Haplotype Diversity and Population Genetic Structure of Antistrophus Gall Wasps Associated with Two Silphium Species and Implication for Host Mediated Speciation

Gall making insects form a special feeding guild of phytophagous animals, and by manipulating host plant tissue differentiation, are able to avoid plant chemical defenses and thus have no need for counter defense mechanisms. Host plant selection is crucial to the evolution of these insects because successful gall formation is largely dependent on host plant ability to respond to stimuli. In Illinois and neighboring states, Antistrophus gall wasps associated with the rosin weed (S. integrifolium) and the cup plant (S. perfoliatum) are morphologically indistinguishable and thus have been treated as belonging to single species. However, the wasps from the host plant species display strong host preference to the host plant species from which they are reared as well as other life history differences, suggesting that they may represent two distinct, although cryptic, species. In order to test the competing hypotheses regarding the identity of these wasps, I investigated whether there exists genetic discontinuity between wasp populations defined by host plant species based on molecular data. Wasps associated with either host plant species, mostly from sympatric populations, were collected from Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri and Iowa and extracted total DNA were PCR amplified and sequenced for three DNA loci, including two mitochondrial genes, (Cytb and COI) and one nuclear gene (28S D2). Phylogenetic reconstruction for all samples based on the Cytb and COI genes did not recover any monophyletic lineage consisting exclusively of wasps sampled from either of the two host-plant species but revealed a clear pattern of lineage bias toward host plant species in the tree resolved from Cytb gene. Examination of haplotype diversity revealed five haplotypes among our Cytb (n= 60) and COI (n= 59) sequences, respectively and three haplotypes for the 28S gene (N= 65). Further analyses of the genealogical relationship among the haplotypes using network method uncovered a distinct host affiliation pattern for Cytb, but not for the COI gene, similar to the results of the phylogenetic analyses. For the more conservative 28S gene, the wasps associated with the two host plant species can be readily separated based on a single indel event at position 181, except for one single sample (R28), which was associated with rosin weed, but without the extra T at 181 position found in other wasps associated with rosinweed. Except for this indel and an additional transitional mutation for R28, there was no variation throughout the entire 524 bp length of the 28S gene. These results do not provide unambiguous support for the cryptic species hypothesis, but revealed significant discontinuity between the gall wasp gene pools associated with the two host plant species, which may indicate incipient host plant mediated speciation

Haplotype Diversity and Population Genetic Structure of Antistrophus Gall Wasps Associated with Two Silphium Species and Implication for Host Mediated Speciation

Gall making insects form a special feeding guild of phytophagous animals, and by manipulating host plant tissue differentiation, are able to avoid plant chemical defenses and thus have no need for counter defense mechanisms. Host plant selection is crucial to the evolution of these insects because successful gall formation is largely dependent on host plant ability to respond to stimuli. In Illinois and neighboring states, Antistrophus gall wasps associated with the rosin weed (S. integrifolium) and the cup plant (S. perfoliatum) are morphologically indistinguishable and thus have been treated as belonging to single species. However, the wasps from the host plant species display strong host preference to the host plant species from which they are reared as well as other life history differences, suggesting that they may represent two distinct, although cryptic, species. In order to test the competing hypotheses regarding the identity of these wasps, I investigated whether there exists genetic discontinuity between wasp populations defined by host plant species based on molecular data. Wasps associated with either host plant species, mostly from sympatric populations, were collected from Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri and Iowa and extracted total DNA were PCR amplified and sequenced for three DNA loci, including two mitochondrial genes, (Cytb and COI) and one nuclear gene (28S D2). Phylogenetic reconstruction for all samples based on the Cytb and COI genes did not recover any monophyletic lineage consisting exclusively of wasps sampled from either of the two host-plant species but revealed a clear pattern of lineage bias toward host plant species in the tree resolved from Cytb gene. Examination of haplotype diversity revealed five haplotypes among our Cytb (n= 60) and COI (n= 59) sequences, respectively and three haplotypes for the 28S gene (N= 65). Further analyses of the genealogical relationship among the haplotypes using network method uncovered a distinct host affiliation pattern for Cytb, but not for the COI gene, similar to the results of the phylogenetic analyses. For the more conservative 28S gene, the wasps associated with the two host plant species can be readily separated based on a single indel event at position 181, except for one single sample (R28), which was associated with rosin weed, but without the extra T at 181 position found in other wasps associated with rosinweed. Except for this indel and an additional transitional mutation for R28, there was no variation throughout the entire 524 bp length of the 28S gene. These results do not provide unambiguous support for the cryptic species hypothesis, but revealed significant discontinuity between the gall wasp gene pools associated with the two host plant species, which may indicate incipient host plant mediated speciation

