The promise and reality of personal genomics

The second personal genome sequence of a Korean tells something about genetic ancestry but still little of medical relevance

DocumentNet: Bridging the Data Gap in Document Pre-Training

Document understanding tasks, in particular, Visually-rich Document Entity Retrieval (VDER), have gained significant attention in recent years thanks to their broad applications in enterprise AI. However, publicly available data have been scarce for these tasks due to strict privacy constraints and high annotation costs. To make things worse, the non-overlapping entity spaces from different datasets hinder the knowledge transfer between document types. In this paper, we propose a method to collect massive-scale and weakly labeled data from the web to benefit the training of VDER models. The collected dataset, named DocumentNet, does not depend on specific document types or entity sets, making it universally applicable to all VDER tasks. The current DocumentNet consists of 30M documents spanning nearly 400 document types organized in a four-level ontology. Experiments on a set of broadly adopted VDER tasks show significant improvements when DocumentNet is incorporated into the pre-training for both classic and few-shot learning settings. With the recent emergence of large language models (LLMs), DocumentNet provides a large data source to extend their multi-modal capabilities for VDER.Comment: EMNLP 202

Acute Liver Failure Secondary to Hepatic Infiltration of Malignant Melanoma

Acute liver failure due to malignant melanoma is uncommon. We presents a case of acute liver failure secondary to hepatic infiltration of a malignant melanoma. An 86-year-old man was admitted with elevated liver enzymes and an increased lactate dehydrogenase level. His condition progressed to acute liver failure, but the etiology of liver failure was unclear. Esophagogastroduodenoscopy was performed to evaluate dyspepsia, which showed signs indicative of malignant melanoma. Based on the endoscopy findings and elevated liver enzyme levels, liver biopsy was performed to confirm the presence of malignant melanoma. Hepatic infiltration of malignant melanoma was observed histologically. However, massive and diffuse liver metastasis is very rare and difficult to identify on imaging studies. If the etiology of liver failure is unclear, diffuse metastatic melanoma infiltration should be considered as differential diagnosis. Early liver biopsy can help to clarify the diagnosis

Production of high‐purity hydrogen and layered doubled hydroxide by the hydrolysis of Mg‐Al alloys

Hydrogen is becoming an important clean energy and layered doubled hydroxide (LDH) is of great interest for many applications, including water treatment, environmental remediation, and chemical catalysis. The production of high‐purity hydrogen and LDH by the hydrolysis of Mg‐Al alloys is reported. The effects of initial pH, reaction temperature, reaction time, and alloy's Mg/Al mass ratio on the rate of hydrogen generation and the purity of LDH are evaluated and the solid hydrolysis products are characterized by different techniques. The initial rate of hydrogen generation increases with decreasing initial pH and increasing reaction temperature and Mg/Al ratio while the purity of LDH increases with Mg/Al ratio, reaction temperature and time. This study may provide a new, green, and sustainable approach for storage of hydrogen and material for water treatment

Cold sintering of perovskite‐based mixed conducting membrane for oxygen separation

Cold sintering has attracted significant attention as its remarkably rapid densification process at low sintering temperatures leads to considerable energy savings. However, the sintering behaviors of cold‐sintered perovskite ceramics remain poorly understood and lack precise control over material microstructure. Here, we fabricated dense SrCo0.8Fe0.2O3−δ (SCF) ceramic oxygen permeation membranes by cold sintering. Adding an appropriate ratio of sub‐micron SCF particles can better bridge the sintering interspaces between micron particles, generate amorphous phase through “dissolution‐precipitation,” and aid in the initial densification. The average relative density of SCF membranes undergoes a significant increase to 95.9% after cold sintering and post‐annealing at 900°C, which is much lower than the temperature required for conventional high‐temperature solid‐state sintering (>1200°C). The oxygen permeation flux of the prepared SCF perovskite membrane reaches 2.8 mL min−1 cm−2, which proves that this method has the potential to be an excellent sintering technique for dense perovskite ceramic membranes

Preparation of a Novel Organic Phosphonic Acid Intercalated Phosphate Tailings Based Hydrotalcite and Its Application in Enhancing Fire Safety for Epoxy Resin

