CPopQA: Ranking Cultural Concept Popularity by LLMs

Prior work has demonstrated large language models' (LLMs) potential to discern statistical tendencies within their pre-training corpora. Despite that, many examinations of LLMs' knowledge capacity focus on knowledge explicitly appearing in the training data or implicitly inferable from similar contexts. How well an LLM captures the corpus-level statistical trends of concepts for reasoning, especially long-tail ones, is still underexplored. In this study, we introduce a novel few-shot question-answering task (CPopQA) that examines LLMs' statistical ranking abilities for long-tail cultural concepts (e.g., holidays), with a specific focus on these concepts' popularity in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively. We curate a dataset containing 459 holidays across 58 countries, generating a total of 6,000 QA testing pairs. Experiments on four strong LLMs show that large models are capable of ranking long-tail cultural concepts regarding their statistical tendency. Notably, GPT-3.5 displayed superior performance and exhibited its potential to identify geo-cultural proximity across continents

Design and control of electronics based medical emergency system using a Quadcopter

Thesedays, there are many incidents that lead to road accidents, some being very severe. These accidents sometimes even result in loss of many lives. One of the major reasons for this loss is the lack of timely first aid. In fact, we observed from our survey conducted at an RTO that most deaths during accidents occur, due to delay or lack of first aid. The project focuses on developing a prototype of the system which would cater to the need of medical emergencies that arise during road accidents. This will be accomplished by use of a quadcopter which will deliver the required first aid. With this project, we are attempting to bring about faster accessibility to the patient, than other present means of medical emergency system. In order to achieve this goal, various means of communication will be utilized. The use of a camera will help to view the accident site. This will help to considerably bring down the death rates caused due to lack of timely first aid during accidents

Impact of Pyraclostrobin (F-500) on Crop Plants

Strobilurins, such as pyraclostrobin, belong to a fungicide group with preventative mode of action and are used around the world. Strobilurins inhibit mitochondrial respiration by stopping electron transfer at the quinol oxidation site in the cytochrome-bc1 complex which disrupts energy cycle of the fungus. F-500 (pyraclostrobin) strobilurin, a new generation broad spectrum fungicide has been shown to cause changes in the metabolism of plants resulting in higher biomass and yield. Considering the ever increasing demand for food production with shrinking cultivable area day by day, it is necessary to go for agrochemicals which enhance the growth and development vis-à-vis productivity

Recent advancements in targeted protein knockdown technologies—emerging paradigms for targeted therapy

A generalized therapeutic strategy for various disease conditions, including cancer, is to deplete or inactivate harmful protein targets. Various forms of protein or gene silencing molecules, e.g., small molecule inhibitors, RNA interference (RNAi), and microRNAs (miRNAs) have been used against druggable targets. Over the past few years, targeted protein degradation (TPD) approaches have been developed for direct degradation of candidate proteins. Among the TPD approaches, proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTACs) have emerged as one of the most promising approaches for the selective elimination of proteins via the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Other than PROTACs, TPD methods with potential therapeutic use include intrabody-mediated protein knockdown and tripartite motif-21 (TRIM-21) mediated TRIM-Away. In this review, protein knockdown approaches, their modes of action, and their advantages over conventional gene knockdown approaches are summarized. In cancers, disease-associated protein functions are often executed by specific post-translational modifications (PTMs). The role of TRIM-Away is highlighted in the direct knockdown of PTM forms of target proteins. Moreover, the application challenges and the prospective clinical use of TPD approaches in various diseases are also discussed

Quantification of cystine in human renal proximal tubule cells using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

Nephropathic cystinosis is characterized by abnormal intralysosomal accumulation of cystine throughout the body causing irreversible damage to various organs, particularly the kidneys. Cysteamine, the currently available treatment, can reduce lysosomal cystine and postpone disease progression. However, cysteamine poses serious side effects and does not address all symptoms of cystinosis. To screen for new treatment options, a rapid and reliable high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) method was developed to quantify cystine in conditionally immortalized human proximal tubular epithelial cells (ciPTEC). The ciPTEC were treated with N-ethylmaleimide, lysed and deproteinized with 15% (w/v) sulfosalicylic acid. Subsequently, cystine was measured using deuterium-labeled cystine-D4, as an internal standard. The assay developed demonstrated linearity to at least 20 μmol/L with a good precision. Accuracies were between 97.3-102.9% for both cell extracts and whole cell samples. Cystine was sufficiently stable under all relevant analytical conditions. The assay was successfully applied to determine cystine levels in both healthy and cystinotic ciPTEC. Control cells showed clearly distinguishable cystine levels compared to cystinotic cells treated with or without cysteamine. The method developed provides a fast and reliable quantification of cystine, and is applicable to screen for potential drugs that could reverse cystinotic symptoms in human kidney cells

Spectral Log-Demons: Diffeomorphic Image Registration with Very Large Deformations

International audienceThis paper presents a new framework for capturing large and complex deformations in image registration and atlas construction. This challenging and recurrent problem in computer vision and medical imaging currently relies on iterative and local approaches, which are prone to local minima and, therefore, limit present methods to relatively small deformations. Our general framework introduces to this effect a new direct feature matching technique that finds global correspondences between images via simple nearest-neighbor searches. More specifically, very large image deformations are captured in Spectral Forces, which are derived from an improved graph spectral representation. We illustrate the benefits of our framework through a new enhanced version of the popular Log-Demons algorithm, named the Spectral Log-Demons, as well as through a groupwise extension, named the Groupwise Spectral Log-Demons, which is relevant for atlas construction. The evaluations of these extended versions demonstrate substantial improvements in accuracy and robustness to large deformations over the conventional Demons approaches