Bis[μ-1,2-bis­(1H-imidazol-1-ylmeth­yl)benzene-κ2 N 3:N 3′]disilver(I) 3-carboxyl­ato-4-hydroxy­benzene­sulfonate methanol solvate trihydrate

In the title compound, [Ag2(C14H14N4)2](C7H4O6S)·CH3OH·3H2O, the complex dication has a binuclear structure in which each AgI ion is two-coordinated in a slightly distorted linear coordination geometry. The two AgI atoms are bridged by two 1,2-bis­[(1H-imidazol-1-yl)meth­yl]benzene (IBI) ligands, forming a 22-membered ring. In the dication, π–π inter­actions are observed between the imidazole rings with centroid–centroid distances of 3.472 (3) and 3.636 (3) Å. In the crystal, the uncoordinated water mol­ecules, anions and methanol solvent mol­ecules are linked into chains along the b axis by O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds. In addition, π–π inter­actions are observed between the benzene rings of the IBI ligands, with a centroid–centroid distance of 3.776 (2) Å. The sulfonate group is disordered over two orientations with occupancies of 0.676 (12) and 0.324 (12)

A Fully-Integrated Reconfigurable Dual-Band Transceiver for Short Range Wireless Communications in 180 nm CMOS

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.A fully-integrated reconfigurable dual-band (760-960 MHz and 2.4-2.5 GHz) transceiver (TRX) for short range wireless communications is presented. The TRX consists of two individually-optimized RF front-ends for each band and one shared power-scalable analog baseband. The sub-GHz receiver has achieved the maximum 75 dBc 3rd-order harmonic rejection ratio (HRR3) by inserting a Q-enhanced notch filtering RF amplifier (RFA). In 2.4 GHz band, a single-ended-to-differential RFA with gain/phase imbalance compensation is proposed in the receiver. A ΣΔ fractional-N PLL frequency synthesizer with two switchable Class-C VCOs is employed to provide the LOs. Moreover, the integrated multi-mode PAs achieve the output P1dB (OP1dB) of 16.3 dBm and 14.1 dBm with both 25% PAE for sub-GHz and 2.4 GHz bands, respectively. A power-control loop is proposed to detect the input signal PAPR in real-time and flexibly reconfigure the PA's operation modes to enhance the back-off efficiency. With this proposed technique, the PAE of the sub-GHz PA is improved by x3.24 and x1.41 at 9 dB and 3 dB back-off powers, respectively, and the PAE of the 2.4 GHz PA is improved by x2.17 at 6 dB back-off power. The presented transceiver has achieved comparable or even better performance in terms of noise figure, HRR, OP1dB and power efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art.Peer reviewe

Biological Activities and Applications of Dioscorins, the Major Tuber Storage Proteins of Yam

AbstractYam tubers, a common tuber crop and an important traditional Chinese medicine in Taiwan, have many bioactive substances, including phenolic compounds, mucilage polysaccharides, steroidal saponins and proteins. Among the total soluble proteins, 80% of them are dioscorins. In the past two decades, many studies showed that dioscorins exhibited biological activities both in vitro and in vivo, including the enzymatic, antioxidant, antihypertensive, immunomodulatory, lectin activities and the protecting role on airway epithelial cells against allergens in vitro. Some of these activities are survived after chemical, heating process or enzymatic digestion. Despite of lacking the intact structural information and the detail action mechanisms in the cells, yam dioscorins are potential resources for developing as functional foods and interesting targets for food protein researchers

Derived pp-adic heights and the leading coefficient of the Bertolini--Darmon--Prasanna pp-adic LL-function

Let $E/\mathbf{Q}$ be an elliptic curve and let $p$ be an odd prime of good reduction for $E$. Let $K$ be an imaginary quadratic field satisfying the classical Heegner hypothesis and in which $p$ splits. In a previous work, Agboola--Castella formulated an analogue of the Birch--Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for the $p$-adic $L$-function $L_{\mathfrak{p}}^{\rm BDP}$ of Bertolini--Darmon--Prasanna attached to $E/K$, assuming the prime $p$ to be ordinary for $E$. The goal of this paper is two-fold: (1) We formulate a $p$-adic BSD conjecture for $L_{\mathfrak{p}}^{\rm BDP}$ for all odd primes $p$ of good reduction. (2) For an algebraic analogue $F_{\overline{\mathfrak{p}}}^{\rm BDP}$ of $L_{\mathfrak{p}}^{\rm BDP}$, we show that the ``leading coefficient'' part of our conjecture holds, and that the ``order of vanishing'' part follows from the expected ``maximal non-degeneracy'' of an anticyclotomic $p$-adic height. In particular, when the Iwasawa--Greenberg Main Conjecture $(F_{\overline{\mathfrak{p}}}^{\rm BDP})=(L_{\mathfrak{p}}^{\rm BDP})$ is known, our results determine the leading coefficient of $L_{\mathfrak{p}}^{\rm BDP}$ at $T=0$ up to a $p$-adic unit. Moreover, by adapting the approach of Burungale--Castella--Kim in the $p$-ordinary case, we prove the main conjecture for supersingular primes $p$ under mild hypotheses.Comment: 34 page

