Large modulation of thermal transport in 2D semimetal triphosphides by doping-induced electron-phonon coupling

Recent studies demonstrate that novel 2D triphosphides semiconductors possess high carrier mobility and promising thermoelectric performance, while the carrier transport behaviors in 2D semimetal triphosphides have never been elucidated before. Herein, using the first-principles calculations and Boltzmann transport theory, we reveal that the electron-phonon coupling can be significant and thus greatly inhibits the electron and phonon transport in electron-doped BP3 and CP3. The intrinsic heat transport capacity of flexural acoustic phonon modes in the wrinkle structure is largely suppressed arising from the strong out-of-plane phonon scatterings, leading to the low phonon thermal conductivity of 1.36 and 5.33 W/(mK) for BP3 and CP3 at room temperature, and at high doping level, the enhanced scattering from electron diminishes the phonon thermal conductivity by 71% and 54% for BP3 and CP3, respectively. Instead, electron thermal conductivity shows nonmonotonic variations with the increase of doping concentration, stemming from the competition between electron-phonon scattering rates and electron group velocity. It is worth noting that the heavy-doping effect induced strong scattering from phonon largely suppresses the electron transport and reduces electron thermal conductivity to the magnitude of phonon thermal conductivity. This work sheds light on the electron and phonon transport properties in semimetal triphosphides monolayer and provides an efficient avenue for the modulation of carrier transport by doping-induced electron-phonon coupling effect

Gene-alcohol interactions identify several novel blood pressure loci including a promising locus near SLC16A9

Alcohol consumption is a known risk factor for hypertension, with recent candidate studies implicating gene-alcohol interactions in blood pressure (BP) regulation. We used 6,882 (predominantly) Caucasian participants aged 20 to 80 years from the Framingham SHARe (SNP Health Association Resource) to perform a genome-wide analysis of SNP-alcohol interactions on BP traits. We used a two-step approach in the ABEL suite to examine genetic interactions with three alcohol measures [ounces of alcohol consumed per week, drinks consumed per week, and the number of days drinking alcohol per week] on four BP traits [systolic (SBP), diastolic (DBP), mean arterial (MAP), and pulse (PP) pressure]. In the first step, we fit a linear mixed model of each BP trait onto age, sex, BMI, and antihypertensive medication while accounting for the phenotypic correlation among relatives. In the second step, we conducted 1 degree-of-freedom (df) score tests of the SNP main effect, alcohol main effect, and SNP-alcohol interaction using the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters from the first step. We then calculated the joint 2 df score test of the SNP main effect and SNP-alcohol interaction using MixABEL. The effect of SNP rs10826334 (near SLC16A9) on SBP was significantly modulated by both the number of alcoholic drinks and the ounces of alcohol consumed per week (p-values of 1.27E-08 and 3.92E-08, respectively). Each copy of the G-allele decreased SBP by 3.79 mmHg in those consuming 14 drinks per week versus a 0.461 mmHg decrease in non-drinkers. Index SNPs in 20 other loci exhibited suggestive (p-value≤1E-06) associations with BP traits by the 1 df interaction test or joint 2df test, including 3 rare variants, one low-frequency variant, and SNPs near/in genes ESRRG, FAM179A, CRIPT-SOCS5, KAT2B,ADCY2, GLI3, ZNF716, SLIT1, PDE3A, KERA-LUM, RNF219-AS1, CLEC3A , FBX015, and IGSF5. SNP -alcohol interactions may enhance discovery of novel variants with large effects that can be targete

Comparison between single-marker analysis using Merlin and multi-marker analysis using LASSO for Framingham simulated data

We compared family-based single-marker association analysis using Merlin and multi-marker analysis using LASSO (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) for the low-density lipoprotein phenotype at the first visit for all 200 replicates of the Genetic Analysis Workshop 16 Framingham simulated data sets. Using "answers," we selected single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on chromosome 22 for comparison of results between single-marker and multi-marker analyses. For the major causal SNP rs2294207 on chromosome 22, both single-marker and multi-marker analyses provided similar results, indicating the importance of this SNP. For the 12 polygenic SNPs on the same chromosome, both single-marker and multi-marker analyses failed to provide statistically significant associations, indicating that their effects were too weak to be detected by either method. The main difference between the two methods was that for the 14 SNPs near the causal SNPs, p-values from Merlin were the next smallest, whereas LASSO often excluded these non-causal neighboring SNPs entirely from the first 10,000 models

Comparison of two methods for analysis of gene-environment interactions in longitudinal family data: The Framingham heart study

