Under some initial and boundary conditions, the rapid reaction-thermal diffusion process taking place during frontal polymerization (FP) destabilizes the planar mode of front propagation, leading to spatially varying, complex hierarchical patterns in thermoset polymeric materials. Although modern reaction-diffusion models can predict the patterns resulting from unstable FP, the inverse design of patterns, which aims to retrieve process conditions that produce a desired pattern, remains an open challenge due to the non-unique and non-intuitive mapping between process conditions and manufactured patterns. In this work, we propose a probabilistic generative model named univariate conditional variational autoencoder (UcVAE) for the inverse design of hierarchical patterns in FP-based manufacturing. Unlike the cVAE, which encodes both the design space and the design target, the UcVAE encodes only the design space. In the encoder of the UcVAE, the number of training parameters is significantly reduced compared to the cVAE, resulting in a shorter training time while maintaining comparable performance. Given desired pattern images, the trained UcVAE can generate multiple process condition solutions that produce high-fidelity hierarchical patterns.

Rapid reaction-thermal diffusion during frontal polymerization (FP) with variations in initial and boundary conditions destabilizes the planar mode of front propagation, leading to spatially varying complex hierarchical patterns in polymeric materials. Although modern reaction-diffusion models can predict the patterns resulting from unstable FP, the inverse design of patterns, which aims to retrieve process conditions that produce a desired pattern, remains an open challenge due to the nonunique and nonintuitive mapping between process conditions and patterns. In this work, we propose a novel probabilistic generative model named univariate conditional variational autoencoder (UcVAE) for the inverse design of hierarchical patterns in FP-based manufacturing. Unlike the cVAE, which encodes both the design space and the design target, the UcVAE encodes only the design space. In the encoder of the UcVAE, the number of training parameters is significantly reduced compared to the cVAE, resulting in a shorter training time while maintaining comparable performance. Given desired pattern images, the trained UcVAE can generate multiple process condition solutions that produce high-fidelity hierarchical patterns.

This paper investigates the dynamics of non-autonomous cooperative systems of difference equations with asymptotically constant coefficients. We are mainly interested in global attractivity results for such systems and the application of such results to evolutionary population cooperation models. We use two methods to extend the global attractivity results for autonomous cooperative systems to related non-autonomous cooperative systems which appear in recent problems in evolutionary dynamics.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to measure financial inclusion (FI) and to examine the role of digital financial literacy (DFL) and its components, and various socio-demographics in relation to FI. In addition, the mediating effect of digital financial attitudes (DFA) on the relationship between digital financial knowledge (DFK) and digital financial behaviour (DFB), as well mediating effect of DFA and DFB on the relationship between DFK and FI, is being explored.Design/methodology/approach Using a cross-sectional research design, we utilize a dataset from the survey of adults’ financial literacy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, collected from the representative sample of 1,096 adults in 2022. The main methodology relies on logistic and ordinal logistic regression analyses and PROCESS for mediation analyses.Findings The findings suggest that the effect of DFK on DFB is partially mediated by DFA. In addition, the effect of DFK on FI is fully mediated through three pathways: DFA, DFB, and DFA and DFB in serial mediation. Age, education, employment status and residence are significantly related to FI. Internet access is significant only for FI scores but not for adults’ banking status. Although women are almost twice as unbanked as men, we find no gender-based differences in financial product holdings, FI or adults’ banking status.Practical implications There is a need to enhance DFK and DFA to enable adults to use financial products. Financial institutions could use our results in designing and promoting their services.Social implications Policy implications are seen in the need for developing national strategies for financial education, with an emphasis on strengthening DFL, especially DFK and DFA, which will enhance the formal FI of adults. Also, governments should work on expanding Internet access.Originality/value The results make a contribution to the theory of planned behaviour. They contribute to the limited empirical evidence of the mediating role of DFA in relationship to DFB, as well as the mediating role of DFA and DFB in relationship to FI.

