Treeing: what remains of a pilgrim

Myths and legends have existed since the start of human civilization, but now we can only imagine a world full of wonders from our ancestor’s scripts. What if we could go back to the age of myths and magic? Would we see things differently? In Treeing: What Remains of a Pilgrim, I propose a fictional book with 15 short myths of humans transformed into trees. The stories combine my own imagination with inspiration from real mythologies. In the annotations of each story, an unnamed person is following the myths as guidance and manuals, one by one, trying to bring them into reality with their own body. We begin with a preface and introduction by an imagined editor who has found the book of myths and is planning to publish it. The second part is the book itself with the hand-written annotations. Lastly, there is a glossary and bibliography. Multilayered in its storytelling approach, this book is an invitation to look into your own understanding of myths and folklore, and root yourself back in the most sublime imaginations of nature

Síntesis de zeolitas de estructura LTA con distinta relación Si/Al y su aplicación como catalizadores en la reacción de metanol a olefinas

El objetivo de este trabajo es sintetizar varias zeolitas de estructura LTA con distinta relación Si/Al y emplearlas como catalizadores en la reacción de metanol a olefinas con el fin de estudiar la influencia del contenido en Al sobre la actividad catalítica. La zeolita LTA posee una estructura con aperturas de poro de tamaño pequeño (4.1Å) que dan acceso a grandes cavidades en su interior y presenta una elevada capacidad de adsorción. Se sintetiza comúnmente con una relación Si/Al = 1 y se utiliza como adsorbente y como componente de detergentes. Sin embargo, para poder ser empleada como catalizador es necesario aumentar su relación Si/Al. En la bibliografía se han descrito distintos procedimientos de síntesis que han permitido obtener esta zeolita con mayor relación Si/Al, e incluso se ha preparado en su composición puramente silícea (ITQ-29). En este trabajo se pretende preparar la zeolita LTA con relaciones Si/Al = 5 y superiores con el propósito de emplearla como catalizador en la reacción de metanol a olefinas, en la que se suelen utilizar zeolitas de tamaño de poro pequeño. En concreto, el plan de trabajo del proyecto abarca los siguientes apartados: 1) Síntesis de zeolitas del tipo LTA con la misma relación Si/Al, alrededor de 20-30, empleando dos métodos de síntesis diferentes descritos en la bibliografía. Para ello, será necesario preparar las moléculas que se utilizan como agentes orgánicos directores de estructura en la síntesis, puesto que no se encuentran disponibles comercialmente. Se evaluará la reproducibilidad y el rendimiento de dichos métodos de síntesis. También se pretende comparar las propiedades de las zeolitas sintetizadas mediante el uso de distintas técnicas de caracterización, tales como difracción de Rayos X, análisis termogravimétrico, análisis químico por ICP, adsorción de N2 para la determinación de la porosidad y área superficial, etc. 2) Síntesis de zeolitas del tipo LTA de relación Si/Al = 5 empleando otro método de síntesis descrito en bibliografía. Se evaluará la reproducibilidad y el rendimiento de dicho método de síntesis y se realizará la caracterización correspondiente de la zeolita sintetizada empleando las técnicas mencionadas anteriormente. 3) Una vez sintetizadas las zeolitas se llevará a cabo la calcinación de las mismas para eliminar el material orgánico usado durante la síntesis y liberar así la porosidad. A continuación, se emplearán las zeolitas calcinadas como catalizadores en la reacción de metanol a olefinas (MTO) utilizando el mismo tiempo espacial y las mismas condiciones de reacción con el fin de evaluar la actividad catalítica de todas las zeolitas preparadas.Liu, S. (2017). Síntesis de zeolitas de estructura LTA con distinta relación Si/Al y su aplicación como catalizadores en la reacción de metanol a olefinas. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/86321TFG

DyRRen: A Dynamic Retriever-Reranker-Generator Model for Numerical Reasoning over Tabular and Textual Data