Dynamic Optimal Control of a CO2 Heat Pump Coupled with Hot and Cold Thermal Storages

This study presents a model-based dynamic optimization strategy for a dual-mode CO2 heat pump coupled with hot and cold thermal storages, which was proposed as a high-efficiency smart grid enabling option in heating and cooling services for buildings or industry. Dynamic optimal control for simultaneously charging of hot and cold thermal storages is very delicate. The optimal control of compressor discharge pressure were commonly used for optimal control of heat pump systems. In this study, the outlet water temperatures of hot and cold tanks are used as indicators in the dynamic optimal strategy for charging of hot and cold storages using a dual-mode heat pump. The Modelica based dynamic model of the coupled system was developed and validated. To optimize the overall coefficient of performance (COP) during energy process, the transient total COP is optimized by genetic algorithm based on Modelica-based modeling of dynamic system. A dynamic optimal control strategy was developed and implemented into an experimental system. Test results show that this developed model-based dynamic optimal control strategy is able to search the optimal transient total COP and optimize the overall COP of such coupled systems during energy charging; and the optimal results is better than those obtained using another two experiment-based methods

Effective Gradient Sample Size via Variation Estimation for Accelerating Sharpness aware Minimization

Sharpness-aware Minimization (SAM) has been proposed recently to improve model generalization ability. However, SAM calculates the gradient twice in each optimization step, thereby doubling the computation costs compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient sampling method to significantly accelerate SAM. Concretely, we discover that the gradient of SAM is a combination of the gradient of SGD and the Projection of the Second-order gradient matrix onto the First-order gradient (PSF). PSF exhibits a gradually increasing frequency of change during the training process. To leverage this observation, we propose an adaptive sampling method based on the variation of PSF, and we reuse the sampled PSF for non-sampling iterations. Extensive empirical results illustrate that the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art accuracies comparable to SAM on diverse network architectures

Assessing Impulsivity in Chinese: Elaborating Validity of BIS Among Male Prisoners

This study was carried out to test the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale–Version 11 (BIS-11), and its short versions (the eight-item and 15-item BIS) in a sample of 424 Chinese male prisoners (M = 31.26, SD = 7.43, age = 18-52 years). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFAs) indicated that the single-factor model of BIS with eight items (BIS-8) and the three-factor model of BIS with 15 items (BIS-15) fit the data well. In addition, the item response theory (IRT) approach confirmed the construct and items for the BIS-8 with good discrimination, threshold parameters, and test information curve. Correlations with psychopathic traits, antisocial personality disorder, and aggression suggested that the performance of the eight-item BIS was comparable with that of the original 30-item BIS in measuring general impulsivity.This research was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 31400904) and Guangzhou University’s 2017 training program for top-notch young people (Grant BJ201715)

Neural Eigenfunctions Are Structured Representation Learners

This paper introduces a structured, adaptive-length deep representation called Neural Eigenmap. Unlike prior spectral methods such as Laplacian Eigenmap that operate in a nonparametric manner, Neural Eigenmap leverages NeuralEF to parametrically model eigenfunctions using a neural network. We show that, when the eigenfunction is derived from positive relations in a data augmentation setup, applying NeuralEF results in an objective function that resembles those of popular self-supervised learning methods, with an additional symmetry-breaking property that leads to \emph{structured} representations where features are ordered by importance. We demonstrate using such representations as adaptive-length codes in image retrieval systems. By truncation according to feature importance, our method requires up to $16\times$ shorter representation length than leading self-supervised learning ones to achieve similar retrieval performance. We further apply our method to graph data and report strong results on a node representation learning benchmark with more than one million nodes

Extreme Learning Machine-Assisted Solution of Biharmonic Equations via Its Coupled Schemes

