Genetic screen in Drosophila muscle identifies autophagy-mediated T-tubule remodeling and a Rab2 role in autophagy.

Transverse (T)-tubules make-up a specialized network of tubulated muscle cell membranes involved in excitation-contraction coupling for power of contraction. Little is known about how T-tubules maintain highly organized structures and contacts throughout the contractile system despite the ongoing muscle remodeling that occurs with muscle atrophy, damage and aging. We uncovered an essential role for autophagy in T-tubule remodeling with genetic screens of a developmentally regulated remodeling program in Drosophila abdominal muscles. Here, we show that autophagy is both upregulated with and required for progression through T-tubule disassembly stages. Along with known mediators of autophagosome-lysosome fusion, our screens uncovered an unexpected shared role for Rab2 with a broadly conserved function in autophagic clearance. Rab2 localizes to autophagosomes and binds to HOPS complex members, suggesting a direct role in autophagosome tethering/fusion. Together, the high membrane flux with muscle remodeling permits unprecedented analysis both of T-tubule dynamics and fundamental trafficking mechanisms

Does Product Type Affect Electronic Word-of-Mouth Richness Effectiveness? Influences of Message Valence and Consumer Knowledge

Drawing on the information richness theory, this study attempts to address how valence of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), product type and consumer knowledge will yield different levels of eWOM richness. The results based on an experimental study suggest that negative eWOM has a stronger effect in producing eWOM information richness than does positive eWOM, and such effect is more pronounced for a leisure farm tour (experience goods) than for digital camera (search goods). The tendency that negative eWOM will provide richer information for the leisure farm tour is more evident for high-knowledge consumers than for low-knowledge consumers. The study’s results caution against the aggravated harm of negative eWOM incurred from the dissatisfactory experience of a leisure farm tour

The screening effects on field enhancement factor of zigzag graphene nanoribbon arrays: A first-principles study

The field screening effect on the electronic and field-emission properties of zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs) has been studied using first-principles calculations. We have systematically investigated the effect of inter-ribbon distance and ribbon width on the work function, field enhancement factor, band gap and edge magnetism of zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs). It is found that the work function of ZGNRs increases rapidly as the inter-ribbon distance Dx increases, which is caused by the positive dipole at the edge of the ribbon. For a given Dx, the work function of ZGNRs decreases as the ribbon width W increases. The wider the width of ribbon, the stronger the effect of inter-ribbon distance on the work function. Using a simple linear interpolation model, we can obtain the work function of ZGNR of any ribbon-width. For the case of Dx < W, the field enhancement factor increases rapidly as the inter-ribbon distance increases. As we further increase Dx, the enhancement factor increases slowly and then tends toward saturation. The inter-ribbon distance of ZGNRs can modulate the magnitude of the band gap and edge magnetism. These observations above can all be explained by the screening effect

An Effective Mixture-Of-Experts Approach For Code-Switching Speech Recognition Leveraging Encoder Disentanglement

With the massive developments of end-to-end (E2E) neural networks, recent years have witnessed unprecedented breakthroughs in automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the codeswitching phenomenon remains a major obstacle that hinders ASR from perfection, as the lack of labeled data and the variations between languages often lead to degradation of ASR performance. In this paper, we focus exclusively on improving the acoustic encoder of E2E ASR to tackle the challenge caused by the codeswitching phenomenon. Our main contributions are threefold: First, we introduce a novel disentanglement loss to enable the lower-layer of the encoder to capture inter-lingual acoustic information while mitigating linguistic confusion at the higher-layer of the encoder. Second, through comprehensive experiments, we verify that our proposed method outperforms the prior-art methods using pretrained dual-encoders, meanwhile having access only to the codeswitching corpus and consuming half of the parameterization. Third, the apparent differentiation of the encoders' output features also corroborates the complementarity between the disentanglement loss and the mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture.Comment: ICASSP 202

A Dataset and Baselines for Measuring and Predicting the Music Piece Memorability

Nowadays, humans are constantly exposed to music, whether through voluntary streaming services or incidental encounters during commercial breaks. Despite the abundance of music, certain pieces remain more memorable and often gain greater popularity. Inspired by this phenomenon, we focus on measuring and predicting music memorability. To achieve this, we collect a new music piece dataset with reliable memorability labels using a novel interactive experimental procedure. We then train baselines to predict and analyze music memorability, leveraging both interpretable features and audio mel-spectrograms as inputs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore music memorability using data-driven deep learning-based methods. Through a series of experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate that while there is room for improvement, predicting music memorability with limited data is possible. Certain intrinsic elements, such as higher valence, arousal, and faster tempo, contribute to memorable music. As prediction techniques continue to evolve, real-life applications like music recommendation systems and music style transfer will undoubtedly benefit from this new area of research

Mass-accretion, spectral, and photometric properties of T Tauri stars in Taurus based on TESS and LAMOST

We present the analysis of 16 classical T Taur stars using LAMOST and TESS data, investigating spectral properties, photometric variations, and mass-accretion rates. All 16 stars exhibit emissions in H$\alpha$ lines, from which the average mass-accretion rate of $1.76\times10^{-9}~M_{\odot}yr^{-1}$ is derived. Two of the stars, DL Tau and Haro 6-13, show mass-accretion bursts simultaneously in TESS, ASAS-SN, and/or ZTF survey. Based on these observations, we find that the mass-accretion rates of DL Tau and Haro 6-13 reach their maximums of $2.5 \times 10^{-8}~M_{\odot}yr^{-1}$ and $2 \times 10^{-10}~M_{\odot}yr^{-1}$ during the TESS observation, respectively. We detect thirteen flares among these stars. The flare frequency distribution shows that the CTTSs' flare activity is not only dominated by strong flares with high energy but much more active than those of solar-type and young low-mass stars. By comparing the variability classes reported in the literature, we find that the transition timescale between different classes of variability in CTTSs, such as from Stochastic (S) to Bursting (B) or from quasi-periodic symmetric (QPS) to quasi-periodic dipping (QPD), may range from 1.6 to 4 years. We observe no significant correlation between inclination and mass-accretion rates derived from the emission indicators. This suggests that inner disk properties may be more important than that of outer disk. Finally, we find a relatively significant positive correlation between the asymmetric metric "M" and the cold disk inclination compared to the literature. A weak negative correlation between the periodicity metric "Q" value and inclination has been also found.Comment: 39 pages, 22 figures, 8 table

Using Barthel Index and Performance Status Scale to predict inpatient bowel preparation quality

Purpose: Bowel preparation, cecal intubation rate, and adenoma detection rate influence the quality of colonoscopy and interval cancer rate. Adequate bowel preparation is first and essential step for not only procedure safety but also lesions defection ability. According to literature, several factors affect inpatient bowel preparation such as age, socioeconomic class, opiate/ tricyclic antidepressants use, and physical status classification system by American society of anesthesiologists. However, there was still lack of general predicting model. Under hypothesis that patient s activity may be related to bowel movement then influence the bowel preparation. Thus we tried to predict inpatient bowel preparation by activity scoring system: Barthel index and performance status scale by eastern cooperative oncology group that routinely assessed in our inpatient nursing work. This study was aimed to evaluate predicting power of Barthel index and performance status scale by eastern cooperative oncology group for inpatient bowel preparation. We also investigated the cutoff values of scoring systems for inadequate bowel preparation. Methods: All consecutive patients hospitalized for colonoscopy at the gastroenterology ward between 2016 May to 2016 June were retrospectively analyzed. We used Aronchick scale for bowel preparation evaluation. The level excellent and good were defined as adequate; fair and poor were defined as inadequate. All patients activity statuses were assessed by Barthel index and performance status scale by eastern cooperative oncology group. The results were tested by receiver operating characteristic curve. Final the cutoffs were calculated by Youden\u27s index. Results: During the period of study, 100 hospitalized patients were retrospectively reviewed. The adequate bowel preparation rate was 70%. In addition, adenoma detection rate was 35%; cecal intubation rate was 99%. In receiver operating characteristic curve, area under curve of Barthel index was 0.798; area under curve of performance status scale by eastern cooperative oncology group was 0.824. Both of them were good discrimination for bowel preparation. After Youden\u27s index calculation, we found 82 was cutoff for Barthel index and 1 was for performance status scale by eastern cooperative oncology group. Conclusion: Both Barthel index and performance status scale by eastern cooperative oncology group were valuable to predicting inpatient bowel preparation. In daily practice, cutoffs let medical team pay more attention to possible inadequate bowel preparation