Numerical reasoning over hybrid data containing tables and long texts has recently received research attention from the AI community. To generate an executable reasoning program consisting of math and table operations to answer a question, state-of-the-art methods use a retriever-generator pipeline. However, their retrieval results are static, while different generation steps may rely on different sentences. To attend to the retrieved information that is relevant to each generation step, in this paper, we propose DyRRen, an extended retriever-reranker-generator framework where each generation step is enhanced by a dynamic reranking of retrieved sentences. It outperforms existing baselines on the FinQA dataset.Comment: 9 pages, accepted by AAAI 202

Effects of wave parameters on load reduction performance for amphibious aircraft with V-hydrofoil

An investigation of the influence of the hydrofoil on load reduction performance during an amphibious aircraft landing on still and wavy water is conducted by solving the Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations coupled with the standard $k-\omega$ turbulence model in this paper. During the simulations, the numerical wave tank is realized by using the velocity-inlet boundary wave maker coupled with damping wave elimination technique on the outlet, while the volume of fluid model is employed to track the water-air interface. Subsequently, the effects of geometric parameters of hydrofoil have been first discussed on still water, which indicates the primary factor influencing the load reduction is the static load coefficient of hydrofoil. Furthermore, the effects of descent velocity, wave length and wave height on load reduction are comprehensively investigated. The results show that the vertical load reduces more than 55$\%$ at the early stage of landing on the still water through assembling the hydrofoil for different descent velocity cases. Meanwhile, for the amphibious aircraft with high forward velocity, the bottom of the fuselage will come into close contact with the first wave when landing on crest position, and then the forebody will impact the next wave surface with extreme force. In this circumstance, the load reduction rate decreases to around 30$\%$, which will entail a further decline with the increase of wave length or wave height

influence of surface chemistry of carbon nanofibers on the hydrodechlorination of chloroform to olefins

Functionalized carbon nanofibers (CNF) are fascinating materials to be used as supports in Pd-based catalysts for the treatment of waste chloroform (TCM) to produce light olefins through the catalytic hydrodechlorination (HDC). The CNF were functionalized by HNO3, HCl, and urea. Compared to the Pd supported on un-treated CNF, all the catalysts using functionalized CNF as support showed lower turnover frequency values with higher stability, owing to their smaller Pd nanoparticles (NPs). These smaller Pd NPs are formed due to the stronger metal–support interactions promoted by the higher concentration of surface groups on the functionalized catalysts. Since the smaller Pd NPs could hinder the hydrogenation of olefins to paraffins, the selectivity to olefins increased on the functionalized catalysts. Moreover, the N-doped CNF was successfully formed on the catalyst functionalized by urea. Since the nitrogen functional groups (pyridinic N and pyrrolic N) could provide much stronger metal–support interactions compared to the oxygen functional groups on the other catalysts, the catalyst functionalized by urea showed the smallest Pd NPs among the four catalysts, leading to the highest selectivity to light olefin

Understanding hydrodechlorination of chloromethanes. Past and future of the technology

Chloromethanes are a group of volatile organic compounds that are harmful to the environment and human health. Abundant studies have verified that hydrodechlorination might be an effective treatment to remove these chlorinated pollutants. The most outstanding advantages of this technique are the moderate operating conditions used and the possibility of obtaining less hazardous valuable products. This review presents a global analysis of experimental and theoretical studies regarding the hydrodechlorination of chloromethanes. The catalysts used and their synthesis methods are summarized. Their physicochemical properties are analyzed in order to deeply understand their influence on the catalytic performance. Moreover, the main causes of the catalyst deactivation are explained, and prevention and regeneration methods are suggested. The reaction systems used and the effect of the operating conditions on the catalytic activity are also analyzed. Besides, the mechanisms and kinetics of the process at the atomic level are reviewed. Finally, a new perspective for the upgrading of chloromethanes, via hydrodechlorination, to valuable hydrocarbons for industry, such as light olefins, is discussedThe authors gratefully acknowledge financial support through research projects SI1/PJI/2019-00487 (Comunidad de Madrid/UAM) and CTM2017-85498-R (FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades-Agencia Estatal de Investigación). M. Martín Martínez acknowledges a postdoctoral grant, 2017-T2/AMB-5668, from the Comunidad de Madrid “Atracción de talento investigador” programme. S. Liu acknowledges MINECO for his research grant PRE2018-08442

