Introduction

In 2020, for the first time in history, there were more people in the world aged 60 years and over than there were children below the age of 5 years. The population aged over 65 years is projected to increase from one billion in 2019 to more than two billion in 2050, and those aged over 80 years are projected to increase from 143 to 426 million, with the largest increase occurring in the developing world (UN World Population Prospects, 2019). This demographic trend constitutes the largest global health challenge, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The European Union has set it as one of the major challenges in Horizon 2020 and it has important societal implications (European Commission, 2020). The proportion of retired individuals will increase, leading to an increased ratio between those who have exited the workforce and those still active in the labour market. Thus, ageing represents a global societal and scientific challenge requiring integrated efforts, multidisciplinary translational research approaches and social innovations that build on ideas of potentials and capabilities, emphasising the value of old age.

Stochastic Model For Setpoint of a Rolling Mill: An Application In The Soybean Oil Production

A scientific challenge on industrial production is to mathematically represent a production process, and this challenge increases when describing production processes with stochastic behavior. The present paper will be approaching a specific part of the production process of soybean oil, where the main objective is to maximize the oil extraction by keeping the thicknesses of the soybean flakes within an operating range. We propose a method, based on a mathematical stochastic model, to obtain pressure setpoints that produce flakes as ideal as possible for oil extraction. The results reported are achieved by applying the proposed method in the industry with improvements within the process in terms of time and quality.

Role of Institutional Environment in Shaping Political Careers of Young Political Leaders in the Regions of South-West Siberia

Evaluating prospects of bringing youth into Russian political elites has both an acuteness of a scientific challenge and practical relevance in the light of upcoming federal and regional elections of 2021. Based on the surveys of mass political consciousness of the youth and expert polls held in 2018-2020 in Altai Krai and Novosibirsk Oblast, the article has analyzed the visions of young people and their leaders on the effectiveness of career development through participation in youth political organizations, political parties and running for posts in election campaigns. Having measured these visions against the proportion of young people in the elite of the regional offices of political parties and in the lists of candidates running in regional elections, the authors have come to the conclusion about the low acceptance rate of career lift in regional political process. The object of the research comprises regions with different level of social and economic development, which has proved that lack of resource hinders realization of young leaders potential primarily in the regions with high concentration of economic capital and strong political competition.

Spiritual energy of the Russian word as a scientific challenge of humanitarian thought

The authors consider faith as a direct way to form spirituality of an individual and nation on the whole, as our main moral wealth. This problem is especially relevant in the modern world, since the most important words for national consciousness are now devaluating. The purpose of the research is to prove that the language, namely the word , has resources for creating and accumulating the spiritual potential of the native speaker. The research has been carried on the material of the Bible and the National Corpus of the Russian language (a subcorpus of literary texts published after 1950). The authors used the following research methods: the traditional general scientific methods of analysis, comparison, generalization and the new one - discourse analysis. In the course of the research two aspects of the indicated problem have been considered: the language is a spiritual essence; the word is a barometer of our understanding of the world. The study resulted in the following conclusions: the primary and the most important function of the language is the function of communication with God; the spirituality of the Russian people is formed and preserved thanks to the language, because the language contains deep transcendental meanings, almost inaccessible for rational comprehension. These meanings create and retain spirituality in the society and the individual, form the spiritual code of the nation; fulfil the sacred function of communication with God; reveals the great mystery of the world and the human soul at the same time. These provisions allow to outline the prospects for the future research within the framework of a new stage of the anthropocentric paradigm, which brings it closer to the theo-anthropo-cosmic paradigm as the paradigm of the future. In it, an individual begins to realize his place not above the world, but inside it.

Approaches to Inactivating Aflatoxins—A Review and Challenges

According to the World Health Organization, the contamination of crops with aflatoxins poses a significant economic burden, estimated to affect 25% of global food crops. In the event that the contaminated food is processed, aflatoxins enter the general food supply and can cause serious diseases. Aflatoxins are distributed unevenly in food or feedstock, making eradicating them both a scientific and a technological challenge. Cooking, freezing, or pressurizing have little effect on aflatoxins. While chemical methods degrade toxins on the surface of contaminated food, the destruction inside entails a slow process. Physical techniques, such as irradiation with ultraviolet photons, pulses of extensive white radiation, and gaseous plasma, are promising; yet, the exact mechanisms concerning how these techniques degrade aflatoxins require further study. Correlations between the efficiency of such degradation and the processing parameters used by various authors are presented in this review. The lack of appropriate guidance while interpreting the observed results is a huge scientific challenge.

