Photoswap: Personalized Subject Swapping in Images

In an era where images and visual content dominate our digital landscape, the ability to manipulate and personalize these images has become a necessity. Envision seamlessly substituting a tabby cat lounging on a sunlit window sill in a photograph with your own playful puppy, all while preserving the original charm and composition of the image. We present Photoswap, a novel approach that enables this immersive image editing experience through personalized subject swapping in existing images. Photoswap first learns the visual concept of the subject from reference images and then swaps it into the target image using pre-trained diffusion models in a training-free manner. We establish that a well-conceptualized visual subject can be seamlessly transferred to any image with appropriate self-attention and cross-attention manipulation, maintaining the pose of the swapped subject and the overall coherence of the image. Comprehensive experiments underscore the efficacy and controllability of Photoswap in personalized subject swapping. Furthermore, Photoswap significantly outperforms baseline methods in human ratings across subject swapping, background preservation, and overall quality, revealing its vast application potential, from entertainment to professional editing.Comment: 14 page

Late Ordovician gastropods from the Zhaolaoyu Formation in the southwestern margin of the North China Platform

The Ordos Basin is located in the western part of the North China Platform and is the second largest sedimentary basin in China; the basin has a huge thickness of the Early Palaeozoic marine deposits, especially the Ordovician ones. The Zhaolaoyu Formation is distributed in the Fuping area of the southern Ordos Basin, where brachiopods, gastropods, graptolites, sponge spicules and ichnofossils are abundant. Ordovician gastropods are abundant, widespread and well known from different palaeocontinents across the world and are important for the study of biogeography and palaeoenvironments of the Ordovician. However, gastropods from the Ordovician in the Ordos Basin of North China have been rarely documented. The Early to Middle Ordovician of gastropod fauna from the Zhouzishan area, Inner Mongolia, western Ordos Basin, is dominated by the discoidal gastropods with a three to four whorls. Twelve genera of gastropods from the Ordovician of the western and southern Ordos Basin were documented, all with larger spire angle and up to four whorls. Since then, no other Ordovician gastropod fossils have been reported from the Ordos Basin. Herein, we reported and illustrated a gastropod fauna from the Late Ordovician in the Ordos Basin of North China. All gastropod specimens were preserved as internal moulds, which were manually picked from the residues after the samples were chemically dissolved in buffered acetic acid (5â10%). The fauna was recovered from the Zhaolaoyu Formation at the Zhaolaoyu section, Fuping County and consists of several species: Hormotoma sp., Lophonema sp., Lophospira sp. and Lophospira cf. sinensis. This fauna is dominated by high-spired gastropods with more than five whorls and provides an important supplement to the palaeontological information of the studied area

Studies on Chemical Characterization of Ginkgo Amillaria Oral Solution and Its Drug–Drug Interaction With Piceatannol 3′-O-β-D-Glucopyranoside for Injection

Ginkgo Amillaria oral solution (GAO) is commonly used for the treatment of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases in China. Piceatannol-3′-O-β-D-glucopyranoside for injection (PGI) is mainly used for the prevention and treatment of ischemic cerebrovascular diseases. With the spread of cerebrovascular disease, the possibility of combining the two drugs has increased; however, there is no research on the drug–drug interaction (DDI) between these two medicines. In this paper, an ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography/quadrupole–orbitrap mass spectrometry (UHPLC/Q-Orbitrap MS) method was established to characterize the chemical constituents of GAO first; 62 compounds were identified or tentatively identified based on their retention time (RT), MS, and MS/MS data. Nine main compounds were determined by ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography/triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (UPLC-QQQ-MS). Furthermore, incubation with liver microsomes in vitro was fulfilled; the results showed that GAO had a significant inhibitory effect on UGT1A9 and UGT2B7 (p < 0.05), and PGI was mainly metabolized by UGT1A9. The identification results of in vivo metabolites of PGI showed that PGI mainly undergoes a phase II binding reaction mediated by UDP-glucuronosyltransferase (UGT) and sulfotransferase (SULT) in vivo. Therefore, pharmacokinetic studies were performed to investigate the DDI between GAO and PGI. The results showed that the AUC (p < 0.05) and T1/2 (p < 0.05) of PGI in vivo were significantly increased when administered together with GAO, whereas the CL was significantly decreased (p < 0.05). The exploration of in vitro and in vivo experiments showed that there was a DDI between GAO and PGI

Extending the spatiotemporal resolution of super-resolution microscopies using photomodulatable fluorescent proteins

In the past two decades, various super-resolution (SR) microscopy techniques have been developed to break the diffraction limit using subdiffraction excitation to spatially modulate the fluorescence emission. Photomodulatable fluorescent proteins (FPs) can be activated by light of specific wavelengths to produce either stochastic or patterned subdiffraction excitation, resulting in improved optical resolution. In this review, we focus on the recently developed photomodulatable FPs or commonly used SR microscopies and discuss the concepts and strategies for optimizing and selecting the biochemical and photophysical properties of PMFPs to improve the spatiotemporal resolution of SR techniques, especially time-lapse live-cell SR techniques