Occurrence and Control of Soybean Aphid, Aphis glycines Matsumura

The soybean aphid, Aphis glycines Matsumura, is one of the most important pests of soybean. The A. glycines outbreak in 1998 followed another aphid outbreak after 1989, which caused enormous economic losses. The aphid infested areas exceeded 200 thousand mu, and the soybean yields decreased by 20%. Among aphid infested areas, 78 thousand mu were severely infested with a yield loss of 46%. More than 3,000 mu had no yield at all.Originating text in Chinese.Citation: Wu, Xiaobing, Ni, Wenjun, Liu, Peijing. (1999). Occurrence and Control of Soybean Aphid, Aphis glycines Matsumura. How Peasants Can Increase Wealth, 6, 20

Boosting Point Clouds Rendering via Radiance Mapping

Recent years we have witnessed rapid development in NeRF-based image rendering due to its high quality. However, point clouds rendering is somehow less explored. Compared to NeRF-based rendering which suffers from dense spatial sampling, point clouds rendering is naturally less computation intensive, which enables its deployment in mobile computing device. In this work, we focus on boosting the image quality of point clouds rendering with a compact model design. We first analyze the adaption of the volume rendering formulation on point clouds. Based on the analysis, we simplify the NeRF representation to a spatial mapping function which only requires single evaluation per pixel. Further, motivated by ray marching, we rectify the the noisy raw point clouds to the estimated intersection between rays and surfaces as queried coordinates, which could avoid spatial frequency collapse and neighbor point disturbance. Composed of rasterization, spatial mapping and the refinement stages, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on point clouds rendering, outperforming prior works by notable margins, with a smaller model size. We obtain a PSNR of 31.74 on NeRF-Synthetic, 25.88 on ScanNet and 30.81 on DTU. Code and data would be released soon

Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Domain Mixup

Recent works on domain adaptation reveal the effectiveness of adversarial learning on filling the discrepancy between source and target domains. However, two common limitations exist in current adversarial-learning-based methods. First, samples from two domains alone are not sufficient to ensure domain-invariance at most part of latent space. Second, the domain discriminator involved in these methods can only judge real or fake with the guidance of hard label, while it is more reasonable to use soft scores to evaluate the generated images or features, i.e., to fully utilize the inter-domain information. In this paper, we present adversarial domain adaptation with domain mixup (DM-ADA), which guarantees domain-invariance in a more continuous latent space and guides the domain discriminator in judging samples' difference relative to source and target domains. Domain mixup is jointly conducted on pixel and feature level to improve the robustness of models. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed approach can achieve superior performance on tasks with various degrees of domain shift and data complexity.Comment: Accepted as oral presentation at 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 202

Motifs within the CA-repeat-rich region of Surfactant Protein B (SFTPB) intron 4 differentially affect mRNA splicing

The first half of the surfactant protein B (SP-B) gene intron 4 is a CA-repeat-rich region that contains 11 motifs. To study the role of this region on SP-B mRNA splicing, minigenes were generated by systematic removal of motifs from either the 5’ or 3’ end. These were transfected in CHO cells to study their splicing efficiency. The latter was determined as the ratio of completely to incompletely spliced SP-B RNA. Our results indicate that SP-B intron 4 motifs differentially affect splicing. Motifs 8 and 9 significantly enhanced and reduced splicing of intron 4, respectively.  RNA mobility shift assays performed with a Motif 8 sequence that contains a CAUC cis-element and cell extracts resulted in a RNA:protein shift that was lost upon mutation of the element. Furthermore, in silico analysis of mRNA secondary structure stability for minigenes with and without motif 8 indicated a correlation between mRNA stability and splicing ratio.  We conclude that differential loss of specific intron 4 motifs results in one or more of the following: a) altered splicing, b) differences in RNA stability and c)changes in secondary structure. These, in turn, may affect SP-B content in lung health or disease

Lunar meteorites: witnesses of the composition and evolution of the Moon

Lunar meteorites are fragments of the Moon that escaped the gravity of the Moon following high-energy impacts by asteroids, subsequently fell to Earth. An inventory of 165 lunar meteorites has been developed since the discovery and identification of the first lunar meteorite, ALHA 81005, in 1979. Although the Apollo samples are much heavier in mass than lunar meteorites, the meteorites are still an important sample supplement for scientific research on the composition and history of the Moon. Apart from a small amount of unbrecciated crystalline rocks, the majority of lunar meteorites are breccias that can be classified into three groups: highland feldspathic breccia, mare basaltic breccia, and mingled(including fledspathic and basaltic clasts) breccia. The petrography of lunar rocks suggests that there are a series of rock types of anorthosite, basalt, gabbro, troctolite, norite and KREEP in the Moon. Although KREEP is rare in lunar rocks, KREEP components have been found in the increasing number of lunar meteorites. KREEP provides important information on lunar magmatic evolution, e.g., the VHK KREEP clasts in SaU 169 may represent the pristine lunar magma (urKREEP). Six launching pairs of lunar meteorites have been proposed now, along with ten possible lunar launching sites. In addition, symplectite is often found in lunar basalts, which is a significant record of shock metamorphism on the lunar surface. Furthermore, isotopic ages and noble gases not only provide information on crystallization processes in lunar rocks and the formation of lunar crust, but also provide insight into shock events on the lunar surface