Symmetry and topology in antiferromagnetic spintronics

Antiferromagnetic spintronics focuses on investigating and using antiferromagnets as active elements in spintronics structures. Last decade advances in relativistic spintronics led to the discovery of the staggered, current-induced field in antiferromagnets. The corresponding N\'{e}el spin-orbit torque allowed for efficient electrical switching of antiferromagnetic moments and, in combination with electrical readout, for the demonstration of experimental antiferromagnetic memory devices. In parallel, the anomalous Hall effect was predicted and subsequently observed in antiferromagnets. A new field of spintronics based on antiferromagnets has emerged. We will focus here on the introduction into the most significant discoveries which shaped the field together with a more recent spin-off focusing on combining antiferromagnetic spintronics with topological effects, such as antiferromagnetic topological semimetals and insulators, and the interplay of antiferromagnetism, topology, and superconductivity in heterostructures.Comment: Book chapte

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Protective Effect of Lycium ruthenicum Murr. Against Radiation Injury in Mice

The protective effect of Lycium ruthenicum Murr. against radiation injury was examined in mice. Kunming mice were randomly divided into a control group, model group, positive drug group and L. ruthenicum high dose (8 g/kg), L. ruthenicum middle dose (4 g/kg), L. ruthenicum low dose (2 g/kg) treatment groups, for which doses were administered the third day, seventh day and 14th day after irradiation. L. ruthenicum extract was administered orally to the mice in the three treatment groups and normal saline was administered orally to the mice in the control group and model group for 14 days. The positive group was treated with amifostine (WR-2721) at 30 min before irradiation. Except for the control group, the groups of mice received a 5 Gy quantity of X-radiation evenly over their whole body at one time. Body weight, hemogram, thymus and spleen index, DNA, caspase-3, caspase-6, and P53 contents were observed at the third day, seventh day, and 14th day after irradiation. L. ruthenicum could significantly increase the total red blood cell count, hemoglobin count and DNA contents (p < 0.05). The spleen index recovered significantly by the third day and 14th day after irradiation (p < 0.05). L. ruthenicum low dose group showed a significant reduction in caspase-3 and caspase-6 of serum in mice at the third day, seventh day, and 14th day after irradiation and L. ruthenicum middle dose group experienced a reduction in caspase-6 of serum in mice by the seventh day after irradiation. L. ruthenicum could decrease the expression of P53. The results showed that L. ruthenicum had protective effects against radiation injury in mice

Protective Effect of Lycium ruthenicum Murr. Against Radiation Injury in Mice

The protective effect of Lycium ruthenicum Murr. against radiation injury was examined in mice. Kunming mice were randomly divided into a control group, model group, positive drug group and L. ruthenicum high dose (8 g/kg), L. ruthenicum middle dose (4 g/kg), L. ruthenicum low dose (2 g/kg) treatment groups, for which doses were administered the third day, seventh day and 14th day after irradiation. L. ruthenicum extract was administered orally to the mice in the three treatment groups and normal saline was administered orally to the mice in the control group and model group for 14 days. The positive group was treated with amifostine (WR-2721) at 30 min before irradiation. Except for the control group, the groups of mice received a 5 Gy quantity of X-radiation evenly over their whole body at one time. Body weight, hemogram, thymus and spleen index, DNA, caspase-3, caspase-6, and P53 contents were observed at the third day, seventh day, and 14th day after irradiation. L. ruthenicum could significantly increase the total red blood cell count, hemoglobin count and DNA contents (p < 0.05). The spleen index recovered significantly by the third day and 14th day after irradiation (p < 0.05). L. ruthenicum low dose group showed a significant reduction in caspase-3 and caspase-6 of serum in mice at the third day, seventh day, and 14th day after irradiation and L. ruthenicum middle dose group experienced a reduction in caspase-6 of serum in mice by the seventh day after irradiation. L. ruthenicum could decrease the expression of P53. The results showed that L. ruthenicum had protective effects against radiation injury in mice

