Giant Anomalous Hall and Nernst Effects in a Heavy Fermion Ferromagnet

The anomalous Hall and Nernst effects describe the voltage drop perpendicular to an applied current and temperature gradient due to the magnetization of a magnetic material. These effects can be utilized to measure the Berry curvature at the Fermi energy, and have potential applications in future electronic devices and thermoelectric energy conversion. In this paper, we report giant anomalous Hall conductivity and anomalous Nernst coefficient, as high as about 1000 $\Omega^{-1}$ cm$^{-1}$ and 10 $\mu$V K$^{-1}$, respectively, in a heavy fermion ferromagnet, CeCrGe$_3$. This compound uniquely manifests strong hybridization between the 4$f$ and conduction electrons, leading to a Kondo lattice state in the presence of ferromagnetic order. Unlike conventional topological semimetals in which the electron correlation is weak, CeCrGe$_3$ manifests a strong Berry curvature field of the heavy fermion with an extremely low Fermi energy. Our findings pave the way for exploring correlation-driven topological responses in a ferromagnetic Kondo lattice environment.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Kidney and Tumor Segmentation Using Modified 3D Mask RCNN

Detection of kidney tumors and accurate evaluation of their size are crucial for tracking cancer progression. Automating 3D volume detection and segmentation can improve workflow as well as patient care. We adapt the state of the art architecture for 2D object detection and segmentation, Mask RCNN, to handle 3D images and employ it along with U-net to detect and segment kidney and kidney tumor from CT scans. We report on competitive results for the kidney segmentation and kidney tumor segmentation on the 2019 Kidney Tumor Segmentation Challenge data set

Efficient Ambient LoRa Backscatter with On-Off Keying Modulation

Backscatter communication holds potential for ubiquitous and low-cost connectivity among low-power IoT devices. To avoid interference between the carrier signal and the backscatter signal, recent works propose a frequency-shifting technique to separate these two signals in the frequency domain. Such proposals, however, have to occupy the precious wireless spectrum that is already overcrowded, and increase the power, cost, and complexity of the backscatter tag. In this paper, we revisit the classic ON-OFF Keying (OOK) modulation and propose Aloba, a backscatter system that takes the ambient LoRa transmissions as the excitation and piggybacks the in-band OOK modulated signals over the LoRa transmissions. Our design enables the backsactter signal to work in the same frequency band of the carrier signal, meanwhile achieving flexible data rate at different transmission range. The key contributions of Aloba include: (1) the design of a low-power backscatter tag that can pick up the ambient LoRa signals from other signals. (2) a novel decoding algorithm to demodulate both the carrier signal and the backscatter signal from their superposition. We further adopt link coding mechanism and interleave operation to enhance the reliability of backscatter signal decoding. We implement Aloba and conduct head-to-head comparison with the state-of-the-art LoRa backscatter system PLoRa in various settings. The experiment results show Aloba can achieve 199.4 Kbps data rate at various distances, 52.4 times higher than PLoRa

Exome sequencing revealed PDE11A as a novel candidate gene for early-onset Alzheimer\u27s disease

To identify novel risk genes and better understand the molecular pathway underlying Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD), whole-exome sequencing was performed in 215 early-onset AD (EOAD) patients and 255 unrelated healthy controls of Han Chinese ethnicity. Subsequent validation, computational annotation and in vitro functional studies were performed to evaluate the role of candidate variants in EOAD. We identified two rare missense variants in the phosphodiesterase 11A (PDE11A) gene in individuals with EOAD. Both variants are located in evolutionarily highly conserved amino acids, are predicted to alter the protein conformation and are classified as pathogenic. Furthermore, we found significantly decreased protein levels of PDE11A in brain samples of AD patients. Expression of PDE11A variants and knockdown experiments with specific short hairpin RNA (shRNA) for PDE11A both resulted in an increase of AD-associated Tau hyperphosphorylation at multiple epitopes in vitro. PDE11A variants or PDE11A shRNA also caused increased cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) levels, protein kinase A (PKA) activation and cAMP response element-binding protein phosphorylation. In addition, pretreatment with a PKA inhibitor (H89) suppressed PDE11A variant-induced Tau phosphorylation formation. This study offers insight into the involvement of Tau phosphorylation via the cAMP/PKA pathway in EOAD pathogenesis and provides a potential new target for intervention

