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This paper reports the first study on the ability of Year 3 students (ages 7 to 8) to conceptualize Einsteinian concepts. This paper reports that children aged 7-8 are not too young to learn key Einsteinian concepts, and the benefits of reinforcement indicate that longer programs are needed for ideas to be consolidated.
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Revisiting a $50$-year-old estimate of Choi, Erdős and Szemerédi, we show that if $A \subseteq \{1, 2, \ldots, 2n\}$ satisfies $|A| \ge n + 1.2 \cdot 10^8$, then there exist five distinct integers whose pairwise sums are all contained in $A$. In order to guarantee pairwise sums of three or four integers instead, we show that one can replace the constant $1.2 \cdot 10^8$ by $1$ or $3$ respectively, which are both optimal.
Today, Wi-Fi is over 25 years old. Yet, despite sharing the same branding name, today's Wi-Fi boasts entirely new capabilities that were not even on the roadmap 25 years ago. This article aims to provide a holistic and comprehensive technical and historical tutorial on Wi-Fi, beginning with IEEE 802.11b (Wi-Fi 1) and looking forward to IEEE 802.11bn (Wi-Fi 8). This is the first tutorial article to span these eight generations. Rather than a generation-by-generation exposition, we describe the key mechanisms that have advanced Wi-Fi. We begin by discussing spectrum allocation and coexistence, and detailing the IEEE 802.11 standardization cycle. Second, we provide an overview of the physical layer and describe key elements that have enabled data rates to increase by over 1,000x. Third, we describe how Wi-Fi Medium Access Control has been enhanced from the original Distributed Coordination Function to now include capabilities spanning from frame aggregation to wideband spectrum access. Fourth, we describe how Wi-Fi 5 first broke the one-user-at-a-time paradigm and introduced multi-user access. Fifth, given the increasing use of mobile, battery-powered devices, we describe Wi-Fi's ener
R. W. Hamming published the Hamming codes and the sphere packing bound in 1950. In the past 75 years, infinite families of distance-optimal linear codes over finite fields with minimum distance at most 8 with respect to the sphere packing bound have been reported in the literature. However, it is a 75-year-old open problem in coding theory whether there is an infinite family of distance-optimal linear codes over finite fields with arbitrarily large minimum distance with respect to the sphere packing bound. This main objective of this paper is to settle this long-standing open problem in coding theory. As by-products, several infinite families of distance-optimal binary codes with small minimum distances are presented. Two infinite families of binary five-weight codes are reported. Some open problems are also proposed.
A common denominator for most therapy treatments for children who suffer from an anxiety disorder is daily practice routines to learn techniques needed to overcome anxiety. However, applying those techniques while experiencing anxiety can be highly challenging. This paper presents the design, implementation, and pilot study of a tactile hand-held pocket robot AffectaPocket, designed to work alongside therapy as a focus object to facilitate coping during an anxiety attack. The robot does not require daily practice to be used, has a small form factor, and has been designed for children 7 to 12 years old. The pocket robot works by sensing when it is being held and attempts to shift the child's focus by presenting them with a simple three-note rhythm-matching game. We conducted a pilot study of the pocket robot involving four children aged 7 to 10 years, and then a main study with 18 children aged 6 to 8 years; neither study involved children with anxiety. Both studies aimed to assess the reliability of the robot's sensor configuration, its design, and the effectiveness of the user tutorial. The results indicate that the morphology and sensor setup performed adequately and the tutorial
This paper investigates the suitability of frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) for Q&A interactions in science centres, with the aim of boosting visitor engagement while maintaining factual accuracy. Using a dataset of questions collected from the National Space Centre in Leicester (UK), we evaluated responses generated by three leading models: OpenAI's GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google Gemini 1.5. Each model was prompted for both standard and creative responses tailored to an 8-year-old audience, and these responses were assessed by space science experts based on accuracy, engagement, clarity, novelty, and deviation from expected answers. The results revealed a trade-off between creativity and accuracy, with Claude outperforming GPT and Gemini in both maintaining clarity and engaging young audiences, even when asked to generate more creative responses. Nonetheless, experts observed that higher novelty was generally associated with reduced factual reliability across all models. This study highlights the potential of LLMs in educational settings, emphasizing the need for careful prompt engineering to balance engagement with scientific rigor.
