cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Overconfidence among option traders

The investor overconfidence theory predicts a direct relationship between market-wide turnover and lagged market return. Whereas previous research has examined this prediction in the equity market, we focus on trading in the options market. Controlling for stock market cross-sectional volatility, stock idiosyncratic risk, and option market volatility, we find that option trading turnover is positively related to past stock market return. In addition, call option turnover and call to put ratio are also positively associated with the past stock market return. These findings are consistent with the overconfidence theory. We also find that overconfident investors trade more in the options market than in the equity market. We rule out explanations other than investor overconfidence, such as momentum trading and varying risk preferences, for our findings.
Identification of common genetic risk variants for autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly heritable and heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental phenotypes diagnosed in more than 1% of children. Common genetic variants contribute substantially to ASD susceptibility, but to date no individual variants have been robustly associated with ASD. With a marked sample-size increase from a unique Danish population resource, we report a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 18,381 individuals with ASD and 27,969 controls that identified five genome-wide-significant loci. Leveraging GWAS results from three phenotypes with significantly overlapping genetic architectures (schizophrenia, major depression, and educational attainment), we identified seven additional loci shared with other traits at equally strict significance levels. Dissecting the polygenic architecture, we found both quantitative and qualitative polygenic heterogeneity across ASD subtypes. These results highlight biological insights, particularly relating to neuronal function and corticogenesis, and establish that GWAS performed at scale will be much more productive in the near term in ASD.
22 – Special Senses: Ear

The ear of mice, rats, and humans detects sound and maintains balance. In mammals, this “stato-acoustic” system is traditionally divided into three structural units: the external, middle, and inner ear. The external and middle ear are designed to receive, transmit, and amplify sound. The sensory receptors for both hearing and balance are located in a membranous portion of the inner ear. Sensory areas in all three species have similar histologic design with some modifications.
Curating Large Skeletal Collections: An Example from the Ancient Maya Site of Copán, Honduras

Archaeologists strive to understand ancient lifeways, and bioarchaeological data provide honest and immutable evidence of the realities of ancient society in the bodies of the dead. Given the importance of human remains in the archaeological record, a major component of the author's work has been devoted to the ethical responsibilities of bioarchaeologists in the treatment of the collections studied. However, the curation of skeletal remains is often challenging because the conservation and storage of these delicate materials may be afterthoughts in archaeological plans, being inadequately or incorrectly stored and sometimes treated to the same conservation conditions as more robust artifacts and samples. This article offers guidelines and recommendations for skeletal curation based on observations of curation challenges in a large collection in the subtropical Maya region. The collection was not well managed and human remains were not prioritized in the conservation program. The challenges and mitigations are presented here.
Resilience by Reconfiguration: Exploiting Heterogeneity in Robot Teams.

We propose a method to maintain high resource availability in a networked heterogeneous multi-robot system subject to resource failures. In our model, resources such as sensing and computation are available on robots. The robots are engaged in a joint task using these pooled resources. When a resource on a particular robot becomes unavailable (e.g., a sensor ceases to function), the system automatically reconfigures so that the robot continues to have access to this resource by communicating with other robots. Specifically, we consider the problem of selecting edges to be modified in the system’s communication graph after a resource failure has occurred. We define a metric that allows us to characterize the quality of the resource distribution in the network represented by the communication graph. Upon a resource becoming unavailable due to failure, we reconFigure the network so that the resource distribution is brought as close to the maximal resource distribution as possible without a large change in the number of active inter-robot communication links. Our approach uses mixed integer semi-definite programming to achieve this goal. We employ a simulated annealing method to compute a spatial formation that satisfies the inter-robot distances imposed by the topology, along with other constraints. Our method can compute a communication topology, spatial formation, and formation change motion planning in a few seconds. We validate our method in simulation and real-robot experiments with a team of seven quadrotors.
Speech Denoising by Parametric Resynthesis

This work proposes the use of clean speech vocoder parameters as the target for a neural network performing speech enhancement. These parameters have been designed for text-to-speech synthesis so that they both produce high-quality resyntheses and also are straightforward to model with neural networks, but have not been utilized in speech enhancement until now. In comparison to a matched text-to-speech system that is given the ground truth transcripts of the noisy speech, our model is able to produce more natural speech because it has access to the true prosody in the noisy speech. In comparison to two denoising systems, the oracle Wiener mask and a DNN-based mask predictor, our model equals the oracle Wiener mask in subjective quality and intelligibility and surpasses the realistic system. A vocoder-based upper bound shows that there is still room for improvement with this approach beyond the oracle Wiener mask. We test speaker-dependence with two speakers and show that a single model can be used for multiple speakers.
A Multi-Task Approach for Disentangling Syntax and Semantics in Sentence Representations

We propose a generative model for a sentence that uses two latent variables, with one intended to represent the syntax of the sentence and the other to represent its semantics. We show we can achieve better disentanglement between semantic and syntactic representations by training with multiple losses, including losses that exploit aligned paraphrastic sentences and word-order information. We evaluate our models on standard semantic similarity tasks and novel syntactic similarity tasks. Empirically, we find that the model with the best performing syntactic and semantic representations also gives rise to the most disentangled representations.
An economic theory of economic analysis: the case of the School of Salamanca

