EVOLUTION OF THE NORTHERN ALXA BLOCK IN THE PALEOZOIC: CONSTRAINTS FROM GEOCHRONOLOGY, GEOCHEMICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND ZIRCON HF ISOTOPES OF GRANITOIDS

The Alxa block is situated to the south of the CAOB, situated to the east of the Tarim block and west of the NCC. Voluminous intrusive and extrusive rocks outcrop in the northern Alxa block and adjacent southern CAOB. Most of them are thought to be related to the closure of the Paleo-Asia Ocean and subsequent collision [Wu, 1993; Wu et al., 1998; Zhang et al., 2013; Dan et al., 2016].The Alxa block is situated to the south of the CAOB, situated to the east of the Tarim block and west of the NCC. Voluminous intrusive and extrusive rocks outcrop in the northern Alxa block and adjacent southern CAOB. Most of them are thought to be related to the closure of the Paleo-Asia Ocean and subsequent collision [Wu, 1993; Wu et al., 1998; Zhang et al., 2013; Dan et al., 2016]

Fully integrated InGaAs/InP single-photon detector module with gigahertz sine wave gating

InGaAs/InP single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) working in the regime of GHz clock rates are crucial components for the high-speed quantum key distribution (QKD). We have developed for the first time a compact, stable and user-friendly tabletop InGaAs/InP single-photon detector system operating at a 1.25 GHz gate rate that fully integrates functions for controlling and optimizing SPAD performance. We characterize the key parameters of the detector system and test the long-term stability of the system for continuous operation of 75 hours. The detector system can substantially enhance QKD performance and our present work paves the way for practical high-speed QKD applications.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Review of Scientific Instrument

MicroRNA-101 Exerts Tumor-Suppressive Functions in Non-small Cell Lung Cancer through Directly Targeting Enhancer of Zeste Homolog 2

Introduction:Overexpression of the enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (EZH2) protein has been found in broad range of cancer types, including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which EZH2 becomes overexpressed in NSCLC remain unclear. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) can regulate target gene expression through translational control. In this study, we investigate whether miRNA (miR-101) regulates EZH2 expression in NSCLC.Methods:We evaluated the expression of miR-101 and EZH2 in 20 matched NSCLC and adjacent nontumor lung tissues by reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction and immunohistochemistry, respectively. Luciferase reporter assay was used to determine whether miR-101 directly targets EZH2. To assess the effect of miR-101 on NSCLC biological behavior, cell proliferation, invasion, and response to chemotherapy were analyzed using NSCLC cells transfected with miR-101 mimics or transfected with specific small interfering RNA to deplete EZH2 (small interfering RNA-EZH2).Results:Reduced expression of miR-101 was associated with overexpression of EZH2 in NSCLC tumor tissues. Transfection of miR-101 mimics significantly suppressed the activity of the luciferase reporter containing wild type but not mutant EZH2 3′-UTR and decreased EZH2 expression in NSCLC cell lines. Furthermore, enforced expression of miR-101 or knockdown of EZH2 led to reduced NSCLC cell proliferation and invasion and sensitized cancer cells to paclitaxel-mediated apoptosis through inducing expression of the proapoptotic protein Bim.Conclusions:miR-101 inhibits cell proliferation and invasion and enhances paclitaxel-induced apoptosis in NSCLC cells, at least in part, by directly repressing EZH2 expression. Therapeutic strategies to rescue miR-101 expression or silence EZH2 may be beneficial to patients with NSCLC in the future

Filament L1482 in the California molecular cloud

Aims. The process of gravitational fragmentation in the L1482 molecular filament of the California molecular cloud is studied by combining several complementary observations and physical estimates. We investigate the kinematic and dynamical states of this molecular filament and physical properties of several dozens of dense molecular clumps embedded therein. Methods. We present and compare molecular line emission observations of the J=2--1 and J=3--2 transitions of 12CO in this molecular complex, using the KOSMA 3-meter telescope. These observations are complemented with archival data observations and analyses of the 13CO J=1--0 emission obtained at the Purple Mountain Observatory 13.7-meter radio telescope at Delingha Station in QingHai Province of west China, as well as infrared emission maps from the Herschel Space Telescope online archive, obtained with the SPIRE and PACS cameras. Comparison of these complementary datasets allow for a comprehensive multi-wavelength analysis of the L1482 molecular filament. Results. We have identified 23 clumps along the molecular filament L1482 in the California molecular cloud. All these molecular clumps show supersonic non-thermal gas motions. While surprisingly similar in mass and size to the much better known Orion molecular cloud, the formation rate of high-mass stars appears to be suppressed in the California molecular cloud relative to that in the Orion molecular cloud based on the mass-radius threshold derived from the static Bonnor Ebert sphere. Our analysis suggests that these molecular filaments are thermally supercritical and molecular clumps may form by gravitational fragmentation along the filament. Instead of being static, these molecular clumps are most likely in processes of dynamic evolution.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, accepted to Astronomy and Astrophysic