Background To assess the results after elbow arthroplasty it is essential to gather patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). However, the acquisition of PROMs poses a challenge because of potential low literacy, lengthiness and diversity of questionnaires, and questionnaire fatigue. Instead of a questionnaire, patient-reported outcomes can be collected using a single assessment numeric evaluation (SANE), the subjective elbow value (SEV). The aim of this pilot study is to assess the correlation between the SEV and conventionally used patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) after elbow arthroplasty. Materials and methods The SEV was added to our follow-up system in 2021, consisting of a scale from 0 to 10 in which the patients are asked to rate the overall functionality of their elbow, 0 corresponds to very poor functionality and 10 to a perfectly functional or healthy elbow. All patients who underwent elbow arthroplasty (total or radial head) and responded to the SEV question were retrospectively identified and included. The correlation between the SEV at the final follow-up and the Oxford Elbow Score (OES), and between the SEV and the Quick Disbailities of the Arm, Shoulder, and Hand (quickDASH) score was assessed using Pearson’s r. Results In total, 82 patients responded to the SEV question and were included in the study, with a median follow-up of 5 years [interquartile range (IQR) 3–7]. Of these patients, 17 (21%) underwent radial head arthroplasty and 65 (79%) total elbow arthroplasty. The Pearson’s r for the correlation between SEV and OES was 0.502 (p < 0.001) and between the SEV and the QuickDASH −0.537 (p < 0.001), which correspond to a moderate correlation. Conclusions The SEV shows a moderate correlation with conventional PROMs, demonstrating its potential in simplifying the follow-up of elbow arthroplasty, possibly decreasing time, costs, and patients’ questionnaire fatigue compared with conventional PROM questionnaires. Evidence level: III.

This study examines climate finance context, policy context in Bosnia and Herzegovina and creating recommendations regarding national Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system to track climate finance inflows and public expenditure. This research was prepared to answer the question, what is the best methodological approach for recording climate finance in Bosnia and Herzegovina, considering the best foreign practices as well as the specifics of the political system of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The subject of the research was the financial flows of investments in climate change, mitigation and adaptation, and the recommendation of the best way to establish a system for monitoring, reporting and verifying the relevant financial indicators. During the research, the main hypothesis was tested: H1: The existing monitoring of flows of public finances in Bosnia and Herzegovina give a clear picture of investment in climate change. The findings underscore the necessity for a robust MRV system that not only enhances transparency but also fosters accountability in the allocation of climate finance. It becomes evident that tailored strategies must be deployed to integrate these practices within the existing governance frameworks, ensuring that financial flows align with national climate objectives. Ultimately, this study seeks to contribute valuable insights and actionable recommendations toward advancing climate finance management in Bosnia and Herzegovina, advocating for a sustainable and resilient future in the face of climate change impacts.

Industrija osiguranja u Bosni i Hercegovini je neminovna sastavnica njenog ekonomskog rasta i razvoja. Njen sadržaj i forma su dio kriterija koje treba ostvariti Bosna i Hercegovina na svom putu pristupanja Evropskoj uniji. Kakvo je aktuelno stanje i kakvi su trendovi u industriji osiguranja BiH te koliko zaostajemo za industrijom osiguranja članica Evropske unije? Industrija osiguranja u BiH je kompleksne strukture. Recidiv je ne samo državnog uređenja BiH i njene ekonomske snage nego i nerazvijene svijesti odgovornih institucija i ličnosti o mjestu i ulozi osiguranja u društvu, državi, ekonomiji… SWOT analiza jasno pokazuje snage i slabosti, prilike i prijetnje industriji osiguranja u BiH u sadašnjem, a posebno budućem periodu. Naučna istina se ne uvažava dovoljno u kreiranju zakonskog ambijenta racionalnog i potrebnog sadržaja i forme osiguranja kod fizičkih i pravnih lica, životnog i radnog okoliša; stručna određenja i praktična primjena nisu na potrebnom savremenom nivou kakav je prisutan na prostorima Evropske unije. Snagom naučnih istina, savremenih trendova u razvijenim državama, posebno članicama Evropske unije, neminovno trebamo i u Bosni i Hercegovini vršiti ubrzanu tranziciju neracionalne industrije osiguranja u prosperitetnu industriju kao bitnu sastavnicu ubrzanog ekonomskog razvoja naše države i mjesto proizvodnje veće sigurnosti svih njenih građana, pravnih lica, institucija, životne i radne sredine. Brojni su izazovi industrije osiguranja u BiH u procesu integracije naše države u Evropsku uniju. Te izazove treba jasno identificirati, ocijeniti njihove pondere koji su kompleksne naravi i poduzimati konkretne aktivnosti na putu osavremenjavanja ove industrije i prilagođavanja potrebama osiguranika, društvene zajednice i države.

