10,507 research outputs found
Striatal Morphological and Functional Alterations Induced by Prenatal Alcohol Exposure
Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) is an insidious yet preventable cause of developmental disability. The prenatal stage is a critical period for brain development with the concurrence of high vulnerability to the acute and prolonged effects of PAE. There is substantial evidence from both human observations and laboratory experiments that PAE is a common risk factor that predisposes to an array of postnatal mental disorders, including emotional, cognitive, and motor deficits. Although it is well accepted that PAE causes substantial morbidity, available treatments are limited. One reason is the lack of sufficient understanding about the neuroalterations induced by PAE, and how these changes contribute to PAE-induced mental disorders. Among a number of brain structures that have been explored extensively in PAE, the striatum has attracted great attention in the last 20 years in the field of PAE neurobiology. Interestingly, in animal models, the striatum has been considered as a pivotal switch of brain dysfunction induced by PAE, such as addiction, anxiety, depression, and neurodegeneration. In this review, we focus on recent advances in the understanding of morphological and functional changes in brain regions related to alterations after PAE, in particular the striatum. Because this region is central for behavior, emotion and cognition, there is an urgent need for more studies to uncover the PAE-induced alterations at the circuit, neuronal, synaptic and molecular levels, which will not only improve our understanding of the neuroplasticity induced by PAE, but also provide novel biological targets to treat PAE-related mental disorders with translational significance
Enhanced quantum teleportation in the background of Schwarzschild spacetime by weak measurements
It is commonly believed that the fidelity of quantum teleportation in the
gravitational field would be degraded due to the heat up by the Hawking
radiation. In this paper, we point out that the Hawking effect could be
eliminated by the combined action of pre- and post-weak measurements, and thus
the teleportation fidelity is almost completely protected. It is intriguing to
notice that the enhancement of fidelity could not be attributed to the
improvement of entanglement, but rather to the probabilistic nature of weak
measurements. Our work extends the ability of weak measurements as a quantum
technique to battle against gravitational decoherence in relativistic quantum
information.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, comments are welcom
Women and Trade: Gender\u27s Impact on Trade Finance and Fintech
Woman-owned firms engage differently with finance for trade. The barriers they face in starting and running a business are well-known. Yet, this offers little insight into how they finance their business once globalized. Surveys indicate that finance is often the primary barrier to trade. We seek to deepen and modernize this finding by using a unique data set to explore the patterns of financial access exhibited by woman-owned exporting firms. We show that women face two levels of exclusion in access to finance—access to basic finance and access to trade finance. The latter is driven by characteristics common to firms owned by women. Also, in line with existing work, we show that woman-owned firms tend to turn to informal finance as an alternative more than their male counterparts. However, we also show that women are more likely to adopt fintech as a financial solution than men. This suggests that policies aimed at incentivizing banks to lend more to women may not be solving the right problem
Enhancing teleportation of quantum Fisher information by partial measurements
The purport of quantum teleportation is to completely transfer information
from one party to another distant partner. However, from the perspective of
parameter estimation, it is the information carried by a particular parameter,
not the information of total quantum state that needs to be teleported. Due to
the inevitable noise in environment, we propose two schemes to enhance quantum
Fisher information (QFI) teleportation under amplitude damping noise with the
technique of partial measurements. We find that post partial measurement can
greatly enhance the teleported QFI, while the combination of prior partial
measurement and post partial measurement reversal could completely eliminate
the effect of decoherence. We show that, somewhat consequentially, enhancing
QFI teleportation is more economic than that of improving fidelity
teleportation. Our work extends the ability of partial measurements as a
quantum technique to battle decoherence in quantum information processing.Comment: Revised version, minor changes, accepted by Phys. Rev.
Representation Theorems for Quadratic -Consistent Nonlinear Expectations
In this paper we extend the notion of ``filtration-consistent nonlinear
expectation" (or "-consistent nonlinear expectation") to the case
when it is allowed to be dominated by a -expectation that may have a
quadratic growth. We show that for such a nonlinear expectation many
fundamental properties of a martingale can still make sense, including the
Doob-Meyer type decomposition theorem and the optional sampling theorem. More
importantly, we show that any quadratic -consistent nonlinear
expectation with a certain domination property must be a quadratic
-expectation. The main contribution of this paper is the finding of the
domination condition to replace the one used in all the previous works, which
is no longer valid in the quadratic case. We also show that the representation
generator must be deterministic, continuous, and actually must be of the simple
form
Protecting entanglement from correlated amplitude damping channel using weak measurement and quantum measurement reversal
Based on the quantum technique of weak measurement, we propose a scheme to
protect the entanglement from correlated amplitude damping decoherence. In
contrast to the results of memoryless amplitude damping channel, we show that
the memory effects play a significant role in the suppression of entanglement
sudden death and protection of entanglement under severe decoherence. Moreover,
we find that the initial entanglement could be drastically amplified by the
combination of weak measurement and quantum measurement reversal even under the
correlated amplitude damping channel. The underlying mechanism can be
attributed to the probabilistic nature of weak measurements.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, accepted by Quantum Information Processin
- …