Obtaining the solutions of partial differential equations based on various machine learning methods has drawn more and more attention in the fields of scientific computation and engineering applications. In this work, we first propose a coupled Extreme Learning Machine (called CELM) method incorporated with the physical laws to solve a class of fourth-order biharmonic equations by reformulating it into two well-posed Poisson problems. In addition, some activation functions including tangent, gauss, sine, and trigonometric (sin+cos) functions are introduced to assess our CELM method. Notably, the sine and trigonometric functions demonstrate a remarkable ability to effectively minimize the approximation error of the CELM model. In the end, several numerical experiments are performed to study the initializing approaches for both the weights and biases of the hidden units in our CELM model and explore the required number of hidden units. Numerical results show the proposed CELM algorithm is high-precision and efficient to address the biharmonic equation in both regular and irregular domains

Mechanism of dissolution and oxidation of stibnite mediated by the coupling of iron and typical antimony oxidizing bacteria

Antimony oxidizing bacteria (SbOB) and iron oxides are the main driving factors to the weathering dissolution and oxidation of stibnite (Sb2S3) waste ore. The characteristics of the dissolution and oxidation process of stibnite in the absence of strain AO-1 and iron oxides, Pseudomonas sp. AO-1-mediated (AO-1-mediated), Fe (Fe, Fe2(SO4)3, and FeS2) -mediated, and coupled-mediated groups (Fe+AO-1, Fe2(SO4)3+AO-1, FeS2+AO-1) under various pH values were examined through sequential batch experiments. The results showed that all the AO-1-mediated, Fe-mediated and coupled-mediated can promote the dissolution and oxidation of stibnite, and the promotion effect increased with the rise of pH. The order of contribution to the dissolution of stibnite under the coupling mediation is as follows: coupling effect (42.4-78.2%) > chemical effect (19.4-56.6%) > biological effect (0.9-2.4%). In addition, the dissolution and oxidation mechanisms of stibnite were further investigated and analyzed in combination with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). This study has important implications for elucidating the source control and geochemical behavior of antimony pollution in antimony mining areas

A Unified Model for Video Understanding and Knowledge Embedding with Heterogeneous Knowledge Graph Dataset

Video understanding is an important task in short video business platforms and it has a wide application in video recommendation and classification. Most of the existing video understanding works only focus on the information that appeared within the video content, including the video frames, audio and text. However, introducing common sense knowledge from the external Knowledge Graph (KG) dataset is essential for video understanding when referring to the content which is less relevant to the video. Owing to the lack of video knowledge graph dataset, the work which integrates video understanding and KG is rare. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous dataset that contains the multi-modal video entity and fruitful common sense relations. This dataset also provides multiple novel video inference tasks like the Video-Relation-Tag (VRT) and Video-Relation-Video (VRV) tasks. Furthermore, based on this dataset, we propose an end-to-end model that jointly optimizes the video understanding objective with knowledge graph embedding, which can not only better inject factual knowledge into video understanding but also generate effective multi-modal entity embedding for KG. Comprehensive experiments indicate that combining video understanding embedding with factual knowledge benefits the content-based video retrieval performance. Moreover, it also helps the model generate better knowledge graph embedding which outperforms traditional KGE-based methods on VRT and VRV tasks with at least 42.36% and 17.73% improvement in HITS@10

Intrathoracic Endotracheal Metastasis from Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma: A First Case Report and Review of the Literature

Intrathoracic endotracheal metastasis from a very distant site is extremely rare. We report the first case of such a disease in a 68-year-old man with nasopharyngeal carcinoma who presented with a cough and hemoptysis 34 months after finishing radiotherapy. Prior to tracheal metastasis, he developed a solitary metastasis in the lung and underwent chemotherapy followed by radiotherapy. Computed tomography showed the presence of an enlarged lymph node in the para-aortic arch. Fiberoptic bronchoscopy revealed an endotracheal tumor 1 cm above the carina. Histological and immunohistochemical analyses confirmed its nasopharyngeal origin. He was treated with conventional radiotherapy and three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy; complete tumor remission was achieved. He died of nonmalignant disease with no signs of tumor recurrence 2 years after treatment completion. Radiotherapy may be an appropriate management approach to achieve long-term tumor control for this disease