The Bing Xin Children's Literary Award (Bing Xin ertong wenxue xinzuo jiang 冰心儿童文学新作奖) is named after the Chinese writer Bing Xin, whose work has made her a key figure in 20th-century Chinese literature. It is an annual award intended to "honor the creativity of Chinese Children's literature and in addition to discovering and fostering new authors, supporting and encouraging outstanding children's literature and publishing..." The first series of awards were announced in 2005.Bing Xin's daughter Wu Qing continues to be involved with the Bing Xin Children's Literature Award.
Geroscience needs biomarkers that capture the progressive decline of integrated biological systems with age. Physical capacity, a direct manifestation of systemic integrity, is a core pillar of biological aging but is typically assessed through discrete clinical tests. Speech production, a complex motor act requiring coordinated respiratory, laryngeal, and articulatory control, shares fundamental physiological pathways with global physical function and may therefore serve as an accessible digital biomarker of aging. In a longitudinal cohort of 464 community-dwelling older adults (mean age 79.6 ± 8.7 years), we tested the hypothesis that changes in speech track specific changes in physical capacity. Participants underwent a 3-month adapted physical activity (APA) program. At baseline (T0) and post-intervention (T1), we performed a battery of ten objective physical tests (strength, power, endurance, gait, balance, flexibility, mobility, appendicular lean mass, fatigue) and recorded spontaneous speech during emotional autobiographical recall. Multi-layered acoustic, temporal, and linguistic features were automatically extracted. The longitudinal association was analyzed via Spearman correlations and univariate linear mixed-effects models. The APA intervention induced significant improvements in key physical domains, including mobility, gait speed, handgrip strength, and balance (all p < 0.01). These gains were specifically correlated with concurrent changes in speech features (|ρ| = 0.11–0.22). For instance, greater lower-limb strength correlated with reduced vocal shimmer and lexical diversity, while improved flexibility was associated with a lower spectral centroid and zero-crossing rate, indicating smoother phonation. Linear mixed models confirmed significant within-individual coupling between trajectories of physical function and speech dynamics. Emotional context systematically modulated these associations, revealing different speech-stress signatures under cognitive-affective load. This study provides novel longitudinal evidence that speech is a dynamic digital biomarker of domain-specific physical capacity, reflecting underlying functional integrity. The domain-specific speech-physical coupling suggests that speech analysis can serve as a novel, integrative tool for remote monitoring of aging trajectories and the functional efficacy of interventions targeting the age-related physiological decline. Speech as a longitudinal digital biomarker of physical aging.
Mean field games (MFGs) and mean field control (MFC) have been introduced to study large populations of strategic players. They correspond respectively to non-cooperative or cooperative scenarios, where the aim is to find the Nash equilibrium and social optimum. They approximate finite player problems and have many applications in economics, biology, machine learning. This paper studies how players can pass from a non-cooperative to a cooperative regime, and vice-versa. The first direction is reminiscent of mechanism design, in which the game’s definition is modified so that non-cooperative players reach an outcome similar to a cooperative scenario. The second direction studies how initially cooperative players gradually deviate from social optimum to reach Nash equilibrium when they optimize their individual cost very much in the spirit of the free-rider phenomenon. To formalize these connections, we introduce and theoretically analyze two new classes of games which lie between MFG and MFC: λ -interpolated MFGs, in which the cost of an individual player is an interpolation of the MFG and the MFC costs, and p-partial MFGs, in which a proportion of the population deviates from social optimum by behaving non-cooperatively. We conclude by providing an algorithm for myopic players to learn a p-partial mean field equilibrium.
We describe a novel DNA extraction protocol based on the ionic liquid 1-octylpyridinium bromide ([C8Pyr]Br), offering a rapid and reproducible alternative to column-based commercial kits. The method involves a selective DNA precipitation via charge neutralization and groove binding, followed by a displacement of the ionic liquid using phosphate-buffered saline. This process results in high-quality DNA with A260/A280 and A260/A230 ratios within optimal analytical ranges. The method was tested on eukaryotic cell lines and Drosophila tissue, consistently achieving two- to fivefold higher DNA yields than QIAGEN kits. Extracted DNA was validated by UV spectrophotometry, gel electrophoresis, and PCR. Additionally, dye displacement assays and circular dichroism confirmed preservation of DNA structure and suggested a minor groove binding mechanism for [C8Pyr]Br. This efficient, low-cost protocol may be of particular interest in diagnostics, molecular biology workflows, and resource-limited laboratories.
This study introduces a flexible macroscopic model for heterogeneous traffic flow on general road networks, allowing the presence of several vehicle classes with general speed functions and different maximal densities pertinent to urban environments. The model, applicable to shared road situations, is designed for describing both creeping phenomena and class-specific lane discipline. Extended to networks, the model addresses the dynamics at general m x n junctions by prescribing suitable coupling conditions. Using the passenger-car-equivalent representation, numerical experiments demonstrate the model's effectiveness in handling different real-life traffic scenarios, each with their complexities. The study focuses on the assessment of total travel time and CO2 emissions in the network, highlighting influences from various factors and traffic management strategies such as route guidance and modal shift. Results show that the model can accurately describe scenarios of congested situations where cyclists navigate past queues of cars and cars overtake queues of trucks.
In [24, 26] Guichard and Wienhard introduced the notion of $\Theta $ -positivity, a generalization of Lusztig's total positivity to real Lie groups that are not necessarily split.Based on this notion, we introduce in this paper $\Theta $ -positive representations of surface groups. We prove that $\Theta $ -positive representations of closed surface groups are $\Theta $ -Anosov. This implies that $\Theta $ -positive representations are discrete and faithful and that the set of $\Theta $ -positive representations is open in the representation variety.We further establish important properties on limits of $\Theta $ -positive representations, proving that the set of $\Theta $ -positive representations is closed in the set of representations containing a $\Theta $ -proximal element. This is used in [3] to prove the closedness of the set of $\Theta $ -positive representations.
