90 research outputs found
Resolving the ancestry of Austronesian-speaking populations
There are two very different interpretations of the prehistory of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), with genetic evidence invoked in support of both. The “out-of-Taiwan” model proposes a major Late Holocene expansion of Neolithic Austronesian speakers from Taiwan. An alternative, proposing that Late Glacial/postglacial sea-level rises triggered largely autochthonous dispersals, accounts for some otherwise enigmatic genetic patterns, but fails to explain the Austronesian language dispersal. Combining mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), Y-chromosome and genome-wide data, we performed the most comprehensive analysis of the region to date, obtaining highly consistent results across all three systems and allowing us to reconcile the models. We infer a primarily common ancestry for Taiwan/ISEA populations established before the Neolithic, but also detected clear signals of two minor Late Holocene migrations, probably representing Neolithic input from both Mainland Southeast Asia and South China, via Taiwan. This latter may therefore have mediated the Austronesian language dispersal, implying small-scale migration and language shift rather than large-scale expansion
Second law, entropy production, and reversibility in thermodynamics of information
We present a pedagogical review of the fundamental concepts in thermodynamics
of information, by focusing on the second law of thermodynamics and the entropy
production. Especially, we discuss the relationship among thermodynamic
reversibility, logical reversibility, and heat emission in the context of the
Landauer principle and clarify that these three concepts are fundamentally
distinct to each other. We also discuss thermodynamics of measurement and
feedback control by Maxwell's demon. We clarify that the demon and the second
law are indeed consistent in the measurement and the feedback processes
individually, by including the mutual information to the entropy production.Comment: 43 pages, 10 figures. As a chapter of: G. Snider et al. (eds.),
"Energy Limits in Computation: A Review of Landauer's Principle, Theory and
Experiments
Bartonella henselae AS A PUTATIVE CAUSE OF CONGENITAL CHOLESTASIS
SUMMARY Severe anemia and cholestatic hepatitis are associated with bartonella infections. A putative vertical Bartonella henselae infection was defined on the basis of ultrastructural and molecular analyses in a three-year-old child with anemia, jaundice and hepatosplenomegaly since birth. Physicians should consider bartonellosis in patients with anemia and hepatitis of unknown origin
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