Lipidic nanoparticles (LNPs), including liposomes and cubosomes, are widely employed drug delivery systems owing to their biocompatibility and capacity for stimuli-responsive 'smart' drug release. Steric stabilizers, including DSPE-PEG-2000 and Pluronic F127, are commonly used to stabilize LNPs by creating an effective steric barrier between the particle and aqueous physiological environment, but the implication for interactions with macromolecular components of complex physiological fluids is unclear. Thus, the impact of the polymeric steric barrier on enzymatic digestion by bacterial lipases is investigated in this study. Specifically, the impact of stabilizer chemistry, mode of attachment and nanoparticle geometry on the digestion of phospholipid liposomes and monoolein cubosomes by cell-free supernatants of Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa containing the expressed extracellular enzymes from these organisms is investigated. Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) revealed that bilayer-anchored DSPE-PEG-2000 hinders the digestion of phospholipid liposomes yet accelerates the digestion of monoolein cubosomes. These results suggest that nanoparticle architecture determines how effectively steric stabilizers protect against enzymatic digestion.This article is part of the theme issue 'Geometry, materials and the imagination'.
Finite tangles are embeddings of graphs that include knots or links as subcomponents. We describe vertex-transitive tangles with 12 or fewer crossings, as well as tangles with just two crossings that feature the Hopf link. Additionally, we consider tangles formed by adding edges to a ravel.This article is part of the theme issue 'Geometry, materials and the imagination'.
Capacities satisfying the antibuoyancy condition can be used to define Choquet integrals that adhere to the Pigou-Dalton or progressive transfers principle. As well as being a key concept in economics, where the principle underlies measures of welfare and wealth inequality, it has also often been adopted in ecology for defining indices related to species diversity. The point of difference for the Choquet integral in this setting is that it can also incorporate the differing importances of inputs and groups of inputs-not just whether they are high or low relative to the others. It makes it possible to define measures of species diversity that can place increased value on abundance of rare or keystone species, while still adhering to the Pigou-Dalton principle. In this contribution, we outline some of the key considerations for applying and constructing antibuoyant capacities in this context. Illustrative examples are provided along with an application to optimizing measures of species diversity with respect to land-use constraints. We also briefly address the behaviour of the Sugeno integral with respect to antibuoyant capacities.This article is part of the theme issue 'Data driven modelling for living systems'.
Accurate and interpretable real estate forecasting is difficult because housing markets contain heterogeneous price trends, irregular transaction volumes and horizon-dependent price-volume interactions. This study proposes an explainable Kolmogorov-Arnold network (EX-KAN) framework for price forecasting with joint lagged price-volume inputs and competitive transaction-volume prediction. EX-KAN uses lagged price and volume information to forecast future market conditions and applies elasticity-based diagnostics to explain how historical price and transaction volume contribute to predicted prices. Experiments are conducted on an Australian suburban real estate panel with 1826 suburbs and 256 monthly observations from January 2003 to April 2024. EX-KAN is evaluated against KAN, long short-term memory, time-series mixing (TSMixer) and Transformer under a fair joint-input setting across 3-, 6- and 12-month horizons. The results show that EX-KAN achieves the strongest overall price forecasting performance under mean absolute error, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and symmetric MAPE, ranking first in six of nine price comparisons and second in the remaining three. Against TSMixer, EX-KAN reduces price MAPE by 17.00% and 8.72% at the three- and six-month horizons, respectively. For transaction-volume forecasting, EX-KAN remains competitive, although KAN is slightly stronger overall. Elasticity, regime-specific and suburb-level analyses show that volume-price relationships vary across horizons, market states and local suburbs.This article is part of the theme issue 'Data driven modelling for living systems'.
The paper presents data and analysis of the blood group distributions of the Bulgarian population for the year 2024, retrieved from the national information system serving the centres and departments of transfusion haematology. Several significant indicators are considered in both national and regional aspects and in both absolute numbers and percentages. The study is particularly focused on tracing the ABO system blood type frequencies, Rh(D) antigen (rhesus factor) frequencies and certain demographic indicators of blood donation activity, including blood donor's sex, age, location and type of donation (voluntary or family/replacement). The atomic approach towards data analysis, adopted as early as the research planning phase, has given vast opportunities for data stratification in various ways and for discovering patterns, regional specifics and even data anomalies. The presented data and conclusions can serve in planning the operation and resources of the centres and departments of transfusion haematology on national and regional levels, for information backup of the blood donation campaigns and for raising the society's awareness and sensibility towards the needs and benefits of voluntary blood donation as the safest and most sustainable source of blood supply.This article is part of the theme issue 'Data driven modelling for living systems'.
