Bilinear effect in complex systems

The distribution of the lifetime of Chinese dynasties (as well as that of the British Isles and Japan) in a linear Zipf plot is found to consist of two straight lines intersecting at a transition point. This two-section piecewise-linear distribution is different from the power law or the stretched exponent distribution, and is called the Bilinear Effect for short. With assumptions mimicking the organization of ancient Chinese regimes, a 3-layer network model is constructed. Numerical results of this model show the bilinear effect, providing a plausible explanation of the historical data. Bilinear effect in two other social systems is presented, indicating that such a piecewise-linear effect is widespread in social systems.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Multiple Lines of Evidence from Mitochondrial Genomes Resolve Phylogenetic Relationships of Parasitic Wasps in Braconidae

The rapid increase in the number of mitochondrial genomes in public databases provides opportunities for insect phylogenetic studies; but it also provides challenges because of gene rearrangements and variable substitution rates among both lineages and sites. Typically, phylogenetic studies use mitochondrial sequence data but exclude other features of the mitochondrial genome from analyses. Here, we undertook large-scale sequencing of mitochondrial genomes from a worldwide collection of specimens belonging to Braconidae, one of the largest families of Metazoa. The strand-asymmetry of base composition in the mitochondrial genomes of braconids is reversed, providing evidence for monophyly of the Braconidae. We have reconstructed a backbone phylogeny of the major lineages of Braconidae from gene order of the mitochondrial genomes. Standard phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequences provided strong support for both Cyclostomes and Noncyclostomes. Four subfamily complexes, that is, helconoid, euphoroid, sigalphoid, and microgastroid, within the Noncyclostomes were reconstructed robustly, the first three of which formed a monophyletic group sister to the last one. Aphidiinae was recovered as a lineage sister to other groups of Cyclostomes, while the Ichneutinae was recovered as paraphyletic. Separate analyses of the subdivided groups showed congruent relationships, employing different matrices and methods, for the internal nodes of the Cyclostomes and the microgastroid complex of subfamilies. This research, using multiple lines of evidence from mitochondrial genomes, illustrates multiple uses of mitochondrial genomes for phylogenetic inference in Braconidae

EdgeQAT: Entropy and Distribution Guided Quantization-Aware Training for the Acceleration of Lightweight LLMs on the Edge

Despite the remarkable strides of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various fields, the wide applications of LLMs on edge devices are limited due to their massive parameters and computations. To address this, quantization is commonly adopted to generate lightweight LLMs with efficient computations and fast inference. However, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) methods dramatically degrade in quality when quantizing weights, activations, and KV cache together to below 8 bits. Besides, many Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) works quantize model weights, leaving the activations untouched, which do not fully exploit the potential of quantization for inference acceleration on the edge. In this paper, we propose EdgeQAT, the Entropy and Distribution Guided QAT for the optimization of lightweight LLMs to achieve inference acceleration on Edge devices. We first identify that the performance drop of quantization primarily stems from the information distortion in quantized attention maps, demonstrated by the different distributions in quantized query and key of the self-attention mechanism. Then, the entropy and distribution guided QAT is proposed to mitigate the information distortion. Moreover, we design a token importance-aware adaptive method to dynamically quantize the tokens with different bit widths for further optimization and acceleration. Our extensive experiments verify the substantial improvements with our framework across various datasets. Furthermore, we achieve an on-device speedup of up to 2.37x compared with its FP16 counterparts across multiple edge devices, signaling a groundbreaking advancement.Comment: Preprin

Anxiety and depression mediate the relationship between digestive tract conditions and oral health-related quality of life in orthodontic patients

BackgroundAnxiety and depression are common psychological problems in orthodontic patients whose diet habits and oral health status change frequently during treatment. However, relationships between anxiety and depression, digestive tract condition, and impaired oral health-related quality of life remain unknown.Materials and methodsIn this study, clinical assessments, including anxiety, depression, digestive tract condition, and oral health-related quality of life, were collected from 769 outpatients in the orthodontic department using three self-reported questionnaires. Correlation analysis was used to investigate the relationships among different clinical assessments. A chained mediation analysis model was further conducted to explore the direct and indirect effects of these various clinical factors.ResultsChanges in digestive tract conditions were positively correlated with the psychological status and oral health-related quality of life. Anxiety and depression partially mediated the relationship between them, and the indirect effect was 0.68 (30%), of which the mediation effect of anxiety accounted for 56%.ConclusionAnxiety and depression mediate the relationship between gastrointestinal conditions and oral health. In particular, anxiety seems to play a significant mediating role. Our findings indicate that psychological status must be paid more attention to in future clinical practices and supervision for digestive tract symptoms of orthodontic patients

Nucleic acid aptamer-guided cancer therapeutics and diagnostics: the next generation of cancer medicine

