The multidimensional dependence of halo bias in the eye of a machine: a tale of halo structure, assembly and environment

We develop a novel approach in exploring the joint dependence of halo bias on multiple halo properties using Gaussian process regression. Using a $\Lambda$CDM $N$-body simulation, we carry out a comprehensive study of the joint bias dependence on halo structure, formation history and environment. We show that the bias is a multivariate function of halo properties that falls into three regimes. For massive haloes, halo mass explains the majority of bias variation. For early-forming haloes, bias depends sensitively on the recent mass accretion history. For low-mass and late-forming haloes, bias depends more on the structure of a halo such as its shape and spin. Our framework enables us to convincingly prove that $V_\mathrm{max}/V_\mathrm{vir}$ is a lossy proxy of formation time for bias modelling, whereas the mass, spin, shape and formation time variables are non-redundant with respect to each other. Combining mass and formation time largely accounts for the mass accretion history dependence of bias. Combining all the internal halo properties fully accounts for the density profile dependence inside haloes, and predicts the clustering variation of individual haloes to a $20\%$ level at $\sim 10\mathrm{Mpc}h^{-1}$. When an environmental density is measured outside $1\mathrm{Mpc}h^{-1}$ from the halo centre, it outperforms and largely accounts for the bias dependence on the internal halo structure, explaining the bias variation above a level of $30\%$.Comment: MNRAS accepte

The effect of food flavour on human appetite and eating behaviour

Overconsumption of foods is thought to be one of the main causes of the rising number of global obesity. This thesis aims to investigate the role of food flavour in human appetite and eating behaviour through three studies. The first study investigated whether the sweetness intensity of a milkshake affected ad libitum intake of the milkshake and sensory-specific satiety (SSS). In a crossover single-blinded design, 24 participants consumed ad libitum high, ideal and low sweetness (HS, IS or LS) milkshakes over three visits. After milkshake intake, participants consumed ad libitum one, or both of a sweet and a savoury snack. All milkshake consumption was similar, suggesting that the sweetness intensity did not affect the ad libitum intake of the milkshake. After intake of all sweet milkshakes, ratings of desire for something sweet decreased, and subsequent savoury snacks were consumed more than subsequent sweet snacks. The sweetness intensity of milkshakes did not affect the change in the desire for something sweet or the subsequent snack intake. Ratings of desire for something savoury increased after the intake of HS milkshake and were higher than the ratings collected following the intake of IS milkshake. Therefore, this study suggested that a sweeter milkshake did not affect the magnitude of SSS for sweet foods, but increased a stronger sensory-specific appetite (SSA) for savoury foods. The second study examined the effects of aroma, taste and their interaction on subjective appetite sensation and subsequent lunch intake. In a crossover design, 26 females consumed 1 of the 4 test drinks as a preload: 1) water; 2) strawberry aroma in water; 3) sucrose and citric acid in water; 4) strawberry aroma, sucrose and citric acid in water. The subsequent lunch intake did not differ after all drink preloads. The drink with only aroma or only taste were not different from water in affecting appetite sensation. A drink with both aroma and taste reduced hunger ratings greater than water or a drink with only taste or aroma, during 15 min drinking and up to 30 min post drinking. Meanwhile, the drink with both taste and aroma was the highest in perceived flavour intensity. This suggests enhancing flavour perception of a drink through aroma-taste cross-modal interaction can increase the satiating effect of a drink. The third study investigated effects of sweetness, thickness and caramel flavour perception of custards on expected satiation and expected satiety of the custards. 90 participants (65 females, 25 males) tasted 18 custard samples over two sessions. Ingredients of custards were different only in the concentrations of caramel aroma, Truvia sweetener and carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC), based on an experimental design. Thickness enhanced both expected satiation and expected satiety. Sweetness enhanced expected satiation but not expected satiety. Caramel flavour did not affect expected satiation or expected satiety. The cognitive expectation on satiation and satiety has previously been shown to determine self-selected portion size. Therefore, the current study suggests that manipulating sweetness and thickness perception of a food without changing its energy content might help portion size control, via manipulating consumers’ cognitive expectation of the food. In conclusion, manipulating food flavour is a promising area to explore with the respect to hunger suppression and fullness enhancing, limiting the intake of eaten foods while promoting intake of other foods via SSS or SSA, and contributing to the cognitive control of portion size. Therefore, manipulation food flavour might be helpful for appetite control and supporting an energy-restrict diet; however, it seems challenging to reduce actual food energy intake through manipulating only the flavour properties of foods

Compact-Size Low-Profile Wideband Circularly Polarized Omnidirectional Patch Antenna With Reconfigurable Polarizations

A compact-size low-profile wideband circularly polarized (CP) omnidirectional antenna with reconfigurable polarizations is presented in this communication. This design is based on a low-profile omnidirectional CP antenna which consists of a vertically polarized microstrip patch antenna working in TM01/TM02 modes and sequentially bended slots etched on the ground plane for radiating horizontally polarized electric field. The combined radiation from both the microstrip patch and the slots leads to a CP omnidirectional radiation pattern. The polarization reconfigurability is realized by introducing PIN diodes on the slots. By electronically controlling the states of the PIN diodes, the effective orientation of the slots on ground plane can be changed dynamically and the polarization of antenna can be altered between left-hand circular polarization (LHCP) and right-hand circular polarization (RHCP). The proposed antenna exhibits a wide-operational bandwidth of 19.8% (2.09-2.55 GHz) with both axial ratio below 3 dB and return loss above 10 dB when radiates either LHCP or RHCP waves. Experimental results show good agreement with the simulation results. The present design has a compact size, a thickness of only 0.024? and exhibits stable CP omnidirectional conical-beam radiation patterns within the entire operating frequency band with good circular polarization

