The telosome/shelterin complex and its functions

The telosome/shelterin protein complex bound to telomeres is essential for maintenance of telomere structure and telomere signaling functions

The Circular Velocity Curve of the Milky Way from 5 to 25 kpc using luminous red giant branch star

We present a sample of 254,882 luminous red giant branch (LRGB) stars selected from the APOGEE and LAMOST surveys. By combining photometric and astrometric information from the 2MASS and Gaia surveys, the precise distances of the sample stars are determined by a supervised machine learning algorithm: the gradient boosted decision trees. To test the accuracy of the derived distances, member stars of globular clusters (GCs) and open clusters (OCs) are used. The tests by cluster member stars show a precision of about 10 per cent with negligible zero-point offsets, for the derived distances of our sample stars. The final sample covers a large volume of the Galactic disk(s) and halo of $0<R<30$ kpc and $|Z|\leqslant15$ kpc. The rotation curve (RC) of the Milky Way across radius of $5\lesssim R\lesssim25$ kpc have been accurately measured with $\sim$ 54,000 stars of the thin disk population selected from the LRGB sample. The derived RC shows a weak decline along $R$ with a gradient of $-1.83\pm0.02$ $({\rm stat.}) \pm 0.07$ $({\rm sys.})$ km s$^{-1}$ kpc$^{-1}$, in excellent agreement with the results measured by previous studies. The circular velocity at the solar position, yielded by our RC, is $234.04\pm0.08$ $({\rm stat.}) \pm 1.36$ $({\rm sys.})$ km s$^{-1}$, again in great consistent with other independent determinations. From the newly constructed RC, as well as constraints from other data, we have constructed a mass model for our Galaxy, yielding a mass of the dark matter halo of $M_{\rm{200}}$ = ($8.05\pm1.15$)$\times$10$^{11} \rm{M_\odot}$ with a corresponding radius of $R_{\rm{200}}$ = $192.37\pm9.24$ kpc and a local dark matter density of $0.39\pm0.03$ GeV cm$^{-3}$.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures and 5 tables, accepted by Ap

Think Before You Speak: Cultivating Communication Skills of Large Language Models via Inner Monologue

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) further improves the capabilities of open-domain dialogue systems and can generate fluent, coherent, and diverse responses. However, LLMs still lack an important ability: communication skills, which makes them more like information seeking tools than anthropomorphic chatbots. To make LLMs more anthropomorphic and proactive during the conversation, we add five communication skills to the response generation process: topic transition, proactively asking questions, concept guidance, empathy, and summarising often. The addition of communication skills increases the interest of users in the conversation and attracts them to chat for longer. To enable LLMs better understand and use communication skills, we design and add the inner monologue to LLMs. The complete process is achieved through prompt engineering and in-context learning. To evaluate communication skills, we construct a benchmark named Cskills for evaluating various communication skills, which can also more comprehensively evaluate the dialogue generation ability of the model. Experimental results show that the proposed CSIM strategy improves the backbone models and outperforms the baselines in both automatic and human evaluations

Segmentation and Recent rupture history of the Xianshuihe Fault, Southwestern China

Tibetan Plateau in western Sichuan Province, China, is one of the world's most active faults, having produced at least 8 earthquakes of M ≥ 7 since 1725 on a 350-km-long segment of the fault. In the more limited 150-km long northern segment including Luhuo and Daofu, 5 earthquakes of M ≥ 6.9 have occurred during the past 100 years alone, with well documented overlapping surface ruptures. Some of these events were remarkably similar in magnitude and location to earlier historic events, suggesting that the characteristic earthquake model may apply here. No obvious geometric segmentation characterizes the smoothly curving Luhuo-Daofu sector, although its ends are marked by major left-stepping en echelon offsets that have also been the terminating points of individual earthquake ruptures. Minor en echelon offsets and bends within this segment are associated with local vertical relief, and one 9° bend is located close to the epicenter of the 1973 Luhuo earthquake (M = 7.6). In the southern sector of the Xianshuihe fault, south of Qianning, the faults splits into several branches, one of which broke over its entire 27-km length during the 1955 Kangding earthquake (M = 7.5). The main fault near Kangding is characterized by a series of restraining and releasing bends, associated with corresponding topography, and these bends may be related to the fact that this southern segment of the fault seems to be characterized by infrequent great earthquakes (e.g., M = 7-3/4 in 1786) rather than by more frequent moderate earthquakes (M = ± 7) such as those that characterize the straighter and more continuous Luhuo-Daofu sector to the north. Continuing creep has been documented along some segments of the fault, and this, together with its high degree of activity, superb high-altitude exposures, and other unique attributes, make the Xianshuihe fault one of the most promising sites in the world for earthquake-prediction, hazard-evaluation, and segmentation studies