The structure of metal electrode/HfZrO x (HZO)/AlON/n + -Si was employed as the platform to study how the effective work function (EWF) of the electrode affects the characteristics of the FTJ ...devices. By introducing TiAl into the conventional TiN electrode, the EWF is reduced which leads to a higher tunnel electroresistance (TER) ratio of 30 due to the improved LRS current arising from the lower barrier height for thermionic emission. In addition, the TiAl-based device also displays high switching speed of 500 ns and robust endurance up to 10 6 , showing competitive advantages compared to others. Furthermore, the implementation of long-term plasticity is also demonstrated, implying potential applications for neuromorphic computing. The prominent properties make TiAl-based electrode as a compelling enabler for FTJ devices with even higher performance.
A comprehensive physical model is established to understand the device operation and optimization strategy of the ferroelectric tunnel junction (FTJ). This model is capable of simulating write ...(switching polarity), read tunnel electroresistance (TER), and ac transient operations with a good agreement with experiments. The strategy of optimizing the thickness of the ferroelectric layer and nonpolar interfacial layer is discussed for enlarging TER ratio. We also discussed the possible misinterpretation of the measured TER ratio according to our model.
Tellurite is highly toxic to most bacteria owing to its strong oxidative ability. However, some bacteria demonstrate tellurite resistance. In particular, some
Escherichia coli
strains, including ...Shiga toxin-producing
E. coli
O157:H7, are known to be resistant to tellurite. This resistance is involved in
ter
operon, which is usually located on a prophage-like element of the chromosome. The characteristics of the
ter
operon have been investigated mainly by genome analysis of pathogenic
E. coli
; however, the distribution and structural characteristics of the
ter
operon in other
E. coli
are almost unknown. To clarify these points, we examined 106
E. coli
strains carrying the
ter
operon from various animals. The draft genomes of 34 representative strains revealed that
ter
operons were clearly classified into four subtypes,
ter
-type 1–4, at the nucleotide sequence level. Complete genomic sequences revealed that operons belonging to three
ter
-types (1, 3, and 4) were located on the prophage-like elements on the chromosome, whereas the
ter
-type 2 operon was located on the IncHI2 plasmid. The positions of the tRNA
Ser
, tRNA
Met
, and tRNA
Phe
indicated the insertion sites of elements carrying
the ter
operons. Using the PCR method developed in this study, 106 strains were classified as type 1 (
n
= 66), 2 (
n
= 13), 3 (
n
= 8), and 4 (
n
= 17), and two strains carried both types 1 and 2. Furthermore, significant differences in the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of tellurite were observed between strains carrying
ter
-type 4 and the others (
p
< 0.05). The
ter
-type was also closely related to the isolation source, with types 2 and 4 associated with chickens and deer, respectively. This study provided new insights related not only to genetic characteristics of the
ter
operons, but also to phenotypic and ecological characteristics that may be related to the diversity of the operon.
Splenectomy is routinely performed during distal or total pancreatectomy (DP or TP) for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), but information about its oncological value is limited. TER cells, ...nonimmune cells discovered in the spleens of tumour‐bearing mice, are elicited by tumours and promote tumour progression, while their role in the clinical outcomes of patients with PDAC remains unclear. In our study, postoperative specimens from 622 patients who underwent DP or TP with splenectomy were analysed by flow cytometry or immunofluorescence, and the relationship between splenic TER cell count and clinical parameters was calculated. We also purified human TER cells for functional experiments and mechanistic studies. We found that TER cell numbers were increased only in the spleens of patients with PDAC but not in PDAC tissue and adjacent pancreatic tissue. High splenic TER cell counts independently predicted poor prognosis (P < .001) and indicated large tumour size, lymph node metastasis, advanced 8th AJCC/mAJCC stage and high CA19‐9 classification (all P < .050) in patients with PDAC. Mechanistic analysis showed that TER cells express artemin, which facilitates the proliferation and invasion of PDAC cells by activating GFRα3‐ERK signalling. Our study reveals that TER cell count is an indicator of poor prognosis of PDAC, while splenectomy during pancreatic surgery might provide oncological benefits in addition to ensuring the radical resection of PDAC.
What's new?
Splenic TER cells, nonimmune cells enriched during tumor progression, are suspected of promoting cancer cell survival and metastasis through remote signaling pathways. Little is known, however, about how TER cells impact tumor progression or whether they are clinically relevant. In this investigation of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) patients, TER cell number was found to be significantly increased in the spleen, with higher TER cell number predicting poor surgical outcome. Human TER cells secreted the neurotropic factor artemin and promoted PDAC cell malignancy via GFRα3‐ERK signaling activation. The findings suggest that splenectomy may be beneficial in the surgical treatment of PDAC.