SUMMARY Natural killer (NK) cells are essential components of the innate immune system, with their activity significantly regulated by Killer cell Immunoglobulin-like Receptors (KIRs). The diversity and structural complexity of KIR genes present significant challenges for accurate genotyping, essential for understanding NK cell functions and their implications in health and disease. Traditional genotyping methods struggle with the variable nature of KIR genes, leading to inaccuracies that can impede immunogenetic research. These challenges extend to high-quality phased assemblies, which have been recently popularized by the Human Pangenome Consortium. This paper introduces BAKIR (Biologically-informed Annotator for KIR locus), a tailored computational tool designed to overcome the challenges of KIR genotyping and annotation on high-quality, phased genome assemblies. BAKIR aims to enhance the accuracy of KIR gene annotations by structuring its annotation pipeline around identifying key functional mutations, thereby improving the identification and subsequent relevance of gene and allele calls. It uses a multi-stage mapping, alignment, and variant calling process to ensure high-precision gene and allele identification, while also maintaining high recall for sequences that are significantly mutated or truncated relative to the known allele database. BAKIR has been evaluated on a subset of the HPRC assemblies, where BAKIR was able to improve many of the associated annotations and call novel variants. BAKIR is freely available on GitHub, offering ease of access and use through multiple installation methods, including pip, conda, and singularity container, and is equipped with a user-friendly command-line interface, thereby promoting its adoption in the scientific community. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION BAKIR is available at github.com/algo-cancer/bakir. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Uloga ustavnog sudstva u svakoj savremenoj demokratski uređenoj državi od nemjerljivog je značaja za očuvanje njenog ustavnopravnog poretka i osnovnih principa pravne države i vladavine prava, ustavnosti i zakonitosti. Pozicija Ustavnog suda Bosne i Hercegovine u sistemu državnih institucija zauzima posebno mjesto, zbog specifičnosti njenog državnog uređenja, stepena demokratskog razvoja i opredijeljenosti političkih aktera ka poštivanju uvodno navedenih principa. Da bi Ustavni sud Bosne i Hercegovine odgovorio svojoj zahtjevnoj ulozi “čuvara” Ustava Bosne i Hercegovine i njenog ustavnopravnog poretka, posebno je važno osigurati da u sastav Ustavnog suda Bosne i Hercegovine budu izabrani samo i isključivo nezavisni, nepristrasni, stručni i profesionalni pravnici visokih moralnih kvaliteta, bez obzira na njihovu etničku pripadnost, oslobođeni mogućnosti bilo kakvih političkih ili drugih uticaja na njihove stavove, mišljenja i odluke, osigurati objektivne i nezavisne procedure donošenja odluka bez bilo kakvih institucionalnih ili vaninstitucionalnih uticaja i pritisaka, posebno kada su u pitanju procedure donošenja odluka koje se ne mogu i ne smiju vezati za etničku ili entitetsku pripadnost pojedinog sudije Ustavnog suda Bosne i Hercegovine. Upravo kroz mehanizme etnicizacije i politizacije pitanja sastava, izbora sudija i načina donošenja odluka Ustavnog suda Bosne i Hercegovine, a posmatrajući ulogu Ustavnog suda Bosne i Hercegovine u očuvanju državnosti i državnopravnog kontinuiteta, svjedoci smo očiglednom podrivanju ustavnopravnog poretka države Bosne i Hercegovine.

Plant pathogenic fungi have evolved different strategies to interfere with plant defense mechanisms. The well described fungal plant pathogen Fusarium graminearum is not only able to produce trichothecene toxins like deoxynivalenol, but also the plant hormone auxin. Highly elevated levels of auxin and auxin derivatives such as IAA-glucoside or IAA amino-acid conjugates were observed in wheat cultivar Apogee infected with F. graminearum. We report that F. graminearum is able to cleave tryptamine-derived hydroxycinnamic acid amides, e.g. the defense compound coumaroyl-tryptamine. In this study we investigated copper amine-oxidases, candidate genes for auxin biosynthesis converting tryptamine into the IAA precursor indole-3-acetyldehyde. After consecutive knock outs of all seven copper amine oxidases the resulting septuple knock out strain had strongly reduced ability to produce auxin. Virulence of the septuple mutant was significantly impaired while DON production in planta was comparable to the wild type. We conclude that F. graminearum, often presumed to be a simple nectrotroph, has a biotrophic phase and is able to employ plant defense compounds by converting them into defense suppressing auxin.

