175 research outputs found
Advances in the human skin microbiota and its roles in cutaneous diseases
Skin is the largest organ in the human body, and the interplay between the environment factors and human skin leads to some skin diseases, such as acne, psoriasis, and atopic dermatitis. As the first line of human immune defense, skin plays significant roles in human health via preventing the invasion of pathogens that is heavily influenced by the skin microbiota. Despite being a challenging niche for microbes, human skin is colonized by diverse commensal microorganisms that shape the skin environment. The skin microbiota can affect human health, and its imbalance and dysbiosis contribute to the skin diseases. This review focuses on the advances in our understanding of skin microbiota and its interaction with human skin. Moreover, the potential roles of microbiota in skin health and diseases are described, and some key species are highlighted. The prevention, diagnosis and treatment strategies for microbe-related skin diseases, such as healthy diets, lifestyles, probiotics and prebiotics, are discussed. Strategies for modulation of skin microbiota using synthetic biology are discussed as an interesting venue for optimization of the skin-microbiota interactions. In summary, this review provides insights into human skin microbiota recovery, the interactions between human skin microbiota and diseases, and the strategies for engineering/rebuilding human skin microbiota
Three dimensional photonic Dirac points in metamaterials
Topological semimetals, representing a new topological phase that lacks a
full bandgap in bulk states and exhibiting nontrivial topological orders,
recently have been extended to photonic systems, predominantly in photonic
crystals and to a lesser extent, metamaterials. Photonic crystal realizations
of Dirac degeneracies are protected by various space symmetries, where Bloch
modes span the spin and orbital subspaces. Here, we theoretically show that
Dirac points can also be realized in effective media through the intrinsic
degrees of freedom in electromagnetism under electromagnetic duality. A pair of
spin polarized Fermi arc like surface states is observed at the interface
between air and the Dirac metamaterials. These surface states show linear
k-space dispersion relation, resulting in nearly diffraction-less propagation.
Furthermore, eigen reflection fields show the decomposition from a Dirac point
to two Weyl points. We also find the topological correlation between a Dirac
point and vortex/vector beams in classic photonics. The theoretical proposal of
photonic Dirac point lays foundation for unveiling the connection between
intrinsic physics and global topology in electromagnetism.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure
Long-term Wind Power Forecasting with Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Transformer
Wind power is attracting increasing attention around the world due to its
renewable, pollution-free, and other advantages. However, safely and stably
integrating the high permeability intermittent power energy into electric power
systems remains challenging. Accurate wind power forecasting (WPF) can
effectively reduce power fluctuations in power system operations. Existing
methods are mainly designed for short-term predictions and lack effective
spatial-temporal feature augmentation. In this work, we propose a novel
end-to-end wind power forecasting model named Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal
Transformer Network (HSTTN) to address the long-term WPF problems.
Specifically, we construct an hourglass-shaped encoder-decoder framework with
skip-connections to jointly model representations aggregated in hierarchical
temporal scales, which benefits long-term forecasting. Based on this framework,
we capture the inter-scale long-range temporal dependencies and global spatial
correlations with two parallel Transformer skeletons and strengthen the
intra-scale connections with downsampling and upsampling operations. Moreover,
the complementary information from spatial and temporal features is fused and
propagated in each other via Contextual Fusion Blocks (CFBs) to promote the
prediction further. Extensive experimental results on two large-scale
real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our HSTTN over
existing solutions.Comment: Accepted to IJCAI 202
Temperature dependence of sensitized Er3+ luminescence in silicon-rich oxynitride films
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