Effects of feedback on parent-child language with infants and toddlers in Korea

The objective was to investigate changes in the natural language environments of families with typically-developing infants receiving language feedback in South Korea. Volunteer parents of 99 children aged 4–16 months were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. During six months intervention, the experimental group recorded weekly day-long automatically-analyzed LENA measures of language environment and viewed feedback, while the control group recorded only baseline, midperiod and post-test without feedback. LENA Adult Word Counts (AWC) and Conversational Turn (CT) counts correlated reasonably well with human transcripts. At baseline groups were not significantly different. At post-test there was no significant overall difference between experimental and control groups, but AWC and CT differences were significant for families below the 50th percentile at baseline. Korean parents whose linguistic environment was below average adapted their communicative interaction in response to linguistic feedback. The intervention has promise for use with at-risk families in many countries

Complex deformation behavior of a partially recrystallized metastable medium-entropy alloy: In-situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction study

Ferrous medium-entropy alloys (FeMEAs), leveraging deformation-induced martensitic transformation (DIMT), demonstrate excellent strain-hardening ability attributed to the transformation-induced plasticity (TRIP) effect. To improve the low yield strength of FeMEAs, the initial microstructure was controlled by utilizing partial recrystallization. The intricate initial microstructure, a blend of recrystallized (ReX) and non-recrystallized (non-ReX) regions, results in complex deformation behavior where DIMT in both the ReX and non-ReX regions are simultaneously activated, posing significant analytical challenges. In this paper, we perform in-situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction during the tensile loading on a partially recrystallized metastable Fe57.5Co18Cr13Ni7.5Mo3C1 (at%) FeMEA to quantitatively analyze each deformation mechanism. The innovative idea of peak deconvolution enables separate tracing of the deformation behavior of the ReX and non-ReX FCC domains, revealing the stress partitioning between them. DIMT kinetics in each domain are investigated by the evolution of domain fractions, and we provide a detailed discussion on how both of them exhibit rapid DIMT kinetics. Furthermore, we measure the contributions of DIMT occurring in each domain on the global strain-hardening rate. The results suggest that the predominant contribution shifts from DIMT in the ReX domain to DIMT in the non-ReX domain as deformation progresses, highlighting the distinctive strain-hardening mechanisms between the ReX and non-ReX domains. This work demonstrates how a partially recrystallized metastable FeMEA exhibits superior mechanical properties and provides insights into analyzing the complex deformation behavior

Tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase proteins inhibit teratoma growth in mice transplanted with pluripotent stem cells

Abstract Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) can serve as an unlimited cell source for transplantation therapies for treating various devastating diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and Parkinson's disease. However, PSC transplantation has some associated risks, including teratoma formation from the remaining undifferentiated PSCs. Thus, for successful clinical application, it is essential to ablate the proliferative PSCs before or after transplantation. In this study, neural stem cell-derived conditioned medium (NSC-CM) inhibited the proliferation of PSCs and PSC-derived neural precursor (NP) cells without influencing the potential of PSC-NP cells to differentiate into neurons in vitro and prevented teratoma growth in vivo. Moreover, we found that the NSC-CM remarkably decreased the expression levels of Oct4 and cyclin D1 that Oct4 directly binds to and increased the cleaved-caspase 3-positive cell death through the DNA damage response in PSCs and PSC-NPs. Interestingly, we found that NSCs distinctly secreted the tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase (TIMP)-1 and TIMP-2 proteins. These proteins suppressed not only the proliferation of PSCs in cell culture but also teratoma growth in mice transplanted with PSCs through inhibition of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-2 and MMP-9 activity. Taken together, these results suggest that the TIMP proteins may improve the efficacy and safety of the PSC-based transplantation therapy. </jats:sec