The Novel or The Garden? Borges' Postmodern Dialogue with China

"The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges is of a highly intelligent design, full of postmodern twists. From The Thousand and One Nights, which Boreges read as a child, and later from Chinese culture, Borges learned the concept of infinity and paradox that became some of the important seeds for his stance on global postmodernism. Such stance is illustrated by the cultural and postmodern relativism embodied in the blurred boundary between fiction and reality and between the East and the West. Complex and layered, the story's narrative cleverly plays with infinite possibilities of East-West relations of the future. The story's final refusal to closure allows the reader to engage in new dialogues between the East and the West. In doing so, the sotry invites the reader to evaluate the relevance of this kind of cultural and epistemological relativism embodied in this remarkable sotry to the global world we all now live in

Monolithic quantum-dot distributed feedback laser array on silicon

Electrically-pumped lasers directly grown on silicon are key devices interfacing silicon microelectronics and photonics. We report here, for the first time, an electrically-pumped, room-temperature, continuous-wave (CW) and single-mode distributed feedback (DFB) laser array fabricated in InAs/GaAs quantum-dot (QD) gain material epitaxially grown on silicon. CW threshold currents as low as 12 mA and single-mode side mode suppression ratios (SMSRs) as high as 50 dB have been achieved from individual devices in the array. The laser array, compatible with state-of-the-art coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) systems, has a well-aligned channel spacing of 20 0.2 nm and exhibits a record wavelength coverage range of 100 nm, the full span of the O-band. These results indicate that, for the first time, the performance of lasers epitaxially grown on silicon is elevated to a point approaching real-world CWDM applications, demonstrating the great potential of this technology

Detection of hepatitis A virus in shellfish and berries by digital polymerase chain reaction

Objective To establish a digital polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method for hepatitis A virus (HAV) in shellfish and berry foods. Methods After sample enrichment by proteinase K digestion polyethylene glycol method, RNA was extracted by high purity virus nucleic acid kit, and then digital PCR was used to detect HAV. Results This method had typical amplification, good repeatability and stability for HAV. The sensitivity of HAV in strawberry, raspberry and shellfish samples was 25.30 CCID50/20 g, 6.32 CCID50/20 g and 12.54 CCID50/2 g respectively, which means that the detection sensitivity of HAV was high. Conclusion This method is rapid, accurate, sensitive, and is suitable for the determination of HAV in shellfish and berry foods