University of Valencia

This study analyzed the psychometric properties of the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ) in a sample of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Participants were 102 residents in Spain (74 women, 72.55%; 26 men, 25.49%; and 2 missing data, 1.96%) age-ranged from 18 years to 68 years old (M = 37.69; SD = 12.66) diagnosed with BPD, who completed the MLQ, Purpose in Life Test-10 Items (PIL-10), and Dissociative Experiences Scale II (DES-II). The bidimensional model for the MLQ (Presence of Meaning: MLQ-P, and Search for Meaning: MLQ-S) showed an adequate internal consistency and an excellent fit. The MLQ-P and MLQ-S subcales correlated positively. The MLQ-P scale showed a positive correlation with the PIL-10 and a negative correlation with the DES-II. Introducing meaning in life into interventions with BPD patients can be a useful way to help them to find purpose in their lives, alleviate their existential suffering, and cope with the clinical symptomatology of BPD.

One of the primary goals of universities is to foster students' professional development and boost their employability. Social media platforms have become integral in today's digital age, causing disruptions in health, education and sport. University educators have integrated these platforms into classrooms to create online and hybrid teaching environments. However, research indicates that graduate students often lack proficiency in leveraging social media for professional use. This study examined the impact of an educational intervention conducted through LinkedIn, focusing on 61 undergraduate sport management students (80.30% male, 19.70% female) from a Spanish university during the 2020–2021 academic year. Pre‐test and post‐test questionnaires evaluated social media's potential as a teaching tool. Descriptive statistics, the Wilcoxon test and Cohen's d effect‐size calculations were used. The results highlight LinkedIn's value as a teaching‐learning tool and its potential for enhancing students' professional development and engagement in the sport industry.

The main objective of this study was to explore the associations between the transformational leadership of coaches and parents and adolescent athletes' social identity and examine the roles of gender and the stage of adolescence in these relationships. Furthermore, this study aimed to provide empirical evidence on measurement invariance across gender and the adolescent stage in the adapted Spanish version of the Social Identity Questionnaire for Sport (SIQS). The sample consisted of 656 athletes (299 males and 357 females) from 12 to 18 years old (M = 15.27, SD = 1.64) who participated in various team sports. All the participants completed a socio-demographic questionnaire, the Social Identity Questionnaire for Sport, and the Transformational Coaching and Transformational Parenting Questionnaires. The results confirmed the scalar measurement invariance of the adapted Spanish version of the SIQS across gender and adolescent stage. Transformational coaching and mothers' transformational parenting positively predicted adolescents' social identity across gender and adolescent stage. Additionally, during early adolescence, fathers' transformational parenting was also associated with their children's social identity. These findings emphasize the importance of transformational leadership in both team and family contexts in promoting athletes' social identity.

After reviewing various notions of symmetry in graph theory, which are typically defined by the connections between vertices, we demonstrate that traditional concepts of symmetry, such as vertex transitivity, can be too restrictive for certain applications. For instance, in some areas of graph analysis, symmetry based on metric properties (such as average distances between vertices) may be more appropriate, particularly in social network analysis or economic fraud detection. This paper focuses on developing metric-based symmetry concepts by introducing mathematical analysis tools, all related to the central idea of the distance distribution function, to group vertices according to their distance-related properties within the graph. In particular, we prove several results that show, under certain compactness properties for the set of distribution functions of all the vertices in an infinite graph, that it is always possible to group these vertices into a finite number of classes with the desired accuracy based on distances.

Energy transfer processes in nanohybrids are at the focal point of conceptualizing, designing, and realizing novel energy‐harvesting systems featuring nanocrystals that absorb photons and transfer their energy unidirectionally to surface‐immobilized functional dyes. Importantly, the functionality of these dyes defines the ultimate application. Herein, CsPbBr3 perovskite nanocrystals (NCs) are interfaced with zinc phthalocyanine (ZnPc) dyes featuring carboxylic acid. The functionality is the photosensitization of singlet oxygen. The CsPbBr3@ZnPc nanohybrid is to the best of our knowledge the first example, in which an unusual Dexter‐type singlet energy transfer between metal halide perovskite nanocrystals and phthalocyanine dyes enables singlet oxygen generation as a proof‐of‐concept application. A detailed temporal picture of the singlet energy transfer mechanism is made possible by combining key time‐resolved spectroscopic techniques, that are, femtosecond, nanosecond, and microsecond transient absorption spectroscopy as well as time‐correlated single photon counting, and target analyses. In fact, three excitonic components in the NCs govern a concerted Dexter‐type energy transfer. The work illustrates the potential of CsPbBr3@ZnPc as a singlet photosensitizer of ZnPc to produce singlet oxygen (¹O2) almost quantitatively while photoexciting CsPbBr3.