Pumilaside A from Litchi semen induces apoptosis in human gastric cancer BGC823 cells via activation of death receptor- and mitochondria-mediated apoptotic pathways

Purpose: To investigate the cytotoxic effect of pumilaside A from Litchi semen against human gastric cancer BGC823 cells, and unravel its possible mechanism(s) of action.Methods: The cytotoxic activity of pumilaside A (5 - 40 μg/mL) against BGC823 cells was assessed by thiazolyl blue tetrazolium bromide assay. The pro-apoptotic effect of PA (10, 20 or 40 μg/mL) on BGC823 cells was monitored by flow cytometry, while the mechanisms involved were investigated using western blot.Results: Pumilaside A significantly produced cytotoxic activity against BGC823 cells (IC50 = 25.43 μg/mL) and induced apoptosis in BGC823 cells (p < 0.01). Treatment with pumilaside A led to significant upregulation of pro-apoptotic factors (Fas, FasL, FADD, Bax, Apaf-1, and c-caspase -8, 9 and 10), and downregulation of anti-apoptotic factors (survivin and Bcl-2, p < 0.05, 0.01). In addition, pumilaside A increased the cytoplasmic levels of Smac and cytochrome c in BGC823 cells by enhancing their mitochondrial release, and significantly upregulated the levels of executioner c-caspases-3, 6 and 7 (p < 0.05, 0.01).Conclusion: Pumilaside A shows good cytotoxic activity against BGC823 cells via a mechanism related to activation of death receptor- and mitochondria-mediated apoptotic pathways. Thus, pumilaside A has a potential for use as an anti-gastric cancer agent.Keywords: Litchi semen, Pumilaside A, BGC823 cells, Cytotoxicity, Apoptosi

Learning Combinatorial Prompts for Universal Controllable Image Captioning

Controllable Image Captioning (CIC) -- generating natural language descriptions about images under the guidance of given control signals -- is one of the most promising directions towards next-generation captioning systems. Till now, various kinds of control signals for CIC have been proposed, ranging from content-related control to structure-related control. However, due to the format and target gaps of different control signals, all existing CIC works (or architectures) only focus on one certain control signal, and overlook the human-like combinatorial ability. By ``combinatorial", we mean that our humans can easily meet multiple needs (or constraints) simultaneously when generating descriptions. To this end, we propose a novel prompt-based framework for CIC by learning Combinatorial Prompts, dubbed as ComPro. Specifically, we directly utilize a pretrained language model GPT-2 as our language model, which can help to bridge the gap between different signal-specific CIC architectures. Then, we reformulate the CIC as a prompt-guide sentence generation problem, and propose a new lightweight prompt generation network to generate the combinatorial prompts for different kinds of control signals. For different control signals, we further design a new mask attention mechanism to realize the prompt-based CIC. Due to its simplicity, our ComPro can easily be extended to more complex combined control signals by concatenating these prompts. Extensive experiments on two prevalent CIC benchmarks have verified the effectiveness and efficiency of our ComPro on both single and combined control signals

Analyzing Network Protocols of Application Layer Using Hidden Semi-Markov Model

With the rapid development of Internet, especially the mobile Internet, the new applications or network attacks emerge in a high rate in recent years. More and more traffic becomes unknown due to the lack of protocol specifications about the newly emerging applications. Automatic protocol reverse engineering is a promising solution for understanding this unknown traffic and recovering its protocol specification. One challenge of protocol reverse engineering is to determine the length of protocol keywords and message fields. Existing algorithms are designed to select the longest substrings as protocol keywords, which is an empirical way to decide the length of protocol keywords. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to determine the optimal length of protocol keywords and recover message formats of Internet protocols by maximizing the likelihood probability of message segmentation and keyword selection. A hidden semi-Markov model is presented to model the protocol message format. An affinity propagation mechanism based clustering technique is introduced to determine the message type. The proposed method is applied to identify network traffic and compare the results with existing algorithm