May Circulating microRNAs be Gastric Cancer Diagnostic Biomarkers?

Gastric cancer (GC) is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths. More than 80% of the diagnosis was made at the advanced stages of the disease, highlighting the urgent demand for novel biomarkers that can be used for early detection. Recently, a number of studies suggest that circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) could be potential biomarkers for GC diagnosis. Cancer-related circulating miRNAs, as well as tissue miRNAs, provide a hopeful prospect of detecting GC at early stages, and the prospective participation of miRNAs in biomarker development will enhance the sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic tests for GC. As miRNAs in blood are stable, their potential value as diagnostic biomarkers in GC has been explored over the past few years. However, due to the inconsistent or sometimes conflicting reports, large-scale prospective studies are needed to validate their potential applicability in GC diagnosis. This review summarizes the current development about potential miRNA biomarkers for GC diagnosis and the obstacles hindering their clinical usage

Unpacking the relationship between outward direct investment and innovation performance: Evidence from Chinese firms

This study investigates the impact of outward direct investment (ODI) by Chinese MNEs on innovation performance and the conditions under which such an impact is moderated, based on a sample of Chinese firms. The empirical evidence suggests that undertaking ODI leads to an increase in the innovation performance of these Chinese firms. The impact of ODI on innovation is contingent on firm characteristics such as in-house R&D, strategic orientation and international experiences as well as contextual factors associated with investment destinations and industry contexts. We also find that learning through ODI is a complex process. There is a substitution between ODI and in-house R&D in Chinese MNEs. Our findings suggest that conducting ODI in developed countries serves as an effective channel for latecomer firms to overcome internal resource constraints and leapfrog towards the technology frontier

Synchronization of Two Different Dynamical Systems under Sinusoidal Constraint

This paper discusses the synchronization of the Van der Pol equation with a pendulum under the sinusoidal constraint through the theory of discontinuous dynamical systems. The analytical conditions for the sinusoidal synchronization of the Van der Pol equation with a periodically forced pendulum are developed. With the conditions, the sinusoidal synchronizations of the two systems are discussed. Switching points for appearance and vanishing of the partial synchronization are developed

Foreign competition, domestic knowledge base and innovation activities: evidence from Chinese high-tech industries

Using panel data analysis for a sample of Chinese high-technology industries from 1998 to 2008, this study examines how industry characteristics affect industry innovation activities. Differing from existing studies, our research considers the impact of foreign competition on innovation activities at industry level in a large emerging economy. The results indicate that the intensity of competition from foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) and domestic skill intensity affect industry buy and make activities. Foreign competition is positively associated with the intensity of buy activity, but negatively affects the intensity of make activity. Further, the findings show that domestic skill intensity weakens the impact of foreign competitive pressure on innovation activities. Our empirical evidence has important policy implications

Chiral metallo-supramolecular complexes selectively recognize human telomeric G-quadruplex DNA

Here, we report the first example that one enantiomer of a supramolecular cylinder can selectively stabilize human telomeric G-quadruplex DNA. The P-enantiomer of this cylinder has a strong preference for G-quadruplex over duplex DNA and, in the presence of sodium, can convert G-quadruplexes from an antiparallel to a hybrid structure. The compound's chiral selectivity and its ability to discriminate quadruplex DNA have been studied by DNA melting, circular dichroism, gel electrophoresis, fluorescence spectroscopy and S1 nuclease cleavage. The chiral supramolecular complex has both small molecular chemical features and the large size of a zinc-finger-like DNA-binding motif. The complex is also convenient to synthesize and separate enantiomers. These results provide new insights into the development of chiral anticancer agents for targeting G-quadruplex DNA

Quasar Photometric Redshifts and Candidate Selection: A New Algorithm Based on Optical and Mid-Infrared Photometric Data

We present a new algorithm to estimate quasar photometric redshifts (photo-$z$s), by considering the asymmetries in the relative flux distributions of quasars. The relative flux models are built with multivariate Skew-t distributions in the multi-dimensional space of relative fluxes as a function of redshift and magnitude. For 151,392 quasars in the SDSS, we achieve a photo-$z$ accuracy, defined as the fraction of quasars with the difference between the photo-$z$ $z_p$ and the spectroscopic redshift $z_s$, $|\Delta z| = |z_s-z_p|/(1+z_s)$ within 0.1, of 74%. Combining the WISE W1 and W2 infrared data with the SDSS data, the photo-$z$ accuracy is enhanced to 87%. Using the Pan-STARRS1 or DECaLS photometry with WISE W1 and W2 data, the photo-$z$ accuracies are 79% and 72%, respectively. The prior probabilities as a function of magnitude for quasars, stars and galaxies are calculated respectively based on (1) the quasar luminosity function; (2) the Milky Way synthetic simulation with the Besan\c{c}on model; (3) the Bayesian Galaxy Photometric Redshift estimation. The relative fluxes of stars are obtained with the Padova isochrones, and the relative fluxes of galaxies are modeled through galaxy templates. We test our classification method to select quasars using the DECaLS $g$, $r$, $z$, and WISE W1 and W2 photometry. The quasar selection completeness is higher than 70% for a wide redshift range $0.5<z<4.5$, and a wide magnitude range $18<r<21.5$ mag. Our photo-$z$ regression and classification method has the potential to extend to future surveys. The photo-$z$ code will be publicly available.Comment: 22 pages, 17 figure, accepted by AJ. The code is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.101440

Low-rank Adaptation Method for Wav2vec2-based Fake Audio Detection

Self-supervised speech models are a rapidly developing research topic in fake audio detection. Many pre-trained models can serve as feature extractors, learning richer and higher-level speech features. However,when fine-tuning pre-trained models, there is often a challenge of excessively long training times and high memory consumption, and complete fine-tuning is also very expensive. To alleviate this problem, we apply low-rank adaptation(LoRA) to the wav2vec2 model, freezing the pre-trained model weights and injecting a trainable rank-decomposition matrix into each layer of the transformer architecture, greatly reducing the number of trainable parameters for downstream tasks. Compared with fine-tuning with Adam on the wav2vec2 model containing 317M training parameters, LoRA achieved similar performance by reducing the number of trainable parameters by 198 times.Comment: 6page

Unpacking the relationship between outward direct investment and innovation performance: evidence from Chinese firms

This study investigates the impact of outward direct investment (ODI) by Chinese MNEs on innovation performance and the conditions under which such an impact is moderated, based on a sample of Chinese firms. The empirical evidence suggests that undertaking ODI leads to an increase in the innovation performance of these Chinese firms. The impact of ODI on innovation is contingent on firm characteristics such as in-house R&D, strategic orientation and international experiences as well as contextual factors associated with investment destinations and industry contexts. We also find that learning through ODI is a complex process. There is a substitution between ODI and in-house R&D in Chinese MNEs. Our findings suggest that conducting ODI in developed countries serves as an effective channel for latecomer firms to overcome internal resource constraints and leapfrog towards the technology frontier

Multicolor stimulated Raman scattering microscopy

Stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy has opened up a wide range of biochemical imaging applications by probing a particular Raman-active molecule vibrational mode in the specimen. However, the original implementation with picosecond pulse excitation can only realize rapid chemical mapping with a single Raman band. Here we present a novel SRS microscopic technique using a grating-based pulse shaper for excitation and a grating-based spectrograph for detection to achieve simultaneous multicolor SRS imaging with high sensitivity and high acquisition speeds. In particular, we use a linear combination of the measured $CH_2$ and $CH_3$ stretching signals to map the distributions of protein and lipid contents simultaneously.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog