Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

This study investigates safety performance of permeable friction courses (PFCs) in terms of hydroplaning. An analytical model was derived to calculate water depth on PFC under static rainfalls. A tire-water-pavement interaction model was used to predict hydroplaning speeds. The results show that water film depth increases from innermost to outermost traffic lanes. PFC can mitigate hydroplaning risk under 0.5cm/h rain rate. At rain rate of 1cm/h, the impact of horizontal hydraulic conductivity and PRF thickness on hydroplaning speed is less than 10%, but becomes negligible at higher rain rates. On the other hand, the flow slope of PFC significantly affects hydroplaning speed by over 50%, while this effect decreases as rain rate increases. The surface macrotexture of PFC shows less than 5% impact on hydroplaning speed at all rain rates. An analysis framework with design example is proposed to incorporate hydroplaning speed in decision-making of roadway design with PFC.

We present a development of a novel scaled testbed for studying aircraft tire-runway frictional interactions and braking performance under various pavement and wet conditions. The indoor testbed is built on a platform with a rotational arm to support an aircraft tire to travel on a circular, reconfigurable runway track. By designing the braking torque and the rotating arm motion, the testbed possesses the capability to emulate the dynamic characteristics of aircraft tire-runway interactions and braking maneuvers. Besides the mechatronic design of the testbed, we present the modeling and control of the platform subsystems to demonstrate the capability and performance for simulation of braking maneuvers with different pavement grooves and water film thicknesses. The dimensionless analysis and design are presented to represent the equivalent braking processes of a full-size aircraft. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficacy of the testbed design in studying the frictional interactions between the aircraft tire and the runway pavement.

Opioid use disorder is heritable, yet its genetic etiology is largely unknown. C57BL/6J and C57BL/6NJ mouse substrains exhibit phenotypic diversity in the context of limited genetic diversity which together can facilitate genetic discovery. Here, we found C57BL/6NJ mice were less sensitive to oxycodone (OXY)‐induced locomotor activation versus C57BL/6J mice in a conditioned place preference paradigm. Narrow‐sense heritability of OXY‐induced locomotor activity traits ranged from 0.22 to 0.31, implicating suitability for genetic analysis. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in an F2 cross identified a chromosome 1 QTL explaining 7%–12% of the variance in OXY locomotion and anxiety‐like withdrawal in the elevated plus maze. A second QTL for EPM withdrawal behavior on chromosome 5 near Gabra2 (alpha‐2 subunit of GABA‐A receptor) explained 9% of the variance. To narrow the chromosome 1 locus, we generated recombinant lines spanning 163–181 Mb, captured the QTL for OXY locomotor traits and withdrawal, and fine‐mapped a 2.45‐Mb region (170.16–172.61 Mb). Transcriptome analysis identified five, localized striatal cis‐eQTL transcripts and two were confirmed at the protein level (KCNJ9, ATP1A2). Kcnj9 codes for a potassium channel (GIRK3) that is a major effector of mu opioid receptor signaling. Atp1a2 codes for a subunit of a Na+/K+ ATPase enzyme that regulates neuronal excitability and shows functional adaptations following chronic opioid administration. To summarize, we identified two candidate genes underlying the physiological and behavioral properties of opioids, with direct preclinical relevance to investigators employing these widely used substrains and clinical relevance to human genetic studies of opioid use disorder.

In vitro studies have shown that a neuron’s electroresponsive properties can predispose it to oscillate at specific frequencies. In contrast, network activity in vivo can entrain neurons to rhythms that their biophysical properties do not predispose them to favor. However, there is limited information on the comparative frequency profile of unit entrainment across brain regions. Therefore, this study aimed to characterize the frequency profile of unit entrainment in cortex, thalamus, striatum, and basolateral amygdala (BLA) in rats of either sex. Neurons recorded simultaneously in a given brain region and behavioral state generally had very similar frequency profiles of unit entrainment. While cortical, striatal, and thalamic neurons were more strongly entrained by low than high local field potential (LFP) frequencies, increases in the power of these oscillations were linked to decreased firing rates for low frequencies versus increased firing rates for high frequencies. Deviating from this general trend, BLA neurons were more strongly entrained by high gamma than all other frequency bands in all subjects and states. By contrast, neurons in other regions displayed marked inter-individual variability. That is, although neurons in some regions had exceptionally high entrainment values in particular frequency bands, these were not observed consistently across rats. Based on these findings, some might infer that oscillations play a minor role or that different oscillatory patterns can support the same functions. Alternatively, the oscillations critical to brain function could be those not investigated here, namely those arising transiently in response to specific task variables or contexts. Perhaps those are less susceptible to genetic variations. While our findings do not allow us to determine which explanation is correct, they do highlight the perils of averaging.

The Gezi Park protests that erupted in spring 2013 sparked renewed interest in social movements and collective action in Turkey. While much of the literature has emphasized the novelty and spontaneity of these protests, this article situates them within a broader context and historical framework of social movements in Turkey. It argues that the events surrounding the demolition of Gezi Park should be understood as a cycle of protest, best analyzed in relation to earlier cycles to gain deeper insights into the culture and agency of social movements in the country. In this regard, the article posits that the Turkish manifestations of the Global Justice Movement in the late 1990s and early 2000s provided crucial precedents for the Gezi Park protests, offering an organizational infrastructure, collective frames for mobilization, and adaptable models for action.

A growing number of studies have recognized the pivotal role of relational Human Resource Management (HRM) systems in fostering positive interpersonal relationships in the workplace. These systems are tailored to fulfill specific relational objectives through collective‐level mechanisms. However, there has been a notable neglect of strategies for establishing the general foundations of positive workplace relationships and the contributions of individual actors in relationship‐building activities. Drawing upon the multilevel micro‐foundational structure framework and strategic human capital theory, this study introduces and validates a new measure of strategic relational HRM (SRHRM) systems. This measure incorporates a set of interrelated HRM practices aimed at reinforcing individual employees' relational knowledge, skills, and abilities, which serve as micro‐foundations for the development and maintenance of workplace relationships. Our methodology encompasses a meticulous validation process for the SRHRM measure. This involves employing four diverse samples from North America and Asia to assess its content validity, internal consistency, convergent and discriminant validity, as well as criterion‐related validity. Our findings provide substantial support for the application of the SRHRM measure in future empirical investigations.

It has been well established that the effectiveness and quality of political representation is unequally distributed in Western democracies. Scholars have frequently warned about the rise of ‘diploma democracies’ and a ‘new gilded age’ in which political systems are skewed towards the interests of those with a higher socio-economic status. In this paper, we investigate one possible causal mechanism of this inequality: the greater ability of educated citizens to cast a ‘correct’ vote. If some citizens are not able to accurately identify the party or candidate that best represents their interests, electoral and political participation will not lead to full representation. On the basis of the American National Election Study and original experimental data, we provide evidence that citizens’ level of education has important repercussions for their capacity for correct voting. More educated voters have higher levels of political sophistication, and they are in turn more likely to cast a correct vote. As we find that both political sophistication and information processing capability help us to explain the effect of education on correct voting, we expect that this form of stratification will remain rather persistent.

