Dirac-Surface-State Modulated Spin Dynamics in a Ferrimagnetic Insulator at Room Temperature

This work demonstrates dramatically modified spin dynamics of magnetic insulator (MI) by the spin-momentum locked Dirac surface states of the adjacent topological insulator (TI) which can be harnessed for spintronic applications. As the Bi-concentration x is systematically tuned in 5 nm thick (BixSb1-x)2Te3 TI film, the weight of the surface relative to bulk states peaks at x = 0.32 when the chemical potential approaches the Dirac point. At this concentration, the Gilbert damping constant of the precessing magnetization in 10 nm thick Y3Fe5O12 MI film in the MI/TI heterostructures is enhanced by an order of magnitude, the largest among all concentrations. In addition, the MI acquires additional strong magnetic anisotropy that favors the in-plane orientation with similar Bi-concentration dependence. These extraordinary effects of the Dirac surface states distinguish TI from other materials such as heavy metals in modulating spin dynamics of the neighboring magnetic layer

Coal overcapacity in China:Multiscale analysis and prediction

Gaining a quantitative understanding of the causes of coal overcapacity and accurately predicting it are important for both government agencies and coal enterprises. Following the decomposition-reconstruction-prediction concept, a combined Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition-Least Square Support Vector Machine-Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (EEMD-LSSVM-ARIMA) model is proposed for quantitatively analyzing and forecasting coal overcapacity in China. The results show that the main causes of coal overcapacity in China include insufficient demand, market failure, and institutional distortion. Institutional distortion, with an influence degree of 73.75%, is the most fundamental and influential factor. From 2017 to 2019, the scale of coal overcapacity in China will reach between 1.721and 1.819 billion tons, suggesting that coal overcapacity will remain a serious problem. The rate of coal overcapacity caused by insufficient demand will fluctuate slightly, while coal overcapacity caused by market failure will trend downward, but the impact of institutional distortion on coal overcapacity will be exacerbated. A statistical analysis demonstrates that the EEMD-LSSVM-ARIMA model significantly outperformed other widely developed baselines (e.g. ARIMA, LSSVM, EEMD-ARIMA, and EEMD-LSSVM)

Improving alignment accuracy on homopolymer regions for semiconductor-based sequencing technologies

BACKGROUND: Ion Torrent and Ion Proton are semiconductor-based sequencing technologies that feature rapid sequencing speed and low upfront and operating costs, thanks to the avoidance of modified nucleotides and optical measurements. Despite of these advantages, however, Ion semiconductor sequencing technologies suffer much reduced sequencing accuracy at the genomic loci with homopolymer repeats of the same nucleotide. Such limitation significantly reduces its efficiency for the biological applications aiming at accurately identifying various genetic variants. RESULTS: In this study, we propose a Bayesian inference-based method that takes the advantage of the signal distributions of the electrical voltages that are measured for all the homopolymers of a fixed length. By cross-referencing the length of homopolymers in the reference genome and the voltage signal distribution derived from the experiment, the proposed integrated model significantly improves the alignment accuracy around the homopolymer regions. CONCLUSIONS: Besides improving alignment accuracy on homopolymer regions for semiconductor-based sequencing technologies with the proposed model, similar strategies can also be used on other high-throughput sequencing technologies that share similar limitations

Egg consumption and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke: dose-response meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies

Objective: To investigate and quantify the potential dose-response association between egg consumption and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. Design: Dose-response meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. Data sources PubMed and Embase prior to June 2012 and references of relevant original papers and review articles. Eligibility criteria for selecting studies Prospective cohort studies with relative risks and 95% confidence intervals of coronary heart disease or stroke for three or more categories of egg consumption. Results: Eight articles with 17 reports (nine for coronary heart disease, eight for stroke) were eligible for inclusion in the meta-analysis (3 081 269 person years and 5847 incident cases for coronary heart disease, and 4 148 095 person years and 7579 incident cases for stroke). No evidence of a curve linear association was seen between egg consumption and risk of coronary heart disease or stroke (P=0.67 and P=0.27 for non-linearity, respectively). The summary relative risk of coronary heart disease for an increase of one egg consumed per day was 0.99 (95% confidence interval 0.85 to 1.15; P=0.88 for linear trend) without heterogeneity among studies (P=0.97, I2=0%). For stroke, the combined relative risk for an increase of one egg consumed per day was 0.91 (0.81 to 1.02; P=0.10 for linear trend) without heterogeneity among studies (P=0.46, I2=0%). In a subgroup analysis of diabetic populations, the relative risk of coronary heart disease comparing the highest with the lowest egg consumption was 1.54 (1.14 to 2.09; P=0.01). In addition, people with higher egg consumption had a 25% (0.57 to 0.99; P=0.04) lower risk of developing hemorrhagic stroke. Conclusions: Higher consumption of eggs (up to one egg per day) is not associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease or stroke. The increased risk of coronary heart disease among diabetic patients and reduced risk of hemorrhagic stroke associated with higher egg consumption in subgroup analyses warrant further studies

Comparing the vulnerability of different coal industrial symbiosis networks under economic fluctuations

We establish a vulnerability analytical framework of CISN, and illustrate the impact path of economic fluctuation on CISN performance. Based on this, we propose an improved cascading failure model with directed weighted network, and design five network performance indicators (i.e., relative value of cascading failure, average path length, relative value of maximal connected sub-graphs, network efficiency, and structure entropy). Taking three coal eco-industrial parks in China as cases, we simulate and compare the impacts on CISN vulnerability (i.e., equality-based, dependent-based, and nested-based CISNs) of economic fluctuation. The results indicate that the interaction between economic fluctuation and network structure is the key factor in determining system vulnerability. Concerning overall vulnerability, equality-based CISN is highest, dependent-based CISN is next, and nested-based CISN is lowest. Regarding disturbance type, the changes in the five performance indicators of the three types of CISN are more intense under energy price shocks than with declining demand. Moreover, the cascading failure scale of equality-based CISN is greatest with declining demand, while the other two kinds of CISN’s is greatest under energy price shocks. Concerning disturbance intensity, equality-based CISN shows initial value sensitivity to economic fluctuation, and nested-based CISN has the strongest tolerances for economic fluctuation. From the network performance perspective, the performance of nested-based CISN is superior to that of dependent-based and equality-based CISNs. Due to longer average path length and lower network efficiency, the failure diffusion trend of equality-based CISN shows the curve of Type-S, and the diffusion rate is smooth and slow. Contrariwise, the initial diffusion rate of dependent-based CISN is the highest, indicating that the loss of system efficiency can somewhat improve the system’s anti-risk ability