A high-resolution spectroscopic search for multiple populations in the 2 Gyr old cluster NGC 1846

We present detailed C, O, Na, Mg, Si, Ca, Ti, V, Fe, Zr, Ba, and Eu abundance measurements for 20 red giant branch (RGB) stars in the LMC star cluster NGC 1846 ([Fe/H] = -0.59). This cluster is 1.95 Gyr old and lies just below the supposed lower age limit (2 Gyr) for the presence of multiple populations in massive star clusters. Our measurements are based on high and low-resolution VLT/FLAMES spectra combined with photometric data from HST. Corrections for non-local thermodynamic equilibrium effects are also included for O, Na, Mg, Si, Ca, Fe and Ba. Our results show that there is no evidence for multiple populations in this cluster based on the lack of any intrinsic star-to-star spread in the abundances of Na and O: we place 95 \% confidence limits on the intrinsic dispersion for these elements of $\leq 0.07$ and $\leq 0.09$ dex, respectively. However, we do detect a significant spread in the carbon abundances, indicating varying evolutionary mixing occurring on the RGB that increases with luminosity. Overall, the general abundance patterns for NGC 1846 are similar to those seen in previous studies of intermediate-age LMC star clusters and field stars

Contextualizing Multiple Tasks via Learning to Decompose

One single instance could possess multiple portraits and reveal diverse relationships with others according to different contexts. Those ambiguities increase the difficulty of learning a generalizable model when there exists one concept or mixed concepts in a task. We propose a general approach Learning to Decompose Network (LeadNet) for both two cases, which contextualizes a model through meta-learning multiple maps for concepts discovery -- the representations of instances are decomposed and adapted conditioned on the contexts. Through taking a holistic view over multiple latent components over instances in a sampled pseudo task, LeadNet learns to automatically select the right concept via incorporating those rich semantics inside and between objects. LeadNet demonstrates its superiority in various applications, including exploring multiple views of confusing tasks, out-of-distribution recognition, and few-shot image classification

Atherosclerosis and Helminths Infection

Atherosclerosis is a chronic disease that causes various cardiovascular complications. Plaque formation in atherosclerosis is considered similar to the pathogenesis of other autoimmune diseases; thus, immunomodulation and immunosuppression may present strategies for the treatment and prevention of these diseases. Interestingly helminth infection was found to inhibit T helper 1-mediated autoimmune diseases and T helper 2-mediated allergy and asthma, indicating significant potential for clinical application. Some study even found that therapeutic efficacy of the viable tapeworm was superior to dexamethasone treatment. Recently, some studies have shown an inverse association between helminth infections and inflammatory diseases, including diabetes mellitus, lipid abnormality, and atherosclerosis. Will the underlying mechanism bring us a new idea on the treatment for these diseases? We tried to find an answer by reviewing recent articles