Ozone is an urban air pollutant, known to cause lung injury and altered function. Using established models of acute (0.8 ppm, 3 h) and episodic (1.5 ppm, 2 h, 2 times/wk, 6 wk) inhalation exposure, we observed distinct structural changes in the lung; whereas acutely, ozone primarily disrupts the bronchiolar epithelial barrier, episodic exposure causes airway remodeling. Herein we examined how these responses altered pulmonary function. A SCIREQ small animal ventilator was used to assess lung function; impedance was used to conditionally model resistance and elastance. Episodic, but not acute ozone exposure reduced the inherent and frequency-dependent tissue recoil (elastance) of the lung. Episodic ozone also increased central and high-frequency resistance relative to air control after methacholine challenge, indicating airway hyperresponsiveness. Pressure-volume (PV) loops showed that episodic ozone increased maximum lung volume, while acute ozone decreased lung volume. Episodic ozone-induced functional changes were accompanied by increases in alveolar circularization; conversely, minimal histopathology was observed after acute exposure. However, acute ozone exposure caused increases in total phospholipids, total surfactant protein D (SP-D), and low molecular weight SP-D in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid. Episodic ozone exposure only increased total SP-D. These findings demonstrate that acute and episodic ozone exposure cause distinct alterations in surfactant composition and pulmonary function. Whereas loss in PV loop area following acute ozone exposure is likely driven by increases in SP-D and inflammation, emphysematous pathology and airway hyperresponsiveness after episodic ozone appears to be the result of alterations in lung structure.

Wearable and implantable biosensors have rapidly entered the fields of health and biomedicine to diagnose diseases and physiological monitoring. The use of wired medical devices causes surgical complications, which can occur when wires break, become infected, generate electrical noise, and are incompatible with implantable applications. In contrast, wireless power transfer is ideal for biosensing applications since it does not necessitate direct connections between measurement tools and sensing systems, enabling remote use of the biosensors. In addition, wireless sensors eliminate the need for a battery or energy harvester, reducing the size of the sensor. As far as we are aware, this is the first report ever describing a new method for wireless readout of a label-free electronic biosensor for detecting protein biomarkers. Our results reveal that we are able to successfully detect target protein and corresponding antibodies within this wireless setup. We are able to distinguish target protein in purified samples from a blank PBS sample as a negative control by tracking gradual changes in impedance at the input of the transmitter (P-value = 0.00788). We also demonstrate real-time wireless quantification of cytokines within rheumatoid arthritis patient serum samples (P-value = 0.00891). A Fine Gaussian Support Vector Machine is also used to differentiate protein from negative controls with the highest accuracy from a dataset of 54 experiments. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10544-024-00728-9.

Lung cancer is one of the most frequently diagnosed cancers in the US. African-American (AA) men are more likely to develop lung cancer with higher incidence and mortality rates than European-American (EA) men. Herein, we report high-confidence alternative splicing (AS) events from high-throughput, high-depth total RNA sequencing of lung tumors and non-tumor adjacent tissues (NATs) in two independent cohorts of patients with adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC). We identified novel AS biomarkers with notable differential percent spliced in (PSI) values between lung tumors and NATs enriched in the AA and EA populations, which were associated with oncogenic signaling pathways. We also uncovered tumor subtype- and population-specific AS events associated with cell surface proteins and cancer driver genes. We highlighted significant AS events in SYNE2 specific to LUAD in both populations, as well as those in CD44 from EAs and TMBIM6 from AAs specific to LUAD. Here, we also present the validation of cancer signatures based on direct high-throughput reverse transcription-PCR. Our large survey of lung tumors presents a rich data resource that may help to understand molecular subtypes of lung tumor between AAs and EAs and reveal new therapeutic vulnerabilities that potentially advance health equity.

Introduction Birth centers are an underused care setting with potential to improve birth experience and satisfaction. Both hospital‐based and freestanding birth centers operate with the midwifery model of care that focuses on safe, low‐intervention physiologic birth experiences for healthy, low‐risk pregnant people. However, financial barriers limit freestanding birth center sustainability and accessibility in New Jersey, especially for traditionally marginalized populations. This qualitative study explores the financial barriers faced by freestanding birth centers in order to expand access and choice for pregnant people in New Jersey. Methods Semistructured interviews were conducted with participants from 4 sectors: (1) birth center or health system, (2) policy‐adjacent philanthropy or research, (3) state departments, and (4) health insurance. Coding and analysis followed a reflexive thematic analysis process, resulting in the identification of 4 financial barriers to birth center access. Results Facility Medicaid reimbursement rates are a primary barrier for birth centers, along with startup and operating costs and, more indirectly, low supply of midwives and low patient demand for birth center care. Discussion New Jersey is well‐positioned to enact critical policies and programs that can improve out‐of‐hospital birth center access, based on the findings and recommendations from this research. Other states can follow suit in pursuit of solutions to improve maternal health access and equitable birth center sustainability.

