An implementation of nDGP gravity in Pinocchio

In this paper we investigate dark matter structure formation in the normal branch of the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (nDGP) model using the PINOCCHIO algorithm. We first present 2nd order Lagrangian perturbation theory for the nDGP model, which shows that the 1st- and 2nd-order growth functions in nDGP are larger than those in {\Lambda}CDM. We then examine the dynamics of ellipsoidal collapse in nDGP, which is accelerated compared to {\Lambda}CDM due to enhanced gravitational interactions. Running the nDGP-PINOCCHIO code with a box size of 512 Mpc/h and 1024*1024*1024 particles, we analyze the statistical properties of the output halo catalogs, including the halo power spectrum and halo mass function. The calibrated PINOCCHIO halo power spectrum agrees with N-body simulations within 5% in the comoving wavenumber range k < 0.3 (h/Mpc) at redshift z = 0. The agreement is extended to smaller scales for higher redshifts. For the cumulative halo mass function, the agreement between N-body and PINOCCHIO is also within the simulation scatter.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure

4-Des­oxy-4β-(4-methoxy­carbonyl-1,2,3-triazol-1-yl)podophyllotoxin dichloro­methane solvate

In the title compound {systematic name: methyl 1-[12-oxo-10-(3,4,5-trimethoxy­phen­yl)-4,6,13-trioxa­tetra­cyclo­[7.7.0.03,7.011,15]hexa­deca-1,3(7),8-trien-16-yl]-1H-1,2,3-triazole-4-carboxyl­ate dichloro­methane solvate}, C26H25N3O9·CH2Cl2, the tetra­hydro­furan ring and the six-membered ring fused to it both display envelope conformations

Robust Calibrate Proxy Loss for Deep Metric Learning

The mainstream researche in deep metric learning can be divided into two genres: proxy-based and pair-based methods. Proxy-based methods have attracted extensive attention due to the lower training complexity and fast network convergence. However, these methods have limitations as the poxy optimization is done by network, which makes it challenging for the proxy to accurately represent the feature distrubtion of the real class of data. In this paper, we propose a Calibrate Proxy (CP) structure, which uses the real sample information to improve the similarity calculation in proxy-based loss and introduces a calibration loss to constraint the proxy optimization towards the center of the class features. At the same time, we set a small number of proxies for each class to alleviate the impact of intra-class differences on retrieval performance. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated by extensive experiments on three public datasets and multiple synthetic label-noise datasets. The results show that our approach can effectively improve the performance of commonly used proxy-based losses on both regular and noisy datasets

Impacts of Drought on Maize and Soybean Production in Northeast China During the Past Five Decades.

Climate change has a distinct impact on agriculture in China, particularly in the northeast, a key agriculture area sensitive to extreme hydroclimate events. Using monthly climate and agriculture data, the influence of drought on maize and soybean yields-two of the main crops in the region-in northeast China since 1961 to 2017 were investigated. The results showed that the temperature in the growing season increased by 1.0 °C from the period 1998-2017 to the period 1961-1980, while the annual precipitation decreased slightly. However, precipitation trends varied throughout the growing season (May-September), increasing slightly in May and June, but decreasing in July, August and September, associated with the weakening of the East Asian summer monsoon. Consequently, the annual and growing season drought frequency increased by 15%, and 25%, respectively, in the period 1998-2017 relative to the period 1961-1980. The highest drought frequency (55%) was observed in September. At the same time, the drought intensity during the growing season increased by 7.8%. The increasing frequency and intensity of drought had negative influences on the two crops. During moderate drought years in the period 1961-2017, 3.2% and 10.4% of the provincial maize and soybean yields were lost, respectively. However, during more severe drought years, losses doubled for soybean (21.8%), but increased more than four-fold for maize (14.0%). Moreover, in comparison to the period 1961-1980, a higher proportion of the yields were lost in the period 1998-2017, particularly for maize, which increased by 15% (increase for soybean was 2.4%). This change largely depends on increasing droughts in August and September, when both crops are in their filling stages. The impact of drought on maize and soybean production was different during different growth stages, where a strong relationship was noted between drought and yield loss of soybean in its filling stage. Given the sensitivity of maize and soybean yields in northeast China to drought, and the observed production trends, climate change will likely have significant negative impacts on productivity in the future