Skin Rash as the First Manifestation of Pediatric Chronic Neutrophilic Leukemia

A 6-year-old girl presented with recurrent skin rash at the initial stage, recent joint pain, and neutrophilia was found during a routine blood test. After a multidisciplinary case discussion, she was diagnosed with chronic neutrophil leukemia, and the symptoms were relieved after hydroxyurea and luxolitinib treatment. She received the allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation subsequently. At present, she is in stable condition and under follow-up. Chronic neutrophil leukemia is a rare disease, which rarely occurs in children. It is more difficult to diagnose in patients with skin rash as the first manifestation. The diagnosis and treatment of this case reflects the important role of multidisciplinary cooperation in the diagnosis and treatment of difficult and rare diseases

Rate-distortion optimized sparse coding with ordered dictionary for image set compression

Image set compression has recently emerged as an active research topic due to the rapidly increasing demand in cloud storage. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for image set compression based on the rate-distortion optimized sparse coding. Specifically, given a set of similar images, one representative image is first identified according to the similarity among these images, and a dictionary can be learned subsequently in wavelet domain from the training samples collected from the representative image. In order to improve coding efficiency, the dictionary atoms are reordered according to their use frequencies when representing the representative image. As such, the remaining images can be efficiently compressed with sparse coding based on the reordered dictionary that is highly adaptive to the content of the image set. To further improve the efficiency of sparse coding, the number of dictionary atoms for image patches is further optimized in a rate-distortion sense. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the image compression performance compared with JPEG, JPEG2000, and the state-of-the-art dictionary learning-based methods.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore

Influence of reservoir primary water on shale gas occurrence and flow capacity

In this paper, shale samples of Lower Silurian Longmaxi Fm, taken from the Changning–Weiyuan area in the Sichuan Basin, were selected to figure out the influence of reservoir primary water on the adsorption laws and the flow capacity of shale gas. Experimental samples with different water saturations were prepared using the adsorption equilibrium method. Then, high-pressure isothermal adsorption experiments were carried out, and the isothermal adsorption effects and mechanisms of shale under different water saturations were discussed. Finally, the flow capacity of shale gas under different water saturations was tested using the independently developed steady-state flow test device. And the following research results were obtained. First, the presence of primary water in micron–nanometer pores of shale reservoirs reduces the adsorption capacity of shale. When the water saturation is 40%, the simulated total gas content is 18% lower than that in the conventional calculation result. Second, the apparent shale permeability is a function of pressure. Due to the effect of Knudsen diffusion, the apparent shale permeability increases significantly with the decrease of pressure under low pressure. When the average pressure is 5 MPa and the water saturation reaches 50%, the apparent shale permeability is about 70% lower than that of a dry sample. Third, when the water saturation is lower than the critical value, water is mainly presented as non-movable water in micropores and mesopores, and it has less effect on the flow capacity of shale gas. When the water saturation is greater than the critical value, the lodging point of water is changed, resulting in significant reduction of the shale gas flow capacity. It is concluded that an accurate understanding of the original water saturation and critical water saturation of shale reservoirs helps to calculate shale gas reserves accurately and predict gas well production rate rationally. Keywords: Shale gas, Reservoir, Water saturation, Isothermal adsorption, State of occurrence, Flow capacity, Reserves, Gas production rat

Mechanical Properties and Microstructure of Iron Tailings Cemented Paste Backfills Using Carbide Slag-Activated Ground Granulated Blast-Furnace Slag as Alternative Binder

For rational disposal of solid wastes, low-cost cemented paste backfills (CPB) were prepared with iron tailings, ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS), and calcium carbide slag (CS). To ensure that CPB can be effectively utilized in mine backfill projects, the effects of solid contents, GGBS content, CS/GGBS ratio, and mixing water on the workability and mechanical properties of CPB were investigated. The results indicated that when the solid content was 70%, the GGBS content was 14%, the CS/GGBS ratio was 0.4, the mixing water was tap water, the fluidity of fresh CPB slurry was 167 mm, and 28d unconfined compressive strength (UCS) of CPB reached 2.89 MPa, at which time the effect of the activation of the GGBS with CS was optimal. The analysis of X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopic imaging (SEM), thermogravimetric analysis (TG-DTG), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) demonstrated that the hydration products are mainly C-S-H gels, C-A-S-H, hemicarbonate, and hydrotalcite in CS-GGBS cementitious material. The C-S-H gel content gradually increased with increasing curing time and CS content (15%–35%). When the CS content was increased to 25%, the C-S-H gel content significantly increased, which improved the overall structural compactness and increased the UCS of CPB