With the rapid growth of video content consumption, it is important to deliver high-quality streaming videos to users even under limited available network bandwidth. In this paper, we propose EVASR, a system that performs edge-based video delivery to clients with salience-aware super-resolution. We select patches with higher saliency score to perform super-resolution while applying the simple yet efficient bicubic interpolation for the remaining patches in the same video frame. To efficiently use the computation resources available at the edge server, we introduce a new metric called “saliency visual quality” and formulate patch selection as an optimization problem to achieve the best performance when an edge server is serving multiple users. We implement EVASR based on the FFmpeg framework and deploy it on three different platforms including desktop/laptop computers, mobile phones, and single board computers (SBCs). We conduct extensive experiments for evaluating the visual quality, super-resolution speed, and power savings that can be achieved by EVASR. Results show that EVASR outperforms baseline approaches in both resource efficiency and visual quality metrics including PSNR, saliency visual quality (SVQ), and VMAF. EVASR can also achieve substantial energy savings compared to baseline approaches MobileSR and JetsonSR on mobile devices.

We aimed to identify the neuronal correlates of performance errors in a difficult timing task. Male rats were trained to seek r ewards and avoid s hocks depending on the position of photic conditioned stimuli (CS- R and CS- S , respectively). Then, they were exposed to conflict trials where they had to time the interval between the CS-R and CS-S to obtain rewards while avoiding footshocks. There were pronounced individual differences in behavioral strategies on conflict trials. When presented with a CS-S, some rats quickly left the shock sector, forsaking the option of earning a reward, and rarely got shocked. Others earned rewards by delaying avoidance based on the interval between the CS-R and CS-S but were shocked more often. The probability rats would fail a given trial was not stable across trials as rats engaged in incorrect trial runs that were longer than expected by chance. Since this finding suggested that rats shift between two quasi-stable processing modes, we next examined the neuronal correlates of errors. Incorrect trials coincided with reduced firing rates in CA1 and sensory cortical neurons. Moreover, trial-to-trial variations in the firing rates of simultaneously recorded neurons were more strongly correlated on error than correct trials. Last, the power of low frequency local field potential oscillations was higher during incorrect trials. The finding that the neuronal correlates of correct and error trials are similar in the hippocampus and neocortex lead us to hypothesize that they depend on changes in the activity of common afferents, such as neuromodulatory inputs. Significance statement We studied the neuronal correlates of performance errors in a task where rats had to time the interval between reward- and shock-predicting stimuli to obtain rewards while avoiding footshocks. Rats engaged incorrect trial runs that were longer than expected by chance, suggesting that they shift between two quasi-stable modes of processing. Error trials coincided with a drop in the firing rates of CA1 and sensory cortical neurons. Trial-to-trial variations in the firing rates of simultaneously recorded CA1 and cortical neurons were more strongly correlated on error than correct trials. The finding that the correlates of correct and error trials are similar in the hippocampus and neocortex suggest that they depend on common changes in neuromodulator levels.

Content creators with marginalized identities are disproportionately affected by shadowbanning on social media platforms, which impacts their economic prospects online. Through a diary study and interviews with eight marginalized content creators who are women, pole dancers, plus size, and/or LGBTQIA+, this paper examines how content creators with marginalized identities experience shadowbanning. We highlight the labor and economic inequalities of shadowbanning, and the resulting invisible online labor that marginalized creators often must perform. We identify three types of invisible labor that marginalized content creators engage in to mitigate shadowbanning and sustain their online presence: mental and emotional labor, misdirected labor, and community labor. We conclude that even though marginalized content creators engaged in cross-platform collaborative labor and personal mental/emotional labor to mitigate the impacts of shadowbanning, it was insufficient to prevent uncertainty and economic precarity created by algorithmic opacity and ambiguity.