Key Mediators Reducing Socioeconomic Inequality in Early Childhood Caries.

Objectives: Socioeconomic status (SES) has a significant effect on the burden of early childhood caries (ECC), yet addressing SES disparities remains challenging. This study aimed to identify and quantify the most impactful mediator linking SES effect to the occurrence of ECC using advanced causal mediation analysis, to inform targeted interventions that reduce SES-related disparities in ECC.

Methods: Data were drawn from the Study of Mothers' and Infants' Life Events, a cohort of 2,182 mother-child dyads recruited from Adelaide's 3 largest public hospitals (2013-2014).

Automating the Search for Artificial Life With Foundation Models.

With the recent Nobel Prize awarded for radical advances in protein discovery, foundation models (FMs) for exploring large combinatorial spaces promise to revolutionize many scientific fields. Artificial Life (ALife) has not yet integrated FMs, thus presenting a major opportunity for the field to alleviate the historical burden of relying chiefly on manual design and trial and error to discover the configurations of lifelike simulations. This article presents, for the first time, a successful realization of this opportunity using vision-language FMs.

Middle Interlayer Engineered Ferroelectric NAND Flash Overcoming Reliability and Stability Bottlenecks for Next-Generation High-Density Storage Systems.

Multilevel storage and low-voltage operation position ferroelectric transistors as promising candidates for next-generation nonvolatile memory. Among them, gate-injection-type ferroelectric transistors offer improved vertical scalability and power efficiency for three-dimensional (3D) NAND flash. However, their intricate interplay between polarization switching and charge trapping complicates systematic understanding of degradation mechanisms, limiting strategies to improve reliability and stability.

Underappreciated role of canopy nitrogen deposition for forest productivity.

Atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition is generally expected to stimulate plant carbon (C) sequestration and promote tree growth, thereby mitigating atmospheric CO accumulation. Yet, the magnitude of N deposition contribution to forest productivity remains contentious. While correlative studies suggest substantial plant growth enhancement, controlled fertilization experiments typically demonstrate a limited impact.

Curative intent therapy of stage I-III non-small cell lung cancer: a patient-centered precision approach to assess, measure, and interpret benefits and harms.

Background: The number of people diagnosed with stage I-III non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is increasing, in part due to greater implementation of lung cancer screening and earlier detection. Definitive surgery, radiation, or chemoradiation are increasingly utilized along with adjunctive therapies that include chemotherapy, radiation, immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), and receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors (rTKIs). However, remedial and adverse effects exist for each modality that must be accounted for in individual treatment plans with curative intent.