Detection of circular RNA expression and related quantitative trait loci in the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Background Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are implicated in various biological processes. As a layer of the gene regulatory network, circRNA expression is also an intermediate phenotype bridging genetic variation and phenotypic changes. Thus, analyzing circRNA expression variation will shed light on molecular fundamentals of complex traits and diseases. Results We systematically characterize 10,559 high-quality circRNAs in 589 human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex samples. We identify biological and technical factors contributing to expression heterogeneity associated with the expression levels of many circRNAs, including the well-known circRNA CDR1as. Combining the expression levels of circRNAs with genetic cis-acting SNPs, we detect 196,255 circRNA quantitative trait loci (circQTLs). By characterizing circQTL SNPs, we find that partial circQTL SNPs might influence circRNA formation by altering the canonical splicing site or the reverse complementary sequence match. Additionally, we find that a subset of these circQTL SNPs is highly linked to genome-wide association study signals of complex diseases, especially schizophrenia, inflammatory bowel disease, and type II diabetes mellitus. Conclusions Our results reveal technical, biological, and genetic factors affecting circRNA expression variation among individuals, which lead to further understanding of circRNA regulation and thus of the genetic architecture of complex traits or diseases

LLM-Mini-CEX: Automatic Evaluation of Large Language Model for Diagnostic Conversation

There is an increasing interest in developing LLMs for medical diagnosis to improve diagnosis efficiency. Despite their alluring technological potential, there is no unified and comprehensive evaluation criterion, leading to the inability to evaluate the quality and potential risks of medical LLMs, further hindering the application of LLMs in medical treatment scenarios. Besides, current evaluations heavily rely on labor-intensive interactions with LLMs to obtain diagnostic dialogues and human evaluation on the quality of diagnosis dialogue. To tackle the lack of unified and comprehensive evaluation criterion, we first initially establish an evaluation criterion, termed LLM-specific Mini-CEX to assess the diagnostic capabilities of LLMs effectively, based on original Mini-CEX. To address the labor-intensive interaction problem, we develop a patient simulator to engage in automatic conversations with LLMs, and utilize ChatGPT for evaluating diagnosis dialogues automatically. Experimental results show that the LLM-specific Mini-CEX is adequate and necessary to evaluate medical diagnosis dialogue. Besides, ChatGPT can replace manual evaluation on the metrics of humanistic qualities and provides reproducible and automated comparisons between different LLMs

Enhanced Carrier Transport by Transition Metal Doping in WS2 Field Effect Transistors

High contact resistance is one of the primary concerns for electronic device applications of two-dimensional (2D) layered semiconductors. Here, we explore the enhanced carrier transport through metal-semiconductor interfaces in WS2 field effect transistors (FETs) by introducing a typical transition metal, Cu, with two different doping strategies: (i) a "generalized" Cu doping by using randomly distributed Cu atoms along the channel and (ii) a "localized" Cu doping by adapting an ultrathin Cu layer at the metal-semiconductor interface. Compared to the pristine WS2 FETs, both the generalized Cu atomic dopant and localized Cu contact decoration can provide a Schottky-to-Ohmic contact transition owing to the reduced contact resistances by 1 - 3 orders of magnitude, and consequently elevate electron mobilities by 5 - 7 times higher. Our work demonstrates that the introduction of transition metal can be an efficient and reliable technique to enhance the carrier transport and device performance in 2D TMD FETs.Comment: Under revie