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In everyday life, individuals often need to make choices about the difficulty level of tasks they wish to perform. Here, we investigate age- and gender-related differences in the monitoring of discrepancies between the difficulty of a given task and one's own performance level, and in the likelihood to select task difficulties that match one's performance level. Male and female children, teenagers, younger adults, and older adults (total N = 160) were asked to play a modified version of the BINGO game. Task difficulty was operationalized as the number of cards played simultaneously. We expected that (a) discrepancies between individuals' self-selected difficulty levels and their objectively assessed maximum manageable task difficulty (MMTD) would be lowest in early adulthood; (b) children and teenagers, on average, would select relatively difficult task difficulties; and (c) males would overestimate their performance levels, on average, to a greater extent than females. As predicted, younger adults selected task difficulties closest to their MMTD. All other age groups, including older adults, chose task difficulties above their MMTD. The expected gender differences were restricted to children, with boys showing more pronounced performance overestimations than girls. Children and teenagers fluctuated more in their difficulty choices than adults, and many of them, especially boys, occasionally chose difficulty levels far beyond their performance capabilities. We conclude that task-difficulty choices are an interesting topic for lifespan studies. Future research should systematically vary the physical risk involved in a task, and also include the presence of peers.

Based on the establishment of peridynamic nonlocal porous media seepage model, several kernel functions reflecting the degree of nonlocal effect are introduced to improve the calculation accuracy, and the peridynamic permeability coefficients corresponding to different kernel functions are derived. In the two-dimensional seepage model, the Weibull-distributed permeability coefficient model and the fracture network seepage model are established to realize the heterogeneous seepage in porous media matrix and fracture, respectively, which make up for the shortage of classical peridynamic model that cannot well simulate the heterogeneous seepage in porous media such as rock and soil. Different kernel function models are tested in simulating one-dimensional seepage problems, and the influence of kernel functions on simulation results is analyzed. The results show that the improved model can well converge to the theoretical solution, and the polynomial kernel function has the highest convergence accuracy relative to other kernel functions. Then, the polynomial kernel function is introduced into the two-dimensional model, and the corresponding two-dimensional permeability coefficient is derived. The proposed heterogeneous seepage model is employed in the simulation of two-dimensional seepage in porous media with and without fracture, and the simulation results show that the proposed model can well simulate the heterogeneous seepage process in rock materials, proposing a wide application prospect in porous media seepage simulation.

Sea slug (Subclass Heterobranchia) biodiversity is an important element of marine coral reef communities. However, due to their small size and cryptic behavior, few studies have examined their spatiotemporal variation. Taiwan is in the middle of East Asia Island Arcs, where it is one of the hotspots of sea slug diversity. Meanwhile, the northeast coast of this island lies within the subtropical monsoon region, where the climate shifts from a warm southwest monsoon (SW: May to Sep) to a cold northeast monsoon (NE: Oct to Apr). Between the monsoons, distinct temperatures and currents result in different community structures. To understand how those environmental factors (i.e., monsoon season, diel period and water depth) influence sea slug species richness and assemblages, we surveyed these invertebrates monthly at both night and day by diving in a marine protection area (CJ) and at a nearby non-protected site (MR) from May 2020 to Apr 2021. We showed that the species composition in our sampling area was highly consistent with what was found in Okinawa and Pescadores island, but less similar to those in southern Taiwan or Hong Kong. On the northeast coast of Taiwan, sea slug number and abundance were both higher in CJ than MR, but biodiversity (H’) and the species evenness index J’ was lower in CJ than MR. Additionally, cluster analysis indicated that the sea slug assemblages differed between the two sites. Monsoon season significantly influenced both species richness and species assemblages, with species richness during SW being significantly higher than in the NE monsoon and species assemblages also being distinct between these two seasons. Moreover, species richness increased with water depth (within the surveyed range of 0-25 m). Diel period did not exert a strong impact on sea slug biodiversity, except for species richness at CJ, where it was higher during the day than at night. Our study suggested that changing currents between the monsoon seasons could transport individuals originating from either the north or south of these island arcs. Furthermore, temperature and food sources may differ between seasons and depths, thereby influencing sea slug assemblages in this region.

