Lacking protection compared to drivers of other vehicles, motorcyclists accounted for most casualties and fatalities. This study explores how non-motorcycle drivers affect motorcyclists’ injury outcomes in motorcycle-vehicle collisions. The motorcycle-vehicle crashes from the United Kingdom for 2016–2020 are used to estimate two alternative logit models to account for possible unobserved heterogeneities. The models are a latent class multinomial logit with class probability functions and a random threshold-parameter generalized ordered logit. With three possible injury severity levels (fatal injury, severe injury, and minor injury), the characteristics of motorcyclist, driver, roadway, environment, vehicle, and collision are considered potential determinants. Then, the temporal instability issues are revealed through the likelihood ratio tests and out-of-sample predictions based on the two models. Showing good (Formula presented.) values of over 0.370, the latent class model’s estimation results are leveraged to quantify the effects of the contributing factors. Moreover, the marginal effects are also calculated to reveal the existing temporal instability, while some variables reflect the temporal instability in the influence trend and degree. The critical factors increasing the risk levels are male motorcyclists, higher speed limit, older ages of motorcyclists and vehicles, fine weather, single carriageway, and head-on collision type. Overall, subtle variations in the injury severity predictions exist in alternative heterogeneity modeling approaches, suffering from the modeling mechanism of different structural frameworks in capturing the unobserved heterogeneities.

The transition of bacteria from an individualistic to a biofilm lifestyle profoundly alters their biology. During biofilm development, the bacterial cell-cell adhesions are a major determinant of initial microcolonies, which serve as kernels for the subsequent microscopic and mesoscopic structure of the biofilm, and determine the resulting functionality. In this study, the significance of bacterial cell-cell adhesion dynamics on bacterial aggregation and biofilm maturation is elucidated. Using photoswitchable adhesins between bacteria, modifying the dynamics of bacterial cell-cell adhesions with periodic dark-light cycles is systematic. Dynamic cell-cell adhesions with liquid-like behavior improve bacterial aggregation and produce more compact microcolonies than static adhesions with solid-like behavior in both experiments and individual-based simulations. Consequently, dynamic cell-cell adhesions give rise to earlier quorum sensing activation, better intermixing of different bacterial populations, improved biofilm maturation, changes in the growth of cocultures, and higher yields in fermentation. The here presented approach of tuning bacterial cell-cell adhesion dynamics opens the door for regulating the structure and function of biofilms and cocultures with potential biotechnological applications.

This study proposes random-parameters multinomial logit models, with heterogeneity in means and variances, to explore the differences in the factors influencing injury severities of drivers involved in different types of two-vehicle crashes. The models are verified using crash data from the United Kingdom (UK) over three years (2016–2018). Three types of crashes are separately identified (car-car, car-truck, and truck-truck crashes). In this study, a wide variety of potential variables, including the driver, vehicle, road, and environmental characteristics, are considered, with two possible injury-severity outcomes: severe and slight injury. The results show that unobserved heterogeneity existed for young drivers in both car-car and truck-truck crash models and the 30 mph speed limit in the three separate models. Remarkably variations are observed in crashes involving different types of vehicles. The driver’s age and gender, speeding, sideswipes, presence of junctions, weekdays, unlit, and weather conditions significantly impact driver-injury severities in various types of vehicle crashes. These findings are expected to help policymakers seek to improve highway safety and implement proper safety countermeasures.