Complex genetic architecture underlying the plasticity of maize agronomic traits

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of a given genotype to produce multiple phenotypes in response to changing environmental conditions. Understanding the genetic basis of phenotypic plasticity and establishing a predictive model is highly relevant to future agriculture under a changing climate. Here we report findings on the genetic basis of phenotypic plasticity for 23 complex traits using a diverse maize population planted at five sites with distinct environmental conditions. We found that latitude -related environmental factors were the main drivers of across-site variation in flowering time traits but not in plant architecture or yield traits. For the 23 traits, we detected 109 quantitative trait loci (QTLs), 29 for mean values, 66 for plasticity, and 14 for both parameters, and 80% of the QTLs interacted with latitude. The effects of several QTLs changed in magnitude or sign, driving variation in phenotypic plasticity. We experimentally validated one plastic gene, ZmTPS14.1, whose effect was likely mediated by the compen-sation effect of ZmSPL6 from a downstream pathway. By integrating genetic diversity, environmental vari-ation, and their interaction into a joint model, we could provide site-specific predictions with increased accuracy by as much as 9.9%, 2.2%, and 2.6% for days to tassel, plant height, and ear weight, respectively. This study revealed a complex genetic architecture involving multiple alleles, pleiotropy, and genotype-by -environment interaction that underlies variation in the mean and plasticity of maize complex traits. It provides novel insights into the dynamic genetic architecture of agronomic traits in response to changing environments, paving a practical way toward precision agriculture

Hardware Design and Testing of SUPERball, A Modular Tensegrity Robot

We are developing a system of modular, autonomous "tensegrity end-caps" to enable the rapid exploration of untethered tensegrity robot morphologies and functions. By adopting a self-contained modular approach, different end-caps with various capabilities (such as peak torques, or motor speeds), can be easily combined into new tensegrity robots composed of rods, cables, and actuators of different scale (such as in length, mass, peak loads, etc). As a first step in developing this concept, we are in the process of designing and testing the end-caps for SUPERball (Spherical Underactuated Planetary Exploration Robot), a project at the Dynamic Tensegrity Robotics Lab (DTRL) within NASA Ames's Intelligent Robotics Group. This work discusses the evolving design concepts and test results that have gone into the structural, mechanical, and sensing aspects of SUPERball. This representative tensegrity end-cap design supports robust and repeatable untethered mobility tests of the SUPERball, while providing high force, high displacement actuation, with a low-friction, compliant cabling system

Impact of recycler information sharing on supply chain performance of construction and demolition waste resource utilization

In recent years, the generation of a large amount of construction and demolition waste (CDW) has threatened the public environment and human health. The inefficient supply chain of CDW resource utilization hinders the green development of countries around the world, including China. This study aims to reveal the impact of information sharing regarding recyclers’ market demand forecast on the performance of CDW resource utilization supply chains. Therefore, this paper uses the incomplete information dynamic game method to establish and solve the decision-making model of the construction and demolition waste resource utilization supply chain under the conditions of recyclers sharing and not sharing their information. The paper then obtains the Bayesian equilibrium solution and the optimal expected profit for each party. Finally, a numerical simulation was used in order to verify the validity of the model and conclusions. The main conclusions are as follows. In the CDW resource utilization supply chain, if the recycler is more pessimistic about the market’s demand forecast, their information sharing makes the remanufacturer more motivated to improve their level of environmental responsibility. In addition, information sharing by recyclers is always beneficial in increasing the profit of the remanufacturer, but it also may make the recycler lose profit. When the efficiency of the environmental responsibility investment of remanufacturers is in a high range, information sharing increases the profits of recyclers. Conversely, information sharing has no significant effect on the profits of recyclers. The impact on the profits of the entire CDW resource utilization supply chain depends on the intensity of competition among channels, the market share of offline recycling channels and the efficiency of environmental responsibility investments

Apatinib combined with camrelizumab in the treatment of recurrent/metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma: a prospective multicenter phase II study

BackgroundPreclinical studies demonstrated that immune checkpoint inhibitors combined with antiangiogenic drugs have a synergistic anti-tumor effect. This present phase II trial aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of apatinib combined with camrelizumab in patients with recurrent/metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma (RM-NPC).MethodsPatients with RM-NPC were administered with apatinib at 250 mg orally once every day and with camrelizumab at 200 mg via intravenous infusion every 2 weeks until the disease progressed or toxicity became unacceptable. The objective response rate (ORR) was the primary endpoint, assessed using RECIST version 1.1. Progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), disease control rate (DCR) and safety were the key secondary endpoints. This study was registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04350190.ResultsThis study enrolled 26 patients with RM-NPC between January 14, 2021 and September 15, 2021. At data cutoff (March 31, 2023), the median duration of follow-up was 16 months (ranging from 1 to 26 months). The ORR was 38.5% (10/26), the disease control rate (DCR) was 61.5% (16/26), and the median PFS was 6 months (IQR 3.0-20.0). The median OS was 14 months (IQR 6.0-21.25). Treatment-related grade 3 or 4 adverse events occurred in seven (26.9%) patients, and comprised anemia (7.7%), stomatitis (3.8%), headache (3.8%), pneumonia (7.7%), and myocarditis (3.8%). There were no serious treatment-related adverse events or treatment-related deaths.ConclusionIn patients with RM-NPC, apatinib plus camrelizumab showed promising antitumor activity and manageable toxicities

Social evaluation boosts cooperation by enhancing guilt aversion: an effect diminished in primary psychopathic traits

The association between primary psychopathic traits and non-cooperative behaviors is well-identified. There is a lack of studies on how to motivate cooperative behaviors in individuals with primary psychopathic traits. This study investigated the effects of mone- tary incentives and social incentives on promoting cooperation in healthy adults with vary- ing primary psychopathic traits. Participants played a one-shot public goods game (PGG) with other anonymous players in three different contexts: a social incentives context where participants’ decisions would be judged by others, a monetary incentives context where participants’ decisions would result in winning or losing money depending on their con- tributions, and a control condition where no additional incentives were implemented. We found that, compared to the control condition, both monetary and social incentives sig- nificantly improved participants’ contributions to the public project—an indicator of cooperative behavior. However, the association between higher primary psychopathic traits and less cooperation was only observed in the context of social incentives. Computa- tional modeling further revealed that this effect can be explained by the diminishing guilt aversion when participants deliberately violated their inferred expectations of themselves from others’ perspectives. This study found that social incentives can encourage coopera- tive behaviors in non-clinical psychopathy, and identified the mental processes navigating this effect

Transformer-Based Multimodal Infusion Dialogue Systems

The recent advancements in multimodal dialogue systems have been gaining importance in several domains such as retail, travel, fashion, among others. Several existing works have improved the understanding and generation of multimodal dialogues. However, there still exists considerable space to improve the quality of output textual responses due to insufficient information infusion between the visual and textual semantics. Moreover, the existing dialogue systems often generate defective knowledge-aware responses for tasks such as providing product attributes and celebrity endorsements. To address the aforementioned issues, we present a Transformer-based Multimodal Infusion Dialogue (TMID) system that extracts the visual and textual information from dialogues via a transformer-based multimodal context encoder and employs a cross-attention mechanism to achieve information infusion between images and texts for each utterance. Furthermore, TMID uses adaptive decoders to generate appropriate multimodal responses based on the user intentions it has determined using a state classifier and enriches the output responses by incorporating domain knowledge into the decoders. The results of extensive experiments on a multimodal dialogue dataset demonstrate that TMID has achieved a state-of-the-art performance by improving the BLUE-4 score by 13.03, NIST by 2.77, image selection Recall@1 by 1.84%