A Review of Chinese Ice Caves

Ice caves are a rare geological phenomenon. Ningwu ice cave, Zibaishan ice cave, and Wudalianchi ice cave are the most famous ice caves in China. We described each one in detail and carried out thermal-elastic modeling and heat conduction modeling to investigate the stability of the cave and the formation of ice deposit. In order to quantitatively study the mechanism of formation and preservation of the ice cave, we applied the FEM to model the heat exchange in the ice cave. The modeling results revealed that there is the seasonal asymmetric energy exchange. Heat energy is conducted inefficiently into the ice cave from outside and wall rock in spring, summer, and autumn. While in winter, heat energy is transferred very efficiently due to the air natural convection, thus cooling it down. We proposed that Ningwu ice cave and Zibaishan ice cave may be a self-regulating system, respectively. At Wudalianchi ice cave, airtight doors have been installed at these ice caves’ entrances. This actually prevents cooling in winter. We expect that no airtight door will be fixed at each ice cave’s entrance, and few people enter the ice cave before comprehensive and detailed studies, avoiding further affecting its natural conditions

Terahertz Atmospheric Windows for High Angular Resolution Terahertz Astronomy from Dome A

Atmospheric transmission from Dome A, Antarctica, presents new possibilities in the field of terahertz astronomy, where space telescopes have been the only observational tools until now. Using atmospheric transmission measurements from Dome A with a Fourier transform spectrometer, transmission spectra and long-term stabilities have been analyzed at 1.461 THz, 3.393 THz, 5.786 THz and 7.1 THz, which show that important atmospheric windows for terahertz astronomy open for a reasonable length of time in the winter season. With large aperture terahertz telescopes and interferometers at Dome A, high angular resolution terahertz observations are foreseen of atomic fine-structure lines from ionized gas and a water ice feature from protoplanetary disks.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Advances in Polar Scienc

Model-based evaluation and process development of continuous chromatography

Multi-column periodic counter-current (PCC) chromatography has been proposed as continuous capturing technology to improve the process productivity and resin capacity utilization, as well as reduce buffer consumption and equipment footprint, which is applying for monoclonal antibody (mAb) capture with Protein A affinity resin. Due to the complexity of continues chromatography, some mathematical framework should be developed to aid the process development. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Intronic MicroRNA (miRNA)

Nearly 97% of the human genome is composed of noncoding DNA, which varies from one species to another. Changes in these sequences often manifest themselves in clinical and circumstantial malfunction. Numerous genes in these non-protein-coding regions encode microRNAs, which are responsible for RNA-mediated gene silencing through RNA interference (RNAi)-like pathways. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), small single-stranded regulatory RNAs capable of interfering with intracellular messenger RNAs (mRNAs) with complete or partial complementarity, are useful for the design of new therapies against cancer polymorphisms and viral mutations. Currently, many varieties of miRNA are widely reported in plants, animals, and even microbes. Intron-derived microRNA (Id-miRNA) is a new class of miRNA derived from the processing of gene introns. The intronic miRNA requires type-II RNA polymerases (Pol-II) and spliceosomal components for their biogenesis. Several kinds of Id-miRNA have been identified in C elegans, mouse, and human cells; however, neither function nor application has been reported. Here, we show for the first time that intron-derived miRNAs are able to induce RNA interference in not only human and mouse cells, but in also zebrafish, chicken embryos, and adult mice, demonstrating the evolutionary preservation of intron-mediated gene silencing via functional miRNA in cell and in vivo. These findings suggest an intracellular miRNA-mediated gene regulatory system, fine-tuning the degradation of protein-coding messenger RNAs

BiSinger: Bilingual Singing Voice Synthesis

Although Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) has made great strides with Text-to-Speech (TTS) techniques, multilingual singing voice modeling remains relatively unexplored. This paper presents BiSinger, a bilingual pop SVS system for English and Chinese Mandarin. Current systems require separate models per language and cannot accurately represent both Chinese and English, hindering code-switch SVS. To address this gap, we design a shared representation between Chinese and English singing voices, achieved by using the CMU dictionary with mapping rules. We fuse monolingual singing datasets with open-source singing voice conversion techniques to generate bilingual singing voices while also exploring the potential use of bilingual speech data. Experiments affirm that our language-independent representation and incorporation of related datasets enable a single model with enhanced performance in English and code-switch SVS while maintaining Chinese song performance. Audio samples are available at https://bisinger-svs.github.io.Comment: Accepted by ASRU202

Ground state baryons in the flux-tube three-body confinement model using Diffusion Monte Carlo

We make a systematical diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) calculation for all ground state baryons in two confinement scenarios, the pairwise confinement and the three-body flux-tube confinement. With the baryons as an example, we illustrate a feasible procedure to investigate the few-quark states with possible few-body confinement mechanisms, which can be extended to the multiquark states easily. For each baryon, we extract the mass, mean-square radius, charge radius, and the quark distributions. We use the Jackknife resampling method to estimate the statistical uncertainties of masses to be less than 1 MeV. To determine the baryon charge radii, we include the constituent quark size effect, which is fixed by the experimental and lattice QCD results. Our results show that both two-body and three-body confinement mechanisms can give a good description of the experimental data if the parameters are chosen properly. In the flux-tube confinement, introducing different tension parameters for the baryons and mesons are necessary, specifically, $\sigma_Y= 0.9204 \sigma_{Q\bar{Q}}$. The lesson from the calculation of the nucleon mass with the DMC method is that the improper pre-assignment of the channels may prevent us from obtaining the real ground state. With this experience, we obtain the real ground state (the $\eta_c \eta_c$ threshold with the di-meson configuration) of the $cc\bar{c}\bar{c}$ system with $J^{PC}=0^{++}$ starting from the diquark-antidiquark spin-color channels alone, which is hard to achieve in the variational method and was not obtained in the previous DMC calculations.Comment: 24 pages, 18 figures. The Supplement material is attached in the source code of LaTeX. Comments are welcome