Update on the efficacy of vaccination on host immunity to influenza virus infection

This article was originally published in International Archives of Allergy and Immunology. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1159/000551286 This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY) (https://karger.com/Services/OpenAccessLicense). Usage, derivative works and distribution are permitted provided that proper credit is given to the author and the original publisher.Abstract Influenza, commonly known as the flu, is a contagious respiratory illness caused by influenza viruses, primarily affecting the epithelial cells of the respiratory tract. There are several strains of the virus, with influenza A and B being the most significant in terms of public health impact. The immune system’s response to influenza infection plays a crucial role in determining the severity of the illness and the effectiveness of vaccination strategies. The immune system's response to the influenza virus is both complex and vital for recovery and immunity. Vaccination plays a key role in mitigating the impact of influenza, although its effectiveness can vary based on multiple factors. Continuous monitoring of circulating strains and advancements in vaccine technology are essential in improving prevention strategies and protecting public health. Ongoing research into novel vaccine strategies is crucial for achieving better efficacy and addressing vaccine hesitancy, ultimately leading to reduced morbidity and mortality associated with influenza. Key words: Influenza, TLRs, CTL, PRR, NKNo funding was obtained for this study

2026 KIDS COUNT in Delaware Legislative Calendar

Page-a-day style calendar containing data on Delaware children and their families. Calendar counts down to the end of legislative session.Delaware Division of Libraries, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the University of Delaware and the State of Delaware

Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention to Promote Walking Behavior and Reduce Stationary Time in Physically Inactive Adults: Protocol for the Walking With JITAIs Study

©Cora J Firkin, Ajith Vemuri, Tanvir Rahman, Barry Bodt, Elizabeth Orsega-Smith, Keith Decker, Gregory M Dominick. Originally published in JMIR Research Protocols (https://www.researchprotocols.org), 07.Jan.2026. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR This article was originally published in JMIR Research Protocols. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.2196/79022Background: A Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) recognizes the dynamic nature of individuals’ states and contexts, predicts support needs, and sends tailored support at more opportune, actionable times. Objective: This paper outlines the application architecture and protocol for the pilot “Walking With Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions” (WWJ) study, which uses a JITAI approach to improve walking behavior—duration, speed, and distance—and reduce stationary time, defined as idle sitting or standing. Methods: This study targets 20 adults who are physically inactive and leverages the Apple Watch to deliver fully automated tailored intervention notifications to “walk faster,” “walk longer,” or “stand up and move around” based on real-time data and contextual factors, including time-of-day activity patterns, geographic locations (eg, home, work, park, and gymnasium), weather conditions (eg, precipitation, wind speed, and humidity), and receptiveness. The protocol involves a preintervention assessment of demographics, behavior change constructs, anthropometrics, and resting vital signs; a 2-week observation period to establish walking behavior and stationary time baselines; a 2-week just-in-time learning period to evaluate receptiveness to untailored prompts at all applicable times; the 2-week JITAI intervention phase; and a postintervention assessment. Feasibility will be evaluated through protocol fidelity, participant adherence, Apple Watch wear-time compliance, user burden, acceptability ratings, and perceptions of benefits and preferences. Results: The WWJ architecture development began in spring 2021 and concluded in fall 2022. Participant recruitment and enrollment began in fall 2022. A total of 18 participants were recruited. Upon completion of the analyses, the results of this study are expected to be submitted for publication. Conclusions: Distinctively, the WWJ just-in-time learning period aims to train the learner based on user receptiveness within contexts by sending interventions whenever a participant meets the predetermined thresholds regardless of the likelihood that the user will be receptive to the notification to prune out non opportune or “nonactionable” times. This approach may allow for greater customization during the JITAI period.This study was internally funded through the Center for Innovative Health Research (CIHR), University of Delaware

Integrase anchors viral RNA to the HIV-1 capsid interior

This article was originally published in Nature. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10154-x Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.HIV-1 integrase (IN) promotes encapsulation of viral genomic RNA into mature viral cores, and this function is a target for ongoing antiretroviral drug development efforts1,2,3. Here we determined the cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structure of a primate lentiviral IN in a complex with RNA, revealing a linear filament made of IN octamer repeat units, each comprising a pair of asymmetric homotetramers. The assembly is stabilized through IN–RNA interactions involving mainly the IN C-terminal domains and RNA backbone. The spacing and orientation of the IN filament repeat units closely matched those of consecutive capsid (CA) hexamers within the mature CA lattice. Using cryo-EM images of native purified HIV-1 cores, we refined the structure of the IN filament as it propagates along the luminal side of the CA lattice. Each IN tetramer within the filament nestled in a CA hexamer, engaging closely with the major homology regions. Substitutions of residues involved in IN–CA contacts yielded eccentric virions with RNA nucleoids located outside of the cores. Collectively, our results establish the structural basis for the HIV-1 IN–RNA interaction and reveal that IN forms an RNA-binding module on the luminal side of the mature CA lattice

Mitigating product abuse through privacy-preserving and secure technologies in digital and industrial systems