The School of Salamanca often is identified as the first economic tradition in the history of the “dismal science”. Its members anticipated principles later developed by the likes of Adam Smith and Carl Menger. This paper provides an economic theory of the production of economic analysis by the Doctors of Salamanca, beginning from the observation that producers of economic analysis respond to incentives the same way producers of meat, beer, or bread do. Historically, the demand for economic analysis arises from two sources: governments and interest groups. I argue that the changes in international trade associated with the emergence of new transatlantic markets in the sixteenth century led to an increase in the demand for economic analysis by Spanish merchants and that the contribution of the School of Salamanca was grounded in the predictable supply response to those fresh incentives.
Vector Autoregressive POMDP Model Learning and Planning for Human–Robot Collaboration

Human–robot collaboration (HRC) has emerged as a hot research area at the intersection of control, robotics, and psychology in recent years. It is of critical importance to obtain an expressive but meanwhile tractable model for human beings in HRC. In this letter, we propose a model called vector autoregressive partially observable Markov decision process (VAR-POMDP) which is an extension of the traditional POMDP model by considering the correlation among observations. The VAR-POMDP model is more powerful in the expressiveness of features than the traditional continuous observation POMDP since the traditional one is a special case of the VAR-POMDP model. Meanwhile, the proposed VAR-POMDP model is also tractable, as we show that it can be effectively learned from data and we can extend point-based value iteration (PBVI) to VAR-POMDP planning. Particularly, in this letter, we propose to use the Bayesian non-parametric learning to decide potential human states and learn a VAR-POMDP model using data collected from human demonstrations. Then, we consider planning with respect to PCTL which is widely used as safety and reachability requirement in robotics. Finally, the advantage of using the proposed model for HRC is validated by experimental results using data collected from a driver-assistance test-bed.
Utility functions for mild and severe health risks

This article reviews economic evidence on health-dependent utility functions and presents new estimates of utility functions for cancer. Estimates of health-dependent utility functions have found that mild adverse health impacts can be treated as monetary equivalents. Severe health consequences also reduce utility levels but have an additional effect of altering the structure of utility functions by reducing the marginal utility of income. The implications of past studies are often misleading when they fail to account for income losses and medical expenses associated with serious ailments. This article’s estimates of the structure of utility functions for cancer indicate a substantially lower marginal utility of income at any given income level. This result is consistent with the welfare consequences of other severe health effects, which impose harms that are not tantamount to a monetary loss.
Single-Copy Knock-In Loci for Defined Gene Expression in Caenorhabditis elegans

We have generated a single-copy knock-in loci for defined gene expression (SKI LODGE) system to insert any DNA by CRISPR/Cas9 at defined safe harbors in the Caenorhabditis elegans genome. Utilizing a single crRNA guide, which also acts as a Co-CRISPR enrichment marker, any DNA sequence can be introduced as a single copy, regulated by different tissue-specific promoters. The SKI LODGE system provides a fast, economical, and effective approach for generating single-copy ectopic transgenes in C. elegans.
When Do Partisans Stop Following the Leader

Evidence of public opinion blindly following political leader rhetoric has important implications for the scope of elite influence and normative democratic concerns. Past research, however, does no...
Fast Blind MIMO Decoding Through Vertex Hopping

We present an algorithm that efficiently performs blind decoding of MIMO signals. That is, given no channel state information (CSI) at either the transmitter or the receiver, our algorithm takes a block of samples and returns an estimate of the underlying data symbols. In prior work, the problem of blind decoding was formulated as a non-convex optimization problem. In this paper, we present an algorithm that efficiently solves this non-convex problem in practical settings. This algorithm leverages the concepts of linear and mixed-integer linear programming. Empirically, we show that our technique has an error performance close to that of zero-forcing with perfect CSI at the receiver. Initial estimates of the run time of the algorithm presented in this paper suggest that the real-time blind decoding of MIMO signals is possible for even modest-sized MIMO systems.
Risk Adjustment in Private Equity Returns

This article reviews empirical methods to assess risk and return in private equity. I discuss data and econometric issues for fund-level, deal-level, and publicly traded partnerships data. Risk-adj...
Aziridination of γ,δ-dibromoethyl-2-pentenoate with primary amines: extension of the Gabriel–Cromwell reaction☆

Ethyl (E)-4,5-dibromo-2-pentenoate readily reacts with an assortment of primary amines in the presence of DBU to afford the corresponding conjugated aziridines in good to moderate yields. That the reaction is compatible with a nucleoside-derived amine suggests a broad scope of application.
SYNTHESIS OF ARYL AND ALKYL ACYLSILANES USING TRIMETHYL(TRIBUTYLSTANNYL)SILANE

Abstract Palladium catalyzed coupling of acid chlorides and trimethyl(tributylstannyl)silane proves to be a convenient method for the preparation of both aromatic and aliphatic acylsilanes.
“Laser and the Tuber”: thermal dynamic and volumetric factors influencing seizure outcomes in pediatric subjects with tuberous sclerosis undergoing stereoencephalography-directed laser ablation of tubers

