This chapter reviews the development of looming motion perception in infancy, tracing the progression from early behavioral defensive behaviors, such as blinking, to contemporary EEG-based brain-computer interface approaches. Grounded in ecological optics, it examines how infants learn to detect approaching objects that signal impending collision and how this skill becomes increasingly refined with age and locomotor experience. Behavioral studies show that younger infants tend to rely on simpler cues, such as the visual angle of the approaching object, whereas older infants and crawlers increasingly use time-to-collision information for more accurate responses. High-density EEG studies extend these findings by revealing developmental changes in parieto-occipital brain activity, theta and alpha synchronization, and more efficient neural timing strategies. The chapter also highlights differences between full-term and preterm children, with preterm children showing poorer prospective control and delayed visual motion processing, resulting in sustained vulnerabilities in dorsal-stream function. Recent work further demonstrates that EEG-based BCI methods can detect infant perceptual responses to looming stimuli with promising classification accuracy, pointing toward future applications in early cognitive monitoring and intervention. Overall, the chapter presents looming perception as a powerful window into the developing perception-action system and a potential tool for identifying atypical developmental trajectories early.

To provide an evidence-based review of the effects of electrical stimulation (ES) in children with obstetric brachial plexus injury (OBPI).A systematic literature search and review was performed using Medline, Embase, PEDro, and manual citation searching. Studies using ES applied to the skin resulting in muscle contraction in children (0-18 years) with OBPI were included. Quality assessment was performed using the Cochrane Collaboration Risk of Bias tool and the National Institute of Health Quality Assessment Tool. Outcomes were reported as range of motion, active movement scale, Mallet grading system, and side effects.Ten studies with a total of 388 participants were included: Five randomized controlled trials, three prospective interventional studies, and two retrospective studies. In most of them, ES was combined with conventional physiotherapy. No side effects were reported, and ES was well adhered. Improvements in at least one outcome measure were reported across the included studies following ES therapy. However, substantial heterogeneity existed regarding study design, ES application protocols, and reported outcomes.ES is well tolerated in children with OBPI. It may have a positive effect as part of a rehabilitation program, especially in combination with physiotherapy.

Autistic children often differ from non-autistic peers in social interaction, emotional processing, and language communication. While the neural differences between autistic and non-autistic children in processing paralinguistic social-emotional cues, such as emotional prosody, are well-documented, much less is known about how the brain processes the social-emotional meaning carried by the language content itself. In non-autistic adults, the left superior temporal sulcus (STS) and adjacent gyrus show a social-emotional bias, responding more strongly to social-emotional content than to content describing inanimate objects. We investigated whether this bias is present in children and whether it is altered in autistic children. We recruited 78 right-handed children who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while listening to sentences describing either people in emotional situations (social-emotional sentences) or non-human objects, events, or concepts (object sentences). After excluding those with excessive head motion, we analyzed data from 58 of them (37 autistic and 21 non-autistic; mean age 10 years). Across the sample as a whole, the left STS responded more strongly to social-emotional sentences than to object sentences, indicating that this social-emotional bias is already present in childhood. Importantly, this bias was reduced in autistic children compared to non-autistic controls, whereas no group difference was observed in general auditory or lexico-syntactic processing. This reduced activity in the left STS in response to social-emotional semantics may contribute to autistic children's social communication challenges.

Ambulatory electrocardiogram (ECG) readings are prone to mixed noise from physical activities, including baseline wander (BW), muscle artifact (MA), and electrode motion artifact (EM). Developing a method to remove such complex noise and reconstruct high-fidelity signals is clinically valuable for diagnostic accuracy. How ever, denoising of multi-beat ECG segments remains understudied and poses technical challenges. To address this, we propose Time-Frequency Complementary Diffusion (TFCDiff), a novel approach that models ECG signals in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain. To refine waveform details, we incorporate Temporal Feature Enhancement Mechanism (TFEM) to reinforce temporal representations and preserve key physiological information. Comparative experiments on a synthesized dataset demon strate that TFCDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance across five evaluation metrics. Furthermore, TFCDiff shows superior generalization on the unseen SimEMG Database, outperforming all benchmark models. Notably, TFCDiff processes raw 10-second sequences and maintains robustness under flexible random mixed noise (fRMN), enabling plug-and-play deployment in wearable ECG moni tors for high-motion scenarios. Source code is available at https://github.com/Miroircivil/TFCDiff.

Cardiolipin (CL) is a very important lipid in bacteria and the mitochondria of higher cells. CL is characterized by a unique structure, featuring four acyl chains and two negative charges, exhibiting a highly negative intrinsic curvature. We investigate the influence of CL on the function of the intramembrane E. coli protease GlpG, reconstituted into E. coli-like membranes. To underline the importance of CL, we find a ∼40% accelerated substrate cleavage rate in the presence of 10 mol % CL in phosphatidylethanolamine (PE)/phosphatidylglycerol (PG) membranes. CL induces a lateral restructuring of the membrane: without CL, PE/PG in the lipid annulus show a decreased chain length to match the hydrophobic thickness of GlpG. When CL is present, PE and PG share the properties of the bulk lipids, while CL undergoes the same amount of thinning that was observed for PE/PG before. To reveal the molecular properties of CL, we collect a multitude of NMR parameters to quantitatively describe the structure and dynamics of CL in the absence and presence of GlpG. In addition to the chain disordering and reduction of membrane thickness, we observe that some CL species follow the slow rotational diffusive motions of GlpG. This implies an association with GlpG, indicating preferential GlpG-CL interactions. We suggest that the high negative charge and the negative intrinsic curvature of CL are the main determinants of this remarkable behavior.

