Impact of cadmium stress on soil virus reproduction and the persistence of viruses under abiotic conditions

Soil viruses are ubiquitous and greatly impact the structure and function of soil microbial communities, with their effects modulated by various environmental factors. This study investigates the inactivation of naturally occurring soil viruses in sterilized soil, as well as the effects of cadmium (Cd) exposure and carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) nutrient availability on the population dynamics of virus-host communities in agricultural soil. Lab-scale slurry and unsaturated experiments were performed to examine virus inactivation in the absence of host bacteria in sterilized soil. In slurry experiments, virus abundance declined by over 90% after 10 days of incubation. The addition of bacteria mitigated this decrease, though a declining trend persisted. In unsaturated experiments, virus abundance initially decreased from 1E+09 to 4.49E+08 after 10 days, followed by a substantial increase to 6.76E+09 on day 13 upon bacteria reintroduction. Further experiments assessed the impact of Cd exposure and nutrient availability on soil virus dynamics, demonstrating that both Cd and incubation time significantly influenced virus diversity and abundance, with Cd inducing prophage activation. This research highlights the complex relationships within soil microbial communities and their implications for agricultural ecosystems, focusing on the survival of fresh soil viruses in the absence of host bacteria and the impact of heavy metal exposure on virus dynamics. Integrating viral activity into the overall function of soil food webs can improve our understanding of soil health, optimize soil management practices, and potentially lead to novel virus-based applications in crop health

Periodic solutions of the Lp-Minkowski problem with indefinite weight

We provide a new sufficient condition for the existence of a periodic solution of the singular differential equation u '' + u = h(t)/u(rho), which is associated with the planar L-p-Minkowski problem. A similar result is valid for the conformal version of the problem.National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) 11501170Technological innovation talents in universities and colleges in Henan Province 21HASTIT02

Attentive Aspect Modeling for Review-aware Recommendation

In recent years, many studies extract aspects from user reviews and integrate them with ratings for improving the recommendation performance. The common aspects mentioned in a user's reviews and a product's reviews indicate indirect connections between the user and product. However, these aspect-based methods suffer from two problems. First, the common aspects are usually very sparse, which is caused by the sparsity of user-product interactions and the diversity of individual users' vocabularies. Second, a user's interests on aspects could be different with respect to different products, which are usually assumed to be static in existing methods. In this paper, we propose an Attentive Aspect-based Recommendation Model (AARM) to tackle these challenges. For the first problem, to enrich the aspect connections between user and product, besides common aspects, AARM also models the interactions between synonymous and similar aspects. For the second problem, a neural attention network which simultaneously considers user, product and aspect information is constructed to capture a user's attention towards aspects when examining different products. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that AARM can effectively alleviate the two aforementioned problems and significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art recommendation methods on top-N recommendation task.Comment: Camera-ready manuscript for TOI

Assessment of Reclamation Treatments of Abandoned Farmland in an Arid Region of China

Reclamation of abandoned farmland is crucial to a sustainable agriculture in arid regions. This study aims to evaluate the impact of different reclamation treatments on abandoned salinized farmland. We investigated four artificial reclamation treatments, continuous cotton (CC), continuous alfalfa (CA), tree-wheat intercropping (TW) and trees (TS), which were conducted in 2011–2012 in the Manasi River Basin of Xinjiang Province, China. Soil nutrient, microorganism and enzyme activity were examined in comparison with natural succession (CK) in an integrated analysis on soil fertility improvement and soil salinization control with these reclamations. Results indicate that the four artificial reclamation treatments are more effective approaches than natural restoration to reclaim abandoned farmland. TW and CA significantly increased soil nutrient content compared to CK. CC reduced soil salinity to the lowest level among all treatments. TW significantly enhanced soil enzyme activity. All four artificial reclamations increased soil microbial populations and soil microbial biomass carbon. TW and CA had the greatest overall optimal effects among the four treatments in terms of the ecological outcomes. If both economic benefits and ecological effects are considered, TW would be the best reclamation mode. The findings from this study will assist in selecting a feasible method for reclamation of abandoned farmland for sustainable agriculture in arid regions.This research was supported by the Special Fund for Agro-scientific Research in the Public Interest (201503120); Science and Technology Research and Achievement Transformation Project of The Xinjiang Production and Construction Crops (2016AD022); and the National Key Technology Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2014BAC14B03)

SurrogatePrompt: Bypassing the Safety Filter of Text-To-Image Models via Substitution

Advanced text-to-image models such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney possess the capacity to generate highly realistic images, raising significant concerns regarding the potential proliferation of unsafe content. This includes adult, violent, or deceptive imagery of political figures. Despite claims of rigorous safety mechanisms implemented in these models to restrict the generation of not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, we successfully devise and exhibit the first prompt attacks on Midjourney, resulting in the production of abundant photorealistic NSFW images. We reveal the fundamental principles of such prompt attacks and suggest strategically substituting high-risk sections within a suspect prompt to evade closed-source safety measures. Our novel framework, SurrogatePrompt, systematically generates attack prompts, utilizing large language models, image-to-text, and image-to-image modules to automate attack prompt creation at scale. Evaluation results disclose an 88% success rate in bypassing Midjourney's proprietary safety filter with our attack prompts, leading to the generation of counterfeit images depicting political figures in violent scenarios. Both subjective and objective assessments validate that the images generated from our attack prompts present considerable safety hazards.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Experimental study on the principle of minimal work fluctuations

The central quantity in the celebrated quantum Jarzynski equality is $e^{-\beta W}$, where $W$ is work and $\beta$ is the inverse temperature. The impact of quantum randomness on the fluctuations of $e^{-\beta W}$ and hence on the predictive power of the Jarzynski estimator is an important problem. Working on a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond and riding on an implementation of two-point measurement of non-equilibrium work with single-shot readout, we have conducted a direct experimental investigation of the relationship between the fluctuations of $e^{-\beta W}$ and adiabaticity of non-equilibrium work protocols. It is observed that adiabatic processes minimize the variance of $e^{-\beta W}$, thus verifying an early theoretical concept, the so-called principle of minimal work fluctuations. Furthermore, it is experimentally demonstrated that shortcuts-to-adiabaticity control can be exploited to minimize the variance of $e^{-\beta W}$ in fast work protocols. Our work should stimulate further experimental studies of quantum effects on the bias and error in the estimates of free energy differences based on the Jarzynski equality

Experimental test of the Jarzynski equality in a single spin-1 system using high-fidelity single-shot readouts

The Jarzynski equality (JE), which connects the equilibrium free energy with non-equilibrium work statistics, plays a crucial role in quantum thermodynamics. Although practical quantum systems are usually multi-level systems, most tests of the JE were executed in two-level systems. A rigorous test of the JE by directly measuring the work distribution of a physical process in a high-dimensional quantum system remains elusive. Here, we report an experimental test of the JE in a single spin-1 system. We realized nondemolition projective measurement of this three-level system via cascading high-fidelity single-shot readouts and directly measured the work distribution utilizing the two-point measurement protocol. The validity of the JE was verified from the non-adiabatic to adiabatic zone and under different effective temperatures. Our work puts the JE on a solid experimental foundation and makes the NV center system a mature toolbox to perform advanced experiments of stochastic quantum thermodynamics