Treatment of Soft Soils by Dynamic Compaction

This paper reports a case study on treatment of soft days by dynamic compaction. A special technique adopted in this project allowed massive stiff columns to be formed under the impact locations, and the soils between these impact locations to be replaced and mixed with granular fills, hence creating a composite foundation. The comprehensive field investigation showed that the allowable bearing capacity of the treated ground (as a composite foundation) was 350 kPa, a significant increase compared with that of untreated ground (70 kPa). The achieved stiffness modulus of the composite foundation was 24 MPa

Prompt-Enhanced Software Vulnerability Detection Using ChatGPT

With the increase in software vulnerabilities that cause significant economic and social losses, automatic vulnerability detection has become essential in software development and maintenance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) like GPT have received considerable attention due to their stunning intelligence, and some studies consider using ChatGPT for vulnerability detection. However, they do not fully consider the characteristics of LLMs, since their designed questions to ChatGPT are simple without a specific prompt design tailored for vulnerability detection. This paper launches a study on the performance of software vulnerability detection using ChatGPT with different prompt designs. Firstly, we complement previous work by applying various improvements to the basic prompt. Moreover, we incorporate structural and sequential auxiliary information to improve the prompt design. Besides, we leverage ChatGPT's ability of memorizing multi-round dialogue to design suitable prompts for vulnerability detection. We conduct extensive experiments on two vulnerability datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of prompt-enhanced vulnerability detection using ChatGPT. We also analyze the merit and demerit of using ChatGPT for vulnerability detection.Comment: 13 Pages, 4 figure

Improving Knowledge-aware Dialogue Generation via Knowledge Base Question Answering

Neural network models usually suffer from the challenge of incorporating commonsense knowledge into the open-domain dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware dialogue generation model (called TransDG), which transfers question representation and knowledge matching abilities from knowledge base question answering (KBQA) task to facilitate the utterance understanding and factual knowledge selection for dialogue generation. In addition, we propose a response guiding attention and a multi-step decoding strategy to steer our model to focus on relevant features for response generation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model has robust superiority over compared methods in generating informative and fluent dialogues. Our code is available at https://github.com/siat-nlp/TransDG.Comment: Accepted by AAAI-202

A New Caspase-8 Isoform Caspase-8s Increased Sensitivity to Apoptosis in Jurkat Cells

Caspase-8 is a key initiator of death receptor-induced apoptosis. Here we report a novel short isoform of caspase-8 (caspase-8s), which encodes the first (Death Effector Domain) DED and part of the second DED, missing the C-terminal caspase domain. In vivo binding assays showed that transfected caspase-8s bound to (Fas-associated death domain protein) FADD, the adaptor protein in (death-induced signal complex) DISC. To investigate the potential effects of caspase-8s on cell apoptosis, Jurkat cells were stably transfected with caspase-8s. Overexpression of caspase-8s increased sensitivity to the apoptotic stimuli, Fas-agonistic antibody CH11. These results suggest that caspase-8s may act as a promoter of apoptosis through binding to FADD and is involved in the regulation of apoptosis. In addition, the results also indicate that the first DED was an important structure mediating combination between caspase-8 and FADD

Type-II Ising Pairing in Few-Layer Stanene

Spin-orbit coupling has proven indispensable in realizing topological materials and more recently Ising pairing in two-dimensional superconductors. This pairing mechanism relies on inversion symmetry breaking and sustains anomalously large in-plane polarizing magnetic fields whose upper limit is expected to diverge at low temperatures, although experimental demonstration of this has remained elusive due to the required fields. In this work, the recently discovered superconductor few-layer stanene, i.e. epitaxially strained $\alpha$-Sn, is shown to exhibit a new type of Ising pairing between carriers residing in bands with different orbital indices near the $\Gamma$-point. The bands are split as a result of spin-orbit locking without the participation of inversion symmetry breaking. The in-plane upper critical field is strongly enhanced at ultra-low temperature and reveals the sought for upturn

Interaction and Regulation of Carbon, Nitrogen, and Phosphorus Metabolisms in Root Nodules of Legumes

Members of the plant family Leguminosae (Fabaceae) are unique in that they have evolved a symbiotic relationship with rhizobia (a group of soil bacteria that can fix atmospheric nitrogen). Rhizobia infect and form root nodules on their specific host plants before differentiating into bacteroids, the symbiotic form of rhizobia. This complex relationship involves the supply of C4-dicarboxylate and phosphate by the host plants to the microsymbionts that utilize them in the energy-intensive process of fixing atmospheric nitrogen into ammonium, which is in turn made available to the host plants as a source of nitrogen, a macronutrient for growth. Although nitrogen-fixing bacteroids are no longer growing, they are metabolically active. The symbiotic process is complex and tightly regulated by both the host plants and the bacteroids. The metabolic pathways of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphate are heavily regulated in the host plants, as they need to strike a fine balance between satisfying their own needs as well as those of the microsymbionts. A network of transporters for the various metabolites are responsible for the trafficking of these essential molecules between the two partners through the symbiosome membrane (plant-derived membrane surrounding the bacteroid), and these are in turn regulated by various transcription factors that control their expressions under different environmental conditions. Understanding this complex process of symbiotic nitrogen fixation is vital in promoting sustainable agriculture and enhancing soil fertility

Spin-glass ground state in a triangular-lattice compound YbZnGaO4_4

We report on comprehensive results identifying the ground state of a triangular-lattice structured YbZnGaO$_4$ to be spin glass, including no long-range magnetic order, prominent broad excitation continua, and absence of magnetic thermal conductivity. More crucially, from the ultralow-temperature a.c. susceptibility measurements, we unambiguously observe frequency-dependent peaks around 0.1 K, indicating the spin-glass ground state. We suggest this conclusion to hold also for its sister compound YbMgGaO$_4$, which is confirmed by the observation of spin freezing at low temperatures. We consider disorder and frustration to be the main driving force for the spin-glass phase.Comment: Version as accepted to PR