Coupled-wire construction of static and Floquet second-order topological insulators

Second-order topological insulators (SOTI) exhibit protected gapless boundary states at their hinges or corners. In this paper, we propose a generic means to construct SOTIs in static and Floquet systems by coupling one-dimensional topological insulator wires along a second dimension through dimerized hopping amplitudes. The Hamiltonian of such SOTIs admits a Kronecker sum structure, making it possible for obtaining its features by analyzing two constituent one-dimensional lattice Hamiltonians defined separately in two orthogonal dimensions. The resulting topological corner states do not rely on any delicate spatial symmetries, but are solely protected by the chiral symmetry of the system. We further utilize our idea to construct Floquet SOTIs, whose number of topological corner states is arbitrarily tunable via changing the hopping amplitudes of the system. Finally, we propose to detect the topological invariants of static and Floquet SOTIs constructed following our approach in experiments by measuring the mean chiral displacements of wavepackets.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures. Published versio

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Nociception and hypersensitivity involve distinct neurons and molecular transducers in Drosophila

Significance: Functional plasticity of the nociceptive circuit is a remarkable feature and is of clinical relevance. As an example, nociceptors lower their threshold upon tissue injury, a process known as allodynia that would facilitate healing by guarding the injured areas. However, long-lasting hypersensitivity could lead to chronic pain, a debilitating disease not effectively treated. Therefore, it is crucial to dissect the mechanisms underlying basal nociception and nociceptive hypersensitivity. In both vertebrate and invertebrate species, conserved transient receptor potential (Trp) channels are the primary transducers of noxious stimuli. Here, we provide a precedent that in Drosophila larvae, heat sensing in the nociception and hypersensitivity states is mediated by distinct heat-sensitive neurons and TrpA1 alternative isoforms

Natural Language Embedded Programs for Hybrid Language Symbolic Reasoning

How can we perform computations over natural language representations to solve tasks that require symbolic and numeric reasoning? We propose natural language embedded programs (NLEP) as a unifying framework for addressing math/symbolic reasoning, natural language understanding, and instruction following tasks. Our approach prompts a language model to generate full Python programs that define functions over data structures which contain natural language representations of structured knowledge. A Python interpreter then executes the generated code and prints the output. Despite using a task-general prompt, we find that this approach can improve upon strong baselines across a range of different tasks including math and symbolic reasoning, text classification, question answering, and instruction following. We further find the generated programs are often interpretable and enable post-hoc verification of the intermediate reasoning steps

Oligonucleotides targeting TCF4 triplet repeat expansion inhibit RNA foci and mis-splicing in Fuchs\u27 dystrophy

Fuchs\u27 endothelial corneal dystrophy (FECD) is the most common repeat expansion disorder. FECD impacts 4% of U.S. population and is the leading indication for corneal transplantation. Most cases are caused by an expanded intronic CUG tract in the TCF4 gene that forms nuclear foci, sequesters splicing factors and impairs splicing. We investigated the sense and antisense RNA landscape at the FECD gene and find that the sense-expanded repeat transcript is the predominant species in patient corneas. In patient tissue, sense foci number were negatively correlated with age and showed no correlation with sex. Each endothelial cell has approximately 2 sense foci and each foci is single RNA molecule. We designed antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) to target the mutant-repetitive RNA and demonstrated potent inhibition of foci in patient-derived cells. Ex vivo treatment of FECD human corneas effectively inhibits foci and reverses pathological changes in splicing. FECD has the potential to be a model for treating many trinucleotide repeat diseases and targeting the TCF4 expansion with ASOs represents a promising therapeutic strategy to prevent and treat FECD

Action Real-Time Strategy Gaming Experience Related to Increased Attentional Resources: An Attentional Blink Study

Action real-time strategy gaming (ARSG) is a cognitively demanding task which requires attention, sensorimotor skills, team cooperation, and strategy-making abilities. A recent study found that ARSG experts had superior visual selective attention (VSA) for detecting the location of a moving object that could appear in one of 24 different peripheral locations (Qiu et al., 2018), suggesting that ARSG experience is related to improvements in the spatial component of VSA. However, the influence of ARSG experience on the temporal component of VSA—the detection of an item among a sequence of items presented consecutively and quickly at a single location—still remains understudied. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, this study examined whether ARSG experts had superior temporal VSA performance compared to non-experts in an attentional blink (AB) task, which is typically used to examine temporal VSA. The results showed that the experts outperformed the non-experts in their detection rates of targets. Furthermore, compared to the non-experts, the experts had faster information processing as indicated by earlier P3 peak latencies in an AB period, more attentional resources distributed to targets as indicated by stronger P3 amplitudes, and a more flexible deployment of attentional resources. These findings suggest that experts were less prone to the AB effect. Thus, long-term ARSG experience is related to improvements in temporal VSA. The current findings support the benefit of video gaming experience on the development of VSA

The Influence of Education and Scientific Research System on China's Science and Technology Innovation Capability

This article outlines their impact on China's technological innovation capabilities from nine aspects including primary and secondary education to university education, the shortcomings of scientific research evaluation system, the forward-looking of educational investment and the rationality of research funding, the negative feedback of the employment market on innovative research, intellectual property protection and incentive mechanism, The basic social system and its incentive mechanism combined with learning and research, the incentive mechanism and cultural atmosphere of enterprises and administrative institutions, and the origin of China's modern education model. The comprehensive analysis shows that changing the status quo of China's lack of innovation is a systematic project. A single ministry cannot complete many specific measures of reform, and must have a national-level top-level design. Through reform, the education and scientific research system has reasonable design and strong self-repairing ability. It is the need of innovation to promote industrial upgrading. Its effectiveness directly determines whether China can cross the middle income trap and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation