Lateglacial and Holocene climate change in the NE Tibetan Plateau : Reconciling divergent proxies of Asian summer monsoon variability

The nature of Holocene Asian summer monsoon (ASM) evolution documented by diverse natural archives remains controversial, with a contentious issue being whether or not a strong Asian summer monsoon prevailed during the early Holocene. Here we present sequences of multiple proxies measured in sediment cores from Genggahai Lake in the NE Tibetan Plateau (NETP). The results suggest that a higher lake level and relatively lower terrestrial vegetation cover occurred synchronously during the early Holocene (11.3–8.6 kyr cal BP), compared with the period from 8.6 to 6.9 kyr cal BP. This finding clearly reflects the existence of different hydroclimatic conditions between the lake and its catchment due to diverse driving mechanisms. The early Holocene high stand of the lake, as demonstrated by the stratigraphic variability of the remains of aquatic biota, may have responded to the strengthened ASM and increased monsoonal precipitation; the relatively low vegetation cover in the marginal region of the Asian monsoon during the early Holocene, and the coeval widespread active sand dune mobility in both the NE Tibetan Plateau and NE China, most likely resulted from a low level of effective moisture due to high evaporation, and hence they cannot be interpreted as evidence of a weak ASM. Our results potentially reconcile the current divergent interpretations of various proxy climate records from the region. Our findings suggest that the ASM evolution was characterized by a consistent pattern across the monsoonal regions, as indicated by the oxygen isotope record of Chinese speleothems.Peer reviewe

Resveratrol Promotes Diabetic Wound Healing via SIRT1-FOXO1-c-Myc Signaling Pathway-Mediated Angiogenesis

Background/Aims: Diabetic non-healing skin ulcers represent a serious challenge in clinical practice, in which the hyperglycemia-induced disturbance of angiogenesis, and endothelial dysfunction play a crucial role. Resveratrol (RES), a silent information regulator 1 (SIRT1) agonist, can improve endothelial function and has strong pro-angiogenic properties, and has thus become a research focus for the treatment of diabetic non-healing skin ulcers; however, the underlying mechanism by which RES regulates these processes remains unclear. Therefore, the present study was intended to determine if RES exerts its observed protective role in diabetic wound healing by alleviating hyperglycemia-induced endothelial dysfunction and the disturbance of angiogenesis.Methods: We investigated the effects of RES on cell migration, cell proliferation, apoptosis, tube formation, and the underlying molecular mechanisms in 33 mM high glucose-stimulated human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) by semi-quantitative RT-PCR, western blot analysis, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) staining, and immunofluorescence in vitro. We further explored the role of RES on endothelial dysfunction and wound healing disturbance in db/db mice by TUNEL staining, immunofluorescence, and photography in vivo.Results: We observed an obvious inhibition of hyperglycemia-triggered endothelial dysfunction and a disturbance of angiogenesis, followed by the promotion of diabetic wound healing via RES, along with restoration of the activity of the hyperglycemia-impaired SIRT1 signaling pathway. Pretreatment with EX-527, a SIRT1 inhibitor, abolished the RES-mediated endothelial protection and pro-angiogenesis action, and then delayed diabetic wound healing. Furthermore, examination of the overexpression of forkhead box O1 (FOXO1), a transcription factor substrate of SIRT1, in HUVECs and db/db mice revealed that RES activated SIRT1 to restore hyperglycemia-triggered endothelial dysfunction and disturbance of angiogenesis, followed by the promotion of diabetic wound healing in a c-Myc-dependent manner. Pretreatment with 10058-F4, a c-Myc inhibitor, repressed RES-mediated endothelial protection, angiogenesis, and diabetic wound healing.Conclusion: Our findings indicate that the positive role of RES in diabetic wound healing via its SIRT1-dependent endothelial protection and pro-angiogenic effects involves the inhibition of FOXO1 and the de-repression of c-Myc expression

Unsupervised Summarization for Chat Logs with Topic-Oriented Ranking and Context-Aware Auto-Encoders

Automatic chat summarization can help people quickly grasp important information from numerous chat messages. Unlike conventional documents, chat logs usually have fragmented and evolving topics. In addition, these logs contain a quantity of elliptical and interrogative sentences, which make the chat summarization highly context dependent. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised framework called RankAE to perform chat summarization without employing manually labeled data. RankAE consists of a topic-oriented ranking strategy that selects topic utterances according to centrality and diversity simultaneously, as well as a denoising auto-encoder that is carefully designed to generate succinct but context-informative summaries based on the selected utterances. To evaluate the proposed method, we collect a large-scale dataset of chat logs from a customer service environment and build an annotated set only for model evaluation. Experimental results show that RankAE significantly outperforms other unsupervised methods and is able to generate high-quality summaries in terms of relevance and topic coverage.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2021, 9 page

A PiggyBac-based recessive screening method to identify pluripotency regulators.

