Dark matter for excess of AMS-02 positrons and antiprotons

We propose a dark matter explanation to simultaneously account for the excess of antiproton-to-proton and positron power spectra observed in the AMS-02 experiment while having the right dark matter relic abundance and satisfying the current direct search bounds. We extend the Higgs triplet model with a hidden gauge symmetry of $SU(2)_X$ that is broken to $Z_3$ by a quadruplet scalar field, rendering the associated gauge bosons stable weakly-interacting massive particle dark matter candidates. By coupling the complex Higgs triplet and the $SU(2)_X$ quadruplet, the dark matter candidates can annihilate into triplet Higgs bosons each of which in turn decays into lepton or gauge boson final states. Such a mechanism gives rise to correct excess of positrons and antiprotons with an appropriate choice of the triplet vacuum expectation value. Besides, the model provides a link between neutrino mass and dark matter phenomenology.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, references and comments added, version to appear in Phys. Lett.

Bubbles or cycles? Housing price dynamics in China’s major cities

Based on the monthly data of 35 cities during the period 2006−2017, this study adopts a recursive forward looking method to detect the presence of housing bubbles and investigate their potential cyclical patterns in China’s large and medium sized cities. Empirical results show that the number of cities reporting housing bubbles has been increasing since 2013, before it declined in 2017. Regarding regional disparities of housing bubbles, 1st-tier and 1.5-tier cities have higher probability than 2nd-tier cities for housing bubbles. In general, eastern region cities have more housing bubbles than central and western region cities, which may indicate the problem of shrinking cities China is facing nowadays. Bubble signals for market correction in major cities and municipalities seemed alarming in particular for the period 2013−2016, however it is difficult to conclude if the market adjustment in 2017 indicates a cyclical pattern. First published online 19 December 201

Why We Should Report the Details in Subjective Evaluation of TTS More Rigorously

This paper emphasizes the importance of reporting experiment details in subjective evaluations and demonstrates how such details can significantly impact evaluation results in the field of speech synthesis. Through an analysis of 80 papers presented at INTERSPEECH 2022, we find a lack of thorough reporting on critical details such as evaluator recruitment and filtering, instructions and payments, and the geographic and linguistic backgrounds of evaluators. To illustrate the effect of these details on evaluation outcomes, we conducted mean opinion score (MOS) tests on three well-known TTS systems under different evaluation settings and we obtain at least three distinct rankings of TTS models. We urge the community to report experiment details in subjective evaluations to improve the reliability and interpretability of experimental results.Comment: Interspeech 2023 camera-ready versio

Micro-patterned graphene-based sensing skins for human physiological monitoring.

Ultrathin, flexible, conformal, and skin-like electronic transducers are emerging as promising candidates for noninvasive and nonintrusive human health monitoring. In this work, a wearable sensing membrane is developed by patterning a graphene-based solution onto ultrathin medical tape, which can then be attached to the skin for monitoring human physiological parameters and physical activity. Here, the sensor is validated for monitoring finger bending/movements and for recognizing hand motion patterns, thereby demonstrating its future potential for evaluating athletic performance, physical therapy, and designing next-generation human-machine interfaces. Furthermore, this study also quantifies the sensor's ability to monitor eye blinking and radial pulse in real-time, which can find broader applications for the healthcare sector. Overall, the printed graphene-based sensing skin is highly conformable, flexible, lightweight, nonintrusive, mechanically robust, and is characterized by high strain sensitivity

Src-homology 2 domain-containing tyrosine phosphatase 2 promotes oral cancer invasion and metastasis

BACKGROUND: Tumor invasion and metastasis represent a major unsolved problem in cancer pathogenesis. Recent studies have indicated the involvement of Src-homology 2 domain-containing tyrosine phosphatase 2 (SHP2) in multiple malignancies; however, the role of SHP2 in oral cancer progression has yet to be elucidated. We propose that SHP2 is involved in the progression of oral cancer toward metastasis. METHODS: SHP2 expression was evaluated in paired oral cancer tissues by using immunohistochemical staining and real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. Isogenic highly invasive oral cancer cell lines from their respective low invasive parental lines were established using a Boyden chamber assay, and changes in the hallmarks of the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) were assessed to evaluate SHP2 function. SHP2 activity in oral cancer cells was reduced using si-RNA knockdown or enforced expression of a catalytically deficient mutant to analyze migratory and invasive ability in vitro and metastasis toward the lung in mice in vivo. RESULTS: We observed the significant upregulation of SHP2 in oral cancer tissues and cell lines. Following SHP2 knockdown, the oral cancer cells markedly attenuated migratory and invasion ability. We observed similar results in phosphatase-dead SHP2 C459S mutant expressing cells. Enhanced invasiveness was associated with significant upregulation of E-cadherin, vimentin, Snail/Twist1, and matrix metalloproteinase-2 in the highly invasive clones. In addition, we determined that SHP2 activity is required for the downregulation of phosphorylated ERK1/2, which modulates the downstream effectors, Snail and Twist1 at a transcript level. In lung tissue sections of mice, we observed that HSC3 tumors with SHP2 deletion exhibited significantly reduced metastatic capacity, compared with tumors administered control si-RNA. CONCLUSIONS: Our data suggest that SHP2 promotes the invasion and metastasis of oral cancer cells. These results provide a rationale for further investigating the effects of small-molecule SHP2 inhibitors on the progression of oral cancer, and indicate a previously unrecognized SHP2-ERK1/2-Snail/Twist1 pathway that is likely to play a crucial role in oral cancer invasion and metastasis

Organic Carbon Inferred Environmental Fluctuations during Late Quaternary, Southwestern Taiwan

Organic carbon abundance and isotopic composition of sediments in a coastal plain are potentially used to indicate depositional environments and hinterland organic sources. Since Taiwan is located on the eastern margin of the Eurasian continent facing eastward to the Pacific, its geographical position is sensitive to interactions between the sea and land. Changes in the climate have a direct bearing on the costal environment and types of terrestrial plant species that inhabit it. In this study, we sampled two cores drilled from the coastal plain of southwestern Taiwan, and conducted con-centration and isotopic analyses of organic carbon. Compared with the generally accepted environmental evolution of Taiwan, our study shows the dominant marine organic source have brought on relatively stable carbon abundance and low level isotopic values for to-tal organic carbon (TOC), whilst input from terrestrial sources attributed to arid-climate-induced C4 plant blooms make TOC content and δ 13

Music Source Separation with Band-Split RoPE Transformer

Music source separation (MSS) aims to separate a music recording into multiple musically distinct stems, such as vocals, bass, drums, and more. Recently, deep learning approaches such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been used, but the improvement is still limited. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency-domain approach based on a Band-Split RoPE Transformer (called BS-RoFormer). BS-RoFormer replies on a band-split module to project the input complex spectrogram into subband-level representations, and then arranges a stack of hierarchical Transformers to model the inner-band as well as inter-band sequences for multi-band mask estimation. To facilitate training the model for MSS, we propose to use the Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE). The BS-RoFormer system trained on MUSDB18HQ and 500 extra songs ranked the first place in the MSS track of Sound Demixing Challenge (SDX23). Benchmarking a smaller version of BS-RoFormer on MUSDB18HQ, we achieve state-of-the-art result without extra training data, with 9.80 dB of average SDR.Comment: This paper explains the SAMI-ByteDance MSS system submitted to Sound Demixing Challenge (SDX23) Music Separation Trac