Flank gland-secreted putative chemosignals pertaining to photoperiod, endocrine states, and sociosexual behavior in golden hamsters

Behavioral studies have shown that flank glands are involved in chemical communication in golden hamsters Mesocricetus auratus but little chemical analysis has been conducted on volatiles arising from these glands. Using gas chromatography- mass spectrometry, we detected compounds from the flank glands of males, only eight of which were also produced in females. Based on these chemical data we performed a number of further experiments. By manipulating light we found that males exposed to short-photoperiods developed smaller flank glands than those exposed to long-photoperiods. Six flank gland volatiles reduced in relative abundance, which possibly coded for reproductive status of males of this seasonally breeding hamster species. Through dyadic encounters, we were able to induce the formation of dominant-subordinate relationships and show that two glandular compounds became high in relative abundance and may function as dominance pheromones. Castration eliminated all male-specific compounds resulting from flank glands, but bilateral ovariectomies only affected one compound in females. Once these ovariectomized females were treated with testosterone, their glandular compounds resembled those of males, suggesting these compounds are under the main control of androgen. Two female putative pheromones, tetradecanoic acid and hexadecanoic acid, were used in binary choice tests and were both found to attract males over females. Applying a solution of these pheromone compounds to adult males also suppressed their agonistic behavior

Cross-Utterance Conditioned VAE for Non-Autoregressive Text-to-Speech

Modelling prosody variation is critical for synthesizing natural and expressive speech in end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems. In this paper, a cross-utterance conditional VAE (CUC-VAE) is proposed to estimate a posterior probability distribution of the latent prosody features for each phoneme by conditioning on acoustic features, speaker information, and text features obtained from both past and future sentences. At inference time, instead of the standard Gaussian distribution used by VAE, CUC-VAE allows sampling from an utterance-specific prior distribution conditioned on cross-utterance information, which allows the prosody features generated by the TTS system to be related to the context and is more similar to how humans naturally produce prosody. The performance of CUC-VAE is evaluated via a qualitative listening test for naturalness, intelligibility and quantitative measurements, including word error rates and the standard deviation of prosody attributes. Experimental results on LJ-Speech and LibriTTS data show that the proposed CUC-VAE TTS system improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins

Animal personality can modulate sexual conflict over offspring provisioning

Sexual conflict over parental investment is widespread among species with biparental care. Studies have indicated that a high degree of behavioural similarity between the two parents can increase offspring survival; however, it remains unclear how sexual conflict over parental care is resolved. In this study, we examined whether similarity of personality traits between the two parents plays an important role in affecting the provisioning behaviour of each sex in a wild population of the chestnut thrush, Turdus rubrocanus. First, as expected, the mating pairs with more similar personality traits had higher provisioning rates than those pairs with dissimilar traits. Moreover, we found that the similarity of personality traits can modulate the sexual conflict over provisioning in this species, as both parents with more similar partners had relatively higher and less divergent provisioning rates. A partner removal experiment revealed how the sole female or male parent responded when the level of conflict over care increased (the removed partner does not provide any care). The majority of males always reduced their provisioning investment, while females’ decisions depended on the degree of similarity with their partners. Females compensated by provisioning more frequently in pairs of similar personality traits (i.e. accepting a high level of conflict), but reduced their provisioning investment in extremely dissimilar pairs. Our results promote a better understanding of the resolution of sexual conflict over provisioning and highlight the evolutionary significance of mating with similar partners based on certain personality traits

Retinal laser photocoagulation and intravitreal injection of anti-VEGF for hemorrhagic retinal arterial microaneurysm