Tuberous sclerosis (TSC) is a well-known cause of medically refractory epilepsy (MRE). Stereoencephalography-directed magnetic resonance-guided laser interstitial thermal therapy (SEEG-directed MRgLITT) is an emerging minimally invasive technique that appears aptly suited for the surgical management of TSC. Our aims are to present our experiences with patients who had undergone SEEG-directed MRgLITT to identify and treat cortical tubers responsible for clinical seizures and to perform an in-depth analysis of volumetric and thermal dynamic factors that may be related to seizure outcomes. We studied all pediatric patients with MRE due to TSC who underwent SEEG-directed MRgLITT, investigating seizure outcomes in relation to thermal dynamic and volumetric factors. Eight cortical tubers from three pediatric patients were analyzed. Two of three patients had Engel I outcomes at last follow-up (median 18 months). Average A/T (ablation volume/tuber volume) ratio for Engel I outcomes was 1.28 (variance, 0.16) and 0.84 (variance, < 0.01) for all other outcomes (P = 0.035). There was a moderate positive correlation when comparing ablation energy to ablation volume (R2 = 0.65) in cortical tuber tissue. When the calcified tuber is excluded, the correlation is stronger (R2 = 0.77). Thus, the calculated energy needed to ablate 1 cm3 of cortical tuber tissue is 1263.6 J (calcified tuber) or 1089.5 J (non-calcified tuber). SEEG-directed MRgLITT appears to be a safe and effective technique in the management of pediatric patients with MRE due to TSC. The A/T ratio may be a useful indicator in predicting seizure outcomes.
A New Route to 1,3-Dienes: TMSI Elimination of 2-Ene-1,4-diols

Abstract Iodotrimethylsilane effects conversion of acyclic bis-secondary 2-ene-1,4-diols to 1,3-dienes in moderate yield. The reaction with 3-hexene-2,5-diol favors anti elimination but is largely nonstereospecific.
Stereochemically divergent pathways for the allylation and crotylation reactions of anti- and syn-β-hydroxy-α-methyl aldehydes with allyl- and crotyltrifluorosilanes

Abstract Allylation and crotylation reactions of 2,3-anti-β-hydroxy-α-methyl aldehydes 10 and 11 with allyl and crotyltrifluorosilanes 2, 8 and 9 proceed with high selectivity via the bicyclic chelated transition states 3 and 30. In contrast, analogous allylation and crotylation reactions of the 2,3-syn-β-hydroxy-α-methyl aldehydes 12 and 13 with 2,8 and 9 are generally less selective and proceed preferentially by way of the normal Zimmerman-Traxler transition states 6 and 32.
DeepScope: Nonintrusive Whole Slide Saliency Annotation and Prediction from Pathologists at the Microscope

Modern digital pathology departments have grown to produce whole-slide image data at petabyte scale, an unprecedented treasure chest for medical machine learning tasks. Unfortunately, most digital slides are not annotated at the image level, hindering large-scale application of supervised learning. Manual labeling is prohibitive, requiring pathologists with decades of training and outstanding clinical service responsibilities. This problem is further aggravated by the United States Food and Drug Administration’s ruling that primary diagnosis must come from a glass slide rather than a digital image. We present the first end-to-end framework to overcome this problem, gathering annotations in a nonintrusive manner during a pathologist’s routine clinical work: (i) microscope-specific 3D-printed commodity camera mounts are used to video record the glass-slide-based clinical diagnosis process; (ii) after routine scanning of the whole slide, the video frames are registered to the digital slide; (iii) motion and observation time are estimated to generate a spatial and temporal saliency map of the whole slide. Demonstrating the utility of these annotations, we train a convolutional neural network that detects diagnosis-relevant salient regions, then report accuracy of 85.15% in bladder and 91.40% in prostate, with 75.00% accuracy when training on prostate but predicting in bladder, despite different pathologists examining the different tissues. When training on one patient but testing on another, AUROC in bladder is 0.79 ± 0.11 and in prostate is 0.96 ± 0.04. Our tool is available at https://bitbucket.org/aschaumberg/deepscope.
CD95/Fas ligand mRNA is toxic to cells

CD95/Fas ligand binds to the death receptor CD95 to induce apoptosis in sensitive cells. We previously reported that CD95L mRNA is enriched in sequences that, when converted to si/shRNAs, kill all cancer cells by targeting critical survival genes (Putzbach et al., 2017). We now report expression of full-length CD95L mRNA itself is highly toxic to cells and induces a similar form of cell death. We demonstrate that small (s)RNAs derived from CD95L are loaded into the RNA induced silencing complex (RISC) which is required for the toxicity and processing of CD95L mRNA into sRNAs is independent of both Dicer and Drosha. We provide evidence that in addition to the CD95L transgene a number of endogenous protein coding genes involved in regulating protein translation, particularly under low miRNA conditions, can be processed to sRNAs and loaded into the RISC suggesting a new level of cell fate regulation involving RNAi.
Invariance-Based Concurrent Error Detection for Advanced Encryption Standard.