Heat dissipation and thermal management is a rising concern for nanoelectronic devices and threatens to curtail their adoption in integrated circuits, sensors, and energy converters. Joule heating due to dissipation in the channel region of nanoelectronic devices causes increased temperature and may lead to mobility degradation and long-term reliability issues. Here we study thermal transport and cross-plane thermal boundary conductance in a variety of “beyond graphene” 2D materials and few-layer stacks on several amorphous and crystalline substrates using a combination of first principles methods and Boltzmann transport of phonons. We employ machine learning to accelerate the discovery of 2D-substrate pairings with enhanced thermal conductance. Beyond that, we couple electronic and thermal transport to study dissipation in field effect MOS transistors and show that heat dissipation is non-uniform and that self-heating reduces mobility. We find that judicious selection of the number of layers and substrate can significantly reduce the deleterious effects of Joule heating.

Raman thermometry has gained immense popularity for probing the thermal properties of nanostructured materials due to its excellent spatial resolution and lack of contact error; however, it has a key weakness in its temperature resolution. In this work, we aim to improve the temperature resolution of Raman thermometry through training neural networks to track the locations, widths, and relative heights of multiple peaks at once. We find that in training a multilayer perceptron on 13 pixel values representing the Raman peak of silicon, the variance and standard deviation in thermal conductivity predictions can be reduced as compared to those resulting from the predominant method of tracking the peak location as it shifts with temperature. We expect that this work may contribute to greater accuracy of thermal measurements from non-contact Raman-based techniques and thereby improve the consensus on the thermal properties of 2D materials.

Conjugated polymers (CP) are frequently doped to modulate their transport and optical properties. Doping alters the intrinsic Gaussian density of states (DOS) by adding Coulomb energy and inducing an exponential tail. Changes in transport or optical properties are mainly tracked back to changes in DOS and carrier hopping rates. Conductivity shows a power-law like increase and the Seebeck coefficient a decrease with carrier concentration. This results in a trade-off between transport properties with doping. However, their modification with doping is still not well understood. Here we show that capture transport and optical properties of doped CPs, by developing a tight-binding Hamiltonian that includes dopant-induced energetic disorder (DID) via Coulomb interactions. We utilize perturbation theory to calculate transition rates between wavefunctions from the calculated eigenenergies and eigenfunctions. With the obtained transition rates, we solve Pauli master equation for occupational probabilities to compute transport properties of doped CPs. Additionally, we capture optical absorption features by simply simulating the joint DOS and IR absorption features via simulated AC conductivity. We anticipate our work to significantly contribute to understanding of underlying transport and optical physics of doped CPs.

Despite their potential for miniaturization, electronic devices made of 2D materials face thermal management challenges due to their reduced dimensionality, which can limit their efficiency and lifespan. Low thermal boundary conductance (TBC) is one major limiting factor in realizing efficient heat transfer to the substrate. Due to the roughness at the interface, the adhesion of 2D materials to their substrates tend to be weak, resulting in low TBC. Therefore, to improve heat flow from the 2D material, we need to discover novel ways of increasing TBC. In this study, we have used a numerical model combined with first-principles DFPT simulations to investigate a possible method to increase TBC using an electrostatic field due to gate voltage. Our study shows that electrostatic pressure can be used to effectively enhance TBC for an interface formed by a 2D material and a rough substrate. We find that electrostatic pressure can improve TBC by more than 300 % when an electric field of 3 V/nm is applied. This is due to an improvement in the vdW spring coupling constant, which shows a more than two-fold increase when a substrate roughness of 1.6 nm and correlation length of 10.8 nm, 2D-material's bending stiffness of 1.5 eV, and adhesion energy of 0.1 $J/m^{2}$ were used. We show that TBC is enhanced more when the substrate has a large roughness and small correlation length, and the $2D$ material has a large bending stiffness. This is because a stiff 2D sheet resist bending when voltage/pressure is applied, thus causing it to press more on the roughness peaks, resulting in a tremendous increase in the coupling constants at the peaks in the atomically rough surface of the substrate. However, a flexible 2D material can easily bend to conform to the topography of the rough substrate when voltage/pressure is applied, which makes the coupling constants across the interface more uniform. Here we show that TBC is enhanced more when adhesion is weak because a weak vdW bond is easily compressed by external pressure. Therefore, our study provides valuable information that can be applied in designing electronic devices with efficient heat management by using gate voltage, substrate roughness combined with the mechanical properties.