Networks of lexical borrowing and lateral gene transfer in language and genome evolution

Like biological species, languages change over time. As noted by Darwin, there are many parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. Insights into these parallels have also undergone change in the past 150 years. Just like genes, words change over time, and language evolution can be likened to genome evolution accordingly, but what kind of evolution? There are fundamental differences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic evolution. In the former, natural variation entails the gradual accumulation of minor mutations in alleles. In the latter, lateral gene transfer is an integral mechanism of natural variation. The study of language evolution using biological methods has attracted much interest of late, most approaches focusing on language tree construction. These approaches may underestimate the important role that borrowing plays in language evolution. Network approaches that were originally designed to study lateral gene transfer may provide more realistic insights into the complexities of language evolution

Cognitive function and brain structure after recurrent mild traumatic brain injuries in young-to-middle-aged adults

Recurrent mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs) are regarded as an independent risk factor for developing dementia in later life. We here aimed to evaluate associations between recurrent mTBIs, cognition, and gray matter volume and microstructure as revealed by structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the chronic phase after mTBIs in young adulthood. We enrolled 20 young-to- middle-aged subjects, who reported two or more sports-related mTBIs, with the last mTBI > 6 months prior to study enrolment (mTBI group), and 21 age-, sex- and education matched controls with no history of mTBI (control group). All participants received comprehensive neuropsychological testing, and high resolution T1-weighted and diffusion tensor MRI in order to assess cortical thickness (CT) and microstructure, hippocampal volume, and ventricle size. Compared to the control group, subjects of the mTBI group presented with lower CT within the right temporal lobe and left insula using an a priori region of interest approach. Higher number of mTBIs was associated with lower CT in bilateral insula, right middle temporal gyrus and right entorhinal area. Our results suggest persistent detrimental effects of recurrent mTBIs on CT already in young-to-middle-aged adults. If additional structural deterioration occurs during aging, subtle neuropsychological decline may progress to clinically overt dementia earlier than in age-matched controls, a hypothesis to be assessed in future prospective trials

Passphone: Outsourcing Phone-based Web Authentication while Protecting User Privacy

This work introduces PassPhone, a new smartphone-based authentication scheme that outsources user verification to a trusted third party without sacrificing privacy: neither can the trusted third party learn the relation between users and service providers, nor can service providers learn those of their users to others. When employed as a second factor in conjunction with, for instance, passwords as a first factor, our scheme maximizes the deployability of two-factor authentication for service providers while maintaining user privacy. We conduct a twofold formal analysis of our scheme, the first regarding its general security, and the second regarding anonymity and unlinkability of its users. Moreover, we provide an automatic analysis using AVISPA, a comparative evaluation to existing schemes under Bonneau et al.\u27s framework, and an evaluation of a prototypical implementation

Stochastic priming and spatial cues orchestrate heterogeneous clonal contribution to mouse pancreas organogenesis

The pancreas arises from a small population of cells but how individual cells contribute to organ formation is unclear. Here, the authors deconstruct pancreas organogenesis into clonal units, showing that single progenitors give rise to heterogeneous multi-lineage and endocrinogenic single-lineage clones

Acoustic Scale from the Angular Power Spectra of SDSS-III DR8 Photometric Luminous Galaxies

We measure the acoustic scale from the angular power spectra of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) Data Release 8 imaging catalog that includes 872, 921 galaxies over ~10,000 deg2 between 0.45 \u3c z \u3c 0.65. The extensive spectroscopic training set of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey luminous galaxies allows precise estimates of the true redshift distributions of galaxies in our imaging catalog. Utilizing the redshift distribution information, we build templates and fit to the power spectra of the data, which are measured in our companion paper, to derive the location of Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) while marginalizing over many free parameters to exclude nearly all of the non-BAO signal. We derive the ratio of the angular diameter distance to the sound horizon scale DA(z)/rs = 9.212+0.416-0.404 at z = 0.54, and therefore DA (z) = 1411 ± 65 Mpc at z = 0.54; the result is fairly independent of assumptions on the underlying cosmology. Our measurement of angular diameter distance DA(z) is 1.4σ higher than what is expected for the concordance ΛCDM, in accordance to the trend of other spectroscopic BAO measurements for z ≳ 0.35. We report constraints on cosmological parameters from our measurement in combination with the WMAP7 data and the previous spectroscopic BAO measurements of SDSS and WiggleZ. We refer to our companion papers (Ho et al.; de Putter et al.) for investigations on information of the full power spectrum

Beyond the electric-dipole approximation in simulations of X-ray absorption spectroscopy: Lessons from relativistic theory

We present three schemes to go beyond the electric-dipole approximation in X-ray absorption spectroscopy calculations within a four-component relativistic framework. The first is based on the full semi-classical light-matter interaction operator, and the two others on a truncated interaction within Coulomb gauge (velocity representation) and multipolar gauge (length representation). We generalize the derivation of multipolar gauge to an arbitrary expansion point and show that the potentials corresponding to different expansion point are related by a gauge transformation, provided the expansion is not truncated. This suggests that the observed gauge-origin dependence in multipolar gauge is more than just a finite-basis set effect. The simplicity of the relativistic formalism enables arbitrary-order implementations of the truncated interactions, with and without rotational averaging, allowing us to test their convergence behavior numerically by comparison to the full formulation. We confirm the observation that the oscillator strength of the electric-dipole allowed ligand K-edge transition of TiCl$_4$, when calculated to second order in the wave vector, become negative, but also show that inclusion of higher-order contributions allows convergence to the result obtained using the full light-matter interaction. However, at higher energies, the slow convergence of such expansions becomes dramatic and renders such approaches at best impractical. When going beyond the electric-dipole approximation, we therefore recommend the use of the full light-matter interaction.Comment: The following article has been submitted to The Journal of Chemical Physics. After it is published, it will be found at this https://aip.scitation.org/toc/jcp/current New version with substantial revision, including further insight into origin-dependence in multipolar gaug