The width-flux relation of the broad iron line during the state transition of the black hole X-ray binaries

The observation of varying broad iron lines during the state transition of the black hole X-ray binaries (BHXBs) have been accumulating.In this work, the relation between the normalized intensity and the width of iron lines is investigated, in order to understand better the variation of iron lines and possibly its connection to state transition. Considering the uncertainties due to ionization and illuminating X-rays, only the effects of geometry and gravity are taken into account. Three scenarios were studied, i.e., the continuous disk model, innermost annulus model, and the cloud model. As shown by our calculations, at given iron width, the line flux of the cloud model is smaller than that of the continuous disk model; while for the innermost annulus model, the width is almost unrelated with the flux. The range of the line strength depends on both the BH spin and the inclination of the disk. We then apply to the observation of MAXI J1631-479 by NuSTAR during its decay from the soft state to the intermediate state. We estimated the relative line strength and width according to the spectral fitting results by Xu et al.(2020), and then compared with our theoretical width-flux relation. It was found that the cloud model was more favored. We further modeled the iron line profiles, and found that the cloud model can explain both the line profile and its variation with reasonable parameters.Comment: 7 figures, 12 pages, accepted for publication in RA

Dynamic Cerebral Autoregulation Remains Stable During the Daytime (8 a.m. to 8 p.m.) in Healthy Adults

Many functions of the human body possess a daily rhythm, disruptions of which often lead to disease. Dynamic cerebral autoregulation (dCA) stabilizes the cerebral blood flow to prompt normal neural function. However, whether dCA is stable across the day remains unknown. This study aimed to investigate the daily rhythm of dCA. Fifty-one healthy adults (38.294 ± 13.279 years, 40 females) were recruited and received six dCA measurements per individual that were conducted at predefined time points: 8:00, 9:00, 11:00, 14:00, 17:00, and 20:00. Although the blood pressure fluctuated significantly, there was no statistical difference in phase difference and gain (autoregulatory parameters) across the six time points. This study demonstrates that dCA remains stable during the interval from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and underscores the importance of stable dCA in maintaining cerebral blood flow and neural function

Alcohol Consumption and Ankle-to-Brachial Index: Results from the Cardiovascular Risk Survey

BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY: A low ankle-to-brachial index (ABI) is a strong correlate of cardiovascular disease and subsequent mortality. The relationship between ABI and alcohol consumption remains unclear. Data are from the Cardiovascular Risk Survey (CRS), a multiple-ethnic, community-based, cross-sectional study of 14,618 Chinese people (5757 Hans, 4767 Uygurs, and 4094 Kazakhs) aged 35 years and over at baseline from Oct. 2007 to March 2010. The relationship between alcohol intake and ABI was determined by use of analysis of covariance and multivariable regressions. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In men, alcohol consumption was significantly associated with ABI (P<0.001). After adjusted for the confounding factors, such as age, sex, ethnicity, body mass index, smoking, work stress, diabetes, and fasting blood glucose, the difference remained significant (P<0.001); either the unadjusted or multivariate-adjusted odds ratio (OR) for peripheral artery disease (PAD) was significantly higher in men who consumed >60.0 g/d [OR = 3.857, (95% CI: 2.555-5.824); OR = 2.797, (95% CI: 1.106-3.129); OR = 2.878, (95% CI: 1.215-4.018); respectively] and was significantly lower in men who consumed 20.1-40.0 g/d [OR= 0.330, (95% CI: 0.181-0.599); OR = 0.484, (95% CI: 0.065-0.894); OR = 0.478, (95% CI: 0.243-1.534); respectively] and 40.1-60.0 g/d [OR= 0.306, (95% CI: 0.096-0.969); OR = 0.267, (95% CI: 0.087-0.886); OR = 0.203, (95% CI: 0.113-0.754); respectively] compared with never drinking, respectively (all P<0.01). Neither in unadjusted nor in multivariate-adjusted model was the association between ABI and alcohol consumption significant (all P>0.05) in women. Similarly, PAD was not correlated with alcohol intake in women (all P>0.05). CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our results indicated that in Chinese men, alcohol consumption was associated with peripheral artery disease, and consumption of less than 60 g/d had an inverse association with peripheral atherosclerosis whereas consumption of 60 g/d or more had a positive association

Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities, especially when prompted to generate intermediate reasoning steps (e.g., Chain-of-Thought, CoT). However, LLMs can still struggle with problems that are easy for humans, such as generating action plans for executing tasks in a given environment, or performing complex math, logical, and commonsense reasoning. The deficiency stems from the key fact that LLMs lack an internal $\textit{world model}$ to predict the world $\textit{state}$ (e.g., environment status, intermediate variable values) and simulate long-term outcomes of actions. This prevents LLMs from performing deliberate planning akin to human brains, which involves exploring alternative reasoning paths, anticipating future states and rewards, and iteratively refining existing reasoning steps. To overcome the limitations, we propose a new LLM reasoning framework, $\underline{R}\textit{easoning vi}\underline{a} \underline{P}\textit{lanning}$ $\textbf{(RAP)}$. RAP repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent, and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monto Carlo Tree Search) for strategic exploration in the vast reasoning space. During reasoning, the LLM (as agent) incrementally builds a reasoning tree under the guidance of the LLM (as world model) and task-specific rewards, and obtains a high-reward reasoning path efficiently with a proper balance between exploration $\textit{vs.}$ exploitation. We apply RAP to a variety of challenging reasoning problems including plan generation, math reasoning, and logical inference. Empirical results on these tasks demonstrate the superiority of RAP over various strong baselines, including CoT and least-to-most prompting with self-consistency. RAP on LLAMA-33B surpasses CoT on GPT-4 with 33% relative improvement in a plan generation setting

Curcumin Blocks Small Cell Lung Cancer Cells Migration, Invasion, Angiogenesis, Cell Cycle and Neoplasia through Janus Kinase-STAT3 Signalling Pathway

Curcumin, the active component of turmeric, has been shown to protect against carcinogenesis and prevent tumor development. However, little is known about its anti-tumor mechanism in small cell lung cancer (SCLC). In this study, we found that curcumin can inhibit SCLC cell proliferation, cell cycle, migration, invasion and angiogenesis through suppression of the STAT3. SCLC cells were treated with curcumin (15 µmol/L) and the results showed that curcumin was effective in inhibiting STAT3 phosphorylation to downregulate of an array of STAT3 downstream targets ,which contributed to suppression of cell proliferation, loss of colony formation, depression of cell migration and invasion. Curcumin also suppressed the expression of proliferative proteins (Survivin, Bcl-XL and Cyclin B1), and invasive proteins (VEGF, MMP-2, MMP-7 and ICAM-1).Knockdown of STAT3 expression by siRNA was able to induce anti-invasive effects in vitro. In contrast, activation of STAT3 upstream of interleukin 6 (IL-6) leads to the increased cell proliferation ,cell survival, angiogenesis, invasion, migration and tumor growth. Our findings illustrate the biologic significance of IL-6/JAK/STAT3 signaling in SCLC progression and providenovel evidence that the pathway may be a new potential target for therapy of SCLC. It was concluded that curcumin is a potent agent in the inhibition of STAT3 with favorable pharmacological activity,and curcumin may have translational potential as an effective cancer therapeutic or preventive agent for SCLC

3-Chloro-4-hydroxy­furan-2(5H)-one

In the title compound, C4H3ClO3, mol­ecules are linked via O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds into an infinite chain with graph-set motif C(6) along the c axis