We introduce a Langevin formulation of Vicsek-like active particles, in which orientations evolve through finite-rate relaxation toward the local mean direction, with alignment strength J and rotational diffusivity Dr, thereby combining Vicsek-type local consensus with XY-like orientational dynamics. Using large-scale numerical simulations, we determine the nonequilibrium phase diagram as a function of activity and alignment rate. For example, at intermediate activity and in sufficiently large systems, increasing the alignment rate drives a sequence of transitions from a homogeneous isotropic state to polar bands, a cross-sea phase of intersecting bands, a homogeneous polar state, and ultimately a micro-clustered regime. The isotropic-to-polar transition is strongly first-order, as evidenced by Binder cumulants and bimodal distributions of local polarization and density, indicating coexistence of gas-like and liquid-like regions. Near the onset of collective motion, the band size increases with activity but depends non-monotonically on the alignment rate. Further increasing the alignment rate drives the system through the cross-sea and homogeneous polar phases before enhanced density fluctuations lead to micro-clustering. Our results demonstrate that finite-time orientational relaxation acts as a control parameter that qualitatively restructures collective behavior in polar active matter.

Evidence regarding the influence of relative area per player (ApP), and playing position, on locomotor- and mechanical- external load during small-sided games in elite youth soccer players remains limited. This study aimed to examine associations between continuous ApP and external load during training-based small-sided games in elite U17 soccer players, and to explore whether playing position modified these responses. Twenty-two elite U17 soccer players (16.6 ± 0.47 years) were monitored during small-sided games, using mostly formats such as 4v4, 5v5, and 8v8-using observations derived from individual player responses across SSG bouts under three-game-density conditions. External load variables included total distance (TD); high-speed running distance (HSR); sprint distance (SPRINT); number of sprints (NSPRINTS); accelerations (ACC); decelerations (DEC); high metabolic load distance (HMLD); and, maximal-speed exposure (%MSPEED). Linear mixed-effects models were used to examine associations between continuous ApP and each external load variable, while accounting for repeated observations, including players and session-level clustering. Larger ApP values were positively associated with HSR, SPRINT, NSPRINTS, HMLD, and %MSPEED. In contrast, no significant associations were observed between ApP and TD; ACC; or DEC. No significant main effects of playing position or ApP × position interactions were identified. Supplementary player-level effect-size analyses indicated recurring exploratory positional patterns, particularly for high-speed and sprint-related variables. These findings suggest that ApP is a practical programming variable for scaling high-intensity locomotor and metabolically-demanding external load in elite youth soccer, whereas additional task constraints may be required to specifically target acceleration- and deceleration-based demands.

Landing tasks are a major contributor to knee injuries in sport. While biomechanical determinants of knee joint loading have already been studied, less attention has been given to the role of inter-segmental timing during sport-specific landings. This study aimed to examine both biomechanical and temporal predictors of knee joint loading during horizontal and vertical phases of stop-jump landings. Thirty-three male volleyball and basketball players performed stop-jump tasks while lower-limb kinematics, kinetics, patellar tendon forces, and anterior tibial shear forces were calculated. Statistical Parametric Mapping and Linear Mixed Models were used to identify phase-specific differences and predictors of knee loading. Inter-segmental timing, quantified as foot-contact delay between body segments, emerged as a significant predictor of knee joint loading across conditions. This finding extends previous work by highlighting inter-segmental timing as an additional factor influencing knee joint loading alongside established biomechanical predictors such as displacement velocity, body mass, and knee range of motion. Horizontal landing phases showed a stiffer strategy compared to vertical phases, with reduced joint range of motion (40-83%) and increased knee valgus. These differences were associated with higher anterior tibial shear (121%) and patellar tendon (156%) forces. These results may be particularly relevant in sport situations where landings are not fully planned and can be altered by external perturbations such as opponents' deceiving actions.

The objective of the study was to compare conventional biomechanical outcomes, movement regularity, and local dynamic stability among habitual rearfoot strikers during acute non-rearfoot-strike adoption (HRFS-AN) and after 12 weeks of gait retraining (HRFS-GR), and habitual non-rearfoot strikers (HNRFS). Thirty-three male recreational runners enrolled. Analyses included 13 habitual rearfoot strikers assessed during acute NRFS adoption and after 12 weeks of gait retraining, together with 14 HNRFS. Participants ran on a treadmill at 9 km·h[-][1] while ground reaction forces and lower-limb kinematics were recorded. Coefficient of variation (CV), sample entropy (SampEn), and largest Lyapunov exponent (LyE) were used to characterize discrete kinematic variability, temporal regularity, and local dynamic stability, respectively. Runners in all three states adopted an NRFS pattern. HRFS-AN showed a more anterior foot strike than HRFS-GR and HNRFS. Peak vertical ground reaction force and most spatiotemporal and discrete kinematic outcomes did not differ among states; selected joint angle and CV outcomes differed, while VILR and VALR were lower in HRFS-AN than in HRFS-GR. Compared with HRFS-AN, HRFS-GR and HNRFS exhibited lower SampEn for sagittal-plane knee and ankle motion and vertical COM motion, and lower LyE for sagittal-plane knee and vertical COM motion. Compared with HNRFS, HRFS-GR exhibited higher SampEn for sagittal-plane knee and transverse-plane hip motion and higher LyE for sagittal-plane knee and coronal-plane hip motion. Most conventional biomechanical outcomes were similar among states; however, HRFS-AN exhibited a more anterior foot strike than HRFS-GR and HNRFS, as well as lower VILR and VALR than HRFS-GR. Compared with acute adoption, the retrained state showed greater regularity and local dynamic stability in selected knee, ankle, and COM trajectories, although selected differences from HNRFS remained. These findings suggest that a gradual 12-week gait-retraining programme may be an appropriate approach for transitioning habitual rearfoot strikers to NRFS.