Recently, two extraordinary results on aperiodic monotiles have been obtained in two different settings. One is a family of aperiodic monotiles in the plane discovered by Smith, Myers, Kaplan and Goodman-Strauss in 2023, where rotation is allowed, breaking the 50-year-old record (aperiodic sets of two tiles found by Roger Penrose in the 1970s) on the minimum size of aperiodic sets in the plane. The other is the existence of an aperiodic monotile in the translational tiling of $\mathbb{Z}^n$ for some huge dimension $n$ proved by Greenfeld and Tao. This disproves the long-standing periodic tiling conjecture. However, it is known that there is no aperiodic monotile for translational tiling of the plane. The smallest size of known aperiodic sets for translational tilings of the plane is $8$, which was discovered more than $30$ years ago by Ammann. In this paper, we prove that translational tiling of the plane with a set of $7$ polyominoes is undecidable. As a consequence of the undecidability, we have constructed a family of aperiodic sets of size $7$ for the translational tiling of the plane. This breaks the 30-year-old record of Ammann.
To understand why self-supervised learning (SSL) models have empirically achieved strong performances on several speech-processing downstream tasks, numerous studies have focused on analyzing the encoded information of the SSL layer representations in adult speech. Limited work has investigated how pre-training and fine-tuning affect SSL models encoding children's speech and vocalizations. In this study, we aim to bridge this gap by probing SSL models on two relevant downstream tasks: (1) phoneme recognition (PR) on the speech of adults, older children (8-10 years old), and younger children (1-4 years old), and (2) vocalization classification (VC) distinguishing cry, fuss, and babble for infants under 14 months old. For younger children's PR, the superiority of fine-tuned SSL models is largely due to their ability to learn features that represent older children's speech and then adapt those features to the speech of younger children. For infant VC, SSL models pre-trained on large-scale home recordings learn to leverage phonetic representations at middle layers, and thereby enhance the performance of this task.
We collected more than 300 high-resolution spectra of the 300 Myr old star BD+40 2790 (TOI-2076) over ~3 years. This star hosts three transiting planets discovered by TESS, with orbital periods ~10, 21, and 35 days. BD+40 2790 shows an activity-induced scatter larger than 30 m/s in the radial velocities. We employed different methods to measure the stellar radial velocities and several models to filter out the dominant stellar activity signal, in order to bring to light the planet-induced signals which are expected to have semi-amplitudes one order of magnitude lower. We evaluated the mass loss rate of the planetary atmospheres using photoionization hydrodynamic modeling. The dynamical analysis confirms that the three sub-Neptune-sized companions (our radius measurements are $R_b$=2.54$\pm$0.04, $R_c$=3.35$\pm$0.05, and $R_d$=3.29$\pm$0.06 $R_{\rm Earth}$) have masses in the planetary regime. We derive 3$σ$ upper limits below or close to the mass of Neptune for all the planets: 11--12, 12--13.5, and 14--19 $M_{\rm Earth}$ for planet $b$, $c$, and $d$ respectively. In the case of planet $d$, we found promising clues that the mass could be between ~7 and 8 $M_{\rm Earth}$, with a sig
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted a benefit-risk assessment for Moderna's COVID vaccine mRNA-1273 prior to its full approval, announced 1/31/2022. The FDA's assessment focused on males of ages 18-64 years because the agency's risk analysis was limited to vaccine-attributable myocarditis/pericarditis (VAM/P) given the excess risk among males. The FDA's analysis concluded that vaccine benefits clearly outweighed risks, even for 18-25-year-old males (those at highest VAM/P risk). We reanalyze the FDA's benefit-risk assessment using information available through the third week of January 2022 and focusing on 18-25-year-old males. We use the FDA's framework but extend its model by accounting for protection derived from prior COVID infection, finer age-stratification in COVID-hospitalization rates, and incidental hospitalizations (those of patients who test positive for COVID but are being treated for something else). We also use more realistic projections of Omicron-infection rates and more accurate rates of VAM/P. With hospitalizations as the principal endpoint of the analysis (those prevented by vaccination vs. those caused by VAM/P), our model finds vacci
We present a detailed study of the centre of NGC4654, a Milky Way-like spiral galaxy in the Virgo cluster that has been reported to host a double stellar nucleus, thus promising a rare view of ongoing star cluster infall into a galaxy nucleus. Analysing JWST NIRSpec integral-field spectroscopic data and Hubble Space Telescope imaging of the inner 330 $\times$ 330 pc, we find that the nucleus harbours in fact three massive star clusters. Maps of infrared emission lines from NIRSpec show different morphologies for the ionised and molecular gas components. The emission from molecular hydrogen gas is concentrated at the NSC location, while emission from hydrogen recombination lines is more extended beyond the central cluster. The velocity fields of both gas and stars indicate that the three clusters are part of a complicated dynamical system, with the NSC having an elevated velocity dispersion in line with its high stellar mass. To investigate the stellar populations of the three clusters in more detail, we use surface brightness modelling to measure their fluxes from ultraviolet to mid-infrared wavelengths and fit their spectral energy distributions (SEDs). Two of the clusters are UV-
Understanding the origin of bright shooting stars and their meteorite samples is among the most ancient astronomy-related questions that at larger scales has human consequences [1-3]. As of today, only ${\sim}\,6\%$ of meteorite falls have been firmly linked to their sources (Moon, Mars, and asteroid (4) Vesta [4-6]). Here, we show that ${\sim}\,70\%$ of meteorites originate from three recent breakups of $D > 30\,{\rm km}$ asteroids that occurred 5.8, 7.5 and less than ${\sim}\,40$ million years ago. These breakups, including the well-known Karin family [7], took place in the prominent yet old Koronis and Massalia families and are at the origin of the dominance of H and L ordinary chondrites among meteorite falls. These young families distinguish themselves amidst all main belt asteroids by having a uniquely high abundance of small fragments. Their size-frequency distribution remains steep for a few tens of millions of years, exceeding temporarily the production of metre-sized fragments by the largest old asteroid families (e.g., Flora, Vesta). Supporting evidence includes the existence of associated dust bands [8-10], the cosmic-ray exposure ages of H-chondrite meteorites [11,1
In this classroom-based action-research project, I compared the following two approaches to check their effectiveness in helping students overcome physics misconceptions: Inducing cognitive dissonance or gradually building on students' previous knowledge activating the relevant phenomenological primitives (p-prims). This took place over a two-lesson sequence (each an hour long) using year 8 (12 years old) and year 9 (13 years old) top set students (N=87 in total), in the context of Newton's first law. Results were better for both year groups when inducing cognitive dissonance, which seems to be more effective not only with surface-level learning, but deep-learning as well.
Empathy games are a promising yet new research avenue that explores how to design empathic game experiences that would help children to understand and address the emotions of other people. Research in this field was primarily done in the USA and there is a research gap in understanding how empathy game design can apply and differ from the contexts of other countries. Our study replicated a study earlier conducted in the USA, aiming to explore the dynamic of the PD process, and identify specifics and challenges for PD methodology related to empathy and game design in the Indian context. We conducted a series of participatory design (PD) sessions with 18 Indian children between 7 and 11 years old. This paper reports our preliminary findings, including the following: (1) it might be challenging for Indian children to discuss and design for empathy and emotions-related topics, (2) using the English language can be a barrier while working with Indian children of 8 years old and younger, (3) cultural context affects roles children play in the design process. This paper contributes insights on identifying areas for further methodological work in PD for the Indian context.