Efficacy and safety of the compound Chinese medicine SaiLuoTong in vascular dementia: A randomized clinical trial

Introduction: No licensed medications are available to treat vascular dementia (VaD). Methods: Patients were randomly assigned to experimental groups (SaiLuoTong [SLT] 360 or 240 mg for groups A and B for 52 weeks, respectively) or placebo group (SLT 360 mg and 240 mg for group C only from weeks 27 to 52, respectively). Results: Three hundred twenty-five patients were included in final analysis. At week 26, the difference in VaD Assessment Scale-cognitive subscale scores was 2.67 (95% confidence interval, 1.54 to 3.81) for groups A versus C, and 2.48 (1.34 to 3.62) for groups B versus C (both Discussion: This study suggests that SLT is effective for treatment of VaD, and this compound Chinese medicine may represent a better choice to treat VaD

Two types of zero Hall phenomena in few-layer MnBi2_2Te4_4

The van der Waals antiferromagnetic topological insulator MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ represents a promising platform for exploring the layer-dependent magnetism and topological states of matter. Despite the realization of several quantized phenomena, such as the quantum anomalous Hall effect and the axion insulator state, the recently observed discrepancies between magnetic and transport properties have aroused controversies concerning the topological nature of MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ in the ground state. Here, we demonstrate the existence of two distinct types of zero Hall phenomena in few-layer MnBi$_2$Te$_4$. In addition to the robust zero Hall plateau associated with the axion insulator state, an unexpected zero Hall phenomenon also occurs in some odd-number-septuple layer devices. Importantly, a statistical survey of the optical contrast in more than 200 MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ reveals that such accidental zero Hall phenomenon arises from the reduction of effective thickness during fabrication process, a factor that was rarely noticed in previous studies of 2D materials. Our finding not only resolves the controversies on the relation between magnetism and anomalous Hall effect in MnBi$_2$Te$_4$, but also highlights the critical issues concerning the fabrication and characterization of devices based on 2D materials.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

Morphological diversity of single neurons in molecularly defined cell types.

Dendritic and axonal morphology reflects the input and output of neurons and is a defining feature of neuronal types1,2, yet our knowledge of its diversity remains limited. Here, to systematically examine complete single-neuron morphologies on a brain-wide scale, we established a pipeline encompassing sparse labelling, whole-brain imaging, reconstruction, registration and analysis. We fully reconstructed 1,741 neurons from cortex, claustrum, thalamus, striatum and other brain regions in mice. We identified 11 major projection neuron types with distinct morphological features and corresponding transcriptomic identities. Extensive projectional diversity was found within each of these major types, on the basis of which some types were clustered into more refined subtypes. This diversity follows a set of generalizable principles that govern long-range axonal projections at different levels, including molecular correspondence, divergent or convergent projection, axon termination pattern, regional specificity, topography, and individual cell variability. Although clear concordance with transcriptomic profiles is evident at the level of major projection type, fine-grained morphological diversity often does not readily correlate with transcriptomic subtypes derived from unsupervised clustering, highlighting the need for single-cell cross-modality studies. Overall, our study demonstrates the crucial need for quantitative description of complete single-cell anatomy in cell-type classification, as single-cell morphological diversity reveals a plethora of ways in which different cell types and their individual members may contribute to the configuration and function of their respective circuits

Code for Plasma Biomarkers Predict Alzheimer's Disease 8 to 10 Years Before Clinical Onset in Asian Cohorts

The code used in the study Plasma Biomarkers Predict Alzheimer's Disease 8 to 10 Years Before Clinical Onset in Asian Cohorts