Negative Correlation between the Diffusion Coefficient and Transcriptional Activity of the Glucocorticoid Receptor

The glucocorticoid receptor (GR) is a transcription factor, which interacts with DNA and other cofactors to regulate gene transcription. Binding to other partners in the cell nucleus alters the diffusion properties of GR. Raster image correlation spectroscopy (RICS) was applied to quantitatively characterize the diffusion properties of EGFP labeled human GR (EGFP-hGR) and its mutants in the cell nucleus. RICS is an image correlation technique that evaluates the spatial distribution of the diffusion coefficient as a diffusion map. Interestingly, we observed that the averaged diffusion coefficient of EGFP-hGR strongly and negatively correlated with its transcriptional activities in comparison to that of EGFP-hGR wild type and mutants with various transcriptional activities. This result suggests that the decreasing of the diffusion coefficient of hGR was reflected in the high-affinity binding to DNA. Moreover, the hyper-phosphorylation of hGR can enhance the transcriptional activity by reduction of the interaction between the hGR and the nuclear corepressors

Japan's financial power

Various bank asset rankings indicate Japanese banks almost monopolize the top five banks in the world. This paper explores why this phenomena appears to be of a temporary nature. Firstly, the thrust of long-term capital outflow comes from acquisitions of long dated bonds, especially US Treasury bonds, triggered by rapid expansion of current surplus. Secondly, Japanese banks' assets have increased due to two reasons. The sharp yen appreciation in the past four years has doubled their dollar translated domestic assets. In addition, their overseas assets have risen sharply from less than 10% of the total assets to 40% or more in the past six years. Japan's somewhat exaggerated financial power is likely to disappear in the not too distant future as the trade imbalance should be corrected by one way or another. However, aggressive Japanese investments in R&D efforts as well as production capacities will continue to improve the terms of international trade in Japan's favor. Furthermore, Japan's overseas investments will be paid back only if they will increase positively productivities in the local markets. Japan's financial power will become more invisible and will depend upon its contributions to the world economy, or supports by overseas consumers and investors

‘My soul needs to be washed’: an exploration of the basic encounter group in Japan

In this thesis I explore through qualitative inquiry the development of the person-centred approach in Japan focussing on the encounter group movement. I look at how the approach was introduced to Japan after the Second World War, at how it became accepted and at the place it holds in Japanese life. The research began as I returned home to work as a counsellor after two years of counselling training in England. This thesis, therefore, tells the story of my process over eight years of inquiry, as a counsellor, facilitator and researcher. At the start of the research I wanted to look for ways of building bridges between the Japanese and the Western person-centred approach. This aim changed as I realised how difficult it was to be accepted by the Japanese person-centred world, because I had trained overseas, and how little I knew about the approach in Japan. So, as I began to facilitate and then to organise encounter groups, and to translate Western person-centred texts into Japanese, I collected data: from the Japanese person-centred literature; by interviews with counsellors, facilitators and members of encounter groups; through conversations with critical friends. In doing so I built the networks and bridges in Japan and beyond I had first hoped for. In the thesis I make links between how encounter groups were accepted by Japanese people and the way of being and concern for relations with others shown in Japanese culture, in the tea-ceremony and the Noh theatre. I show what characterises Japanese encounter groups, of the preference for traditional settings and the respect for hierarchy and seniority. I show how an encounter group is structured by the perceptions, experiences and theories of members and facilitators. In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 I explore how encounter groups might help in our recovery

High-dimensional and Permutation Invariant Anomaly Detection

Methods for anomaly detection of new physics processes are often limited to low-dimensional spaces due to the difficulty of learning high-dimensional probability densities. Particularly at the constituent level, incorporating desirable properties such as permutation invariance and variable-length inputs becomes difficult within popular density estimation methods. In this work, we introduce a permutation-invariant density estimator for particle physics data based on diffusion models, specifically designed to handle variable-length inputs. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology by utilizing the learned density as a permutation-invariant anomaly detection score, effectively identifying jets with low likelihood under the background-only hypothesis. To validate our density estimation method, we investigate the ratio of learned densities and compare to those obtained by a supervised classification algorithm.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Point Cloud Transformers applied to Collider Physics

Methods for processing point cloud information have seen a great success in collider physics applications. One recent breakthrough in machine learning is the usage of Transformer networks to learn semantic relationships between sequences in language processing. In this work, we apply a modified Transformer network called Point Cloud Transformer as a method to incorporate the advantages of the Transformer architecture to an unordered set of particles resulting from collision events. To compare the performance with other strategies, we study jet-tagging applications for highly-boosted particles.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

CaloScore v2: Single-shot Calorimeter Shower Simulation with Diffusion Models

Diffusion generative models are promising alternatives for fast surrogate models, producing high-fidelity physics simulations. However, the generation time often requires an expensive denoising process with hundreds of function evaluations, restricting the current applicability of these models in a realistic setting. In this work, we report updates on the CaloScore architecture, detailing the changes in the diffusion process, which produces higher quality samples, and the use of progressive distillation, resulting in a diffusion model capable of generating new samples with a single function evaluation. We demonstrate these improvements using the Calorimeter Simulation Challenge 2022 dataset.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

ABCNet: An attention-based method for particle tagging

In high energy physics, graph-based implementations have the advantage of treating the input data sets in a similar way as they are collected by collider experiments. To expand on this concept, we propose a graph neural network enhanced by attention mechanisms called ABCNet. To exemplify the advantages and flexibility of treating collider data as a point cloud, two physically motivated problems are investigated: quark-gluon discrimination and pileup reduction. The former is an event-by-event classification while the latter requires each reconstructed particle to receive a classification score. For both tasks ABCNet shows an improved performance compared to other algorithms available.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Highlights on top quark measurements from CMS

Recent results from the CMS Collaboration using top quarks are presented. These results are based on partial datasets collected by the CMS Collaboration during the LHC Run 2, at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. This document includes the first measurement of production in association with charm quarks, the first direct measurement of the third generation of the CKM matrix elements, the investigation of the running of the top quark mass, search for CP violation in top quark production, measurement of the forward-backward asymmetry in production at the LHC, and the first global approach in constraining EFT operator coefficients using top quarks

Analysis of intranuclear binding process of glucocorticoid receptor using fluorescence correlation spectroscopy

AbstractThe diffusion properties of EGFP-hGRα and mutants C421G, A458T and I566 in living cells were analyzed. The wild type and mutants C421G and A458T translocated from the cytoplasm to the nucleus after addition of Dex; however, the Brownian motions of the proteins were different. The diffusion constant of wild-type GRα after addition of Dex slowed to 15.6% of that in the absence of Dex, whereas those of A458T and C421G slowed to 34.8% and 61.7%, respectively. This is the first report that dimer formation is less important than the binding activity of GRα to GRE in the living cell