Optical coherence tomography (OCT), as a non-destructive and high-resolution fingerprint acquisition technology, is robust against poor skin conditions and resistant to spoof attacks. It measures fingertip information on and beneath skin as 3D volume data, containing the surface fingerprint, internal fingerprint and sweat glands. Various methods have been proposed to extract internal fingerprints, which ignore the inter-slice dependence and often require manually selected parameters. In this paper, a modified U-Net that combines residual learning, bidirectional convolutional long short-term memory and hybrid dilated convolution (denoted as BCL-U Net) for OCT volume data segmentation and two fingerprint reconstruction approaches are proposed. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that simultaneous and automatic extraction is performed for surface fingerprint, internal fingerprint and sweat glands. The proposed BCL-U Net utilizes the spatial dependence in OCT volume data and deals with segmentation of objects with diverse sizes to achieve accurate extraction. Comparisons have been performed to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method. A thorough evaluation of the recognition abilities of internal and surface fingerprints is conducted using a dataset significantly larger than previous studies. Four databases containing internal and surface fingerprints are generated from 1572 OCT volume data by the proposed method. The internal fingerprint matching experiment has achieved a lowest equal error rate (EER) of 0.95%. Mixed internal and surface fingerprint matching experiment is also performed and achieves an EER of 3.67%, verifying the consistency of the internal and surface fingerprints. The matching experiments for fingers under poor skin conditions show that internal fingerprints achieve an EER of 2.47% that is much lower than that of surface fingerprints, which proves the advantage of internal fingerprints and indicates the potential of the internal fingerprints to supplement or replace the surface fingerprints for some specific applications.

The digital age has seen a rise in digital hoarding behavior, which is defined as the behavior of accumulating digital files, resulting in stress and disorder. However, little is known about the causes and psychological mechanisms of digital hoarding. To address this research gap, this study proposed and empirically tested a moderated mediation model of social networking site (SNS) users’ causes of and psychological motivation for digital hoarding behavior using an online questionnaire method. We surveyed a total of 556 SNS users online. The results revealed that social comparison of this sort increased individuals’ digital hoarding behaviors and that fear of missing out (FoMO) mediated this effect. In addition, dispositional greed moderated the relationship between this comparison and FoMO as well as the relationship between FoMO and digital hoarding behavior such that these relationships were stronger for SNS users with high dispositional greed. Our research improves our understanding of the operative psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions in the relation between upward comparison via SNSs and digital hoarding behavior.

The research of external fingerprint collected by total internal reflection (TIR) has been carried out for decades and research of internal fingerprint of optical coherence tomography (OCT) has just begun. The internal fingerprint can be hardly affected by the finger surface status, due to its strong anti-interference and anti-spoofing ability, which can serve as a powerful supplement to external fingerprint. However, matching fingerprints acquired by different ways can lead to a drop in fingerprint recognition accuracy owing to the differences in fingerprint quality, distortions and detection areas. Whether the internal fingerprint can be used to replace the external fingerprint for direct identification has been hampered by lacking comparison tools to study potential correlation with each other. To study the connection between internal and external fingerprints, a synchronous acquisition system that achieves the same fingerprint area measurement at the same time is necessary. The integration of different optical paths of TIR and OCT as well as the consequent distortion correction of two totally different imaging ways are two challenging problems. This paper presents a fingerprint acquisition system that synchronously acquires the external fingerprint and internal fingerprint with TIR and OCT, respectively. By using a self-designed trapezoidal prism, optical paths of TIR and OCT were integrated. Furthermore, a distortion correction method based on a grid calibration plate is used to remove distortions caused by two imaging methods. The fingerprint quality statistics is illustrated in 264 sets of fingerprint datasets. Identification results show synchronous acquisition and distortion correction of proposed system is efficient.

Engaging in altruistic behaviors is costly, but it contributes to the health and well-being of the performer of such behaviors. The present research offers a take on how this paradox can be understood. Across 2 pilot studies and 3 experiments, we showed a pain-relieving effect of performing altruistic behaviors. Acting altruistically relieved not only acutely induced physical pain among healthy adults but also chronic pain among cancer patients. Using functional MRI, we found that after individuals performed altruistic actions brain activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral insula in response to a painful shock was significantly reduced. This reduced pain-induced activation in the right insula was mediated by the neural activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), while the activation of the VMPFC was positively correlated with the performer’s experienced meaningfulness from his or her altruistic behavior. Our findings suggest that incurring personal costs to help others may buffer the performers from unpleasant conditions.

Recent findings demonstrate that cytoplasmic effectors from fungal and oomycete pathogens enter plant cells via clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME). This raises several questions: Does effector secretion pathway facilitate host uptake? How is CME triggered in host cells? How are the effectors released from endosomal compartments to reach diverse subcellular destinations?