AIM: To evaluate the efficacy of retinal laser photocoagulation and intravitreal injection of anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) for hemorrhagic retinal arterial macroaneurysm (RAM). METHODS: This was a retrospective clinical study. Patients with hemorrhagic RAM were divided into 4 groups defined by different treatments: a retinal laser photocoagulation therapy monotherapy group, an anti-VEGF intravitreal injection monotherapy group, a laser and anti-VEGF combination therapy group, and an observation group. Visual acuity (VA), central macular thickness (CMT), and retinal hemorrhage area (RHA) were collected. RESULTS: Forty-seven eyes of 47 patients were enrolled. VA improved and had a significant difference between baseline and final in each treatment group (logMAR; laser group: 1.90±0.53 vs 1.05±0.63, P<0.001; anti-VEGF group: 1.75±0.63 vs 1.12±0.54, P=0.009; combination group: 1.76±0.38 vs 1.01±0.52, P<0.001); however, VA decreased and had no significant difference in observation group (1.63±0.51 vs 1.76±0.61, P=0.660). CMT decreased and had a significant difference between baseline and final in each group (laser group: 815.16±310.83 vs 252.05±83.90 μm, P<0.001; anti-VEGF group: 725.00±290.79 vs 203.56±69.89 μm, P=0.001; combination group: 595.50±186.51 vs 253.13±55.06 μm, P=0.001; observation group: 758.88±195.65 vs 267.00±120.90 μm, P=0.001). RHA were 28.99±28.15, 25.94±11.58, 19.64±8.97, and 27.45±13.76 mm2 in laser group, anti-VEGF group, combination group and observation group, respectively. RHA was statistically correlated with final VA (P=0.032) in the observation group. CONCLUSION: Both laser and anti-VEGF treatments are effective for hemorrhagic RAM. Combination therapy reduces the number of injections of anti-VEGF. RHA is a visual prognosis predictor in the natural history of hemorrhagic RAM

Operando real-space imaging of a structural phase transformation in a high-voltage electrode

Discontinuous solid-solid phase transformations play a pivotal role in determining properties of rechargeable battery electrodes. By leveraging operando Bragg Coherent Diffractive Imaging (BCDI), we investigate the discontinuous phase transformation in LixNi0.5Mn1.5O4 within a fully operational battery. Throughout Li-intercalation, we directly observe the nucleation and growth of the Li-rich phase within the initially charged Li-poor phase in a 500 nm particle. Supported by the microelasticity model, the operando imaging unveils an evolution from a curved coherent to planar semi-coherent interface driven by dislocation dynamics. We hypothesize these dislocations exhibit a glissile motion that facilitates interface migration without diffusion of host ions, leaving the particle defect-free post-transformation. Our data indicates negligible kinetic limitations impacting the transformation kinetics, even at discharge rates as fast as C/2. This study underscores BCDI's capability to provide operando insights into nanoscale phase transformations, offering valuable guidance for electrochemical materials design and optimization

Catalyst Performance Studies on the Guerbet Reaction in a Continuous Flow Reactor Using Mono- and Bi-Metallic Cu-Ni Porous Metal Oxides

Higher alcohols like 1-butanol are considered important biofuels with superior properties compared to the more readily available bio-ethanol. An attractive route to prepare 1-butanol from ethanol is the Guerbet reaction. We here report the use of hydrotalcite-derived mono- (Cu-PMO or Ni-PMO) and bi-metallic (CuNi-PMO) porous metal oxide catalysts for the Guerbet coupling of ethanol to 1-butanol in a continuous flow reactor (320 °C, 0.1 MPa, LHSV = 15 mL g−1 h−1) at extended times on stream (~160 h). Two distinct regimes with different product distributions were observed for the Cu-PMO and CuNi-PMO catalyst with time on stream. At the start of the run, the initial conversion of ethanol dropped from about 85% to less than 20% after 60 h and acetaldehyde was the main product (regime 1). At prolonged times on stream (60–160 h), fairly constant low conversions of ethanol (14%) were observed and 1-butanol was the main product (regime 2). Performance of the monometallic Cu-PMO catalyst in terms of 1-butanol yield and stability was lower compared to the bi-metallic CuNi-PMO. Detailed catalyst characterization studies (XRD, H2-TPR, sorption of acrylic acid, TGA, TEM, HAADF-STEM, and EDS mapping) on both fresh and spent CuNi-PMO taken at various times on stream was performed to determine the changes in catalyst morphology and composition during a run, and particularly to obtain information on changes in catalyst structure operating in regime 1 or 2. The change in chemoselectivity is in line with an increase in basicity of the catalyst at extended runtimes

2-Amino-4-(3-fluoro­phen­yl)-6-(naphthalen-1-yl)pyridine-3-carbonitrile

There are two independent mol­ecules in the asymmetric unit of the title compound, C22H14FN3, which differ slightly in the relative orientations of the naphthyl and phenyl groups with respect to the pyridyl ring framework. In one mol­ecule, the naphthyl ring system and the phenyl ring form dihedral of angles 56.50 (2) and 48.23 (3)°, respectively, with the pyridyl ring plane. In the other mol­ecule, the corresponding dihedral angles are 50.01 (2) and 51.1 (3)°, respectively. In the crystal, inter­molecular N—H⋯N hydrogen bonds connect the independent mol­ecules into dimers