COVID-19 under spotlight: A close look at the origin, transmission, diagnosis, and treatment of the 2019-nCoV disease

Months after the outbreak of a new flu-like disease in China, the entire world is now in a state of caution. The subsequent less-anticipated propagation of the novel coronavirus disease, formally known as COVID-19, not only made it to headlines by an overwhelmingly high transmission rate and fatality reports, but also raised an alarm for the medical community all around the globe. Since the causative agent, SARS-CoV-2, is a recently discovered species, there is no specific medicine for downright treatment of the infection. This has led to an unprecedented societal fear of the newly born disease, adding a psychological aspect to the physical manifestation of the virus. Herein, the COVID-19 structure, epidemiology, pathogenesis, etiology, diagnosis, and therapy have been reviewed. © 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Application of Nanobiotechnology for Early Diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract: A most discussed topic of the new decade, COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the recently discovered SARS-CoV-2. With an exceedingly high transmission rate, COVID-19 has affected almost all the countries in the world. Absent any vaccine or specific treatment, the humanity is left with nothing but the legacy method of quarantine. However, quarantine can only be effective when combined with early diagnosis of suspected cases. With their high sensitivity and unmatched specificity, biosensors have become an area of interest for development of novel diagnostic methods. Compared to the more traditional diagnostics, nanobiotechnology introduces biosensors as different diagnostics with greater versatility in application. Today, a growing number of analytes are being accurately identified by these nanoscopic sensing machines. Several reports of validated application with real samples further strengthen this idea. As of recent, there has been a rise in the number of studies on portable biosensors. Despite the slow progression, certain devices with embedded biosensors have managed to be of diagnostic value in several countries. The perceptible increase in development of mobile platforms has revolutionized the healthcare delivery system in the new millennium. The present article reviews the most recent advancements in development of diagnostic nanobiosensors and their application in the clinical fields. Key points: � There is no specific treatment for highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2. � Early diagnosis is critical for control of pandemic. � Highly sensitive/specific nanobiosensors are emerging assets against COVID-19. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

An Empirical Study on the Transferability of Transformer Modules in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches have recently garnered a lot of attention. Having considerably lower number of train-able weights, these methods can bring about scalability and computational effectiveness. In this paper, we look for optimal sub-networks and investigate the capability of different transformer modules in transferring knowledge from a pre-trained model to a downstream task. Our empirical results suggest that every transformer module in BERT can act as a winning ticket: fine-tuning each specific module while keeping the rest of the network frozen can lead to comparable performance to the full fine-tuning. Among different modules, LayerNorms exhibit the best capacity for knowledge transfer with limited trainable weights, to the extent that, with only 0.003% of all parameters in the layer-wise analysis, they show acceptable performance on various target tasks. On the reasons behind their effectiveness, we argue that their notable performance could be attributed to their high-magnitude weights compared to that of the other modules in the pre-trained BERT. The code for this paper is freely available at https://github.com/m-tajari/transformer-transferability

An update on sputum MicroRNAs in lung cancer diagnosis

Lung cancer is one of the leading cause of cancer mortality in the world. It is well known that genetic damages could result in lung tumor genesis. Despite years of research, the survival rate of the patients has not been markedly improved. According to lack of high sensitivity and specificity in diagnostic tests, just about 15-20 of lung cancer cases are discovered prior to progression of the disease. In last decade, sputum biomarkers have been developed for early detection/diagnosis of lung cancer. MicroRNAs are a class of small endogenous noncoding RNAs, which act as post-transcriptional regulators. Some specific miRNAs can have multifunctions in lung development and their aberrant expression could induce lung tumor genesis. The differences in miRNAs between the normal and cancerous lung lead to emerging of a novel type of biomarkers, which can be helpful in screening of high risk individuals, diagnosis of lung cancer as well as its therapy. Diagn. Cytopathol. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Effect of temperature on geopolymer and Portland cement composites modified with Micro-encapsulated Phase Change materials

To reduce pollution and global warming, the energy consumption needs to be decreased. Incorporation of Phase Change Materials (PCMs) into building materials can help lower the energy needed to cool and warm buildings, while keeping the indoor temperature at a comfortable level. However, incorporation of PCMs into construction materials alter their performance. In this study, the effect of temperature and addition of two different Micro-encapsulated Phase Change Materials (MPCM) to geopolymer concrete (GPC) and Portland cement concrete (PCC) and pastes was investigated. The samples were examined both below (20 \ub0C) and above (40 \ub0C) the melting points of the PCMs. While the MPCM is not damaged by the alkaline solution, a few microcapsules are broken during the mixing process. Isothermal calorimetry shows that MPCM addition slows down the reaction rate of both geopolymer and Portland cement paste. The setting times were faster when the temperature was increased. The mechanical properties are reduced when MPCM is added to GPC and PCC, although the compressive strength is adequate for building applications. Microstructural studies show more uniform and undamaged edges in the shell-concrete matrix transition zone of GPC than PCC. The samples cured at 40 \ub0C exhibits more air voids in both GPC and PCC than at 20 \ub0C

AnaLog: Testing Analytical and Deductive Logic Learnability in Language Models

We investigate the extent to which pre-trained language models acquire analytical and deductive logical reasoning capabilities as a side effect of learning word prediction. We present AnaLog, a natural language inference task designed to probe models for these capabilities, controlling for different invalid heuristics the models may adopt instead of learning the desired generalisations. We test four languagemodels on AnaLog, finding that they have all learned, to a different extent, to encode information that is predictive of entailment beyond shallow heuristics such as lexical overlap and grammaticality. We closely analyse the best performing language model and show that while it performs more consistently than other language models across logical connectives and reasoning domains, it still is sensitive to lexical and syntactic variations in the realisation of logical statements