Microstructural and Mechanical-Property Manipulation through Rapid Dendrite Growth and Undercooling in an Fe-based Multinary Alloy

Rapid dendrite growth in single- or dual-phase multicomponent alloys can be manipulated to improve the mechanical properties of such metallic materials. Rapid growth of (αFe) dendrites was realized in an undercooled Fe-5Ni-5Mo-5Ge-5Co (wt.%) multinary alloy using the glass fluxing method. The relationship between rapid dendrite growth and the micro-/nano-mechanical properties of the alloy was investigated by analyzing the grain refinement and microstructural evolution resulting from the rapid dendrite growth. It was found that (αFe) dendrites grow sluggishly within a low but wide undercooling range. Once the undercooling exceeds 250 K, the dendritic growth velocity increases steeply until reaching a plateau of 31.8 ms[superscript −1]. The increase in the alloy Vickers microhardness with increasing dendritic growth velocity results from the hardening effects of increased grain/phase boundaries due to the grain refinement, the more homogeneous distribution of the second phase along the boundaries, and the more uniform distribution of solutes with increased contents inside the grain, as verified also by nanohardness maps. Once the dendritic growth velocity exceeds ~8 ms[superscript −1], the rate of Vickers microhardness increase slows down significantly with a further increase in dendritic growth velocity, owing to the microstructural transition of the (αFe) phase from a trunk-dendrite to an equiaxed-grain microstructure.Singapore-MIT Allianc

Pattern Discovery in DNS Query Traffic

AbstractDNS provides a critical function in directing Internet traffic. Traditional rule-based anomaly or intrusion detection methods are not able to update the rules dynamically. Data mining based approaches can find various patterns in massive dynamic query traffic data. In this paper, a novel periodic trend mining method is proposed, as well as a periodic trend pattern based traffic prediction method. Clustering is adopted to partition numerous domain names into separate groups by the characteristics of their query traffic time series. Experimental results on a real-word DNS log indicate data mining based approaches are promising in the domain of DNS service

Looking Forward to Seeing Real Experiences through Photos? It Depends on the Quality of Photos

We investigated whether the quality of photos will exert an influence on the post-evaluation of the experience? Through two experiments, we found that the effect does exist. When people reactivate memories through photos, photos can work in the following ways. First, photos can make the memory related to photo content more prominent. Secondly, photos content can replace the already obscured original memory to a certain extent. When the quality of photos is high, people tend to accept the memory being reprocessed, driven by photos, thus improving the evaluation of the original experience. When the quality of the photos is low, people subconsciously reject the information that photos convey and still insist on the judgment of the original experience. The above scenarios apply when people still have an initial impression on their experiences

Qualitative and Quantitative Assessment of Fatty Acids of Hazelnut by GC-TOF/MS

On the basis of gas chromatography coupled with time-of-flight mass spectrometry, we assessed the constituents and relative quantities of fatty acids extracted by supercritical carbon dioxide in seeds of hazelnut. Hazelnut seeds contain four fatty acids (palmitic, stearic, oleic, and linoleic acids). The content of unsaturated fatty acids is more than 92.9% in hazelnut seed oil. Oleic acid, which constitutes 76.1%, has a high boiling point and low volatility. Hazelnut oil has good storage stability and is recommended as senior edible oil for health and the food industry. Our study reveals the important contribution of hazelnut in the production of bioactive oils and compounds that prevent obesity, cancer, coronary disease, and many other human health as well as pharmaceutical challenges

Phylogenetic analysis and classification of the Brassica rapa SET-domain protein family

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The SET (<it>Su(var)3-9, Enhancer-of-zeste, Trithorax</it>) domain is an evolutionarily conserved sequence of approximately 130-150 amino acids, and constitutes the catalytic site of lysine methyltransferases (KMTs). KMTs perform many crucial biological functions <it>via </it>histone methylation of chromatin. Histone methylation marks are interpreted differently depending on the histone type (i.e. H3 or H4), the lysine position (e.g. H3K4, H3K9, H3K27, H3K36 or H4K20) and the number of added methyl groups (i.e. me1, me2 or me3). For example, H3K4me3 and H3K36me3 are associated with transcriptional activation, but H3K9me2 and H3K27me3 are associated with gene silencing. The substrate specificity and activity of KMTs are determined by sequences within the SET domain and other regions of the protein.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we identified 49 SET-domain proteins from the recently sequenced <it>Brassica rapa </it>genome. We performed sequence similarity and protein domain organization analysis of these proteins, along with the SET-domain proteins from the dicot <it>Arabidopsis thaliana</it>, the monocots <it>Oryza sativa </it>and <it>Brachypodium distachyon</it>, and the green alga <it>Ostreococcus tauri. </it>We showed that plant SET-domain proteins can be grouped into 6 distinct classes, namely KMT1, KMT2, KMT3, KMT6, KMT7 and S-ET. Apart from the S-ET class, which has an interrupted SET domain and may be involved in methylation of nonhistone proteins, the other classes have characteristics of histone methyltransferases exhibiting different substrate specificities: KMT1 for H3K9, KMT2 for H3K4, KMT3 for H3K36, KMT6 for H3K27 and KMT7 also for H3K4. We also propose a coherent and rational nomenclature for plant SET-domain proteins. Comparisons of sequence similarity and synteny of <it>B. rapa </it>and <it>A. thaliana </it>SET-domain proteins revealed recent gene duplication events for some KMTs.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study provides the first characterization of the SET-domain KMT proteins of <it>B. rapa</it>. Phylogenetic analysis data allowed the development of a coherent and rational nomenclature of this important family of proteins in plants, as in animals. The results obtained in this study will provide a base for nomenclature of KMTs in other plant species and facilitate the functional characterization of these important epigenetic regulatory genes in <it>Brassica </it>crops.</p

