller is designed to track the trajectory of the end effector. For each limb, a sliding mode controller is applied to track the position and velocity of the slider. Finally, some simulations using ADAMS and MATLAB are proposed to verify the effectiveness and stability of these controllers.

To meet the different requirements in the industrial area, a novel reconfigurable parallel mechanism is proposed based on the spatial multiloop overconstrained mechanism. The configurations can be changed by driving the low-DOF (degree-of-freedom) overconstrained mechanism. The mobility of this mechanism is investigated. And the kinematic model and Jacobian matrix are both established. Based on the Jacobian matrix, the workspace, stiffness, and conditional number are all analyzed. To focus on the application in the industrial area, this paper proposes a method to establish the relationship between the performance and the structural parameters by using the modified BP neural network. Based on this method, the structural parameters can be chosen by the requirements of the special task in the industrial area. Finally, some numerical examples are presented to verify the method.

We investigated the diurnal ozone variation on 6 September 2013 in a midsize urban environment using multiple in situ and remote-sensing measurements along with the Dutch atmospheric large-eddy simulation (DALES) model coupled with a chemical module and a dry deposition module that we added for this study. Our study area was Huntsville, Alabama, USA, a typical midsize city in the Southeastern United States. The ozone variation in the convective boundary layer (CBL) resulted mainly from local emissions and photochemical production stemming from weather conditions controlled by an anticyclonic system on that day. Local chemical production contributes approximately two thirds of the ozone enhancement in the CBL and, in this case, dynamical processes including ozone transport from the free troposphere (FT) to the CBL through the entrainment processes contributed the remainder. The numerical experiments performed by the large-eddy simulation (LES) model showed acceptable agreement with the TOLNet (The tropospheric ozone lidar network)/RO3QET (Rocket-city ozone quality evaluation in the troposphere) ozone DIAL (differential absorption lidar) observations. This study indicated the need for fine-scale, three-dimensional ozone observations with high temporal and spatial resolution for air quality studies at the urban scale and smaller.

To measure large external forces exerted on a loading platform, a novel three-dimensional force sensor is developed in this paper. The proposed sensor was designed with a parallel mechanism with three degrees of freedom. Kinematic analysis of this sensor was performed. Due to its structural characteristics, the working principle of the sensor was analyzed using a Jacobian matrix. The sensitivity diversity index and measuring capability were both calculated. The analysis showed that the proposed sensor is more suitable for measuring large forces than existing strain sensors. In addition, compared with existing strain sensors, this sensor is more suitable for measuring forces along the x and y axes. By changing the stiffness coefficients of the springs, the proposed sensor has reconfigurability. This sensor can change its measuring capability to meet different requirements. Next, the mode shapes and natural frequencies of the proposed sensor were performed. Finally, based on these performance indices, the design variables were optimized using a Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm.