The ketocarotenoid astaxanthin can be found in the microalgae Haematococcus pluvialis, Chlorella zofingiensis, and Chlorococcum sp., and the red yeast Phaffia rhodozyma. The microalga H. pluvialis ...has the highest capacity to accumulate astaxanthin up to 4–5% of cell dry weight. Astaxanthin has been attributed with extraordinary potential for protecting the organism against a wide range of diseases, and has considerable potential and promising applications in human health. Numerous studies have shown that astaxanthin has potential health‐promoting effects in the prevention and treatment of various diseases, such as cancers, chronic inflammatory diseases, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, diabetic nephropathy, cardiovascular diseases, gastrointestinal diseases, liver diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, eye diseases, skin diseases, exercise‐induced fatigue, male infertility, and HgCl2‐induced acute renal failure. In this article, the currently available scientific literature regarding the most significant activities of astaxanthin is reviewed.
Spoken Language Understanding without Speech Recognition Chen, Yuan-Ping; Price, Ryan; Bangalore, Srinivas
2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP),
2018-April
Conference Proceeding
While conventional approaches to spoken language understanding involve cascading a speech recognizer with a language understanding system, in this paper, we describe a novel approach for deriving ...semantics directly from the speech signal without the need for an explicit speech recognition step. We evaluate this approach in the context of a customer care dialog system and demonstrate its effectiveness in comparison to the conventional approach.
One of the central problems in quantum theory is to characterize, detect, and quantify quantumness in terms of classical strategies. Dephasing processes, caused by non-dissipative information ...exchange between quantum systems and environments, provides a natural platform for this purpose, as they control the quantum-to-classical transition. Recently, it has been shown that dephasing dynamics itself can exhibit (non)classical traits, depending on the nature of the system-environment correlations and the related (im)possibility to simulate these dynamics with Hamiltonian ensembles-the classical strategy. Here we establish the framework of detecting and quantifying the nonclassicality for pure dephasing dynamics. The uniqueness of the canonical representation of Hamiltonian ensembles is shown, and a constructive method to determine the latter is presented. We illustrate our method for qubit, qutrit, and qubit-pair pure dephasing and describe how to implement our approach with quantum process tomography experiments. Our work is readily applicable to present-day quantum experiments.
n-Type bismuth vanadate has been identified as one of the most promising photoanodes for use in a water-splitting photoelectrochemical cell. The major limitation of BiVO4 is its relatively wide ...bandgap (∼2.5 eV), which fundamentally limits its solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency. Here we show that annealing nanoporous bismuth vanadate electrodes at 350 °C under nitrogen flow can result in nitrogen doping and generation of oxygen vacancies. This gentle nitrogen treatment not only effectively reduces the bandgap by ∼0.2 eV but also increases the majority carrier density and mobility, enhancing electron-hole separation. The effect of nitrogen incorporation and oxygen vacancies on the electronic band structure and charge transport of bismuth vanadate are systematically elucidated by ab initio calculations. Owing to simultaneous enhancements in photon absorption and charge transport, the applied bias photon-to-current efficiency of nitrogen-treated BiVO4 for solar water splitting exceeds 2%, a record for a single oxide photon absorber, to the best of our knowledge.
In reported microcanonical molecular dynamics simulations, fast-folding proteins CLN025 and Trp-cage autonomously folded to experimentally determined native conformations. However, the folding times ...of these proteins derived from the simulations were more than 4–10 times longer than their experimental values. This article reports autonomous folding of CLN025 and Trp-cage in isobaric–isothermal molecular dynamics simulations with agreements within factors of 0.69–1.75 between simulated and experimental folding times at different temperatures. These results show that CLN025 and Trp-cage can now autonomously fold in silico as fast as in experiments, and suggest that the accuracy of folding simulations for fast-folding proteins begins to overlap with the accuracy of folding experiments. This opens new prospects of developing computer algorithms that can predict both ensembles of conformations and their interconversion rates for a protein from its sequence for artificial intelligence on how and when a protein acts as a receiver, switch, and relay to facilitate various subcellular-to-tissue communications. Then the genetic information that encodes proteins can be better read in the context of intricate biological functions.
•In NTP simulations CLN025 folded with τs of 0.279 μs at 293 K and 0.198 μs at 300 K.•The experimental τs of CLN025 are 0.261 μs at 293 K and 0.137 μs at 300 K.•In NTP simulations Trp-cage also folded with τs of 2.4 μs at 280 K and 0.8 μs at 300 K.•The experimental τs of Trp-cage are 2.4 μs at 280 K and 1.4 μs at 300 K.•These τs suggest that fast-folding proteins can fold in silico as fast as in experiments.
Hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is more sluggish in alkaline than in acidic media because of the additional energy required for water dissociation. Numerous catalysts, including NiO, that offer ...active sites for water dissociation have been extensively investigated. Yet, the overall HER performance of NiO is still limited by lacking favorable H adsorption sites. Here we show a strategy to activate NiO through carbon doping, which creates under-coordinated Ni sites favorable for H adsorption. DFT calculations reveal that carbon dopant decreases the energy barrier of Heyrovsky step from 1.17 eV to 0.81 eV, suggesting the carbon also serves as a hot-spot for the dissociation of water molecules in water-alkali HER. As a result, the carbon doped NiO catalyst achieves an ultralow overpotential of 27 mV at 10 mA cm
, and a low Tafel slope of 36 mV dec
, representing the best performance among the state-of-the-art NiO catalysts.
One of the most conspicuous features of a mountain belt is the main drainage divide. Divide location is influenced by a number of parameters, including tectonic uplift and horizontal advection. Thus, ...the topography of mountain belts can be used as an archive to extract tectonic information. Here we combine numerical landscape evolution modelling and analytical solutions to demonstrate that mountain asymmetry, determined by the location of the main drainage divide, increases with increasing uplift gradient and advection velocity. Then, we provide a conceptual framework to constrain the present or previous tectonic uplift and advection of a mountain belt from the location and migration direction of its main drainage divide. Furthermore, we apply our model to Wula Shan horst, Northeastern Sicily, and Southern Taiwan.
The clustered, regularly‐interspaced, short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)‐associated nuclease 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) is emerging as a promising genome‐editing tool for treating diseases in a precise way, and ...has been applied to a wide range of research in the areas of biology, genetics, and medicine. Delivery of therapeutic genome‐editing agents provides a promising platform for the treatment of genetic disorders. Although viral vectors are widely used to deliver CRISPR/Cas9 elements with high efficiency, they suffer from several drawbacks, such as mutagenesis, immunogenicity, and off‐target effects. Recently, non‐viral vectors have emerged as another class of delivery carriers in terms of their safety, simplicity, and flexibility. In this review, we discuss the modes of CRISPR/Cas9 delivery, the barriers to the delivery process and the application of CRISPR/Cas9 system for the treatment of genetic disorders. We also highlight several representative types of non‐viral vectors, including polymers, liposomes, cell‐penetrating peptides, and other synthetic vectors, for the therapeutic delivery of CRISPR/Cas9 system. The applications of CRISPR/Cas9 in treating genetic disorders mediated by the non‐viral vectors are also discussed.
The water-sediment regulation scheme (WSRS), beginning in 2002, is an unprecedented engineering effort to manage the Yellow River with the aims to mitigate the siltation both in the lower river ...channel and within the Xiaolangdi Reservoir utilizing the dam-regulated flood water. Ten years after its initial implementation, multi-disciplinary indicators allow us to offer a comprehensive review of this human intervention on a river-coastal system. The WSRS generally achieved its objective, including bed erosion in the lower reaches with increasing capacity for flood discharge and the mitigation of reservoir siltation. However, the WSRS presented unexpected disturbances on the delta and coastal system. Increasing grain size of suspended sediment and decreasing suspended sediment concentration at the river mouth resulted in a regime shift of sediment transport patterns that enhanced the disequilibrium of the delta. The WSRS induced an impulse delivery of nutrients and pollutants within a short period (~20days), which together with the altered hydrological cycle, impacted the estuarine and coastal ecosystem. We expect that the sediment yield from the loess region in the future will decrease due to soil-conservation practices, and the lower channel erosion will also decrease as the riverbed armors with coarser sediment. These, in combination with uncertain water discharge concomitant with climate change, increasing water demands and delta subsidence, will put the delta and coastal ocean at high environmental risks. In the context of global change, this work depicts a scenario of human impacts in the river basin that were transferred along the hydrological pathway to the coastal system and remotely transformed the different components of coastal environment. The synthesis review of the WSRS indicates that an integrated management of the river-coast continuum is crucially important for the sustainability of the entire river-delta system. The lessons learned from the WSRS in the Yellow River provide insights to the integrated management of large rivers worldwide.
•Datasets over 2002–2013 provides a comprehensive review on how dam regulation impacts the lower Yellow River and its delta.•WSRS changed the natural seasonal hydrological rhythm through the artificial flood and the associated sediment delivery.•Both sediment source and grain-size composition differs greatly between the two phases of WSRS.•WSRS alters the nutrients delivery to the sea, and significantly impacts the coastal biogeochemical process and ecosystem.
A parental selection approach based on genomic prediction has been developed to help plant breeders identify a set of superior parental lines from a candidate population before conducting field ...trials. A classical parental selection approach based on genomic prediction usually involves truncation selection, i.e., selecting the top fraction of accessions on the basis of their genomic estimated breeding values (GEBVs). However, truncation selection inevitably results in the loss of genomic diversity during the breeding process. To preserve genomic diversity, the selection of closely related accessions should be avoided during parental selection. We thus propose a new index to quantify the genomic diversity for a set of candidate accessions, and analyze two real rice (Oryza sativa L.) genome datasets to compare several selection strategies. Our results showed that the pure truncation selection strategy produced the best starting breeding value but the least genomic diversity in the base population, leading to less genetic gain. On the other hand, strategies that considered only genomic diversity resulted in greater genomic diversity but less favorable starting breeding values, leading to more genetic gain but unsatisfactorily performing recombination inbred lines (RILs) in progeny populations. Among all strategies investigated in this study, compromised strategies, which considered both GEBVs and genomic diversity, produced the best or second-best performing RILs mainly because these strategies balance the starting breeding value with the maintenance of genomic diversity.
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