Modulation of Outer Hair Cell Electromotility by Cochlear Supporting Cells and Gap Junctions

Outer hair cell (OHC) or prestin-based electromotility is an active cochlear amplifier in the mammalian inner ear that can increase hearing sensitivity and frequency selectivity. In situ, Deiters supporting cells are well-coupled by gap junctions and constrain OHCs standing on the basilar membrane. Here, we report that both electrical and mechanical stimulations in Deiters cells (DCs) can modulate OHC electromotility. There was no direct electrical conductance between the DCs and the OHCs. However, depolarization in DCs reduced OHC electromotility associated nonlinear capacitance (NLC) and distortion products. Increase in the turgor pressure of DCs also shifted OHC NLC to the negative voltage direction. Destruction of the cytoskeleton in DCs or dissociation of the mechanical-coupling between DCs and OHCs abolished these effects, indicating the modulation through the cytoskeleton activation and DC-OHC mechanical coupling rather than via electric field potentials. We also found that changes in gap junctional coupling between DCs induced large membrane potential and current changes in the DCs and shifted OHC NLC. Uncoupling of gap junctions between DCs shifted NLC to the negative direction. These data indicate that DCs not only provide a physical scaffold to support OHCs but also can directly modulate OHC electromotility through the DC-OHC mechanical coupling. Our findings reveal a new mechanism of cochlear supporting cells and gap junctional coupling to modulate OHC electromotility and eventually hearing sensitivity in the inner ear

Inference for high-dimensional linear expectile regression with de-biased method

In this paper, we address the inference problem in high-dimensional linear expectile regression. We transform the expectile loss into a weighted-least-squares form and apply a de-biased strategy to establish Wald-type tests for multiple constraints within a regularized framework. Simultaneously, we construct an estimator for the pseudo-inverse of the generalized Hessian matrix in high dimension with general amenable regularizers including Lasso and SCAD, and demonstrate its consistency through a new proof technique. We conduct simulation studies and real data applications to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed test statistic in both homoscedastic and heteroscedastic scenarios.Comment: 34 page

4-Chloro-5-[(5,5-dimethyl-4,5-dihydro­isoxazol-3-yl)sulfonyl­meth­yl]-3-methyl-1-(2,2,2-trifluoro­ethyl)-1H-pyrazole

The mol­ecule of the title compound, C12H15ClF3N3O3S, is twisted, as indicated by the C—S—C—C torsion angle of 66.00 (18)° for the atoms linking the ring systems. An intra­molecular C—H⋯F short contact occurs. In the crystal, non-classical C—H⋯O inter­actions, one of which has a short H⋯O contact of 2.28 Å, link the mol­ecules

Holographic Storage of Biphoton Entanglement

Coherent and reversible storage of multi-photon entanglement with a multimode quantum memory is essential for scalable all-optical quantum information processing. Although single photon has been successfully stored in different quantum systems, storage of multi-photon entanglement remains challenging because of the critical requirement for coherent control of photonic entanglement source, multimode quantum memory, and quantum interface between them. Here we demonstrate a coherent and reversible storage of biphoton Bell-type entanglement with a holographic multimode atomic-ensemble-based quantum memory. The retrieved biphoton entanglement violates Bell's inequality for 1 microsecond storage time and a memory-process fidelity of 98% is demonstrated by quantum state tomography.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev. Let

On the hydrodynamic performance of a vertical pile-restrained WEC-type floating breakwater

This paper presents a numerical study on the hydrodynamic performance of a vertical pile-restrained wave energy converter type floating breakwater. The aims are to further understand the characteristics of such integrated system in terms of both wave energy extraction and wave attenuation, and to provide guidance for optimising the shape of the floating breakwater for more energy absorption and less wave transmission at the same time. The numerical model solves the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for free-surface flows using the particle-in-cell method and incorporates a Cartesian cut cell based strong coupling algorithm for fluid-structure interaction. The numerical model is first validated against an existing experiment, consisting of a rectangular box as the floating breakwater and a power take-off system installed above the breakwater, for the computation of the capture width ratio and wave transmission coefficients. Following that, an optimisation study based on the numerical model is conducted focusing on modifying the shape of the floating breakwater used in the experiment. The results indicate that by changing only the seaward side straight corner of the rectangular box to a small curve corner, the integrated system achieves significantly more wave energy extraction at the cost of only a slight increase in wave transmission