Naturally occurring and maliciously injected faults reduce the reliability of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and may leak confidential information. We developed an invariance-based concurrent error detection (CED) scheme which is independent of the implementation of AES encryption/decryption. Additionally, we improve the security of our scheme with Randomized CED Round Insertion and adaptive checking. Experimental results show that the invariance-based CED scheme detects all single-bit, all single-byte fault, and 99.99999997% of burst faults. The area and delay overheads of this scheme are compared with those of previously reported CED schemes on two Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. The hardware overhead is in the 13.2-27.3% range and the throughput is between 1.8-42.2Gbps depending on the AES architecture, FPGA family, and the detection latency. One can implement our scheme in many ways; designers can trade off performance, reliability, and security according to the available resources.
Conjugate addition of sodium methanesulfinate to vinyl pyridines and diazines for the synthesis of aliphatic sulfones

A convenient method to introduce a sulfone group to pyridines and diazines is described. This efficient method involves the conjugate addition of sodium methanesulfinate to vinyl heterocycles. This process tolerates a wide variety of functional groups and is performed in the presence of acetic or trifluoroacetic acid. A one-pot, two-step synthesis of sulfones starting from the corresponding heteroaryl halide is also described.
Transcriptomic analysis of diplomonad parasites reveals a trans-spliced intron in a helicase gene in Giardia.

BACKGROUND The mechanisms by which DNA sequences are expressed is the central preoccupation of molecular genetics. Recently, ourselves and others reported that in the diplomonad protist Giardia lamblia, the coding regions of several mRNAs are produced by ligation of independent RNA species expressed from distinct genomic loci. Such trans-splicing of introns was found to affect nearly as many genes in this organism as does classical cis-splicing of introns. These findings raised questions about the incidence of intron trans-splicing both across the G. lambliatranscriptome and across diplomonad diversity in general, however a dearth of transcriptomic data at the time prohibited systematic study of these questions. METHODS I leverage newly available transcriptomic data from G. lamblia and the related diplomonad Spironucleus salmonicidato search for trans-spliced introns. My computational pipeline recovers all four previously reported trans-spliced introns in G. lamblia, suggesting good sensitivity. RESULTS Scrutiny of thousands of potential cases revealed only a single additional trans-spliced intron in G. lamblia, in the p68 helicase gene, and no cases in S. salmonicida. The p68 intron differs from the previously reported trans-spliced introns in its high degree of streamlining: the core features of G. lamblia trans-spliced introns are closely packed together, revealing striking economy in the implementation of a seemingly inherently uneconomical molecular mechanism. DISCUSSION These results serve to circumscribe the role of trans-splicing in diplomonads both in terms of the number of genes effected and taxonomically. Future work should focus on the molecular mechanisms, evolutionary origins and phenotypic implications of this intriguing phenomenon.
Musical Imagery Involves Wernicke's Area in Bilateral and Anti-Correlated Network Interactions in Musicians

Musical imagery is the human experience of imagining music without actually hearing it. The neural basis of this mental ability is unclear, especially for musicians capable of engaging in accurate and vivid musical imagery. Here, we created a visualization of an 8-minute symphony as a silent movie and used it as real-time cue for musicians to continuously imagine the music for repeated and synchronized sessions during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The activations and networks evoked by musical imagery were compared with those elicited by the subjects directly listening to the same music. Musical imagery and musical perception resulted in overlapping activations at the anterolateral belt and Wernicke’s area, where the responses were correlated with the auditory features of the music. Whereas Wernicke’s area interacted within the intrinsic auditory network during musical perception, it was involved in much more complex networks during musical imagery, showing positive correlations with the dorsal attention network and the motor-control network and negative correlations with the default-mode network. Our results highlight the important role of Wernicke’s area in forming vivid musical imagery through bilateral and anti-correlated network interactions, challenging the conventional view of segregated and lateralized processing of music versus language.
Charge-ordering in manganates

Ordering of Mn{sup 3+} and Mn{sup 4+} ions occurs in the rare earth manganates of the general composition Ln{sub 1{minus}x}A{sub x}MnO{sub 3} (Ln = rare earth, A = Ca, Sr). Such charge-ordering is associated with antiferromagnetic and insulating properties. This phenomenon is to be contrasted with the ferromagnetic metallic behavior that occurs when double-exchange between the Mn{sup 3+} and Mn{sup 4+} ions predominates. Two distinct types of charge-ordering can be delineated. In one, a ferromagnetic metallic (FMM) state transforms to the charge-ordered (CO) state on cooling. In the other scenario, the CO state is found in the paramagnetic ground state and there is no ferromagnetism down to the lowest temperatures. Magnetic fields transform the CO state to the FMM state, when the average radius of the A-site cations is sufficiently large ({l_angle}r{sub A}{r_angle} > 1.17 {angstrom}). Chemical melting of the CO state by Cr{sup 3+} substitution in the Mn site is also found only when {l_angle}r{sub A}{r_angle} {approx_gt} 1.17 {angstrom}. The effect of the size of the A-cations on the Mn-O-Mn angle is not enough to explain the observed variations of the charge-ordering temperature as well as the ferromagnetic Curie temperature T{sub c}. An explanation based on a competition betweenmore » the Mn and A-cation orbitals for {sigma}-bonding with the oxygen {rho}{sub {sigma}} orbitals is considered to account for the large changes in T{sub c} and hence the true bandwidth, with {l_angle}r{sub A}{r_angle}. Effects of radiation, electric field, and other factors on the CO state are discussed along with charge-ordering in other manganate systems. Complex phase transitions, accompanied by changes in electronic and magnetic properties, occur in manganates with critical values of {l_angle}r{sub A}{r_angle} or bandwidth. Charge-ordering is found in layered manganates, Bi{sub x}Ca{sub 1{minus}x}MnO{sub 3} and CaMnO{sub 3{minus}{delta}}.« less
A novel approach to Morita–Baylis–Hillman (MBH) lactones via the Lewis acid-promoted couplings of α,β-unsaturated lactone with aldehydes

