Molecular simulation of 2-dimensional microphase separation of single-component homopolymers grafted onto a planar substrate

The structural phase behavior of polymer brushes, single-component linear homopolymers grafted onto a planar substrate, is studied using the molecular Monte Carlo method in 3 dimensions. When simulation parameters of the system are set in regions of macrophase separation of solution for the corresponding non-grafted homopolymers, the grafted polymers also prefer segregation. However, macrophase separation is disallowed due to the spatially-fixed grafting points of the polymers. Such constraints on the grafting are similar to connecting points between blocks of non-grafted diblock copolymers at the microphase separation in the melt state. This results in "microphase separation" of the homopolymer brush in the lateral direction of the substrate. Here we extensively search the parameter space and reveal various lateral domain patterns that are similar to those found in diblock copolymer melts at microphase separation.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in EP

Functional differentiation of skeletal muscles

According to BUCHTHAL the histogram of duration and voltage from the motor unit of biceps brachii muscles gives only one peak respectively as can be seen in Fig. 14 in his paper which reports the data covering the experiment on 1,268 motor units. However, his histogram seems to be made of the spikes led off from several motor units because the histogram shows no much fluctuations in voltage as 50&#956;V to 1,000&#956;V and in duration as 1 msec to 20 msec. Therefore, if observations are actually based on a single motor unit, two peaks may reasonably be expected on the histogram, because two kinds of the motor units, kinetic (phasic) and tonic, have respective individual characteristics of their own shikes The histological observation shows that many white and red muscle fibers are intermingled with each other even in one single fasciculus, and it is supposed that the fasciculus does not correspond to a single motor unit. Moreover, the shape of the spikes, which was formerly considered as a motor unit, is not a pure diphasic form, but irregular and polyphasic ones, and also electromyographically a single motor unit controls the area of more than 10mm in width (BUCHTHAL). From these facts, it is probable that the histogram by BUCHTHAL was made of the spikes composed of muscle fibers belonging to several different motor units. Our observations done by the above stated method showed clearly the pure diphasic spikes. Therefore, we are of the opinion that these spikes obtained by our method are led off from only one or from a few muscle fibers belonging to the same motor unit. These spikes are lower than 550&#956;V in voltage and shorter than 5.5 msec in duration and every individual spikes show uniform diphasic pattern. There exist two kinds of spike groups, in the histogram one which is composed of high voltage with short duration (1.0-1.5 msec.), and the other of low voltage with long duration (2.0-4.0msec.). The former may be of kinetic (phasic) motor unit and the latter is of tonic motor unit, because the white muscle fibers with a larger diameter may have a higher voltage than the red and the white fibers that perform rapid contraction may show shorter duration in wave form. In the two cases having spinal cord tumors, two kinds of spikes with respective and individual characteristics were observed in the same EMG. These will be two different kinds, kinetic (phasic) and tonic motor units. In the case of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, two kinds of spikes appeared, but since both of them were of short duration, they might be considered to be of kinetic (phasic) motor unit (or its intermediate motor unit). Furthermore, since its histological findings revealed that the red muscle fibers were all atrophied and degenerated and showd only white muscle fibers to be normal, it is obvious that the kinetic (phasic) motor unit with a shorter duration is derived from white muscle fibers. Therefore, in our opinion the widely accepted concept that spikes including even irregular wave forms all belong to the motor unit seems not to be true, but these spikes seem to represent a combination of several pure spikes though not so many, and those muscle fibers belonging to the same motor unit appear to be intermingling themselves in a relatively wide area. The reason for this contention may be explained as follows. If the muscle fibers belonging to the same motor unit were agglomerated, clearcut diphasic spikes should appear even with a fairly big electrode, and if the accepted concept be true, these spikes can never be picked up at the distance so far apart as 2.0cm. or 2.5cm. (0.5-1.2cm. by BUCHTHAL) as has been possible in our experiments. Furthermore, the histogram composed only of these pure spikes reveals two peaks, and therefore, we believe it is reasonable to say that these two peaks indicate the existence of kinetic (phasic) and tonic motor units. As a small number of motor units located in between these two peaks can be recognized, these are believed to be the muscle fibers possessing an intermediate stainability as revealed in the histological examination. However, further studies are required before giving any definitive conclusion on this point.</p

