Exploitation of Contemporary Religious Revivals a Few Doubts About the Explanations Provided by Scholars

Since the 1970s, religious revivals have been happening all across the world. Numerous scholars have been investigating the reasons behind such a phenomenon. However, everyone seems to perceive it from a macroscopic and general angle, trying to provide a universal explanation. Therefore, everyone inspects this phenomenon from a “global” point of view. The purpose of this paper is to try to find out the cause and development of the revival as well as the true meaning behind the explanations provided by the scholars. However, after studying the materials, the author finds the discussion, or the attempted explanation, provokes many doubts

Three dimensional spider-web-like superconducting filamentary paths in KxFe2−ySe2K_xFe_{2-y}Se_2 single crystals

Since the discovery of high temperature superconductivity in F-doped LaFeAsO, many new iron based superconductors with different structures have been fabricated2. The observation of superconductivity at about 32 K in KxFe2-ySe2 with the iso-structure of the FeAs-based 122 superconductors was a surprise and immediately stimulated the interests because the band structure calculation8 predicted the absence of the hole pocket which was supposed to be necessary for the theoretical picture of S+- pairing. Soon later, it was found that the material may separate into the insulating antiferromagnetic K2Fe4Se5 phase and the superconducting phase. It remains unresolved that how these two phases coexist and what is the parent phase for superconductivity. In this study we use different quenching processes to produce the target samples with distinct microstructures, and apply multiple measuring techniques to reveal a close relationship between the microstructures and the global appearance of superconductivity. In addition, we clearly illustrate three dimensional spider-web-like superconducting filamentary paths, and for the first time propose that the superconducting phase may originate from a state with one vacancy in every eight Fe-sites with the root8*root10 parallelogram structure.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure

Adsorption and desorption characteristics of arsenic onto ceria nanoparticles

The rapid increase in the use of engineered nanoparticles [ENPs] has resulted in an increasing concern over the potential impacts of ENPs on the environmental and human health. ENPs tend to adsorb a large variety of toxic chemicals when they are emitted into the environment, which may enhance the toxicity of ENPs and/or adsorbed chemicals. The study was aimed to investigate the adsorption and desorption behaviors of arsenic on ceria NPs in aqueous solution using batch technique. Results show that the adsorption behavior of arsenic on ceria NPs was strongly dependent on pH and independent of ionic strength, indicating that the electrostatic effect on the adsorption of these elements was relatively not important compared to surface chemical reactions. The adsorption isotherms fitted very well to both the Langmuir and Freundlich models. The thermodynamic parameters (ΔH0, ΔS0, and ΔG0) for the adsorption of arsenic were determined at three different temperatures of 283, 303, and 323 K. The adsorption reaction was endothermic, and the process of adsorption was favored at high temperature. The desorption data showed that desorption hysteresis occurred at the initial concentration studied. High adsorption capacity of arsenic on ceria NPs suggests that the synergistic effects of ceria NPs and arsenic on the environmental systems may exist when they are released into the environment

Revisiting DETR Pre-training for Object Detection

Motivated by that DETR-based approaches have established new records on COCO detection and segmentation benchmarks, many recent endeavors show increasing interest in how to further improve DETR-based approaches by pre-training the Transformer in a self-supervised manner while keeping the backbone frozen. Some studies already claimed significant improvements in accuracy. In this paper, we take a closer look at their experimental methodology and check if their approaches are still effective on the very recent state-of-the-art such as $\mathcal{H}$-Deformable-DETR. We conduct thorough experiments on COCO object detection tasks to study the influence of the choice of pre-training datasets, localization, and classification target generation schemes. Unfortunately, we find the previous representative self-supervised approach such as DETReg, fails to boost the performance of the strong DETR-based approaches on full data regimes. We further analyze the reasons and find that simply combining a more accurate box predictor and Objects$365$ benchmark can significantly improve the results in follow-up experiments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by achieving strong object detection results of AP=$59.3\%$ on COCO val set, which surpasses $\mathcal{H}$-Deformable-DETR + Swin-L by +$1.4\%$. Last, we generate a series of synthetic pre-training datasets by combining the very recent image-to-text captioning models (LLaVA) and text-to-image generative models (SDXL). Notably, pre-training on these synthetic datasets leads to notable improvements in object detection performance. Looking ahead, we anticipate substantial advantages through the future expansion of the synthetic pre-training dataset

Alzheimer’s disease: amyloid-based pathogenesis and potential therapies

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most severe neurodegenerative diseases among elderly people. Different pathogenic factors for Alzheimer’s disease have been posited and studied in recent decades, but no effective treatment has been found, necessitating further studies. In this Viewpoint article, we assess studies on the mechanisms underlying the accumulation of amyloid b (Aβ) peptide and the formation of Aβ oligomers because their accumulation in amyloid plaques in brain tissue has become a well-studied hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. We focus on the production of Aβ and its impact on the function of synapses and neural circuits, and also discuss the clinical prospects for amyloid-targeted therapies