Wang, HainingThe rapid digitalization of modern life has enabled unprecedented convenience and efficiency while simultaneously creating new opportunities for exploitation, misuse, and privacy violations. This dissertation investigates product abuse (the intentional misuse or manipulation of technological systems beyond their intended design) across distinct digital domains to surface its security, privacy, and operational implications. Using real world datasets, deployed prototypes, and empirical vulnerability assessments, it provides a cross domain examination of how abuse emerges and how defenses succeed or fail in practice. ☐ Case Study 1 (Email Tracking) analyzes how embedded tracking beacons in email communication can be repurposed as tools for covert surveillance and behavioral profiling. Through large scale measurement and analysis, the study exposes the privacy risks posed by such mechanisms, highlighting how legitimate business tools can cross the boundary into privacy abuse. ☐ Case Study 2 (CAPTCHA) surveys 24,000+ web pages from the Alexa Top 50K and correlates implementation patterns with 179 MITRE CVEs (2005–2025). The study finds that most failures stem from implementation errors, weak server-side validation, and supply chain issues, not the intrinsic design of challenges and documents how AI assisted solvers & paid solving economies further erode resilience, with practical hardening recommendations. ☐ Case Study 3 (Industrial IoT / WMS) examines abuse in industrial environments integrating Decision Support Systems, IoT devices, and Warehouse Management Systems. Drawing on a deployed prototype and operational data, it identifies attack surfaces that enable product manipulation, data leakage, and supply chain interference, and proposes blockchain backed audit trails, stronger authentication, and anomaly detection to enhance cyber resilience. ☐ Case Study 4 (Automated Crypto Trading) evaluates Mean Reversion, Arbitrage, Grid Trading, and Mean Deviation strategies as both efficiency enablers and abuse vectors. Experiments highlight how automation, if poorly designed or exploited, can induce market manipulation and systemic instability, motivating transparency, guardrails, and regulation aware algorithmic design. ☐ The dissertation (i) consolidates empirical evidence that product abuse recurs across heterogeneous systems; (ii) maps dominant failure modes from client-side exposure and automation to server-side validation gaps and supply chain weaknesses; (iii) demonstrates deployable countermeasures, privacy preserving email defenses, CAPTCHA hardening practices, IIoT/WMS auditability and access control, and ethics \& compliance aware algorithm design; and (iv) offers a practical threat informed rubric for engineering teams to anticipate misuse, not merely react to incidents. ☐ In conclusion, this dissertation offers both diagnostic and prescriptive perspectives on digital product abuse. It establishes that while product abuse cannot be fully eliminated, it can be systematically reduced through better architecture, stronger accountability, and adaptive security mechanisms that evolve alongside technological progress. By capturing the interplay between innovation, exploitation, and defense, this work contributes to the ongoing discourse on building secure, privacy preserving, and trustworthy digital ecosystems.University of Delaware, Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringPh.D

Red Noise–based False Alarm Thresholds for Astrophysical Periodograms via Whittle’s Approximation to the Likelihood

This article was originally published in The Astronomical Journal. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2512.18205 Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.Astronomers who search for periodic signals using Lomb–Scargle periodograms rely on false alarm level (FAL) estimates to identify statistically significant peaks. Although FALs are often calculated from white noise models, many astronomical time series suffer from red noise. Prewhitening is a statistical technique in which a continuum model is subtracted from the log power spectrum estimate, after which the observer can proceed with a white-noise treatment. Here we present a prewhitening-based method of calculating frequency-dependent FALs. We fit power laws and autoregressive models of order 1 to each Lomb–Scargle periodogram by minimizing the Whittle approximation to the negative log-likelihood (NLL), then calculate FALs based on the best-fit model power spectrum. Our technique is a novel extension of the Whittle NLL to datasets with uneven time sampling. We demonstrate FAL calculations using observations of α Cen B, GJ 581, HD 192310, synthetic data from the radial velocity (RV) fitting challenge, and Kepler observations of a differential rotator. The Kepler data analysis shows that only true rotation signals are detected by red noise FALs, while white noise FALs suggest all spurious peaks in the low-frequency range are significant. A high-frequency sinusoid injected into α Cen B observations exceeds the 1% red noise FAL despite having only 8.9% of the power of the dominant rotation signal. In a periodogram of HD 192310 RVs, peaks associated with differential rotation and planets are detected against the 5% red noise FAL without iterative model fitting or subtraction. The software for calculating red noise–based FALs is available on GitHub.This research has made use of the VizieR catalog access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France (DOI: 10.26093/cds/vizier). The original description of the VizieR service was published in F. Ochsenbein et al. (2000). This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 2307978. This material is based on work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, under contract number DE-AC02-06CH11357. Facilities: ESO:3.6m - European Southern Observatory's 3.6 meter Telescope (European Southern Observatory (ESO) 3.6m Telescope at La Silla Observatory), HET - McDonald Observatory's Hobby-Eberly Telescope (University of Texas, Austin 9.3m Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory), Kepler - The Kepler Mission (NASA 0.95m Kepler Satellite Mission). Software: Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013,2018, 2022)

