Microwave neural processing and broadcasting with spintronic nano-oscillators

Can we build small neuromorphic chips capable of training deep networks with billions of parameters? This challenge requires hardware neurons and synapses with nanometric dimensions, which can be individually tuned, and densely connected. While nanosynaptic devices have been pursued actively in recent years, much less has been done on nanoscale artificial neurons. In this paper, we show that spintronic nano-oscillators are promising to implement analog hardware neurons that can be densely interconnected through electromagnetic signals. We show how spintronic oscillators maps the requirements of artificial neurons. We then show experimentally how an ensemble of four coupled oscillators can learn to classify all twelve American vowels, realizing the most complicated tasks performed by nanoscale neurons

Crossover from Kondo assisted suppression to co-tunneling enhancement of tunneling magnetoresistance via ferromagnetic nanodots in MgO tunnel barriers

Recently, it has been shown that magnetic tunnel junctions with thin MgO tunnel barriers exhibit extraordinarily high tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) values at room temperature1, 2. However, the physics of spin dependent tunneling through MgO barriers is only beginning to be unravelled. Using planar magnetic tunnel junctions in which ultra-thin layers of magnetic metals are deposited in the middle of a MgO tunnel barrier here we demonstrate that the TMR is strongly modified when these layers are discontinuous and composed of small pancake shaped nanodots. At low temperatures, in the Coulomb blockade regime, for layers less than ~1 nm thick, the conductance of the junction is increased at low bias consistent with Kondo assisted tunneling. In the same regime we observe a suppression of the TMR. For slightly thicker layers, and correspondingly larger nanodots, the TMR is enhanced at low bias, consistent with co-tunneling.Comment: Nano Letters (in press

Experimental study on the effect of shape of bolt and nut on fatigue strength for bolted joint

In this study, the effect of curvature radius of the thread bottom and the pitch difference between of M16 bolt and nut on fatigue strength for bolted joint is considered experimentally. The M16 bolt-nut specimens having the two kinds of thread bottom radii and the pitch differences are prepared. The S-N curves for bolted specimens with different thread shapes are obtained by the stress-controlled fatigue test (stress ratio R>0). The experimental results are compared and discussed in terms of stress analysis. The finite element method is used to make a simulation of the fatigue experiment and the mean stress and stress amplitude at each thread bottom of bolt are analysed. It is found that the initiation and propagation of crack are changed by introducing the pitch difference of α=15 μm from the crack observation in cross section of the bolt specimens after the experiment. Furthermore, the fatigue life can be extended by increasing curvature radius of thread bottom and introducing the pitch difference.2018 International Conference on Material Strength and Applied Mechanics (MSAM 2018), 10–13 April 2018, Kitakyushu City, Japa

Proportion of intracerebral haemorrhage due to cerebral amyloid angiopathy in the East and West: Comparison between single hospital centres in Japan and the United Kingdom

PURPOSE: We investigated whether the proportion of intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH) due to cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) differs between patients admitted to hospitals in the East and the West. METHODS: This international cross-sectional study included consecutive spontaneous ICH patients admitted to one stroke centre in the United Kingdom (Western centre origin) and one in Japan (Eastern centre origin) during the same period. We classified spontaneous ICH into "CAA-related" or "other" using the Edinburgh CT-based diagnostic criteria. We used multivariable logistic regression analyses to assess the relationship between CAA-related ICH and geographical location or ethnicity (White vs. East Asian or other ethnicities). Sensitivity analyses were performed using the modified Boston MRI-based diagnostic criteria for CAA-related ICH. RESULTS: Of 433 patients (median age, 72 years; Western centre origin, 55%), 15% were classified as CAA-related ICH. In the multivariable logistic regression model, Eastern centre and ethnicity had a lower proportion of CAA-related ICH (odds ratio [OR] vs Western centre origin 0.55, 95%CI 0.31-0.98; OR [vs. White] 0.47, 95%CI 0.25-0.87); these findings remained robust in sensitivity analyses. The estimated incidence of "other" (non-CAA) ICH (attributed to hypertensive arteriopathy) was 2.5-fold higher in East Asian populations. CONCLUSIONS: The proportion CAA-related ICH is lower in an Eastern compared to a Western hospital ICH population; this might be explained by a higher incidence of ICH related to hypertensive arteriopathy in East Asian populations, suggesting that optimal ICH prevention strategies might differ between the East and West

Spin Diode Based on Fe/MgO Double Tunnel Junction

We demonstrate a spin diode consisting of a semiconductor free nano-scale Fe/MgO-based double tunnel junction. The device exhibits a near perfect spin-valve effect combined with a strong diode effect. The mechanism consistent with our data is resonant tunneling through discrete states in the middle ferromagnetic layer sandwiched by tunnel barriers of different spin-dependent transparency. The observed magneto-resistance is record high, ~4000%, essentially making the structure an on/off spin-switch. This, combined with the strong diode effect, ~100, offers a new device that should be promising for such technologies as magnetic random access memory and re-programmable logic.Comment: 14 page