Abstract The Morita–Baylis–Hillman (MBH)-type reaction of α,β unsaturated δ-lactone with various aldehydes has been achieved without the direct use of a Lewis base. The new MBH process can be conveniently carried out by the slow addition of the diethylaluminum iodide into the solution of lactone and aldehyde in dichloromethane at 0°C. Modest to good yields were obtained (50–65%) for eight examples.
Stereoselective Synthesis of Differentially Protected Derivatives of the Higher Amino Sugars Destomic Acid and Lincosamine from Serine and Threonine.

The aminoheptose destomic acid (3.5) and the aminooctose lincosamine (6.8) were synthesized in protected form by parallel sequences starting from the oxazolidine derivatives 2.4 and 5.1 of N-CBz serinal and N-BOC threoninal. The parallel sequences feature BF3-promoted addition of the (R)-γ-OTBS allylic stannane 2.8 to the homologated enals 2.7 and 5.4, respectively, followed by stereoselective bis-dihydroxylation of the derived bis-OTBS ethers 2.10 and 5.6. Regioselective oxidative cleavage of the less hindered vicinal diol moieties of these intermediates led to the γ-lactols 3.2 and 5.8, respectively. In the former case, treatment with TBAF and subsequent hydrolysis removed the OTBS and acetonide protecting groups affording the destomic acid precursor, pyranose 3.4. Lactol 5.8 was converted to the pyranoside 6.3 by silyl ether cleavage, acidic hydrolysis, and bis-acetonide formation. Inversion of the C7 hydroxyl grouping was effected by the Mitsunobu methodology with p-NO2C6H4CO2H. Subsequent hydrolysis,...
Plastic Superconducting Polymer−NbSe2 Nanocomposites

The preparation and characterization of flexible, superconducting, nanophase materials consisting of organic polymers and NbSe2 layers is reported.
Ecological selection for small microbial genomes along a temperate-to-thermal soil gradient.

Small bacterial and archaeal genomes provide insights into the minimal requirements for life1 and are phylogenetically widespread2. However, the precise environmental pressures that constrain genome size in free-living microorganisms are unknown. A study including isolates has shown that thermophiles and other bacteria with high optimum growth temperatures often have small genomes3. It is unclear whether this relationship extends generally to microorganisms in nature4,5 and more specifically to microorganisms that inhabit complex and highly variable environments, such as soils3,6,7. To understand the genomic traits of thermally adapted microorganisms, here we investigated metagenomes from a 45 °C gradient of temperate-to-thermal soils that lie over the ongoing Centralia, Pennsylvania (USA) coal-seam fire. We found that hot soils harboured distinct communities with small genomes and small cell sizes relative to those in ambient soils. Hot soils notably lacked genes that encode known two-component regulatory systems, and antimicrobial production and resistance genes. Our results provide field evidence for the inverse relationship between microbial genome size and temperature in a diverse, free-living community over a wide range of temperatures that support microbial life. Shotgun metagenomes recovered from a thermal gradient at a coal-seam fire site identified distinct microbial communities with smaller genomes and cell sizes and altered metabolic genes in higher-temperature soils.
Total Synthesis of Phomazarin

A concise total synthesis of phomazarin (1) is detailed enlisting a heterocyclic azadiene inverse electron demand Diels−Alder reaction (1,2,4-triazine → pyridine) for preparation of the fully substituted and appropriately functionalized pyridine C-ring. Thus, [4 + 2] cycloaddition (85%) of triethyl 1,2,4-triazine-3,5,6-tricarboxylate (2) with trimethoxyethylene (3) followed by conversion of the cycloadduct 11 to the cyclic anhydride 13 provided the phomazarin C-ring with the three carboxylates suitably differentiated. Linkage of the A- and C-rings through selective nucleophilic addition of the aryllithium reagent 9 to the least hindered anhydride carbonyl of 13 followed by Friedel−Crafts closure of the B-ring provided the fully functionalized phomazarin skeleton. The successful structural correlation of synthetic 1 with natural material and its derivatives confirmed the latest structural assignment for the natural product.
Half-filled stripes in a hole-doped three-orbital spin-fermion model for cuprates

