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Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) is a method for flexible modelling of high dimensional data. The model takes the form of an expansion in product spline basis functions, where the number of basis functions as well as the parameters associated with each one (product degree and knot locations) are automatically determined by the data. This procedure is motivated by recursive partitioning (e.g. CART) and shares its ability to capture high order interactions. However, it has more power and flexibility to model relationships that are nearly additive or involve interactions in at most a few variables, and produces continuous models with continuous derivatives. In addition, the model can be represented in a form that separately identifies the additive contributions and those associated with different multivariable interactions.

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Postoperative adhesions result from abnormal tissue repair and most frequently occur in patients following abdominal and pelvic surgeries. Prevention of adhesion formation, including the use of anti-adhesion barriers during surgery, is considered the most effective clinical strategy for postoperative adhesions. However, no commercial product is commonly used worldwide because of its insufficient efficacy, complexity, and difficulty of use. We developed a new anti-adhesion barrier using novel biomaterial (SI-449), a cross-linked chondroitin sulfate, in an easy-to-apply powder form. Our previous study using animal models showed that the anti-adhesion efficacy of SI-449 was superior to that of an existing product. In this study, the safety of SI-449 was evaluated based on the results of systemic toxicity tests in rats after intraperitoneal application and a wound healing test in laparotomized rats to mimic its clinical use in abdominal and pelvic surgeries. In the systemic toxicity test, minimal and transient hematological changes and muscular regeneration in the abdominal wall and ileum were observed and were considered to be related to systemic toxicity or local irritation due to SI-449. However, these findings were within the safety margin and not associated with serious toxicity. Other changes were considered physiological reactions to SI-449 or its degradants. In the wound healing test, SI-449 was found to have no effect on the healing of the incisional abdominal wall. In conclusion, the non-clinical safety of SI-449 was confirmed, and this novel biomaterial is expected to be used as an anti-adhesion barrier in abdominal and pelvic surgeries.

In today's fragmented media landscape, social media influencers (SMIs) have emerged as popular political information sources among young audiences—despite often lacking political expertise. However, we have limited knowledge about factors that predict trust in SMIs' political content during early and middle adolescence, a critical period during which political attitudes are formed. This study proposes two novel theoretical pathways to explain varying trust perceptions between and within adolescents: a source-centered pathway, focusing on observed SMI-audience interactions and motive attribution, and an audience-centered pathway, emphasizing adolescents' digital literacy and parental mediation. A three-wave panel survey (

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Drawing upon an online survey of 719 US adult partisans incorporating response latency data, we connected News-Finds-Me (NFM) to the partisan-motivated reasoning literature and theorized it as a consensus-based mode of news exposure that leads to different news-processing pathways, where the vested news-processing effort depends on whether the political falsehood aligns with one's partisan identity and surrounding majority opinion. Individual-level analysis and headline-level modeling jointly illuminated the asymmetric interplay between NFM and affective polarization. In partisan-consistent scenarios, high-NFM users devoted limited processing time, falling short of cognitive effort to enable affect-laden, directional believing of partisan-consistent fake news. However, when challenged by partisan inconsistency, high-NFM users dedicated significantly more processing time, which exacerbated the relationship between affective polarization and refutation of partisan-inconsistent falsehoods. Contrarily, such an effort discrepancy, widely documented in the partisan-motivated reasoning literature, was weakened or reversed for low-NFM individuals. Extending the “Effort-Reinforces-Directional-Reasoning” thesis to fake news vulnerability, our findings underscore the paradoxical interplay between NFM and affective polarization: while NFM and affective polarization deviate people from active news-seeking and accuracy-oriented reasoning, their joint dynamics form a type of group thinking that reduces vulnerability to partisan falsehoods—even those aligned with one's partisan attachments.

Social stereotypes spread through biased language. Experiments in which participants freely generate language allow researchers to causally test how stereotypes affect language use and capture multiple linguistic variables simultaneously, offering high ecological validity. Despite this potential, it remains unclear how and to which extent this paradigm has been used to study linguistic biases. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review (