Conventional anticancer therapies, such as chemo- and/or radio-therapy are often unable to completely eradicate cancers due to abnormal tumor microenvironment, as well as increased drug/radiation resistance. More effective therapeutic strategies for overcoming these obstacles are urgently in demand. Aptamers, as chemical antibodies that bind to targets with high affinity and specificity, are a promising new and novel agent for both cancer diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Aptamer-based cancer cell targeting facilitates the development of active targeting in which aptamer-mediated drug delivery could provide promising anticancer outcomes. This review is to update the current progress of aptamer-based cancer diagnosis and aptamer-mediated active targeting for cancer therapy in vivo, exploring the potential of this novel form of targeted cancer therapy

Dbh+ catecholaminergic cardiomyocytes contribute to the structure and function of the cardiac conduction system in murine heart

The heterogeneity of functional cardiomyocytes arises during heart development, which is essential to the complex and highly coordinated cardiac physiological function. Yet the biological and physiological identities and the origin of the specialized cardiomyocyte populations have not been fully comprehended. Here we report a previously unrecognised population of cardiomyocytes expressing Dbhgene encoding dopamine beta-hydroxylase in murine heart. We determined how these myocytes are distributed across the heart by utilising advanced single-cell and spatial transcriptomic analyses, genetic fate mapping and molecular imaging with computational reconstruction. We demonstrated that they form the key functional components of the cardiac conduction system by using optogenetic electrophysiology and conditional cardiomyocyte Dbh gene deletion models. We revealed their close relationship with sympathetic innervation during cardiac conduction system formation. Our study thus provides new insights into the development and heterogeneity of the mammalian cardiac conduction system by revealing a new cardiomyocyte population with potential catecholaminergic endocrine function

Superior performance of aptamer in tumor penetration over antibody : implication of aptamer-based theranostics in solid tumors

Insufficient penetration of therapeutic agents into tumor tissues results in inadequate drug distribution and lower intracellular concentration of drugs, leading to the increase of drug resistance and resultant failure of cancer treatment. Targeted drug delivery to solid tumors followed by complete drug penetration and durable retention will significantly improve clinical outcomes of cancer therapy. Monoclonal antibodies have been commonly used in clinic for cancer treatment, but their limitation of penetrating into tumor tissues still remains because of their large size. Aptamers, as "chemical antibodies", are 15-20 times smaller than antibodies. To explore whether aptamers are superior to antibodies in terms of tumor penetration, we carried out the first comprehensive study to compare the performance of an EpCAM aptamer with an EpCAM antibody in theranostic applications. Penetration and retention were studied in in vitro three-dimensional tumorspheres, in vivo live animal imaging and mouse colorectal cancer xenograft model. We found that the EpCAM aptamer can not only effectively penetrate into the tumorsphere cores but can also be retained by tumor sphere cells for at least 24 h, while limited tumor penetration by EpCAM antibody was observed after 4 h incubation. As observed from in vivo live animal imaging, EpCAM aptamers displayed a maximum tumor uptake at around 10 min followed by a rapid clearance after 80 min, while the signal of peak uptake and disappearance of antibody appeared at 3 h and 6 h after intravenous injection, respectively. The signal of PEGylated EpCAM aptamers in xenograft tumors was sustained for 26 h, which was 4.3-fold longer than that of the EpCAM antibody. Consistently, there were 1.67-fold and 6.6-fold higher accumulation of PEGylated aptamer in xenograft tumors than that of antibody, at 3 h and 24 h after intravenous administration, respectively. In addition, the aptamer achieved at least a 4-time better tumor penetration in xenograft tumors than that of the antibody at a 200 μm distances from the blood vessels 3 h after intravenous injection. Taken together, these data indicate that aptmers are superior to antibodies in cancer theranostics due to their better tumor penetration, more homogeneous distribution and longer retention in tumor sites. Thus, aptamers are promising agents for targeted tumor therapeutics and molecular imaging

Usability Assessment of a Cable-Driven Exoskeletal Robot for Hand Rehabilitation

Study design: Case series.Background: Robot-assisted rehabilitation mediated by exoskeletal devices is a popular topic of research. The biggest difficulty in the development of rehabilitation robots is the consideration of the clinical needs. This study investigated the usability of a novel cable-driven exoskeletal robot specifically designed for hand rehabilitation.Methods: The study consists of three steps, including prototype development, spasticity observation, and usability evaluation. First, we developed the prototype robot DexoHand to manipulate the patient's fingers based on the clinical needs and the cable-driven concept established in our previous work. Second, we applied DexoHand to patients with different levels of spasticity. Finally, we obtained the system usability scale (SUS) and assessed its usability.Results: Two healthy subjects were recruited in the pre-test, and 18 patients with stroke and four healthy subjects were recruited in the formal test for usability. The total SUS score obtained from the patients and healthy subjects was 94.77 ± 2.98 (n = 22), indicating an excellent level of usability. The satisfaction score was 4.74 ± 0.29 (n = 22), revealing high satisfaction with DexoHand. The tension profile measured by the cables showed the instantaneous force used to manipulate fingers among different muscle tone groups.Conclusions:DexoHand meets the clinical needs with excellent usability, satisfaction, and reliable tension force monitoring, yielding a feasible platform for robot-assisted hand rehabilitation