Model-Driven Analysis of Ion Transport for the Design of Efficient Membrane-Based Electrochemical CO2 Capture

This article was originally published in Journal of The Electrochemical Society. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1149/1945-7111/ae55d3Reducing energy consumption is essential for electrochemical direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 to reach the Department of Energy (DOE) cost target of $100/tonCO2. However, membrane-based electrochemical DAC systems typically exhibit electron efficiencies below 40$23/tonCO2 in energy savings—nearly one quarter of the DOE target. Model projections further indicate that employing a carbonate-rejecting ionomer could elevate efficiencies beyond 75%, providing a new pathway for high-performance, low-energy electrochemical DAC systems.This effort was partially sponsored by the U.S. Government under OTA W912CH-24-9-0006 with the University of Delaware. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation herein. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government. This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. 2330245, which funds the Engineering Research Center for Carbon Utilization Redesign through Biomanufacturing-Empowered Decarbonization (CURB). We appreciate the contributions of Avaneesh Anand, who carried out the initial interlayer thickness experiments

Widespread Phenological Shifts With Temperature in Alaska's Marine Fishes

This article was originally published in Global Change Biology. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70708 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ , which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Published 2026. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. Global Change Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.Changes in the timing of fish spawning and early life stage development can affect the temporal match or mismatch of larvae with production of preferred prey as well as their availability to predators, with potential consequences for recruitment success, food- web dynamics, and fisheries. Using > 370,000 observations from over four decades of spring ichthyoplankton surveys in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea, we investigated long- term changes in the phenology of 29 fish species, including commercially important taxa such as Pacific cod, walleye pollock, and Pacific halibut. Larval size on a standardized date (size- at- date) was used as a proxy for larval developmental timing in spring, and reflects a combination of hatch timing (larval age), growth, and mortality. Spatiotemporal generalized linear mixed models were used to account for variable sampling effort in space and time in order to isolate long- term trends and thermal effects on larval size. For a majority of species, interannual variation in mean size- at- date was significantly and positively related to temperature, demonstrating widespread thermal effects on the phenology of fish early life stages. Despite the wide diversity of life history traits exhibited by the 29 species examined, patterns in size- at- date over time were similar across most species within each ecosystem, reflecting the common effect of temperature on phenology. While temperature affected size- at- date, there was little evidence of long- term trends, likely due to the lack of a linear trend in winter–spring temperatures observed in recent decades. We demonstrate a novel analytical method to assess changes in phenology from larval size observations sampled at variable locations and times, and detect phenological shifts that were not necessarily identifiable from larval abundance data alone. Our results suggest that earlier spring phenology due to warming will be a common response among fishes to projected future climate change in high- latitude ecosystems.We gratefully acknowledge the decades of field work, painstaking laboratory work, and diligent data stewardship by NOAA EcoFOCI scientists past and present that made this study possible. We also thank the Plankton Sorting and Identification Center in Szczecin, Poland, for processing the ichthyoplankton samples. Feedback from Margaret Siple and Will Fennie improved the clarity of the manuscript. The findings and conclusions in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of NOAA or the US Department of Commerce. This paper is contribution EcoFOCI- 1074 to NOAA's Ecosystems and Fisheries- Oceanography Coordinated Investigations Program

Supports for preservice teachers' metacognitive monitoring and explanations of fraction comparisons

This article was originally published in Instructional Science . The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-025-09773-0 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material. Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 275.9 kb) https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11251-025-09773-0/MediaObjects/11251_2025_9773_MOESM1_ESM.docxThe ability to provide clear and comprehensive instructional explanations on mathematical concepts is key to supporting student learning in the classroom. This is especially important when teaching content that students most often struggle with. A large body of literature has established the challenges that elementary students face with developing fraction magnitude concepts. More recent work points to the struggles that both pre- and in-service teachers have with fraction magnitude. Though much work exists on interventions for students in supporting their fraction understanding, there is a dearth of literature on how to support teachers’ provisions of high quality explanations. We designed and evaluated the effectiveness of three instructional supports on elementary pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) revision and improvements of their explanations of fraction concepts. We also examined their metacognitive monitoring and calibration skills as they relate to the revision process. Elementary PSTs were instructed to identify the larger of two fractions and then explain and justify their choice. They had an opportunity to revise after examining different instructional supports depending on their condition. We found that PSTs who were provided with instructional supports that provided a correct and complete exemplar of a fraction magnitude comparison showed greater improvements in their explanations than those who studied example explanations that displayed common misconceptions and errors. Correct and complete exemplars also supported greater detection and correction of errors and omissions in their explanations than those provided with a list of steps focused on structural aspects of the explanation. Hedges’ g effect sizes ranged from medium to large (g = 0.64 to 0.95) for the three comparison tasks. Most PSTs also showed limitations in calibration, indicating over-confidence in the degree of completeness of their explanations at both time points. These findings can inform instructional materials design for pre-service teacher mathematics content courses as they learn how to monitor their own thinking and explain fraction comparisons to students.This work was not grant-funded