Phosphate tailings (PTs) are solid waste, which is produced by phosphate flotation. In this work, PTs were used as raw materials for the preparation of diethylenetriamine pentamethronic acid (DTPMP) intercalated trimetal (Ca-Mg-Al) layered double hydroxides (TM-DTPMP LDHs) by co-precipitation method. TM-DTPMP LDHs were characterized by X-ray diffraction, fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, differential thermal gravimetric analysis, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and applied as a flame retardant to improve the fire safety of epoxy resin (EP). The results showed that the composite materials exhibited obvious layered structure. After intercalation, layer spacing increased from 0.783 to 1.78 Å. When the amount of TM-DTPMP LDH in EP was 8%, the limitted oxygen index of the composite material increased from the original 19.2% to 30.2%. In addition, Cone calorimeter (CC) and Raman spectrum results indicated that with the addition of TM-DTPMP LDHs, the value of heat release rate peak (pHRR) and total heat release (THR) were reduced by more than 43% and 60%, while the value of smoke formation rate (pSPR) and the total smoke production (TSP) decreased nearly 64% and 83%, respectively. The significant reduction in the release of combustion heat and harmful smoke during EP combustion may be attributed to the synergistic flame-retardant effect between hydrotalcite and DTPMP. This work exhibited great potential for the green recycling of PTs and the enhancement of the fire safety of EP

Graph Transformation Policy Network for Chemical Reaction Prediction

We address a fundamental problem in chemistry known as chemical reaction product prediction. Our main insight is that the input reactant and reagent molecules can be jointly represented as graphs, and the process of generating product molecules from reactant molecules can be formulated as a set of graph transformations. To this end, we propose Graph Transformation Policy Network (GTPN) - a novel generic method that combines the strengths of graph neural networks and reinforcement learning to learn reactions directly from data with minimal chemical knowledge. Compared to previous methods, GTPN has some appealing properties such as: end-to-end learning, and making no assumption about the length or the order of graph transformations. In order to guide our model search through the complex discrete space of sets of graph transformations effectively, we extend the standard policy gradient loss by adding useful constraints. Evaluation results show that GTPN improves the top-1 accuracy over the current state-of-the-art method by about 3% on the large USPTO dataset

The effects of semantic congruency: a research of audiovisual P300-speller

Abstract Background Over the past few decades, there have been many studies of aspects of brain–computer interface (BCI). Of particular interests are event-related potential (ERP)-based BCI spellers that aim at helping mental typewriting. Nowadays, audiovisual unimodal stimuli based BCI systems have attracted much attention from researchers, and most of the existing studies of audiovisual BCIs were based on semantic incongruent stimuli paradigm. However, no related studies had reported that whether there is difference of system performance or participant comfort between BCI based on semantic congruent paradigm and that based on semantic incongruent paradigm. Methods The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of semantic congruency in system performance and participant comfort in audiovisual BCI. Two audiovisual paradigms (semantic congruent and incongruent) were adopted, and 11 healthy subjects participated in the experiment. High-density electrical mapping of ERPs and behavioral data were measured for the two stimuli paradigms. Results The behavioral data indicated no significant difference between congruent and incongruent paradigms for offline classification accuracy. Nevertheless, eight of the 11 participants reported their priority to semantic congruent experiment, two reported no difference between the two conditions, and only one preferred the semantic incongruent paradigm. Besides, the result indicted that higher amplitude of ERP was found in incongruent stimuli based paradigm. Conclusions In a word, semantic congruent paradigm had a better participant comfort, and maintained the same recognition rate as incongruent paradigm. Furthermore, our study suggested that the paradigm design of spellers must take both system performance and user experience into consideration rather than merely pursuing a larger ERP response

Groundwater remediation using Magnesium–Aluminum alloys and in situ layered doubled hydroxides

In situ remediation of groundwater by zerovalent iron (ZVI)-based technology faces the problems of rapid passivation, fast agglomeration, limited range of pollutants and secondary contamination. Here a new concept of Magnesium–Aluminum (Mg–Al) alloys and in situ layered double hydroxides on is proposed for the degradation and removal of a wide variety of inorganic and organic pollutants from groundwater. The Mg–Al alloy provides the electrons for the chemical reduction and/or the degradation of pollutants while released Mg2+, Al3+ and OH- ions react to generate in situ LDH precipitates, incorporating other divalent and trivalent metals and oxyanions pollutants and further adsorbing the micropollutants. The Mg–Al alloy outperforms ZVI for treating acidic, synthetic groundwater samples contaminated by complex chemical mixtures of heavy metals (Cd2+, Cr6+, Cu2+, Ni2+ and Zn2+), nitrate, AsO33-, methyl blue, trichloroacetic acid and glyphosate. Specifically, the Mg–Al alloy achieves removal efficiency ≥99.7% for these multiple pollutants at concentrations ranging between 10 and 50 mg L−1 without producing any secondary contaminants. In contrast, ZVI removal efficiency did not exceed 90% and secondary contamination up to 220 mg L−1 Fe was observed. Overall, this study provides a new alternative approach to develop efficient, cost-effective and green remediation for water and groundwater