In search of evidence of the emergence of the compound form of the antepretérito (past before), this article presents morphosyntactic-semantic motivations that led to the grammaticization process of ...the verbs haver/ter as auxiliaries plus verbal participles. Through the analysis of data from 1,680 medieval Galician-Portuguese songs, the emergence of the grammaticization process of compound tenses (haver/ter more participle) is portrayed through four analysis parameters, two of them referring to the argument selection of subject and object, one about the type of verbal combination and yet another to verify morphological marks of the participial form, so that it would be possible to detect grammaticization stages linked to principles such as layering, divergence, persistence, specialization and decategorization. This way, we noticed that the occurrences showed, predominantly, a lack of coincidence between subjects of haver/ter and participle; notion of metaphorical possession of the object; combination of haver/ter much more with verbs that do not contradict the notion of possession and neutralization (masculine/singular) of the participial structure. In addition to these contextual constructs that enabled the grammaticalization of structures composed of haver/ter in the imperfect tense plus participle, other verb tenses combined with the participle, depending on the context, have also manifested the temporal notion of past before another past in the songs, namely: presente do indicativo (present tense), pretérito perfeito do indicativo (simple past tense) and pretérito imperfeito do subjuntivo (subjunctive imperfect tense) followed by participle.
A variety of replication fork traps have recently been characterised in Enterobacterales, unveiling two different types of architecture. Of these, the degenerate type II fork traps are commonly found ...in Enterobacteriaceae such as Escherichia coli. The newly characterised type I fork traps are found almost exclusively outside Enterobacteriaceae within Enterobacterales and include several archetypes of possible ancestral architectures. Dickeya paradisiaca harbours a somewhat degenerate type I fork trap with a unique Ter1 adjacent to tus gene on one side of the circular chromosome and three putative Ter2–4 sites on the other side of the fork trap. The two innermost Ter1 and Ter2 sites are only separated by 18 kb, which is the shortest distance between two innermost Ter sites of any chromosomal fork trap identified so far. Of note, the dif site is located between these two sites, coinciding with a sharp GC-skew flip. Here we examined and compared the binding modalities of E. coli and D. paradisiaca Tus proteins for these Ter sites. Surprisingly, while Ter1–3 were functional, no significant Tus binding was observed for Ter4 even in low salt conditions, which is in stark contrast with the significant non-specific protein-DNA interactions that occur with E. coli Tus. Even more surprising was the finding that D. paradisiaca Tus has a relatively moderate binding affinity to double-stranded Ter while retaining an extremely high affinity to Ter-lock sequences. Our data revealed major differences in the salt resistance and stability between the D. paradisiaca and E. coli Tus protein complexes, suggesting that while Tus protein evolution can be quite flexible regarding the initial Ter binding step, it requires a highly stringent purifying selection for its final locked complex formation.
•D. paradisiaca Tus is almost devoid of non-specific DNA binding.•D. paradisiaca Tus binds moderately to Ter yet retains extreme affinity for Ter-lock.•D. paradisiaca Tus-Ter-lock stability increases 100,000-fold over Tus-Ter in low salt.•Tus evolution requires a highly stringent selection step based upon lock formation.
A low-cost fabrication process of Hf 1-x Zr x O 2 (HZO) nonvolatile memory (NVM) was proposed and its characteristics were investigated. We successfully fabricated a ferroelectric tunnel junction ...(FTJ) device with tunable conductance for neural network applications. The proposed FTJ device exhibits excellent performances, such as large conductance ratio of ~40 for a 500-ns pulse and thus satisfied low-power consumption of write pulse (1 fJ per bit) and fast write speed (<; 500 ns) requirements. Furthermore, we revealed that the metal-ferroelectric-insulator-semiconductor structure had a higher tunneling electroresistance ratio than the metal-ferroelectric-insulator-metalstructure. Moreover, the polarization operation of our FTJ devices achieved low-power analog-like conductance transition, multilevel operation, and even endurance characteristics is promising. These results demonstrate that the FTJ has high potential to be an ideal emerging memory for neuromorphic computing. Therefore, HZO-based devices are promising materials in neural network applications for next-generation devices.
The Portuguese and Galician pluperfect is unique in Romance. Rather than developing a generalized compound pluperfect structure early, as did French and Spanish (e.g., Fr. J'avais chanté 'I had ...sung') the Latin pluperfect indicative survived with its original semantics into the 20th century (Lat. cantāveram > Port. cantara 'I had sung'). This paper presents a thorough description of the development of the Portuguese pluperfect and then proposes an explanation as to why it diverges from the standard Romance pattern.Amaral and Howe (2009) attribute the unique iterative semantics of the Portuguese compound past to auxiliary ter 'to have' generalization. Similarly, this paper proposes that ter selection is also behind the unique pluperfect situation. Specifically, when ter was generalized over haver in the 16th century, the resultative/stative interpretation of the compound pluperfect verb form was preferred. This delayed a grammaticalization process that allowed the compound pluperfect to gain an eventive interpretation and to more freely alternate with-and eventually supplant-the synthetic pluperfect from Latin.Using empirical data from the Corpus do Português (Davies & Ferreira, 2006), this work describes the development of the Portuguese pluperfect and concludes that the generalization of auxiliary ter is the primary reason for the prolonged survival of the Latin synthetic pluperfect form.
Testicular teratomas and teratocarcinomas are the most common testicular germ cell tumors in early childhood and young men, and they are frequently found unilaterally in the left testis. In 129/SvJ ...mice carrying a heterozygous copy of the potent modifier of tumor incidence
, a point mutation in the dead-end homolog one gene (
), ∼70% of the unilateral teratomas arise in the left testis. We previously showed that in mice, left/right differences in vascular architecture are associated with reduced hemoglobin saturation and increased levels of the hypoxia inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF-1α) in the left compared to the right testis. To test the hypothesis that systemic reduction of oxygen availability in
mice would lead to an increased incidence of bilateral tumors, we placed pregnant females from 129/SvJ
intercross matings in a hypobaric chamber for 12-h intervals. Our results show that in 129/SvJ
male gonads, the incidence of bilateral teratoma increased from 3.3% to 64% when fetuses were exposed to acute low oxygen conditions for 12-h between E13.8 and E14.3. The increase in tumor incidence correlated with the maintenance of high expression of pluripotency genes
,
and
, elevated activity of the Nodal signaling pathway, and suppression of germ cell mitotic arrest. We propose that the combination of heterozygosity for the
mutation and hypoxia causes a delay in male germ cell differentiation that promotes teratoma initiation.
This article reflects on complexities and black boxes, as Bruno Latour elaborated, here for mental health policies in Brazil. Black boxes are ‘machines’ that cannot be unraveled, a panacea of ...complexities. What I’m talking about is a black box of studies, and as a result, of the intervention in mental health. I discuss the deleterious (dis)articulation between attitude and conduct from a semantized view by the notions of psychiatric praxis, therapeutic praxis and religious agency. The starting point of the reflection is to consider that there is in this (de)articulation a regime established by empirical and epistemological inconsistencies, conditioned by the play I called in(ter)vention, based on the contribution of Roy Wagner, and to consider that intervention and invention are articulated and inseparable devices.
Este artigo reflete sobre complexidades e caixas-pretas como Bruno Latour elaborou, aqui para as políticas de saúde mental no Brasil. Caixas-pretas são ‘máquinas’ que não se consegue destrinchar, panaceia de complexidades. O que abordo é uma caixa-preta dos estudos, e como decorrência, da intervenção, em saúde mental. Discuto a (des)articulação deletéria entre atitude e conduta a partir de um olhar semantizado pelas noções de práxis psiquiátrica, práxis terapêutica e agência religiosa. O ponto de partida digamos explorativo da reflexão é considerar que há nesta (des)articulação um regime estabelecido por inconsistências empíricas e epistemológicas, condicionado pelo jogo que chamei in(ter)venção, partindo da contribuição de Roy Wagner, e para considerar que intervenção e invenção são dispositivos articulados e inseparáveis.
Este artículo reflexiona sobre las complejidades y las cajas negras que Bruno Latour elaboró, aquí para las políticas de salud mental en Brasil. Las cajas negras son ‘máquinas’ que no se pueden desenredar, una panacea de complejidades. De lo que estoy hablando es de una caja negra de estudios, y como resultado, de la intervención, en salud mental. Discuto la deletérea (des)articulación entre actitud y conducta desde una mirada semantizada por las nociones de praxis psiquiátrica, praxis terapéutica y agencia religiosa. El punto de partida de la reflexión es considerar que existe en esta (des)articulación un régimen establecido por inconsistencias empíricas y epistemológicas, condicionado por el juego que llamé in(ter)vención, basado en la contribución de Roy Wagner, y considerar que intervención e invención son dispositivos articulados e inseparables.
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