Gene–environment interaction (GEI) analysis can potentially enhance gene discovery for common complex traits. However, genome-wide interaction analysis is computationally intensive. Moreover, analysis of longitudinal data in families is much more challenging due to the two sources of correlations arising from longitudinal measurements and family relationships. GWIS of longitudinal family data can be a computational bottleneck. Therefore, we compared two methods for analysis of longitudinal family data: a methodologically sound but computationally demanding method using the Kronecker model (KRC) and a computationally more forgiving method using the hierarchical linear model (HLM). The KRC model uses a Kronecker product of an unstructured matrix for correlations among repeated measures (longitudinal) and a compound symmetry matrix for correlations within families at a given visit. The HLM uses an autoregressive covariance matrix for correlations among repeated measures and a random intercept for familial correlations. We compared the two methods using the longitudinal Framingham heart study (FHS) SHARe data. Specifically, we evaluated SNP–alcohol (amount of alcohol consumption) interaction effects on high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDLC). Keeping the prohibitive computational burden of KRC in mind, we limited the analysis to chromosome 16, where preliminary cross-sectional analysis yielded some interesting results. Our first important finding was that the HLM provided very comparable results but was remarkably faster than the KRC, making HLM the method of choice. Our second finding was that longitudinal analysis provided smaller P-values, thus leading to more significant results, than cross-sectional analysis. This was particularly pronounced in identifying GEIs. We conclude that longitudinal analysis of GEIs is more powerful and that the HLM method is an optimal method of choice as compared to the computationally (prohibitively) intensive KRC method

Magneto Transport of high TCR (temperature coefficient of resistance) La2/3Ca1/3MnO3: Ag Polycrystalline Composites

We report the synthesis, (micro)structural, magneto-transport and magnetization of polycrystalline La2/3Ca1/3MnO3:Agx composites with x = 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 and 0.4. The temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) near ferromagnetic (FM) transition is increased significantly with addition of Ag. The FM transition temperature (TFM) is also increased slightly with Ag addition. Magneto-transport measurements revealed that magneto-resistance MR is found to be maximum near TFM. Further the increased MR of up to 60% is seen above 300 K for higher silver added samples in an applied field of 7 Tesla. Sharp TCR is seen near TFM with highest value of up to 15 % for Ag (0.4) sample, which is an order of magnitude higher than as for present pristine sample and best value yet reported for any polycrystalline LCMO compound. Increased TCR, TFM and significant above room temperature MR of La2/3Ca1/3MnO3:Agx composites is explained on the basis of improved grains size and connectivity with silver addition in the matrix. Better coupled FM domains and nearly conducting grain boundaries give rise to improved physical properties of the La2/3Ca1/3MnO3 manganites.Comment: 16 pages Text + Figs. ACCEPTED: Solid State Communications (Sept. 2006

Target Detection, Tracking and Avoidance System for Low-cost UAVs using AI-Based Approaches

An onboard target detection, tracking and avoidance system has been developed in this paper, for low-cost UAV flight controllers using AI-Based approaches. The aim of the proposed system is that an ally UAV can either avoid or track an unexpected enemy UAV with a net to protect itself. In this point of view, a simple and robust target detection, tracking and avoidance system is designed. Two open-source tools were used for the aim: a state-of-the-art object detection technique called SSD and an API for MAVLink compatible systems called MAVSDK. The MAVSDK performs velocity control when a UAV is detected so that the manoeuvre is done simply and efficiently. The proposed system was verified with Software in the loop (SITL) and Hardware in the loop (HITL) simulators. The simplicity of this algorithm makes it innovative, and therefore it should be used in future applications needing robust performances with low-cost hardware such as delivery drone applications.Comment: IEEE RED-UAS 2019 Conferenc

MC-SpEx: Towards Effective Speaker Extraction with Multi-Scale Interfusion and Conditional Speaker Modulation

The previous SpEx+ has yielded outstanding performance in speaker extraction and attracted much attention. However, it still encounters inadequate utilization of multi-scale information and speaker embedding. To this end, this paper proposes a new effective speaker extraction system with multi-scale interfusion and conditional speaker modulation (ConSM), which is called MC-SpEx. First of all, we design the weight-share multi-scale fusers (ScaleFusers) for efficiently leveraging multi-scale information as well as ensuring consistency of the model's feature space. Then, to consider different scale information while generating masks, the multi-scale interactive mask generator (ScaleInterMG) is presented. Moreover, we introduce ConSM module to fully exploit speaker embedding in the speech extractor. Experimental results on the Libri2Mix dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our improvements and the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed MC-SpEx.Comment: Accepted by InterSpeech 202