The demands of comorbidity: Implications for the explanation and classification of mental disorder

<p>A central goal of psychiatric classification is to assist in the assessment and treatment of those who experience mental disorder. This challenge takes on greater significance in complex cases, especially given the high prevalence of psychiatric comorbidity. High rates of comorbidity also challenge the validity of current psychiatric nosology. Etiological classification has been promoted as an alternative to improve the state of psychiatric diagnosis. However, comorbidity makes specific conceptual, explanatory and methodological demands of any such classification strategy. In this thesis, a demand for coherent and integrative explanation of comorbidity acts as a standard by which to assess the strength of different causal models of mental disorder and their resultant concepts. Integrative pluralism is presented as an epistemological framework well-suited to the complexity of this scientific challenge.</p>

The demands of comorbidity: Implications for the explanation and classification of mental disorder

<p>A central goal of psychiatric classification is to assist in the assessment and treatment of those who experience mental disorder. This challenge takes on greater significance in complex cases, especially given the high prevalence of psychiatric comorbidity. High rates of comorbidity also challenge the validity of current psychiatric nosology. Etiological classification has been promoted as an alternative to improve the state of psychiatric diagnosis. However, comorbidity makes specific conceptual, explanatory and methodological demands of any such classification strategy. In this thesis, a demand for coherent and integrative explanation of comorbidity acts as a standard by which to assess the strength of different causal models of mental disorder and their resultant concepts. Integrative pluralism is presented as an epistemological framework well-suited to the complexity of this scientific challenge.</p>

Applications of unmanned aerial vehicles in Antarctic environmental research

Antarctica plays a fundamental role in the Earth's climate, oceanic circulation and global ecosystem. It is a priority and a scientific challenge to understand its functioning and responses under different scenarios of global warming. However, extreme environmental conditions, seasonality and isolation hampers the efforts to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the physical, biological, chemical and geological processes taking place in Antarctica. Here we present unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as feasible, rapid and accurate tools for environmental and wildlife research in Antarctica. UAV surveys were carried out on Deception Island (South Shetland Islands) using visible, multispectral and thermal sensors, and a water sampling device to develop precise thematic ecological maps, detect anomalous thermal zones, identify and census wildlife, build 3D images of geometrically complex geological formations, and sample dissolved chemicals (< 0.22 µm) waters from inaccessible or protected areas.

Multi-party referential communication in complex strategic games

Verbal communication is an ubiquitous aspect of human interaction occurring in many contexts; however, it is primarily studied in the limited context of two people communicating information. Understanding communication in complex, multi-party interactions is both a scientific challenge for psycholinguistics and an engineering challenge for creating artificial agents who can participate in these richer contexts. We adapted the reference game paradigm to an online 3-player game where players refer to objects in order to coordinate selections based on the available utilities. We ran games with shared or individual payoffs and with or without access to language. Our paradigm can also be used for artificial agents; we trained reinforcement learning-based agents on the same task as a comparison. Our dataset shows the same patterns found in simpler reference games and contains rich language of reference and negotiation.

Revealing semantic and emotional structure of suicide notes with cognitive network science

Understanding how people who commit suicide perceive their cognitive states and emotions represents an important open scientific challenge. We build upon cognitive network science, psycholinguistics and semantic frame theory to introduce a network representation of suicidal ideation as expressed in multiple suicide notes. By reconstructing the knowledge structure of such notes, we reveal interconnections between the ideas and emotional states of people who committed suicide through an analysis of emotional balance motivated by structural balance theory, semantic prominence and emotional profiling. Our results indicate that connections between positively- and negatively-valenced terms give rise to a degree of balance that is significantly higher than in a null model where the affective structure is randomized and in a linguistic baseline model capturing mind-wandering in absence of suicidal ideation. We show that suicide notes are affectively compartmentalized such that positive concepts tend to cluster together and dominate the overall network structure. Notably, this positive clustering diverges from perceptions of self, which are found to be dominated by negative, sad conceptual associations in analyses based on subject-verb-object relationships and emotional profiling. A key positive concept is “love”, which integrates information relating the self to others and is semantically prominent across suicide notes. The emotions constituting the semantic frame of “love” combine joy and trust with anticipation and sadness, which can be linked to psychological theories of meaning-making as well as narrative psychology. Our results open new ways for understanding the structure of genuine suicide notes and may be used to inform future research on suicide prevention.