1,062 research outputs found
Demonstrating nonlocality induced teleportation through Majorana bound states in a semiconductor nanowire
It was predicted by Tewari [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 100}, 027001 (2008)] that a
teleportationlike electron transfer phenomenon is one of the novel consequences
of the existence of Majorana fermion, because of the inherently nonlocal
nature. In this work we consider a concrete realization and measurement scheme
for this interesting behavior, based on a setup consisting of a pair of quantum
dots which are tunnel-coupled to a semiconductor nanowire and are jointly
measured by two point-contact detectors. We analyze the teleportation dynamics
in the presence of measurement backaction and discuss how the teleportation
events can be identified from the current trajectories of strong response
detectors.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
MARCH9 Suppresses Lung Adenocarcinoma Progression by Downregulating ICAM-1
Background/Aims: To investigate the clinical significance and functional mechanisms of membrane-associated RING-CH protein 9 (MARCH9) in lung adenocarcinoma (LAC). Methods: Immunohistochemistry staining was performed to explore the expression of MARCH9 in LAC tissues and adjacent normal lung tissues. Patients’ prognosis was evaluated using overall survival. The prognostic role of MARCH9 was tested with univariate and multivariate analyses. To confirm the effect of MARCH9 in cell proliferation and invasion, overexpression of MARCH9 was induced in two LAC cell lines. Cell cycle, apoptosis, migration, invasion, and immunoprecipitation experiments were performed to further explore the signaling pathways involved. Results: Analysis of a series of 143 clinical samples revealed that MARCH9 was down-regulated in tumor tissues compared with normal lung tissues, and this was closely associated with lymph node metastasis (P = 0.004). Univariate and multivariate analyses indicated that MARCH9 was an independent prognostic biomarker for LAC; low MARCH9 expression indicated poor overall survival. Cellular studies with A549 and H1299 cells demonstrated that MARCH9 can attenuate tumor migration and invasion but had little effect on cell cycle or apoptosis. Moreover, an interaction between MARCH9 and ICAM-1 protein was identified, and overexpression of MARCH9 was found to attenuate the oncogenic effect of ICAM-1, suggesting that MARCH9 may inhibit tumor progression by downregulating ICAM-1 signaling. Conclusion: MARCH9 downregulation in LAC tissues correlated with poor clinical outcomes. MARCH9 may serve as a novel biomarker and potential therapeutic target for LAC
Scaling of global input–output networks
Examining scaling patterns of networks can help understand how structural features relate to the behavior of the networks. Input–output networks consist of industries as nodes and inter-industrial exchanges of products as links. Previous studies consider limited measures for node strengths and link weights, and also ignore the impact of dataset choice. We consider a comprehensive set of indicators in this study that are important in economic analysis, and also examine the impact of dataset choice, by studying input–output networks in individual countries and the entire world. Results show that Burr, Log-Logistic, Log-normal, and Weibull distributions can better describe scaling patterns of global input–output networks. We also find that dataset choice has limited impacts on the observed scaling patterns. Our findings can help examine the quality of economic statistics, estimate missing data in economic statistics, and identify key nodes and links in input–output networks to support economic policymaking
High-Quality Entity Segmentation
Dense image segmentation tasks e.g., semantic, panoptic) are useful for image
editing, but existing methods can hardly generalize well in an in-the-wild
setting where there are unrestricted image domains, classes, and image
resolution and quality variations. Motivated by these observations, we
construct a new entity segmentation dataset, with a strong focus on
high-quality dense segmentation in the wild. The dataset contains images
spanning diverse image domains and entities, along with plentiful
high-resolution images and high-quality mask annotations for training and
testing. Given the high-quality and -resolution nature of the dataset, we
propose CropFormer which is designed to tackle the intractability of
instance-level segmentation on high-resolution images. It improves mask
prediction by fusing high-res image crops that provide more fine-grained image
details and the full image. CropFormer is the first query-based Transformer
architecture that can effectively fuse mask predictions from multiple image
views, by learning queries that effectively associate the same entities across
the full image and its crop. With CropFormer, we achieve a significant AP gain
of on the challenging entity segmentation task. Furthermore, CropFormer
consistently improves the accuracy of traditional segmentation tasks and
datasets. The dataset and code will be released at
http://luqi.info/entityv2.github.io/.Comment: The project webiste: http://luqi.info/entityv2.github.io
The new genetic environment of cfr on plasmid pBS-02 in a Bacillus strain
Sir,
The gene cfr, encoding a 23S rRNA methyltransferase, confers resistance to five chemically unrelated antimicrobial classes, including phenicols, lincosamides, oxazolidinones, pleuromutilins and streptogramin A (PhLOPSA), and has been observed mainly in staphylococcal isolates over the past decade.1–3 Our previous study reported a cfr-carrying plasmid, pBS-01, in a novel strain (BS-01) of a Bacillus species isolated from a pig farm in China.4 In our routine surveillance study on antimicrobial resistance in farm animals in 2010, another florfenicol and chloramphenicol-resistant Bacillus species strain (named BS-02) from swine faeces was identified. Gram staining, sequence analysis of the 16S rRNA and API 50CH testing associated with the API 20E system (bioMérieux, France) showed that BS-02 had an identical profile to that of strain BS-01, which suggested that BS-02 also belongs to a novel Bacillus species. Despite their identical profiles, more than six PFGE band differences were observed between BS-01 and BS-02 (data not shown), indicating that they belong to different clonal types of the same species
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