Interaction effect in two-dimensional Dirac fermions

Based on the Dirac equations in the two-dimensional $\pi-$ flux model, we study the interaction effects both in nontrivial gapped and gapless Dirac equations with numerical exact diagonalization method. In the presence of the nearest and next nearest neighbor interactions: for nontrivial gapped Dirac equation, the topological phase is robust and persists in a finite region of the phase diagram; while for gapless Dirac equation, charge-density-wave and stripe phases are identified and the phase diagram in $(V_1, V_2)$ plane is obtained. When the next-next-nearest neighbor interaction is further included to gapless Dirac equation, the topological phase expected in the mean-field theory is absent. Our results are related to the possibility of dynamically generating topological phase from the electronic correlations.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures. More discussins are added; accepted for publication in Physical Review

Research on the Effects of Youth Personalities on Impulse Purchasing Intention

Youth are the main group of social media users, but there is limited literature on the influencing factors of impulse consumption tendency that focus on youth. This research mainly studies the influence of teenagers\u27 personality traits on impulse buying. We attempt to the mediating effect of upward social comparison and the moderating effect of emotion. We design a questionnaire with measures of personality, upward social and emotion in the recent one month. We expect that the positive/negative emotion would moderate the direct influence of personality traits on impulse consumption and the indirect effect of upward social comparison on impulse consumption. The study not only contributes to the youth purchase behaviors but also links the connections among the personalities, emotions, and purchase intention

Translation directionality and translator anxiety : evidence from eye movements in L1-L2 translation

While considerable research on the impact of anxiety on second language learning has been carried out in international contexts, the impact of anxiety on the translator’s undertaking L2 translation, a sort of anxiety arising from the translation directionality, as well as the structure of cognitive mechanism for translational anxiety, remain under-explored. Adopting the eye-tracking and key-logging approach to data collection, this study implemented an eye-tracking experiment with EFL learners at a Chinese university to probe into how the participants responded to L1 and L2 translation-tasks and the mechanism involved in these processes. It is found that translation directionality does have a great impact on the processing of translation, which causes the change of cognitive load and then leads to the change of levels in translator anxiety. The finding further confirms the key premises of the Processing Proficiency Model and the Revised Hierarchical Model with attendant implications for translation processes

Interpretable and Robust AI in EEG Systems: A Survey

The close coupling of artificial intelligence (AI) and electroencephalography (EEG) has substantially advanced human-computer interaction (HCI) technologies in the AI era. Different from traditional EEG systems, the interpretability and robustness of AI-based EEG systems are becoming particularly crucial. The interpretability clarifies the inner working mechanisms of AI models and thus can gain the trust of users. The robustness reflects the AI's reliability against attacks and perturbations, which is essential for sensitive and fragile EEG signals. Thus the interpretability and robustness of AI in EEG systems have attracted increasing attention, and their research has achieved great progress recently. However, there is still no survey covering recent advances in this field. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive survey and summarize the interpretable and robust AI techniques for EEG systems. Specifically, we first propose a taxonomy of interpretability by characterizing it into three types: backpropagation, perturbation, and inherently interpretable methods. Then we classify the robustness mechanisms into four classes: noise and artifacts, human variability, data acquisition instability, and adversarial attacks. Finally, we identify several critical and unresolved challenges for interpretable and robust AI in EEG systems and further discuss their future directions

Association of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 with the proliferation, migration and invasion in gastric cancer cells

Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 is a cysteine-rich protein that belongs to the CCN family, which has been implicated in mediating the occurrence and progression through distinct molecular mechanisms in several tumor types. However, the association of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 with gastric cancer and the related molecular mechanisms remain to be elucidated. Therefore, this study aimed to clarify the biological role of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 in the proliferation, migration, and invasion in gastric cancer cells and further investigated the associated molecular mechanism on these biological functions. We first detected the expression level of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 in gastric cancer, and the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction have shown that Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 expression levels were upregulated in gastric cancer tissues. The expression of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 in gastric cancer cell lines was also detected by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction and Western blotting. Furthermore, two gastric cancer cell lines with high expression of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 were selected to explore the biological function of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 in gastric cancer. Function assays indicated that knockdown of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 suppressed cell proliferation, migration, and invasion in BGC-823 and AGS gastric cancer cells. Further investigation of mechanisms suggested that cyclinD1 was identified as one of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 related genes to accelerate proliferation in gastric cancer cells. In addition, one pathway of Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 induced migration and invasion was mainly through the enhancement of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition progression. Taken together, our findings presented the first evidence that Wnt1-inducible signaling pathway protein-1 was upregulated in gastric cancer and acted as an oncogene by promoting proliferation, migration, and invasion in gastric cancer cells