Background: The benefits of hepatitis C virus (HCV)eradication for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients in Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) stage B/C remain uncertain. Methods: In this hospital-based cohort study, all HCV-infected patients with BCLC stage B/C HCC during the period January 2017 to March 2021 were retrospectively screened, with 97 patients who had completed direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy being enrolled for final analysis. Results: In total, the sustained virological response (SVR) rate was 90.7%. In logistic regression analysis, progressive disease (PD) to prior tumor treatments was significantly associated with SVR failure (odds ratio 5.59, 95% CI 1.30–24.06, p = 0.021). Furthermore, the overall survival (OS) rate was significantly higher in the SVR group than that in the non-SVR group (1-year OS: 87.5% vs. 57.1%, p = 0.001). SVR was found to be an independent factor related to OS (hazard ratio 8.42, 95% CI 2.93–24.19, p = 0.001). However, even upon achieving SVR, the OS rates in BCLC stage C or Child–Pugh stage B patients remained poor. Conclusions: In BCLC stage B/C HCC, DAA could achieve a high SVR rate except in those patients with PD to prior HCC treatments. SVR was related to improvements in OS; therefore, DAA therapy should be encouraged for patients diagnosed without a short life expectancy.

Background: Repeated sessions of training and non-invasive brain stimulation have the potential to enhance cognition in patients with cognitive impairment. We hypothesized that combining cognitive training with anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) will lead to performance improvement in the trained task and yield transfer to non-trained tasks. Methods: In our randomized, sham-controlled, double-blind study, 46 patients with cognitive impairment (60–80 years) were randomly assigned to one of two interventional groups. We administered a 9-session cognitive training (consisting of a letter updating and a Markov decision-making task) over 3 weeks with concurrent 1-mA anodal tDCS over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (20 min in tDCS, 30 s in sham group). Primary outcome was trained task performance (letter updating task) immediately after training. Secondary outcomes included performance in tasks testing working memory (N-back task), decision-making (Wiener Matrices test) and verbal memory (verbal learning and memory test), and resting-state functional connectivity (FC). Tasks were administered at baseline, at post-assessment, and at 1- and 7-month follow-ups (FU). MRI was conducted at baseline and 7-month FU. Thirty-nine participants (85%) successfully completed the intervention. Data analyses are reported on the intention-to-treat (ITT) and the per-protocol (PP) sample. Results: For the primary outcome, no difference was observed in the ITT (β = 0.1, 95%-CI [− 1.2, 1.3, p = 0.93] or PP sample (β = − 0.2, 95%-CI [− 1.6, 1.2], p = 0.77). However, secondary analyses in the N-back working memory task showed that, only in the PP sample, the tDCS outperformed the sham group (PP: % correct, β = 5.0, 95%-CI [− 0.1, 10.2], p = 0.06, d-prime β = 0.2, 95%-CI [0.0, 0.4], p = 0.02; ITT: % correct, β = 3.0, 95%-CI [− 3.9, 9.9], p = 0.39, d-prime β = 0.1, 95%-CI [− 0.1, 0.3], p = 0.5). Frontoparietal network FC was increased from baseline to 7-month FU in the tDCS compared to the sham group (pFDR < 0.05). Exploratory analyses showed a correlation between individual memory improvements and higher electric field magnitudes induced by tDCS (ρtDCS = 0.59, p = 0.02). Adverse events did not differ between groups, questionnaires indicated successful blinding (incidence rate ratio, 1.1, 95%-CI [0.5, 2.2]). Conclusions: In sum, cognitive training with concurrent brain stimulation, compared to cognitive training with sham stimulation, did not lead to superior performance enhancements in patients with cognitive impairment. However, we observed transferred working memory benefits in patients who underwent the full 3-week intervention. MRI data pointed toward a potential intervention-induced modulation of neural network dynamics. A link between individual performance gains and electric fields suggested dosage-dependent effects of brain stimulation. Together, our findings do not support the immediate benefit of the combined intervention on the trained function, but provide exploratory evidence for transfer effects on working memory in patients with cognitive impairment. Future research needs to explore whether individualized protocols for both training and stimulation parameters might further enhance treatment gains. Trial registration: The study is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT04265378). Registered on 7 February 2020. Retrospectively registered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]