142 research outputs found
Three essays on banking regulation, financial crisis and sovereign debt
This thesis consists of three chapters on macroeconomics and international economics. The first studies the effectiveness of macroprudential policies in a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework with financial frictions. Profit-maximizing banks with endogenous leverage ratio expand credit lending during economic booms and become increasingly vulnerable to unanticipated economic shocks. Countercyclical macroprudential instruments are found to be effective in dampening economic fluctuations and stabilizing the credit cycle. However, a policy regulating the loan-to-value ratio of the residential households causes a credit shift towards the business sector. Optimal simple rules are selected using welfare analysis to provide practical implications for the evaluation, estimation and future implementation of macroprudential policies in alleviating economic risk of financial intermediaries.
The second chapter examines the impact of political risk on sovereign default. An economic model with endogenous default decisions shows that political instability increases the likelihood of sovereign default. A quantitative analysis using data from 68 countries in the period from 1970 to 2010 finds that both short and long-run aspects of the political environment have significant effects. The findings suggest that a country is more likely to experience default when i) it has a relatively younger political regime in place; ii) it faces a higher chance of political turnover; and iii) it has a less democratic political system.
The third chapter investigates the bidirectional relationship between banking and sovereign debt crisis. An economic model with financial intermediaries and a government sector shows that sovereign default may cause a banking crisis as banks hold a large amount of government bonds. Nevertheless, a significant amount of bailouts or bank guarantees may constrain the short-term liquidity of the government sector and trigger a sovereign debt crisis. Empirical studies using the credit default swap spreads of the Eurozone support the two-way linkage. Quantitative results also show increasing spillover effects across borders as globalization leads to greater integration of financial markets
Paradoxical constitutive law between donor O-H bond length and its stretching frequency in water dimer
The constitutive laws of hydrogen bonds (H-bonds) are central to
understanding microphysical processes not precisely observed, especially in
terms of structural properties. Previous experiences in water H-bonding
revealed that as the intermolecular O...O distance shortens, the O-H stretching
frequency redshifts; thus, an elongated O-H bond length can be empirically
inferred, which is described as the constitutive law under the cooperative
effect. Here, using the high-precision CCSD(T) method, we report a violation of
the conventional constitutive law in water dimer. That is, when the variation
in the O...O distance changes from stretching by 0.06 to contracting by -0.15
angstrom compared to the equilibrium position, the donor O-H bond length
decreases from 0.9724 to 0.9717 angstrom, and the O-H stretching frequency
redshifts from 3715 to 3708 cm-1. Our work highlights that the O-H bond length
decreases simultaneously with its stretching frequency, which is clearly
inconsistent with the previously recognized constitutive law.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure
NMI inhibits cancer stem cell traits by downregulating hTERT in breast cancer.
N-myc and STAT interactor (NMI) has been proved to bind to different transcription factors to regulate a variety of signaling mechanisms including DNA damage, cell cycle and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. However, the role of NMI in the regulation of cancer stem cells (CSCs) remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the regulation of NMI on CSCs traits in breast cancer and uncovered the underlying molecular mechanisms. We found that NMI was lowly expressed in breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs)-enriched populations. Knockdown of NMI promoted CSCs traits while its overexpression inhibited CSCs traits, including the expression of CSC-related markers, the number of CD44+CD24- cell populations and the ability of mammospheres formation. We also found that NMI-mediated regulation of BCSCs traits was at least partially realized through the modulation of hTERT signaling. NMI knockdown upregulated hTERT expression while its overexpression downregulated hTERT in breast cancer cells, and the changes in CSCs traits and cell invasion ability mediated by NMI were rescued by hTERT. The in vivo study also validated that NMI knockdown promoted breast cancer growth by upregulating hTERT signaling in a mouse model. Moreover, further analyses for the clinical samples demonstrated that NMI expression was negatively correlated with hTERT expression and the low NMI/high hTERT expression was associated with the worse status of clinical TNM stages in breast cancer patients. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the interaction of YY1 protein with NMI and its involvement in NMI-mediated transcriptional regulation of hTERT in breast cancer cells. Collectively, our results provide new insights into understanding the regulatory mechanism of CSCs and suggest that the NMI-YY1-hTERT signaling axis may be a potential therapeutic target for breast cancers
