Patients with cancer have higher COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. Here we present the prospective CAPTURE study, integrating longitudinal immune profiling with clinical annotation. Of 357 patients with cancer, 118 were SARS-CoV-2 positive, 94 were symptomatic and 2 died of COVID-19. In this cohort, 83% patients had S1-reactive antibodies and 82% had neutralizing antibodies against wild type SARS-CoV-2, whereas neutralizing antibody titers against the Alpha, Beta and Delta variants were substantially reduced. S1-reactive antibody levels decreased in 13% of patients, whereas neutralizing antibody titers remained stable for up to 329 days. Patients also had detectable SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells and CD4+ responses correlating with S1-reactive antibody levels, although patients with hematological malignancies had impaired immune responses that were disease and treatment specific, but presented compensatory cellular responses, further supported by clinical recovery in all but one patient. Overall, these findings advance the understanding of the nature and duration of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 in patients with cancer. Turajlic and colleagues assess longitudinal antibody and cellular immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in patients with cancer, following either recovery from SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination, in two back-to-back reports from the CAPTURE study.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) antiviral response in a pan-tumor immune monitoring (CAPTURE) (NCT03226886) is a prospective cohort study of COVID-19 immunity in patients with cancer. Here we evaluated 585 patients following administration of two doses of BNT162b2 or AZD1222 vaccines, administered 12 weeks apart. Seroconversion rates after two doses were 85% and 59% in patients with solid and hematological malignancies, respectively. A lower proportion of patients had detectable titers of neutralizing antibodies (NAbT) against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants of concern (VOC) versus wild-type (WT) SARS-CoV-2. Patients with hematological malignancies were more likely to have undetectable NAbT and had lower median NAbT than those with solid cancers against both SARS-CoV-2 WT and VOC. By comparison with individuals without cancer, patients with hematological, but not solid, malignancies had reduced neutralizing antibody (NAb) responses. Seroconversion showed poor concordance with NAbT against VOC. Previous SARS-CoV-2 infection boosted the NAb response including against VOC, and anti-CD20 treatment was associated with undetectable NAbT. Vaccine-induced T cell responses were detected in 80% of patients and were comparable between vaccines or cancer types. Our results have implications for the management of patients with cancer during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Turajlic and colleagues assess longitudinal antibody and cellular immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in patients with cancer, following either recovery from SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination, in two back-to-back reports from the CAPTURE study.

Soil respiration is a significant contributor to the global emissions of CO2 and is governed by many soil factors. Reliable estimates of CO2 emission on different scales (e.g., field, regional level) are hard to obtain due to the expressed spatial and temporal variability of the CO2 flux. This study aims to investigate the spatial variability of CO2 flux and soil properties in soybean cropland on Fluvisols (Croatia). The field measurements and soil samples were taken in a regular sampling grid (2 × 2 m) with 44 points in total and the spatial variability was assessed using the kriging and cokriging techniques. The soil CO2 flux showed relatively high spatial heterogeneity, ranging from 0.03 mg/m2s to 0.40 mg/m2s. The soil organic matter content (SOM), soil water content (SWC), and soil temperature (ST) had the lower variability ranging from 2.09% to 2.52%, from 27.7% to 46.8%, and from 13.7 °C to 18.2 °C, respectively. The spatial dependence was high for CO2 flux and ST, moderate for SOM, and low for SWC. The incorporation of the auxiliary variables increased the precision of the estimations for CO2 flux, SOM, and SWC. Kriging was the most accurate method for the spatial prediction of ST. The SWC was associated as the most important factor of the CO2 fluxes, indicated by their significant negative correlation, and the highest increase of the prediction precision during spatial modeling. However, more robust co-variates should be incorporated in future models to further increase the precision.

One of the major application areas of highly automated vehicles is the problem of Automated Valet Parking (AVP). In this work, we analyze solutions and compare performances of RRT (rapidly exploring random tree) based approaches in the context of the AVP problem, which can also be applied in a more general low-speed autonomy context. We present comparison results using both simulation and real-life experiments on a representative parking use case. The results indicate better suitability of RRTx and RRV for utilization in typical AVP scenarios. The main contributions of this work lie in real-life experimental validation and comparisons of RRT approaches for use in low-speed autonomy.

There is growing enthusiasm to develop inexpensive, non-invasive, and portable methods that accurately assess swallowing and provide biofeedback during dysphagia treatment. High-resolution cervical auscultation (HRCA), which uses acoustic and vibratory signals from non-invasive sensors attached to the anterior laryngeal framework during swallowing, is a novel method for quantifying swallowing physiology via advanced signal processing and machine learning techniques. HRCA has demonstrated potential as a dysphagia screening method and diagnostic adjunct to VFSSs by determining swallowing safety, annotating swallow kinematic events, and classifying swallows between healthy participants and patients with a high degree of accuracy. However, its feasibility as a non-invasive biofeedback system has not been explored. This study investigated 1. Whether HRCA can accurately differentiate between non-effortful and effortful swallows; 2. Whether differences exist in Modified Barium Swallow Impairment Profile (MBSImP) scores (#9, #11, #14) between non-effortful and effortful swallows. We hypothesized that HRCA would accurately classify non-effortful and effortful swallows and that differences in MBSImP scores would exist between the types of swallows. We analyzed 247 thin liquid 3 mL command swallows (71 effortful) to minimize variation from 36 healthy adults who underwent standardized VFSSs with concurrent HRCA. Results revealed differences (p < 0.05) in 9 HRCA signal features between non-effortful and effortful swallows. Using HRCA signal features as input, decision trees classified swallows with 76% accuracy, 76% sensitivity, and 77% specificity. There were no differences in MBSImP component scores between non-effortful and effortful swallows. While preliminary in nature, this study demonstrates the feasibility/promise of HRCA as a biofeedback method for dysphagia treatment.