Over-expression of the Hybrid Aspen Homeobox PttKN1 Gene in Red Leaf Beet Induced Altered Coloration of Leaves

PttKN1 (Populus tremula × tremuloides KNOTTED1) gene belongs to the KNOXI gene family. It plays an important role in plant development, typically in meristem initiation, maintenance and organogenesis, and potentially in plant coloration. To investigate the gene functions further, it was introduced into red leaf beet by the floral dip method mediated via Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The transformants demonstrated typical phenotypes as with other PttKN1 transformants. These alterations were very different from the morphology of the wild type. Among them, morphological modification of changed color throughout the entire plant from claret of wild type to yellowish green was the highlight in those transgenic PttKN1-beet plants. The result of spraying selection showed that the PttKN1-beet plants had kanamycin resistance. PCR assay of the 35S-Promoter, NPTII and PttKN1 gene, PCR-Southern analysis of the NPTII and PttKN1 gene showed that the foreign PttKN1 gene had successfully integrated into the genome of beet plant. Furthermore, the results of RT-PCR analysis showed that the gene was ectopic expressed in transgenic plants. These data suggested that there is a correlation between the ectopic expression of PttKN1 gene and morphological alterations of beet plants. Pigment content assay showed that betaxanthins concentrations shared little difference between wild type and transgenic lines, while betacyanins content in transgenic plants was sharply decreased, indicating that the altered plant coloration of the transgenic beet plants may be caused by the changed betacyanins content. The tyrosinase study suggested that the sharply decreased of betacyanins content in transgenic plants was caused via the decreased tyrosinase level. Therefore, the reason for the altered plant coloration may be due to partial inhibition of betacyanin biosynthesis that was induced via the pleiotropic roles of PttKN1 gene

Plug-and-Play Regulators for Image-Text Matching

Exploiting fine-grained correspondence and visual-semantic alignments has shown great potential in image-text matching. Generally, recent approaches first employ a cross-modal attention unit to capture latent region-word interactions, and then integrate all the alignments to obtain the final similarity. However, most of them adopt one-time forward association or aggregation strategies with complex architectures or additional information, while ignoring the regulation ability of network feedback. In this paper, we develop two simple but quite effective regulators which efficiently encode the message output to automatically contextualize and aggregate cross-modal representations. Specifically, we propose (i) a Recurrent Correspondence Regulator (RCR) which facilitates the cross-modal attention unit progressively with adaptive attention factors to capture more flexible correspondence, and (ii) a Recurrent Aggregation Regulator (RAR) which adjusts the aggregation weights repeatedly to increasingly emphasize important alignments and dilute unimportant ones. Besides, it is interesting that RCR and RAR are plug-and-play: both of them can be incorporated into many frameworks based on cross-modal interaction to obtain significant benefits, and their cooperation achieves further improvements. Extensive experiments on MSCOCO and Flickr30K datasets validate that they can bring an impressive and consistent R@1 gain on multiple models, confirming the general effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed methods. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/RCAR.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, Accepted by TIP202

QuantumEyes: Towards Better Interpretability of Quantum Circuits

Quantum computing offers significant speedup compared to classical computing, which has led to a growing interest among users in learning and applying quantum computing across various applications. However, quantum circuits, which are fundamental for implementing quantum algorithms, can be challenging for users to understand due to their underlying logic, such as the temporal evolution of quantum states and the effect of quantum amplitudes on the probability of basis quantum states. To fill this research gap, we propose QuantumEyes, an interactive visual analytics system to enhance the interpretability of quantum circuits through both global and local levels. For the global-level analysis, we present three coupled visualizations to delineate the changes of quantum states and the underlying reasons: a Probability Summary View to overview the probability evolution of quantum states; a State Evolution View to enable an in-depth analysis of the influence of quantum gates on the quantum states; a Gate Explanation View to show the individual qubit states and facilitate a better understanding of the effect of quantum gates. For the local-level analysis, we design a novel geometrical visualization Dandelion Chart to explicitly reveal how the quantum amplitudes affect the probability of the quantum state. We thoroughly evaluated QuantumEyes as well as the novel QuantumEyes integrated into it through two case studies on different types of quantum algorithms and in-depth expert interviews with 12 domain experts. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our approach in enhancing the interpretability of quantum circuits

Structural and biochemical insights into small RNA 3' end trimming by Arabidopsis SDN1.

A family of DEDDh 3'→5' exonucleases known as Small RNA Degrading Nucleases (SDNs) initiates the turnover of ARGONAUTE1 (AGO1)-bound microRNAs in Arabidopsis by trimming their 3' ends. Here, we report the crystal structure of Arabidopsis SDN1 (residues 2-300) in complex with a 9 nucleotide single-stranded RNA substrate, revealing that the DEDDh domain forms rigid interactions with the N-terminal domain and binds 4 nucleotides from the 3' end of the RNA via its catalytic pocket. Structural and biochemical results suggest that the SDN1 C-terminal domain adopts an RNA Recognition Motif (RRM) fold and is critical for substrate binding and enzymatic processivity of SDN1. In addition, SDN1 interacts with the AGO1 PAZ domain in an RNA-independent manner in vitro, enabling it to act on AGO1-bound microRNAs. These extensive structural and biochemical studies may shed light on a common 3' end trimming mechanism for 3'→5' exonucleases in the metabolism of small non-coding RNAs