BACKGROUND The rising demand for environmentally friendly pest control highlights the importance of understanding the interaction between natural enemies and pesticides. Amblyseius swirskii, a predatory mite extensively used in biocontrol, plays a crucial role in managing pest populations in agricultural systems. Integrating this mite with selective pesticide use within integrated pest management (IPM) would significantly advance pest control and may reduce pesticide residues in the environment and agricultural produce. This study characterized the susceptibility of two Amblyseius swirskii colonies to deltamethrin, a widely used pesticide, to assess their potential integration into IPM strategies. RESULTS Both colonies exhibited significant tolerance to deltamethrin at concentrations higher than the maximum recommended field rate. Our analysis identified mutations in the target site in both populations. The commercial population also showed a contribution of cytochromes P450 to the resistant phenotype. Despite these results, semi‐field trials revealed a significant reduction in mite counts post‐treatment with deltamethrin; various experiments were conducted to understand this discrepancy. CONCLUSION This study underscores the need for comprehensive evaluations of pesticide impacts on biological control agents to optimize IPM strategies. Understanding pesticide resistance and field performance dynamics is crucial for developing sustainable pest management practices that ensure environmental resilience and agricultural productivity. © 2025 The Author(s). Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Cryopreservation of fish gametes has many potential applications for ecological, scientific and aquaculture purposes, and cryobank management has been established for many freshwater and marine fish. Nevertheless, there are no studies for the long-term conservation of pufferfish (Takifugu alboplumbeus) sperm, thus the objectives of this work were (i) to develop a new cryopreservation protocol for pufferfish sperm using different sperm:extender ratios and vials; and (ii) to assess the fertilization capacity of cryopreserved sperm. Results showed that cryopreserved sperm samples showed excellent post-thawing motility results when they were frozen in straws, reaching values over 60% with both 1:20 and 1:50 sperm:extender dilution ratios. Samples frozen in cryotubes showed slightly lower motility results (around 50%) than those obtained in the straws. Due to the excellent results obtained in the cryopreservation trials, in vitro fertilization trials were undertaken using different sperm:egg ratios with both fresh and cryopreserved sperm. High fertilization (FR) and hatching (HR) rates (over 90%) were reached using high 1:10⁵ and 1:10⁶ ratios. However, when the spermatozoa amount was limited in the fertilization micro-environment (using lower egg:sperm ratios of 1:10³ and 1:10⁴), the cryopreserved sperm generated lower values of FR and HR than the fresh sperm. These results suggest that for achieving high FR and HR, it is essential to use 10 times more cryopreserved sperm than fresh sperm. We then recommend using egg:sperm ratios of 1:10⁴ and 10⁵ (for fresh and cryopreserved sperm, respectively) for "Takifugu" species in order to optimize the amount of gametes collected during aquaculture procedures. This study has laid the basis for the establishment of cryopreservation protocols in pufferfish, that will be helpful for further reproduction in captivity programs and genetic cryobanking.

In recent years, substantial strides have been made in the field of visual image reconstruction, particularly in its capacity to generate high-quality visual representations from human brain activity while considering semantic information. This advancement not only enables the recreation of visual content but also provides valuable insights into the intricate processes occurring within high-order functional brain regions, contributing to a deeper understanding of brain function. However, considering fusion semantics in reconstructing visual images from brain activity involves semantic-to-image guide reconstruction and may ignore underlying neural computational mechanisms, which does not represent true reconstruction from brain activity. In response to this limitation, our study introduces a novel approach that combines linear mapping with nonlinear noise suppression to reconstruct visual images perceived by subjects based on their brain activity patterns. The primary challenge associated with linear mapping lies in its susceptibility to noise interference. To address this issue, we leverage a flexible denoised deep convolutional neural network, which can suppress noise from linear mapping. Our investigation encompasses linear mapping as well as the training of shallow and deep autoencoder denoised neural networks, including a pre-trained, state-of-the-art denoised neural network. The outcome of our study reveals that combining linear image decoding with nonlinear noise reduction significantly enhances the quality of reconstructed images from human brain activity. This suggests that our methodology holds promise for decoding intricate perceptual experiences directly from brain activity patterns without semantic information. Moreover, the model has strong neural explanatory power because it shares structural and functional similarities with the visual brain.

We present a construction of left braces of right nilpotency class at most two based on suitable actions of an abelian group on itself with an invariance condition. This construction allows us to recover the construction of a free right nilpotent one-generated left brace of class two.