The influence of wetting additive based on C12 - C14 alkyl ester sulfate with essential oils on the quality of nickel coatings is examined in the paper. The additive was tested at different concentrations added to the base electrolyte, taking the following concentrations: the concentration recommended twice lower (C1); lower recommended concentration (C2); upper recommended concentration (C3); the concentration twice higher compared to the lower recommended (C4) and the concentration twice higher compared to the upper recommended (C5). The value of the surface tension of the solution was determined, and the corrosion resistance in the salt chamber was examined. In addition, what is important in the production itself is the visual appearance of the coating, which was determined using the Hull cell test. The additive has been proven to be effective in reducing the surface solutions, which directly affects the production of nickel coatings of better quality and aesthetic appearance.

As a core language skill, reading has always occupied a prominent role in the process of language acquisition, with a strategic approach to its development contributing to greater reading competences and better learning outcomes. The present paper, thus, aims to explore variation in strategy use by study field, year of study and university type among 228 university-level students in Bosnia and Herzegovina employing the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS). A one-way MANCOVA revealed a significant effect of the study field on the overall use of reading strategies with the age factor being controlled and a univariate ANOVA indicated that the study field significantly affected all strategy subtypes. More specifically, students in the field of psychology seem to be the most frequent users of reading strategies and their two subtypes, namely global and support strategies, whereas the students in the field of English language and literature most frequently use problem-solving strategies. Moreover, a two-way MANOVA showed a significant interaction effect of the university status and the year of study on the metacognitive reading strategy use, even though their main effects were insignificant. The current study findings may contribute to broader understanding of the overall as well as type-specific use of reading strategies by EFL learners of different backgrounds, thus setting out guidelines for the development of corresponding curricula and instructional design.

While periodically-driven phases offer a unique insight into non-equilibrium topology that is richer than its static counterpart, their experimental realization is often hindered by ubiquitous decoherence effects. Recently, we have proposed a decoherence-free approach of realizing these Floquet phases. The central insight is that the reflection matrix, being unitary for a bulk insulator, plays the role of a Floquet time-evolution operator. We have shown that reflection processes off the boundaries of systems supporting higher-order topological phases (HOTPs) simulate non-trivial Floquet phases. So far, this method was shown to work for one-dimensional Floquet topological phases protected by local symmetries. Here, we extend the range of applicability by studying reflection off three-dimensional HOTPs with corner and hinge modes. We show that the reflection processes can simulate both first-order and second-order Floquet phases, protected by a combination of local and spatial symmetries. For every phase, we discuss appropriate topological invariants calculated with the nested scattering matrix method.

Optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR) is used to characterize fiber optic links by identifying and localizing various refractive and reflective events such as breaks, splices, and connectors, and measuring insertion/return loss and fiber length. Essentially, OTDR inserts a pulsed signal into the fiber, from which a small portion that is commonly referred to as Rayleigh backscatter, is continuously reflected back with appropriate delays of the reflections expressed as the power loss versus distance, by conveniently scaling the time axis. Specifically, for long-distance events visibility and measurement accuracy, the crucial OTDR attribute is dynamic range, which determines how far downstream the fiber can the strongest transmitted optical pulse reach. As many older-generation but still operable OTDR units have insufficient dynamic range to test the far-end of longer fibers, we propose a simple and cost-effective solution to reactivate such an OTDR by inserting a low-noise high-gain optical preamplifier in front of it to lower the noise figure and thereby the noise floor. Accordingly, we developed an appropriate dynamic range and distance span extension model which provided the exemplar prediction values of 30 dB and 75 km, respectively, for the fiber under test at 1550 nm. These values were found to closely match the dynamic range and distance span extensions obtained for the same values of the relevant parameters of interest by the preliminary practical OTDR measurements conducted with the front-end EDFA optical amplifier, relative to the measurements with the OTDR alone. This preliminary verifies that the proposed concept enables a significantly longer distance span than the OTDR alone. We believe that the preliminary results reported here could serve as a hint and a framework for a more comprehensive test strategy in terms of both test diversification and repeating rate, which can be implemented in a network operator environment or professional lab.

In this paper we consider the problem of finding a Nash equilibrium (NE) via zeroth-order feedback information in games with merely monotone pseudogradient mapping. Based on hybrid system theory, we propose a novel extremum seeking algorithm which converges to the set of Nash equilibria in a semi-global practical sense. Finally, we present two simulation examples. The first shows that the standard extremum seeking algorithm fails, while ours succeeds in reaching NE. In the second, we simulate an allocation problem with fixed demand.

Forests in Europe are, at present not endangered by soil erosion, however, this can change with climate change or intensified forest management practices. Using a newly established network of plots in beech forests across Europe, the aims of this study were 1) discrimination of soil properties and erodibility indices in relation to bedrock, 2) determination of geochemical properties and Corg influencing erodibility, and 3) assessment of the effect of soil depth on erodibility indices. Seventy-six soil samples from 20 beech forests were collected in 11 countries to quantify soil properties influencing erodibility indices clay ratio, modified clay ratio, sodium adsorption ratio, and oxides ratio. Results indicate that dominant soil properties, determined by bedrock, that correlate with forest soil erodibility indices are: Corg, pH, EC, Ca and Na ion concentrations, total-water soluble cations, and the % of sand. According to the tested indices, soil susceptibility to erosion follows the sequence: granite>andesite>sandstone>quartzite>limestone. Deeper soil horizons on granite are more susceptible to erosion than surface horizons, while this is not the case for soils on limestones. In conclusion, forest management should consider the predisposition of different soil types to erosion.