Weight-dependent Gates for Differentiable Neural Network Pruning

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective network pruning framework, which introduces novel weight-dependent gates to prune filter adaptively. We argue that the pruning decision should depend on the convolutional weights, in other words, it should be a learnable function of filter weights. We thus construct the weight-dependent gates (W-Gates) to learn the information from filter weights and obtain binary filter gates to prune or keep the filters automatically. To prune the network under hardware constraint, we train a Latency Predict Net (LPNet) to estimate the hardware latency of candidate pruned networks. Based on the proposed LPNet, we can optimize W-Gates and the pruning ratio of each layer under latency constraint. The whole framework is differentiable and can be optimized by gradient-based method to achieve a compact network with better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method on Resnet34, Resnet50 and MobileNet V2, achieving up to 1.33/1.28/1.1 higher Top-1 accuracy with lower hardware latency on ImageNet. Compared with state-of-the-art pruning methods, our method achieves superior performance.Comment: ECCV worksho

Source attack of decoy-state quantum key distribution using phase information

Quantum key distribution (QKD) utilizes the laws of quantum mechanics to achieve information-theoretically secure key generation. This field is now approaching the stage of commercialization, but many practical QKD systems still suffer from security loopholes due to imperfect devices. In fact, practical attacks have successfully been demonstrated. Fortunately, most of them only exploit detection-side loopholes which are now closed by the recent idea of measurement-device-independent QKD. On the other hand, little attention is paid to the source which may still leave QKD systems insecure. In this work, we propose and demonstrate an attack that exploits a source-side loophole existing in qubit-based QKD systems using a weak coherent state source and decoy states. Specifically, by implementing a linear-optics unambiguous-state-discrimination measurement, we show that the security of a system without phase randomization --- which is a step assumed in conventional security analyses but sometimes neglected in practice --- can be compromised. We conclude that implementing phase randomization is essential to the security of decoy-state QKD systems under current security analyses.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery: A transtracheal approach for the thoracic cavity in a live canine model

BackgroundThe present study aimed to evaluate the performance of transtracheal thoracic exploration and pericardial window creation in a canine survival model.MethodsTransthoracic exploration was performed in 14 dogs. Under general anesthesia, after an incision in the right lateral wall of the middle–lower portion of the trachea was made, a 9-mm metal tube was advanced into the thoracic cavity. For thoracic cavity exploration and pericardial window creation, a flexible bronchoscope was introduced through the metal tube into the thoracic cavity. After thoracoscopy, a Dumon stent (Novatech, Grasse, France) was used to cover the tracheal incision site and facilitate healing. Animals were evaluated by endoscopy 1 and 2 weeks later. Animals were humanely killed, and necropsy was performed 2 weeks after the transtracheal natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery.ResultsFourteen dogs underwent transtracheal thoracic exploration lasting for an average of 110 minutes (range, 80–150), with 3 perioperative deaths. At 2 weeks after pericardial window creation, endoscopy revealed normal healing of the tracheal incision sites in all 11 surviving animals. Necropsy on the 11 animals at 2 weeks showed 9 adhesions around the pericardial window and 5 adhesions around the tracheal incision region. No mediastinitis or abscesses could be identified.ConclusionsTranstracheal thoracic exploration is technically feasible. Increasing surgical experience together with improvement in endoscopic techniques will further facilitate the development of natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery for thoracic diseases

Discovering Chromatin Motifs using FAIRE Sequencing and the Human Diploid Genome

Background: Specific chromatin structures are associated with active or inactive gene transcription. The gene regulatory elements are intrinsically dynamic and alternate between inactive and active states through the recruitment of DNA binding proteins, such as chromatin-remodeling proteins. Results: We developed a unique genome-wide method to discover DNA motifs associated with chromatin accessibility using formaldehyde-assisted isolation of regulatory elements with high-throughput sequencing (FAIRE-seq). We aligned the FAIRE-seq reads to the GM12878 diploid genome and subsequently identified differential chromatin-state regions (DCSRs) using heterozygous SNPs. The DCSR pairs represent the locations of imbalances of chromatin accessibility between alleles and are ideal to reveal chromatin motifs that may directly modulate chromatin accessibility. In this study, we used DNA 6-10mer sequences to interrogate all DCSRs, and subsequently discovered conserved chromatin motifs with significant changes in the occurrence frequency. To investigate their likely roles in biology, we studied the annotated protein associated with each of the top ten chromatin motifs genome-wide, in the intergenic regions and in genes, respectively. As a result, we found that most of these annotated motifs are associated with chromatin remodeling, reflecting their significance in biology. Conclusions: Our method is the first one using fully phased diploid genome and FAIRE-seq to discover motifs associated with chromatin accessibility. Our results were collected to construct the first chromatin motif database (CMD), providing the potential DNA motifs recognized by chromatin-remodeling proteins and is freely available at http://syslab.nchu.edu.tw/chromatin