Topical Halometasone Reduces Acute Adverse Effects Induced by Pulsed Dye Laser for Treatment of Port Wine Stain Birthmarks

Introduction: Pulsed dye laser (PDL) for treatment of port wine stain (PWS) usually causes some acute adverse effects, including pain, erythema, scabbing and swelling. This study aimed to determine whether topical halometasone can be used to reduce these acute adverse effects for post-PDL care of patients.Methods: A total of 40 PWS subjects were enrolled in this study and randomly assigned into two regimens: PDL alone and PDL + halometasone. All subjects were given a single treatment of PDL with wavelength of 595 nm, fluence of 8.0~13.5 J/cm2, pulse duration of 0.45~20 ms (We mainly used purpuric pulse duration for PWS) and spot size of 7 mm. Subjects in the PDL + halometasone group received topical application of halometasone daily for 3 days. Subjects were followed-up on days 3, 7 and one month post-PDL to evaluate the reduction of adverse effects.Results: Subjects in the PDL + halometasone group had significantly improved erythema and scab scores and had less erythema duration days as compared to those in the PDL alone group. Topical halometasone also showed a decrease in pain index among subjects, but was statistically insignificant. Topical halometasone did not affect the ultimate efficacy of PDL treatment for PWS.Conclusion: Topical halometasone can significantly reduce acute adverse effects induced by PDL for treatment of PWS birthmarks, thus providing a safe and efficacious solution for post-PDL care of PWS patients

The role of cancer-associated fibroblasts in the invasion and metastasis of colorectal cancer

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer and has ranked the third leading cause in cancerassociated death globally. Metastasis is the leading cause of death in colorectal cancer patients. The role of tumor microenvironment (TME) in colorectal cancer metastasis has received increasing attention. As the most abundant cell type in the TME of solid tumors, cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) have been demonstrated to have multiple functions in advancing tumor growth and metastasis. They can remodel the extracellular matrix (ECM) architecture, promote epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), and interact with cancer cells or other stromal cells by secreting growth factors, cytokines, chemokines, and exosomes, facilitating tumor cell invasion into TME and contributing to distant metastasis. This article aims to analyze the sources and heterogeneity of CAFs in CRC, as well as their role in invasion and metastasis, in order to provide new insights into the metastasis mechanism of CRC and its clinical applications

Genetic variants in the vitamin D pathway genes VDBP and RXRA modulate cutaneous melanoma disease-specific survival

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the vitamin D pathway genes have been implicated in cutaneous melanoma (CM) risk, but their role in CM disease-specific survival (DSS) remains obscure. We comprehensively analyzed the prognostic roles of 2669 common SNPs in the vitamin D pathway genes using data from a published genome-wide association study (GWAS) at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) and then validated the SNPs of interest in another GWAS from the Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Among the 2669 SNPs, 203 were significantly associated with DSS in MDACC dataset (P C was associated with a better DSS [combined hazards ratio (HR) = 0.66]; and the same for RXRA rs7850212 C > A (combined HR = 0.38), which were further confirmed by the Fine and Gray competing-risks regression model. Further bioinformatics analyses indicated that these loci may modulate corresponding gene methylation status

A Hybrid Backtracking Search Optimization Algorithm with Differential Evolution

The backtracking search optimization algorithm (BSA) is a new nature-inspired method which possesses a memory to take advantage of experiences gained from previous generation to guide the population to the global optimum. BSA is capable of solving multimodal problems, but it slowly converges and poorly exploits solution. The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is a robust evolutionary algorithm and has a fast convergence speed in the case of exploitive mutation strategies that utilize the information of the best solution found so far. In this paper, we propose a hybrid backtracking search optimization algorithm with differential evolution, called HBD. In HBD, DE with exploitive strategy is used to accelerate the convergence by optimizing one worse individual according to its probability at each iteration process. A suit of 28 benchmark functions are employed to verify the performance of HBD, and the results show the improvement in effectiveness and efficiency of hybridization of BSA and DE

MEAformer: Multi-modal Entity Alignment Transformer for Meta Modality Hybrid

As an important variant of entity alignment (EA), multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to discover identical entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) with relevant images attached. We noticed that current MMEA algorithms all globally adopt the KG-level modality fusion strategies for multi-modal entity representation but ignore the variation in modality preferences for individual entities, hurting the robustness to potential noise involved in modalities (e.g., blurry images and relations). In this paper, we present MEAformer, a multi-modal entity alignment transformer approach for meta modality hybrid, which dynamically predicts the mutual correlation coefficients among modalities for entity-level feature aggregation. A modal-aware hard entity replay strategy is further proposed for addressing vague entity details. Experimental results show that our model not only achieves SOTA performance on multiple training scenarios including supervised, unsupervised, iterative, and low resource, but also has a comparable number of parameters, optimistic speed, and good interpretability. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zjukg/MEAformer.Comment: Repository: https://github.com/zjukg/MEAforme