Mercury (Hg) is a global pollutant with substantial risks to human and ecosystem health. By upward transport in tropical regions, mercury enters into the stratosphere, but the contribution of the stratosphere to global mercury dispersion and deposition remains unknown. We find that between 5 and 50% (passing through the 400-kelvin isentropic surface and tropopause, respectively) of the mercury mass deposited on Earth’s surface is chemically processed in the lower stratosphere. Our results show the stratosphere as a unique chemical environment where elemental mercury is efficiently converted to long-lived oxidized species. Subsequent downward transport contributes substantially to the oxidized mercury burden in the troposphere. The results show that the stratosphere facilitates the global dispersion of large amounts of mercury from polluted source regions to Earth’s remote environments. We find that stratospheric transport is as important as tropospheric transport in interhemispheric mercury dispersion. Future projections suggest that expected changes in atmospheric circulation will increase the transport of mercury into the stratosphere.

Background Treponemal diseases are a significant global health risk, presenting challenges to public health and severe consequences to individuals if left untreated. Despite numerous genomic studies on Treponema pallidum and the known possible biases introduced by the choice of the reference genome used for mapping, few investigations have addressed how these biases affect phylogenetic and evolutionary analysis of these bacteria. In this study, we ascertain the importance of selecting an appropriate genomic reference on phylogenetic and evolutionary analyses of T. pallidum. Results We designed a multiple-reference-based (MRB) mapping strategy using four different reference genomes and compared it to traditional single-reference mapping. To conduct this comparison, we created a genomic dataset comprising 77 modern and ancient genomes from the three subspecies of T. pallidum, including a newly sequenced seventeenth century genome (35X mean coverage) of a syphilis-causing strain (designated as W86). Our findings show that recombination detection was consistent across different references, but the choice of reference significantly affected ancient genome reconstruction and phylogenetic inferences. The high-coverage W86 genome introduced in this study also provided a new calibration point for Bayesian molecular clock dating, improving the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of treponemal diseases. Additionally, we identified novel recombination events, positive selection targets, and refined dating estimates for key events in the species’ history. Conclusions This study highlights the importance of considering methodological implications and reference genome bias in high-throughput sequencing-based whole-genome analysis of T. pallidum, especially of ancient or low-coverage samples, contributing to a deeper understanding of the treponemal pathogen and its subspecies.

Twisting 2D van der Waals magnets allows the formation and control of different spin‐textures, as skyrmions or magnetic domains. Beyond the rotation angle, different spin reversal processes can be engineered by increasing the number of magnetic layers forming the twisted van der Waals heterostructure. Here, pristine monolayers and bilayers of the A‐type antiferromagnet CrSBr are considered as building blocks. By rotating 90 degrees these units, symmetric (monolayer/monolayer and bilayer/bilayer) and asymmetric (monolayer/bilayer) heterostructures are fabricated. The magneto‐transport properties reveal the appearance of magnetic hysteresis, which is highly dependent upon the magnitude and direction of the applied magnetic field and is determined not only by the twist‐angle but also by the number of layers forming the stack. This high tunability allows switching between volatile and non‐volatile magnetic memory at zero‐field and controlling the appearance of abrupt magnetic reversal processes at either negative or positive field values on demand. The phenomenology is rationalized based on the different spin‐switching processes occurring in the layers, as supported by micromagnetic simulations. The results highlight the combination between twist‐angle and number of layers as key elements for engineering spin‐switching reversals in twisted magnets, of interest toward the miniaturization of spintronic devices and realizing novel spin textures.

This work aimed to investigate using ATR-FTIR spectroscopy combined with machine learning to classify eight apricot varieties. Traditionally, variety identification relies on physicochemical property measurements, which are time-consuming and require laboratory analysis. Instead, we used the ATR-FTIR spectra from 731 apricots divided into calibration (512) and test (219) sets and three machine learning models (i.e., partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), support vector machine (SVM), and random forest (RF)) to accurately predict 97% of the test samples. Additionally, careful inspection of the PLS-DA regression vectors revealed a strong correlation between the spectra and physicochemical properties, validating ATR-FTIR spectroscopy as a viable alternative for variety identification. Finally, to validate the results, additional models were constructed using the physicochemical data from the apricots. These reference models were then tested using the same data splits as the spectroscopic data used as a referent method, obtaining similar results with both approaches.

