H2O Open Ecosystem for State-of-the-art Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a revolution in AI. However, they also pose many significant risks, such as the presence of biased, private, copyrighted or harmful text. For this reason we need open, transparent and safe solutions. We introduce a complete open-source ecosystem for developing and testing LLMs. The goal of this project is to boost open alternatives to closed-source approaches. We release h2oGPT, a family of fine-tuned LLMs of diverse sizes. We also introduce H2O LLM Studio, a framework and no-code GUI designed for efficient fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment of LLMs using the most recent state-of-the-art techniques. Our code and models are fully open-source. We believe this work helps to boost AI development and make it more accessible, efficient and trustworthy. The demo is available at: https://gpt.h2o.ai/Comment: EMNLP 2023 Demo - ACL Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processin

A Two-Step K-Ar Experiment on Mars: Dating the Diagenetic Formation of Jarosite from Amazonian Groundwaters

Following K-Ar dating of a mudstone and a sandstone, a third sample has been dated by the Curiosity rover exploring Gale Crater. The Mojave 2 mudstone, which contains relatively abundant jarosite, yielded a young K-Ar bulk age of 2.57 ± 0.39 Ga (1σ precision). A two-step heating experiment was implemented in an effort to resolve the K-Ar ages of primary and secondary mineralogical components within the sample. This technique involves measurement of 40Ar released in low-temperature (500°C) and high-temperature (930°C) steps, and a model of the potassium distribution within the mineralogical components of the sample. Using this method, the high-temperature step yields a K-Ar model age of 4.07 ± 0.63 Ga associated with detrital plagioclase, compatible with the age obtained on the Cumberland mudstone by Curiosity. The low-temperature step, associated with jarosite mixed with K-bearing evaporites and/or phyllosilicates, gave a youthful K-Ar model age of 2.12 ± 0.36 Ga. The interpretation of this result is complicated by the potential for argon loss after mineral formation. Comparison with the results on Cumberland and previously published constraints on argon retentivity of the individual phases likely to be present suggests that the formation age of the secondary materials, correcting for plausible extents of argon loss, is still less than 3 Ga, suggesting post-3 Ga aqueous processes occurred in the sediments in Gale Crater. Such a result is inconsistent with K-bearing mineral formation in Gale Lake and instead suggests postdepositional fluid flow at a time after surface fluvial activity on Mars is thought to have largely ceased

Heavy-to-light baryonic form factors at large recoil

We analyze heavy-to-light baryonic form factors at large recoil and derive the scaling behavior of these form factors in the heavy quark limit. It is shown that only one universal form factor is needed to parameterize Lambda_b to p and Lambda_b to Lambda matrix elements in the large recoil limit of light baryons, while hadronic matrix elements of Lambda_b to Sigma transition vanish in the large energy limit of Sigma baryon due to the space-time parity symmetry. The scaling law of the soft form factor eta(P^{\prime} \cdot v), P^{\prime} and v being the momentum of nucleon and the velocity of Lambda_b baryon, responsible for Lambda_b to p transitions is also derived using the nucleon distribution amplitudes in leading conformal spin. In particular, we verify that this scaling behavior is in full agreement with that from light-cone sum rule approach in the heavy-quark limit. With these form factors, we further investigate the Lambda baryon polarization asymmetry alpha in Lambda_b to Lambda gamma and the forward-backward asymmetry A_{FB} in Lambda_b to Lambda l^{+} l^{-}. Both two observables (alpha and A_{FB}) are independent of hadronic form factors in leading power of 1/m_b and in leading order of alpha_s. We also extend the analysis of hadronic matrix elements for Omega_b to Omega transitions to rare Omega_b to Omega gamma and Omega_b to Omega l^{+} l^{-} decays and find that radiative Omega_b to Omega gamma decay is probably the most promising FCNC b to s radiative baryonic decay channel. In addition, it is interesting to notice that the zero-point of forward-backward asymmetry of Omega_b to Omega l^{+} l^{-} is the same as the one for Lambda_b to Lambda l^{+} l^{-} to leading order accuracy provided that the form factors \bar{\zeta}_i (i=3, 4, 5) are numerically as small as indicated from the quark model.Comment: 19 page

Transgene regulation in plants by alternative splicing of a suicide exon

Compared to transcriptional activation, other mechanisms of gene regulation have not been widely exploited for the control of transgenes. One barrier to the general use and application of alternative splicing is that splicing-regulated transgenes have not been shown to be reliably and simply designed. Here, we demonstrate that a cassette bearing a suicide exon can be inserted into a variety of open reading frames (ORFs), generating transgenes whose expression is activated by exon skipping in response to a specific protein inducer. The surprisingly minimal sequence requirements for the maintenance of splicing fidelity and regulation indicate that this splicing cassette can be used to regulate any ORF containing one of the amino acids Glu, Gln or Lys. Furthermore, a single copy of the splicing cassette was optimized by rational design to confer robust gene activation with no background expression in plants. Thus, conditional splicing has the potential to be generally useful for transgene regulation

School environment factors were associated with BMI among adolescents in Xi'an City, China

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>School environment influences students' behaviours. The purpose of this research was to identify school environment factors associated with BMI.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cross-sectional study was conducted among 1792 school-aged adolescents from 30 schools in six districts in Xi'an City in 2004. Height and weight were taken from students by trained field staff. School environment characteristics such as physical factors (school facilities, school shops and fast food outlets in school area), school curricula and policies were collected from school doctors using school environment questionnaire. School environment factors were identified in linear mixed effect models with BMI as outcome and adjusted for socio-demographic factors.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>After adjusted for socio-demographic factors, BMI was associated with the availability of soft drinks at school shops, the availability and the number of western food outlet in the school vicinity. School curricula such as sports-meeting and health education session were also associated with BMI.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Urgent actions are needed to address the obesogenic elements of school environments. Community and school policy makers should make efforts for students to avoid exposure to fast food outlet in school area and soft drinks at school shops, and to improve school curricula to promote healthy behaviours.</p

Assessing the influence of COVID-19 on the shortwave radiative fluxes over the East Asian Marginal Seas

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a widespread reduction in aerosol emissions. Using satellite observations and climate model simulations, we study the underlying mechanisms of the large decreases in solar clear-sky reflection (3.8 W m−2 or 7%) and aerosol optical depth (0.16 or 32%) observed over the East Asian Marginal Seas in March 2020. By separating the impacts from meteorology and emissions in the model simulations, we find that about one-third of the clear-sky anomalies can be attributed to pandemic-related emission reductions, and the rest to weather variability and long-term emission trends. The model is skillful at reproducing the observed interannual variations in solar all-sky reflection, but no COVID-19 signal is discerned. The current observational and modeling capabilities will be critical for monitoring, understanding, and predicting the radiative forcing and climate impacts of the ongoing crisis

First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data

Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signalto- noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of 11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. Although we have found several initial outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried out so far