Influence of area-to-volume ratios on dissolution characteristics and mechanical properties of acid-corroded sandstone

To study the effect of area-to-volume ratio on the dissolution and deterioration characteristics of sandstone in the static acid-rock reaction system, the HCl and H2SO4 solutions with pH=2 and 5 are selected as corrosion environments, and the different area-to-volume ratios are set by changing surface areas of sandstone. The effects of area-to-volume ratios on the physicochemical and mechanical properties of sandstone are studied. According to the acid-rock reaction theory, the effect of the area-to-volume ratio on the diffusion-dissolution mechanism during sandstone corrosion is analyzed. The results show that the sandstone mass loss rate and amount of substance of total cations are all related to the corrosion time as a power function. The area-to-volume is positively correlated with the dissolution rate constant and has little effect on the reaction order. The reaction order is less than one in different environments, indicating that the sandstone corrosion rate decreases gradually with soaking time. In the pH=2、5 HCl solution and pH=2 H2SO4 solution, the amount of substance of cation shows N(Ca2+) > N(Na+) > N(Mg2+) > N(K+), and in the pH=5 H2SO4 solution, it is N(Na+) > N(Ca2+) > N(Mg2+) ≈N(K+). The acid-rock reaction can be summarized as two mechanisms: diffusion control and chemical reaction control. The two control parameters are negatively correlated with the area-to-volume ratio and positively with the pH value of solutions. The parameter values in the H2SO4 solutions are slightly larger than the corresponding values in the HCl solutions. The interaction between sandstone and acid in different conditions is dominated by the chemical reaction. The area-to-volume ratio significantly influences diffusion more than the chemical reaction. The mechanical properties of sandstone are weakened after acid corrosion. The damage of sandstone under uniaxial compression can be divided into four stages: compaction, elastic deformation, plastic yielding and post-peak. The peak strength and elastic modulus decrease, the peak strain increases, the brittleness declines, and the ductility is enhanced. The larger the area-to-volume ratio, the more severe the sandstone deterioration is. Overall, the smaller the pH value of solutions, the more prominent the effects of the area-to-volume ratio on the dissolution characteristics and mechanical properties of sandstone are, which is more obvious in the HCl solutions than in the H2SO4 solutions. The finding can provide theoretical references for the safety assessment and disaster prevention of rock mass engineering under an acidic environment

An infectious clone of enterovirus 71(EV71) that is capable of infecting neonatal immune competent mice without adaptive mutations

Enterovirus 71 (EV71) is a major pathogen that causes hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD), which is a life threatening disease in certain children. The pathogenesis of EV71-caused HFMD is poorly defined due to the lack of simple and robust animal models with severe phenotypes that recapitulate symptoms observed in humans. Here, we generated the infectious clone of a clinical isolate from a severe HFMD patient. Virus rescued from the cDNA clone was infectious in cell lines. When administrated intraperitoneally to neonatal ICR, BALB/c and C57 immune competent mice at a dosage of1.4 × 104 pfu per mouse, the virus caused weight loss, paralysis and death in the infected mice after 4-5 days of infection. In the infected mice, detectable viral replication was detected in various tissues such as heart, liver, brain, lung, kidney, small intestine, leg skeletal muscle and medulla oblongata. The histology of the infected mice included massive myolysis, glomerular atrophy, villous blunting in small intestine, widened alveolar septum, diminished alveolar spaces and lymphocytes infiltration into the lung. By using the UV-inactivated virus as a control, we elucidated that the virus first amplified in the leg skeletal muscle tissue and the muscle tissue served as a primary viral replication site. In summary, we generated a stable EV71 infectious clone that is capable of infecting neonatal immune competent mice without adaptive mutations and provide a simple, valuable animal model for the studies of EV71pathogenesis and therapy.</p