Using Monte Carlo techniques, we study a three-orbital ${\mathrm{CuO}}_{2}$ spin-fermion model for copper-based high-critical-temperature superconductors that captures the charge-transfer properties of these compounds. Our studies reveal the presence of spin order in the parent compound and, more importantly, stripe spin and charge order under hole doping. Due to the $p\text{\ensuremath{-}}d$ orbital hybridization, the added holes are approximately equally distributed among the two $p$ orbitals of the oxygen atoms and the $d$ orbital of the copper atoms in the unit cell. In rectangular clusters of dimension $16\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}4$ half-filled stripes are observed upon hole doping; namely, when ${N}_{h}=2n$ holes are introduced in the system, then $n$ vertical stripes of length 4 along the short periodic direction are formed. The original antiferromagnetic order observed in the parent compound develops a $\ensuremath{\pi}$ shift across each stripe, and the magnetic structure factor has a peak at wave vector $\mathbf{k}=(\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\delta},\ensuremath{\pi})$ with $\ensuremath{\delta}=2\ensuremath{\pi}{N}_{h}/N=\ensuremath{\pi}{N}_{h}/2L$, where $L=16$. The electronic charge is also modulated, and the charge structure factor is maximized at $\mathbf{k}=(2\ensuremath{\delta},0)$. As electrons are removed from the system, intracell orbital nematicity with $\ensuremath{\langle}{n}_{{p}_{x}}\ensuremath{\rangle}\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\langle}{n}_{{p}_{y}}\ensuremath{\rangle}\ensuremath{\ne}0$ develops in the oxygen sector, as well as intercell magnetic nematicity with $\ensuremath{\langle}{S}_{\mathbf{i},d}^{z}({S}_{\mathbf{i}+\mathbf{x},d}^{z}\ensuremath{-}{S}_{\mathbf{i}+\mathbf{y},d}^{z})\ensuremath{\rangle}\ensuremath{\ne}0$ in the spin copper sector, in the standard notation. This occurs not only in rectangular but also in square $8\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}8$ lattices. Our results suggest that the essence of the stripe spin and charge distribution experimentally observed in hole-doped cuprates is captured by unbiased Monte Carlo studies of a simple hole-doped charge-transfer insulator ${\mathrm{CuO}}_{2}$ spin-fermion model.
Comparison of Experimental and Calculated Chiroptical Spectra for Chiral Molecular Structure Determination

For three different chiroptical spectroscopic methods, namely, vibrational circular dichroism (VCD), electronic circular dichroism (ECD), and Raman optical activity (ROA), the measures of similarity of the experimental spectra to the corresponding spectra predicted using quantum chemical theories are summarized. In determining the absolute configuration and/or predominant conformations of chiral molecules, these similarity measures provide numerical estimates of agreement between experimental observations and theoretical predictions. Selected applications illustrating the similarity measures for absorption, circular dichroism, and corresponding dissymmetry factor (DF) spectra, in the case of VCD and ECD, and for Raman, ROA, and circular intensity differential (CID) spectra in the case of ROA, are presented. The analysis of similarity in DF or CID spectra is considered to be much more discerning and accurate than that in absorption (or Raman) and circular dichroism (or ROA) spectra, undertaken individually. Chirality 26:539–552, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Sequential cyclization-silylation reactions of 1,1-disubstituted alkenes catalyzed by a cationic zirconocene complex

Abstract A catalytic method for the sequential cyclization-silylation of dienes containing one or two 1,1-disubstituted alkene moieties to form various cyclic and bicyclic organosilanes in good yield is presented.
Pulling the covers in electronic health records for an association study with self-reported sleep behaviors.

The electronic health record (EHR) contains rich histories of clinical care, but has not traditionally been mined for information related to sleep habits. Here, we performed a retrospective EHR study based on a cohort of 3,652 individuals with self-reported sleep behaviors documented from visits to the sleep clinic. These individuals were obese (mean body mass index 33.6 kg/m2) and had a high prevalence of sleep apnea (60.5%), however we found sleep behaviors largely concordant with prior prospective cohort studies. In our cohort, average wake time was 1 hour later and average sleep duration was 40 minutes longer on weekends than on weekdays (p < 10-12). Sleep duration varied considerably as a function of age and tended to be longer in females and in whites. Additionally, through phenome-wide association analyses, we found an association of long weekend sleep with depression, and an unexpectedly large number of associations of long weekday sleep with mental health and neurological disorders (q < 0.05). We then sought to replicate previously published genetic associations with morning/evening preference on a subset of our cohort with extant genotyping data (n = 555). While those findings did not replicate in our cohort, a polymorphism (rs3754214) in high linkage disequilibrium with a previously published polymorphism near TARS2 was associated with long sleep duration (p < 0.01). Collectively, our results highlight the potential of the EHR for uncovering the correlates of human sleep in real-world populations.
Exponential separation between shallow quantum circuits and unbounded fan-in shallow classical circuits