Phenotype driven genetic screens allow unbiased exploration of the genome to discover new biological regulators. Bloom syndrome gene (Blm) deficient embryonic stem (ES) cells provide an opportunity for recessive screening due to frequent loss of heterozygosity. We describe a strategy for isolating regulators of mammalian pluripotency based on conversion to homozygosity of PiggyBac gene trap insertions combined with stringent selection for differentiation resistance. From a screen of 2000 mutants we obtained a disruptive integration in the Tcf3 gene. Homozygous Tcf3 mutants showed impaired differentiation and enhanced self-renewal. This phenotype was reverted in a dosage sensitive manner by excision of one or both copies of the gene trap. These results provide new evidence confirming that Tcf3 is a potent negative regulator of pluripotency and validate a forward screening methodology to identify modulators of pluripotent stem cell biology

Topic-Oriented Spoken Dialogue Summarization for Customer Service with Saliency-Aware Topic Modeling

In a customer service system, dialogue summarization can boost service efficiency by automatically creating summaries for long spoken dialogues in which customers and agents try to address issues about specific topics. In this work, we focus on topic-oriented dialogue summarization, which generates highly abstractive summaries that preserve the main ideas from dialogues. In spoken dialogues, abundant dialogue noise and common semantics could obscure the underlying informative content, making the general topic modeling approaches difficult to apply. In addition, for customer service, role-specific information matters and is an indispensable part of a summary. To effectively perform topic modeling on dialogues and capture multi-role information, in this work we propose a novel topic-augmented two-stage dialogue summarizer (TDS) jointly with a saliency-aware neural topic model (SATM) for topic-oriented summarization of customer service dialogues. Comprehensive studies on a real-world Chinese customer service dataset demonstrated the superiority of our method against several strong baselines.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2021, 9 page

Moisture Changes in the Northern Xinjiang Basin Over the Past 2400 years as Documented in Pollen Records of Jili Lake

Regional humidity is important for terrestrial ecosystem development, while it differs from region to region in inland Asia, knowledge of past moisture changes in the lower basin of northern Xinjiang remainly largely unclear. Based on a pollen record from Jili Lake, the Artemisia/(Amaranthaceae + Ephedra) (Ar/(Am + E)) ratio, as an index of regional humidity, has recorded four relatively dry phases: 1) 400 BCE to 1 CE, 2) the Roman Warm Period (RWP; c. 1–400 CE), 3) the Medieval Warm Period (MWP; c. 850–1200 CE) and 4) the Current Warm Period (CWP; since 1850 CE). In contrast, the Dark Age Cold Period (DACP; c. 400–850 CE) and the Little Ice Age (LIA; c. 1200–1850 CE) were relatively wet. Lower lake levels in a relatively humid climate background indicated by higher aquatic pollen (Typha and Sparganium) after c. 1700 CE are likely the result of intensified irrigation for agriculture in the catchment as documented in historical records. The pollen Ar/(Am + E) ratio also recorded a millennial-scale wetting trend from 1 CE to 1550 CE which is concomitant with a long-term cooling recorded in the Northern Hemisphere

Morphology and SSU rRNA Gene Sequences of Three Marine Ciliates from Yellow Sea, China, Including One New Species, Uronema heteromarinum nov. spec. (Ciliophora, Scuticociliatida)

The morphology, infraciliature, and silverline system of three marine scuticociliates, Uronema marinum Dujardin, 1841, U. heteromarinum nov. spec. and Pleuronema setigerum Calkins, 1902, isolated from coastal waters off Qingdao, China, were investigated using living observation and silver impregnation methods. Due to the great confusion in the species definition of the well-known species U. marinum, we have documented a detailed discussion/comparison and believe that most of the confusion is due to the fact that at least 2 closely-related sibling morphotypes exist which are often not recognized. Based on the data available, U. marinum is strictly defined as follows: marine Uronema ca. 30 × 10 μm in size, with truncated apical frontal plate and smooth pellicle, extrusomes inconspicuous, cytostome located equatorially, 12–14 somatic kineties and one contractile vacuole pore near posterior end of kinety 2. Uronema heteromarinum nov. spec. resembles U. marinum but can be distinguished morphologically by its notched pellicle with conspicuous extrusomes and reticulate ridges, the 15–16 somatic kineties, widely separated membranelle 1 and membranelle 2, as well as the subequatorially positioned cytostome. Based on the Qingdao population, an improved diagnosis for the poorly known Pleuronema setigerum is: marine slender oval-shaped form, in vivo about 40–50 × 15–20 μm; 3–5 preoral kineties and 14–22 somatic kineties; membranelle 1 and 3 three-rowed, and posterior end of M2a ring-like. The small subunit (SSU) rRNA gene for all three organisms were sequenced and analyzed with standard methods