Combination therapy with irinotecan and cisplatin as neoadjuvant chemotherapy in locally advanced cervical cancer

To evaluate the response rate and toxicity of the combination of irinotecan (CPT-11) and cisplatin in a neoadjuvant setting, a phase II study was conducted regarding the regimen of this combination in patients with locally advanced cervical cancer. Eligibility included patients with previously untreated stage Ib2, IIb, or IIIb squamous cell carcinoma with good performance status. CPT-11 (60 mg m−2) was administered intravenously on days 1, 8 and 15, followed by cisplatin (60 mg m−2) given intravenously on day 1. Treatment was repeated every 4 weeks for a total of two or three cycles. Among 23 eligible patients (median age: 59 years), three showed complete response (13%), 15 showed partial response (65%), for an overall response rate of 78% (95% confidence interval 58–90%). Stable disease was observed in four cases (17%) and progressive disease in one (4%). The median time to failure and median survival time have not yet been reached. Of the 52 treatment cycles administered, diarrhoea and grade 3 or 4 neutropenia were observed in 10% and 75% respectively. There were no therapy-related deaths. The combination of CPT-11 with cisplatin is a promising regimen for neoadjuvant chemotherapy in locally advanced cervical cancer. The toxicities of this regimen are well tolerated. © 1999 Cancer Research Campaig

Pink-Colored Grape Berry Is the Result of Short Insertion in Intron of Color Regulatory Gene

We report here that pink grape berries were obtained by a short insertion in the intron of the MybA1 gene, a gene that regulates grape berry color. Genetic variation was detected among the MybA1 genes from grapes cultivated worldwide. PCR analysis of the MybA1 gene demonstrated that the size of the MybA1 gene in the red allele differs among grapes. Oriental V. vinifera bearing pink berries has the longest MybA1 gene among grapes, whereas the shortest MybA1 gene was detected in occidental V. vinifera grapes. The nucleotide sequences of the MybA1 genes demonstrated that oriental V. vinifera has two additional gene fragments (44 bp and 111 bp) in the promoter region of the MybA1 gene in the red allele and another 33 bp fragment in the second intron of the MybA1 gene in the red allele. The short insertion in the intron decreased the transcription activity in the model system and retained MybA1 transcripts with unspliced intron in the total RNA. From the experiments using deletion mutants of the 33 bp short insertion, 16 bp of the 3′ end in the insertion is a key structure for a defect in splicing of MybA1 transcripts. Thus, a weakly colored grape berry might be a result of the short insertion in the intron of a color regulatory gene. This is new evidence concerning the molecular mechanism of the fate of grape berry color. These findings are expected to contribute to the further understanding of the color variation in grape berries, which is correlated with the evolutional events occurring in the MybA1 gene of grapes

Exploiting likely-positive and unlabeled data to improve the identification of protein-protein interaction articles

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Experimentally verified protein-protein interactions (PPI) cannot be easily retrieved by researchers unless they are stored in PPI databases. The curation of such databases can be made faster by ranking newly-published articles' relevance to PPI, a task which we approach here by designing a machine-learning-based PPI classifier. All classifiers require labeled data, and the more labeled data available, the more reliable they become. Although many PPI databases with large numbers of labeled articles are available, incorporating these databases into the base training data may actually reduce classification performance since the supplementary databases may not annotate exactly the same PPI types as the base training data. Our first goal in this paper is to find a method of selecting likely positive data from such supplementary databases. Only extracting likely positive data, however, will bias the classification model unless sufficient negative data is also added. Unfortunately, negative data is very hard to obtain because there are no resources that compile such information. Therefore, our second aim is to select such negative data from unlabeled PubMed data. Thirdly, we explore how to exploit these likely positive and negative data. And lastly, we look at the somewhat unrelated question of which term-weighting scheme is most effective for identifying PPI-related articles.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To evaluate the performance of our PPI text classifier, we conducted experiments based on the BioCreAtIvE-II IAS dataset. Our results show that adding likely-labeled data generally increases AUC by 3~6%, indicating better ranking ability. Our experiments also show that our newly-proposed term-weighting scheme has the highest AUC among all common weighting schemes. Our final model achieves an F-measure and AUC 2.9% and 5.0% higher than those of the top-ranking system in the IAS challenge.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating unlabeled and likely labeled data to augment a PPI text classification system. Our mixed model is suitable for ranking purposes whereas our hierarchical model is better for filtering. In addition, our results indicate that supervised weighting schemes outperform unsupervised ones. Our newly-proposed weighting scheme, TFBRF, which considers documents that do not contain the target word, avoids some of the biases found in traditional weighting schemes. Our experiment results show TFBRF to be the most effective among several other top weighting schemes.</p