The relationship between red blood cell distribution width and metabolic syndrome in elderly Chinese: a cross-sectional study

© 2019 The Author(s). Objective: Metabolic syndrome (MS) is a group of risk factors which includes hypertension, hyperglycemia, abnormal cholesterol levels, and obesity. Red blood cell distribution width (RDW) is a parameter that reflects the heterogeneity of erythrocyte volume. But the relationship between MS and RDW is intricate and remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that high RDW was associated with MS via inflammation. Our study aimed to investigate the association between RDW and MS in Chinese elderly large cohort. If RDW had a strong correlation with MS, RDW could become a predictor of MS? Methods: We recruited 10,887 ostensibly healthy participants aged from 60 to 93 (5795 male, 5092 female). Associations between RDW and other variables were assessed by Pearson correlation. Crude and adjusted odds ratio for MS with 95% confidence intervals was calculated by binary logistic regression models. Results: In elderly Chinese, RDW was significantly higher in males than in females. The prevalence of both men and women decreased with the rise of RDW. For both sexes, RDW demonstrated positive correlations with age, systolic blood pressure (0.070 in males,0.058 in females), high density lipoprotein(0.027in males,0.064 in females), negative correlations with triglycerides (- 0.120 in males,-0.074 in females) and fasting glucose (- 0.048 in males,-0.016 in females). Notably, we detected the associated reduced risks at the the third and fourth quartile of RDW in males. In women, there was no statistical significance. Conclusion: We found the adjusted odds ratios of MS was lower at the third and fourth quartile of RDW in males

Rapid and continuous regulating adhesion strength by mechanical micro-vibration

Controlled tuning of interface adhesion is crucial to a broad range of applications, such as space technology, micro-fabrication, flexible electronics, robotics, and bio-integrated devices. Here, we show a robust and predictable method to continuously regulate interface adhesion by exciting the mechanical micro-vibration in the adhesive system perpendicular to the contact plane. An analytic model reveals the underlying mechanism of adhesion hysteresis and dynamic instability. For a typical PDMS-glass adhesion system, the apparent adhesion strength can be enhanced by 77 times or weakened to 0. Notably, the resulting adhesion switching timescale is comparable to that of geckos (15 ms), and such rapid adhesion switching can be repeated for more than 2×10^7 vibration cycles without any noticeable degradation in the adhesion performance. Our method is independent of surface microstructures and does not require a preload, representing a simple and practical way to design and control surface adhesion in relevant applications

Effect of potassium simplex optimization medium (KSOM) and embryo screening on the production of human lactoferrin transgenic cloned dairy goats

In this study, we produced cloned transgenic dairy goat based on dairy goat ear skin fibroblast as donor cells for nuclear transfer (NT), which were modified by human lactoferrin (hLF) gene. The developmental competence of NT embryos was compared with either between different embryo culture medium, potassium simplex optimization medium (KSOM) and tissue culture medium (TCM 199), or different classification of NT embryos (48 h after fusion). First we cultured NT embryos to cleavage stage (48 h after fusion) by TCM 199 supplemented with 1 mg/ml bovine serum albumin BSA and KSOM, then used TCM 199 supplemented with 10% FBS to culture them to blastula stage. The results show that the NT embryos in KSOM (19.5%) were superior to TCM 199 (10.6%) in blastulation. In the second experiment, we found that the growth rate of NT embryos (48 h after fusion) was different, then we divided them into four groups: 2-cell, 3- to 4-cell, 5- to 8-cell and >8-cell in stereo microscope and cultured them in vitro respectively. The results show day-2 embryos at 3-4cell and 5-8cell stage (31.9 and 28.2%, P < 0.05) had higher blastocyst formation rates than those at both 2-cell (9.1%) and >8-cell (8.3%) stage, and finally three healthy cloned transgenic goat were successfully produced using 3-8 cell embryos at Day-2 (82%). Using Hoechst 33342 staining, we also found that the >8 cells embryos at Day- 2 demonstrated higher frequency of fragmentation, which may be the one cause of the low blastocyst formation rate. This study therefore demonstrates that KSOM medium could be selected as the early embryo culture medium, and 3-8 cell embryos at day-2 (48 h after fusion) may be the suitable embryos for transplantation, which could reduce the nuclei fragmentation and result in good quality blastocysts that may also enhance the efficiency of transgenic cloned dairy goats production, as well as decrease the economic loss due to embryonic mortality when embryos are transferred to synchronized recipients.Key words: Nuclear transfer, KSOM, transgenic, human lactoferrin, dairy goat