Recently, Bravyi, Gosset, and Konig (Science, 2018) exhibited a search problem called the 2D Hidden Linear Function (2D HLF) problem that can be solved exactly by a constant-depth quantum circuit using bounded fan-in gates (or QNC^0 circuits), but cannot be solved by any constant-depth classical circuit using bounded fan-in AND, OR, and NOT gates (or NC^0 circuits). In other words, they exhibited a search problem in QNC^0 that is not in NC^0. We strengthen their result by proving that the 2D HLF problem is not contained in AC^0, the class of classical, polynomial-size, constant-depth circuits over the gate set of unbounded fan-in AND and OR gates, and NOT gates. We also supplement this worst-case lower bound with an average-case result: There exists a simple distribution under which any AC^0 circuit (even of nearly exponential size) has exponentially small correlation with the 2D HLF problem. Our results are shown by constructing a new problem in QNC^0, which we call the Parity Halving Problem, which is easier to work with. We prove our AC^0 lower bounds for this problem, and then show that it reduces to the 2D HLF problem.
Electrical synapses regulate both subthreshold integration and population activity of principal cells in response to transient inputs within canonical feedforward circuits.

As information about the world traverses the brain, the signals exchanged between neurons are passed and modulated by synapses, or specialized contacts between neurons. While neurotransmitter-based synapses tend to exert either excitatory or inhibitory pulses of influence on the postsynaptic neuron, electrical synapses, composed of plaques of gap junction channels, continuously transmit signals that can either excite or inhibit a coupled neighbor. A growing body of evidence indicates that electrical synapses, similar to their chemical counterparts, are modified in strength during physiological neuronal activity. The synchronizing role of electrical synapses in neuronal oscillations has been well established, but their impact on transient signal processing in the brain is much less understood. Here we constructed computational models based on the canonical feedforward neuronal circuit, and included electrical synapses between inhibitory interneurons. We provided discrete closely-timed inputs to the circuits, and characterize the influence of electrical synapse strength on both subthreshold summation and spike trains in the output neuron. Our simulations highlight the diverse and powerful roles that electrical synapses play even in simple circuits. Because these canonical circuits are represented widely throughout the brain, we expect that these are general principles for the influence of electrical synapses on transient signal processing across the brain.
A reference haplotype panel for genome-wide imputation of short tandem repeats

Short tandem repeats (STRs) are involved in dozens of Mendelian disorders and have been implicated in complex traits. However, genotyping arrays used in genome-wide association studies focus on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and do not readily allow identification of STR associations. We leverage next-generation sequencing (NGS) from 479 families to create a SNP + STR reference haplotype panel. Our panel enables imputing STR genotypes into SNP array data when NGS is not available for directly genotyping STRs. Imputed genotypes achieve mean concordance of 97% with observed genotypes in an external dataset compared to 71% expected under a naive model. Performance varies widely across STRs, with near perfect concordance at bi-allelic STRs vs. 70% at highly polymorphic repeats. Imputation increases power over individual SNPs to detect STR associations with gene expression. Imputing STRs into existing SNP datasets will enable the first large-scale STR association studies across a range of complex traits.
Metastable Vacua in Deformed { n} = 2 Supersymmetric Models

We show that supersymmetric Abelian models that are obtained from deformations of those with supersymmetry also contain metastable vacua for a wide range of parameters. The deformations we consider are combinations of masses for charged and singlet fields, a singlet F-term and an anomalous D-term. We find that, in all cases, the nonsupersymmetric vacua are parametrically far from the supersymmetric ones and therefore metastable. Using retrofitting, we show that these metastable vacua may lead to semirealistic phenomenology.
Effects of multiple sources of genetic drift on pathogen variation within hosts

Changes in pathogen genetic variation within hosts alter the severity and spread of infectious diseases, with important implications for clinical disease and public health. Genetic drift may play a strong role in shaping pathogen variation, but analyses of drift in pathogens have oversimplified pathogen population dynamics, either by considering dynamics only at a single scale-such as within hosts or between hosts-or by making drastic simplifying assumptions, for example, that host immune systems can be ignored or that transmission bottlenecks are complete. Moreover, previous studies have used genetic data to infer the strength of genetic drift, whereas we test whether the genetic drift imposed by pathogen population processes can be used to explain genetic data. We first constructed and parameterized a mathematical model of gypsy moth baculovirus dynamics that allows genetic drift to act within and between hosts. We then quantified the genome-wide diversity of baculovirus populations within each of 143 field-collected gypsy moth larvae using Illumina sequencing. Finally, we determined whether the genetic drift imposed by host-pathogen population dynamics in our model explains the levels of pathogen diversity in our data. We found that when the model allows drift to act at multiple scales-including within hosts, between hosts, and between years-it can accurately reproduce the data, but when the effects of drift are simplified by neglecting transmission bottlenecks and stochastic variation in virus replication within hosts, the model fails. A de novo mutation model and a purifying selection model similarly fail to explain the data. Our results show that genetic drift can play a strong role in determining pathogen variation and that mathematical models that account for pathogen population growth at multiple scales of biological organization can be used to explain this variation.
Catalysis of benzoin condensation by conformationally-restricted chiral bicyclic thiazolium salts

Abstract Two new conformationally-restricted chiral bicyclic thiazolium salts have been synthesized by a concise, high-yielding route. These salts are effective catalysts for the benzoin condensation, affording benzoin in 20–30% yield, with a similar range of enantiomeric excesses.
Synthesis and evaluation of aryl-substituted N-(arylethyl)-N-methyl-2-(1-pyrrolidinyl)ethylamines and corresponding arylacetamides for sigma receptor affinity.

A series of aryl-monosubstituted arylacetamides (4−9) and arylethylenediamine (10−18) compounds were synthesized based on the structure of the high-affinity sigma ligand N-[2-(3,4-dichlorophenyl)ethyl]-N-methyl-2-(1-pyrrolidinyl)ethylamine (2). These compounds were prepared to evaluate the effect of aromatic substitution patterns on sigma-1 and sigma-2 receptor binding affinity and selectivity. The data indicate that 10−18 possessed higher affinity than 4−9 for both sigma sites, especially when substituted with an electron-withdrawing group. The diamine compounds 10−18 were selective for sigma-1 binding sites, whereas the arylacetamide compounds 4−9 generally exhibited an increased selectivity for sigma-2 sites compared to sigma-1. No clear pattern between the orientation of aromatic substituents and the sigma binding activity was observed.
Decavanadate with a novel coordination complex: Synthesis and characterization of (NH4)2[Ni(H2O)5(NH3)]2(V10O28)·4H2O

Abstract A new compound (NH4)2[Ni(H2O)5(NH3)]2[V10O28]·4H2O (1) containing a {V10O28} 6− anionic cluster and a novel complex cation, [Ni(H2O)5(NH3)]2 +, has been synthesized and fully characterized by single crystal X-ray crystallography, spectroscopy and thermogravimetric analysis. The presence of the ammonia ligand in the complex cation in 1 was established unambiguously by X-ray crystallography and variable temperature (200–400 °C) thermogravimetric analyses in combination with FTIR spectroscopic studies. The formation of the novel complex species {Ni(H2O)5(NH3)}2 + during the synthesis of 1 can be rationalized in terms of ligand substitution involving {Ni(H2O)6}2 +.
Spillover Impacts on Education from Employment Guarantees

Programs that provide lower-skill employment are a popular anti-poverty strategy in developing countries, with India's employment-guarantee program (MGNREGA) employing adults in 23% of Indian house...
Conserved Herpesvirus Protein Kinases Target SAMHD1 to Facilitate Virus Replication.

Summary To ensure a successful infection, herpesviruses have developed elegant strategies to counterbalance the host anti-viral responses. Sterile alpha motif and HD domain 1 (SAMHD1) was recently identified as an intrinsic restriction factor for a variety of viruses. Aside from HIV-2 and the related simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) Vpx proteins, the direct viral countermeasures against SAMHD1 restriction remain unknown. Using Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) as a primary model, we discover that SAMHD1-mediated anti-viral restriction is antagonized by EBV BGLF4, a member of the conserved viral protein kinases encoded by all herpesviruses. Mechanistically, we find that BGLF4 phosphorylates SAMHD1 and thereby inhibits its deoxynucleotide triphosphate triphosphohydrolase (dNTPase) activity. We further demonstrate that the targeting of SAMHD1 for phosphorylation is a common feature shared by beta- and gamma-herpesviruses. Together, our findings uncover an immune evasion mechanism whereby herpesviruses exploit the phosphorylation of SAMHD1 to thwart host defenses.
Dependent Artin–Schreier defect extensions and strong monomialization

Abstract In this paper we affirmatively answer a question posed by F.-V. Kuhlmann. We show that the first Artin–Schreier defect extension in Cutkosky and Piltant's counter-example to strong monomialization is a dependent extension. Our main tool is the use of generating sequences of valuations.
Improving Coreference Resolution by Learning Entity-Level Distributed Representations

A long-standing challenge in coreference resolution has been the incorporation of entity-level information - features defined over clusters of mentions instead of mention pairs. We present a neural network based coreference system that produces high-dimensional vector representations for pairs of coreference clusters. Using these representations, our system learns when combining clusters is desirable. We train the system with a learning-to-search algorithm that teaches it which local decisions (cluster merges) will lead to a high-scoring final coreference partition. The system substantially outperforms the current state-of-the-art on the English and Chinese portions of the CoNLL 2012 Shared Task dataset despite using few hand-engineered features.
Vector Learning for Cross Domain Representations

Recently, generative adversarial networks have gained a lot of popularity for image generation tasks. However, such models are associated with complex learning mechanisms and demand very large relevant datasets. This work borrows concepts from image and video captioning models to form an image generative framework. The model is trained in a similar fashion as recurrent captioning model and uses the learned weights for image generation. This is done in an inverse direction, where the input is a caption and the output is an image. The vector representation of the sentence and frames are extracted from an encoder-decoder model which is initially trained on similar sentence and image pairs. Our model conditions image generation on a natural language caption. We leverage a sequence-to-sequence model to generate synthetic captions that have the same meaning for having a robust image generation. One key advantage of our method is that the traditional image captioning datasets can be used for synthetic sentence paraphrases. Results indicate that images generated through multiple captions are better at capturing the semantic meaning of the family of captions.