Female entrepreneurs encounter several barriers before starting a business. The prevalent association of entrepreneurship with masculine stereotypes in many countries is a contributing factor as to why fewer women pursue entrepreneurial ventures. Yet our understanding of whether these barriers vanish once females have founded a new business remains limited. To shed more light on women’s experiences, we conducted 32 semi-structured interviews to investigate German female entrepreneurs’ perceptions of challenges post-foundation. Our findings show that female entrepreneurs are still affected by stereotypes of their private and professional surroundings after their business has launched. The main reasons for exiting their businesses are experienced role conflicts that may result in mental health issues. Based on these findings, we developed a framework illustrating how women navigate through the entrepreneurial lifecycle, encountering increased role incongruity as they become more deeply immersed in the entrepreneurial environment. Understanding the factors through which women decide about their future paths is important for researchers and practitioners to support female entrepreneurs after new business startup. We conclude that sustained private and professional as well as instrumental and non-instrumental support during the early stages after starting a new venture may help sustain the share of female entrepreneurs and reduce the share of females resigning and going into other labor.

Populism is usually understood as a complex multi-dimensional phenomenon that encompasses different manifestations. However, most studies on the demand-side adopt a parsimonious minimal definition approach that hinders the ability to capture different forms of populism and the variable weight of its components. This article tests a new multi-dimensional strategy to measure and compare populist and pluralist attitudes in the context of Brexit Britain. We explore the relationship between populism and Britons' socio-political views-on borders, democracy, governance, identity, and the European Union-and psychological traits-such as conspiracy belief, social alienation, justification of political violence, and meaning in life-. Our new Multi-dimensional Populist Attitudes Scale (MPAS) reveals two varieties of populism, 'aspirational/ subversive' and 'identitarian/protective', and a non-populist 'moderate/pluralist' archetype. The new items introduced in the MPAS can complement (or become an alternative to) extant scales especially in contexts where populist movements do not fully fit narrow conceptualisations of populism.

Computer models for simulating cardiac electrophysiology are valuable tools for research and clinical applications. Traditional reaction–diffusion (RD) models used for these purposes are computationally expensive. While eikonal models offer a faster alternative, they are not well-suited to study cardiac arrhythmias driven by reentrant activity. The present work extends the diffusion–reaction eikonal alternant model (DREAM), incorporating conduction velocity (CV) restitution for simulating complex cardiac arrhythmias. The DREAM modifies the fast iterative method to model cyclical behavior, dynamic boundary conditions, and frequency-dependent anisotropic CV. Additionally, the model alternates with an approximated RD model, using a detailed ionic model for the reaction term and a triple-Gaussian to approximate the diffusion term. The DREAM and monodomain models were compared, simulating reentries in 2D manifolds with different resolutions. The DREAM produced similar results across all resolutions, while experiments with the monodomain model failed at lower resolutions. CV restitution curves obtained using the DREAM closely approximated those produced by the monodomain simulations. Reentry in 2D sheets yielded similar results in vulnerable window and mean reentry duration for low CV in both models. In the left atrium, most inducing points identified by the DREAM were also present in the high-resolution monodomain model. DREAM’s reentry simulations on meshes with an average edge length of 1600\,\upmu \hbox {m} were 87x faster than monodomain simulations at 200\,\upmu \hbox {m}. This work establishes the mathematical foundation for using the accelerated DREAM simulation method for cardiac electrophysiology. Cardiac research applications are enabled by a publicly available implementation in the openCARP simulator.

Background Distal myopathies (MPDs) are heterogeneous diseases of complex diagnosis whose prevalence and distribution in specific populations are unknown. Methods Demographic, clinical, genetic, neurophysiological, histopathological and muscle imaging characteristics of a MPDs cohort from a neuromuscular reference center were analyzed to study their epidemiology, features, genetic distribution and factors related to diagnosis. Results The series included 219 patients (61% were men, 94% Spanish and 41% sporadic cases). Mean age at onset and years of follow-up were 29 and 12.4, respectively. Patients commonly presented with gait disturbances in adulthood and did not usually exhibit a purely distal involvement, but disto-proximal involvement. HyperCKemia was detected in 56.6%, leading to consultation in 11.7%. Myopathic electromyography patterns and spontaneous activity were common; however, neurogenic features were also observed. Muscle imaging was useful for diagnosis as were certain histological features. Suspected pathogenic variants were identified in 68.7% of patients across 19 genes, but 85% concentrated in 8: MYH7, ANO5, DYSF, TTN, MYOT, HSPB1, GNE and HNRNPDL. Founder/cluster variants were found as well as overlap between myopathic and neurogenic processes. Onset before 60 years old, familial cases, very high CK levels and myopathic histopathological features were associated with a higher probability of molecular diagnosis. We found a minimum prevalence of MPDs of 3.9 per 100,000 individuals in the Valencian Community. Conclusions This series being the largest cohort of patients with MPDs presents their frequency and behavior. This study identifies new genes presenting as MPDs, provides data to guide diagnosis and lays the groundwork for cooperative studies.