Ein Neues Verfahren zur Messung der Bakteriziden Fähigkeit des Vollblutes

Das oben erwahnte Verfahren hat vor den anderen Methoden besonders die Vorzuge, 1) da&#946; man dadurch zu einem sicheren Resultat gelangen und gleichzeitig auch jedes Datum mit exakten Ziffern zum Ausdruck bringen kann, 2) da&#946; bei diesem Verfahren keineswegs erforderlich ist, eine bestimmte Anzahl von Keimen einschlie&#946;ende Bakterienaufschwemmung herzusteHen und auch Kontrollversuch anzustellen, 3) da&#946; es von den Fehlern des Mischverhaltnisses zwischen der Bakterienlosung und dem Blut nicht so erheblich beeinflu&#946;t wird, und 4) da&#946; man durch dieses Verfahren gleichzeitig mehrere bakterientotende Faktoren untersuchen kann. Ferner hat dieses Verfahren auch den Vorzug, da&#946; es praktisch sehr einfach auszufuhren ist und nur 6 Stunden nach der Blutentnahme bereits das Ergebnis liefert. Es gestattet ferner, die bakterizide Kraft des Blutes gleichzeitig bei 6 - 8 Menschen zu untersuchen, was mich zur Uberzeugung fuhrt, da&#946; es in der Klinik hochgeschatzt werden wird. Auch das Verfahren und die ebenfalls vom mir aufgestellte Formel zur zusammenfassenden Beurteilung kann man nach meinem Erachten durch entsprechende Veranderungen einiger Faktoren ohne jede Schwierigkeiten auch fur andere Bakterienarten anwenden. Man wird wohl gegen eine einzige Lucke dieses Verfahrens, da&#946; die mikroskopische Untersuchung und die Berechnung allzu verwickelt zu sein scheint, Einwand erheben, eine Lucke, zu deren Schlu&#946; jedoch nur eine kurzfristige Ubung erfordert wird, durch welche die mikroskopische Untersuchung innerhalb 30 Minuten, die Berechnung nur in 5 Minuten vollendet werden kann. (Zur Berechnung bedarf es einer Gauss'schen Logarithmentafel.) Obgleich das geschilderte Verfahren noch viele, genauere Prufungen erheischende Punkte in sich einschlie&#946;t, mu&#946; es hier, wenn auch in Grundzugen, jetzt schon angefuhrt werden,. da ich der festen Uberzeugung bin, da&#946; es im Vergleich zu den bisherigen Methoden ein dem wirklichen Wert der Bakterizidie des Vollblutes im lebenden Organismus viel naheres Resultat liefert.</p

Studies on Allergic Genesis of Idiopathic Epi­lepsy

In such animals not having any organic changes in their brains during the initial stage showed a descendence of convulsive threshold. abnormal findings in their electroencephalogram and ascending activity of ChE. But what is the cause of these functional changes? First, from the fact that though there was no organic changes, they were sensitized and reiniected by a known antigen, which is obviously an antigen-antibody reaction. Second, from the fact that we got a histological.change, which was acknowledged as C.L.A. changes by increasing the concentration of these solution and the number of injections, it could be thought that these functional changes were caused by what I called latent C.L.A.. That is, it seems it could be thought that it would give functionally a permanent hypersensitivity, which is called convulsive arrangement. Furthermore, a similar histological findings as seen in old epileptics were made experimentally after prolonged and repeated injections of very diluted antigens. I believe it can be said, also from this histological point that they are experimental epileptics. But I am not trying to say that idiopathic epilepsy is the same allergic disease as asthma. If it was so, it should offer clinically a problem of eosinophilia in the blood of epileptics. But actually there is no eosinophilia in epileptics. Also, in adult epileptics, convulsive attacks is not often seen soon after introduction of antigens. Consequently, my theory that epilepsy is allergic, does not mean that allergy is the direct cause of epileptic attacks. What I mean is, the causal genesis of idiopathic epilepsy is hypersensitivity of nerve cells in the brain. This hypersensitivity was attained as a tissue reaction by some allergic mechanism without any organic changes. This functional change gives the nerve cell a hypersensitive state, which becomes the base of the beginnihg of convulsion. Its inducement of attack could be water stagnation in the body, anemic state of the brain, alkalosis, or introduction of allergens. In short, the cause of attack does not always come from allergic reactions.</p

Neural Architecture Search using Deep Neural Networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has shown great success in automating the design of neural networks, but the prohibitive amount of computations behind current NAS methods requires further investigations in improving the sample efficiency and the network evaluation cost to get better results in a shorter time. In this paper, we present a novel scalable Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based NAS agent, named AlphaX, to tackle these two aspects. AlphaX improves the search efficiency by adaptively balancing the exploration and exploitation at the state level, and by a Meta-Deep Neural Network (DNN) to predict network accuracies for biasing the search toward a promising region. To amortize the network evaluation cost, AlphaX accelerates MCTS rollouts with a distributed design and reduces the number of epochs in evaluating a network by transfer learning, which is guided with the tree structure in MCTS. In 12 GPU days and 1000 samples, AlphaX found an architecture that reaches 97.84\% top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10, and 75.5\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, exceeding SOTA NAS methods in both the accuracy and sampling efficiency. Particularly, we also evaluate AlphaX on NASBench-101, a large scale NAS dataset; AlphaX is 3x and 2.8x more sample efficient than Random Search and Regularized Evolution in finding the global optimum. Finally, we show the searched architecture improves a variety of vision applications from Neural Style Transfer, to Image Captioning and Object Detection.Comment: To appear in the Thirty-Fourth AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2020