Real higher-order Weyl photonic crystal
Higher-order Weyl semimetals are a family of recently predicted topological
phases simultaneously showcasing unconventional properties derived from Weyl
points, such as chiral anomaly, and multidimensional topological phenomena
originating from higher-order topology. The higher-order Weyl semimetal phases,
with their higher-order topology arising from quantized dipole or quadrupole
bulk polarizations, have been demonstrated in phononics and circuits. Here, we
experimentally discover a class of higher-order Weyl semimetal phase in a
three-dimensional photonic crystal (PhC), exhibiting the concurrence of the
surface and hinge Fermi arcs from the nonzero Chern number and the nontrivial
generalized real Chern number, respectively, coined a real higher-order Weyl
PhC. Notably, the projected two-dimensional subsystem with kz = 0 is a real
Chern insulator, belonging to the Stiefel-Whitney class with real Bloch
wavefunctions, which is distinguished fundamentally from the Chern class with
complex Bloch wavefunctions. Our work offers an ideal photonic platform for
exploring potential applications and material properties associated with the
higher-order Weyl points and the Stiefel-Whitney class of topological phases
Gestational Exposure to Particulate Matter 2.5 (PM2.5) Leads to Spatial Memory Dysfunction and Neurodevelopmental Impairment in Hippocampus of Mice Offspring
Prenatal exposure to air pollutants has long-term impact on growth retardation of nervous system development and is related to central nervous system diseases in children. However, it is not well-characterized whether gestational exposure to air pollutants affects the development of nervous system in offspring. Here, we investigated the effects of gestational exposure to particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) on hippocampus development in mice offspring, through neurobehavioral, ultrastructural, biochemical and molecular investigations. We found that spatial memory in mice offspring from PM2.5 high-dosage group was impaired. Next, hippocampal ultrastructure of the mice offspring in puberty exhibited mitochondrial damage related to PM2.5 exposure. Interestingly, EdU-positive cells in the subgranular zone (SGZ) of offspring from PM2.5 high-dosage group decreased, with NeuN+/EdU+cells reduced significantly. Furthermore, the numbers of NeuN+/TUNEL+, GFAP+/TUNEL+, and Iba1+/TUNEL+ double-labeled cells increased with PM2.5 exposure in a dosage-dependent manner. In addition, gestational exposure to PM2.5 resulted in increased levels of both mRNAs and proteins involved in apoptosis, including caspase-3, -8, -9, p53, and c-Fos, and decreased Bcl-2/Bax ratios in the hippocampus of mice offspring. Moreover, gestational exposure to PM2.5 was dosage-dependently associated with the increased secretions of inflammatory proteins, including NF-κB, TNF-α, and IL-1β. Collectively, our results suggest that gestational exposure to PM2.5 leads to spatial memory dysfunction and neurodevelopmental impairment by exerting effects on apoptotic and neuroinflammatory events, as well as the neurogenesis in hippocampus of mice offspring
Segment Anything Model for Medical Images?
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is the first foundation model for general
image segmentation. It designed a novel promotable segmentation task, ensuring
zero-shot image segmentation using the pre-trained model via two main modes
including automatic everything and manual prompt. SAM has achieved impressive
results on various natural image segmentation tasks. However, medical image
segmentation (MIS) is more challenging due to the complex modalities, fine
anatomical structures, uncertain and complex object boundaries, and wide-range
object scales. SAM has achieved impressive results on various natural image
segmentation tasks. Meanwhile, zero-shot and efficient MIS can well reduce the
annotation time and boost the development of medical image analysis. Hence, SAM
seems to be a potential tool and its performance on large medical datasets
should be further validated. We collected and sorted 52 open-source datasets,
and build a large medical segmentation dataset with 16 modalities, 68 objects,
and 553K slices. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of different SAM testing
strategies on the so-called COSMOS 553K dataset. Extensive experiments validate
that SAM performs better with manual hints like points and boxes for object
perception in medical images, leading to better performance in prompt mode
compared to everything mode. Additionally, SAM shows remarkable performance in
some specific objects and modalities, but is imperfect or even totally fails in
other situations. Finally, we analyze the influence of different factors (e.g.,
the Fourier-based boundary complexity and size of the segmented objects) on
SAM's segmentation performance. Extensive experiments validate that SAM's
zero-shot segmentation capability is not sufficient to ensure its direct
application to the MIS.Comment: 23 pages, 14 figures, 12 table
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