In a systematic literature and software review over 100 OWL reasoners/systems were analyzed to see if they would still be usable in 2023. This has never been done in this capacity. OWL reasoners still play an important role in knowledge organisation and management, but the last comprehensive surveys/studies are more than 8 years old. The result of this work is a comprehensive list of 95 standalone OWL reasoners and systems using an OWL reasoner. For each item, information on project pages, source code repositories and related documentation was gathered. The raw research data is provided in a Github repository for anyone to use.
Einstein's theory of relativity is largely thought of as one of the most important discoveries of the 20$^{th}$ century and continues to pass observational tests over 100 years later. Yet, it is Newtonian gravity, a 350 year old formalism proven to be less accurate than relativity, which is taught in schools. It has been shown that Einsteinian gravitational concepts can be well understood by students in both primary and secondary education. In this paper, a cross-section of students from Yr 7-13 enrolled in an English secondary school took part in an intervention designed to introduce the idea of gravity from spacetime curvature. The overall aim of this work is to assess the viability of including relativity in the secondary curriculum and to ascertain which year this material would be best placed in. We determine that all year groups where able to appreciate the effects of curvature to some extent. Visual demonstrations aided conceptual understanding at Yr 7-8 level, but this does not have a strong effect on their ideas around the source of the gravitational force. Participants in Yr 9-13 were able to understand concepts beyond those introduced in the demonstrations. However, a de
Several models of working memory (WM) have been proposed in the literature. Most of the research on the architecture of WM is based on adults or older children, but less is known about younger children. In this study, we tested various models of WM on a sample of 739 Italian children from 3 to 8 years old. Participants were assessed with 12 WM tasks, systematically varying the modality and level of executive control required (based on the number of activities to be performed at once: retention alone, ignoring distractors, and dealing with dual tasks). We examined younger children, n = 501, Mage = 56.8 months (SD = 6.4, 48% males) and older children, n = 238, Mage = 80.0 months (SD = 9.0, 58% males) separately using multigroup confirmatory factor analyses. A Bayesian analytical approach was adopted. Our results suggested that a four-factor model distinguishing between verbal, visual, spatial-simultaneous, and spatial-sequential components of WM achieved the best fit. Overall, the WM structure was very similar in the two groups. We further explored this result with an additional model with a central executive factor loaded on high-control tasks only, and found evidence for the presen
We perform a full nuclear-network numerical calculation of the $r$-process nuclei in binary neutron-star mergers (NSMs), with the aim of estimating $γ$-ray emissions from the remnants of Galactic NSMs up to $10^6$ years old. The nucleosynthesis calculation of 4,070 nuclei is adopted to provide the elemental composition ratios of nuclei with an electron fraction $Y_{\rm e}$ between 0.10 and 0.45 . The decay processes of 3,237 unstable nuclei are simulated to extract the $γ$-ray spectra. As a result, the NSMs have different spectral color in $γ$-ray band from various other astronomical objects at less than $10^5$ years old. In addition, we propose a new line-diagnostic method for $Y_{\rm e}$ that uses the line ratios of either $^{137{\rm m}}$Ba/$^{85}$K or $^{243}$Am/$^{60{\rm m}}$Co, which become larger than unity for young and old $r$-process sites, respectively, with a low $Y_{\rm e}$ environment. From an estimation of the distance limit for $γ$-ray observations as a function of the age, the high sensitivity in the sub-MeV band, at approximately $10^{-9}$ photons s$^{-1}$ cm$^{-2}$ or $10^{-15}$ erg s$^{-1}$ cm$^{-2}$, is required to cover all the NSM remnants in our Galaxy if we
Four nearby white dwarf stars have been discovered hiding in plain sight beside brighter red dwarf companions。 Hubble's ultraviolet observations finally revealed the long-hidden stellar remnants, including one just 25 light-years away that took nearly three decades to confirm。 The findings match long-standing predictions and suggest our corner of t