Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding ...preferences--such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism--as likely candidates for fostering large-scale cooperation. A critical question concerns the ontogenetic origins of these constituents of cooperative behavior, as well as whether they emerge independently or in an interrelated fashion. The answer to this question will shed light on the interdisciplinary debate regarding the significance of such preferences for explaining how humans become such cooperative beings. We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion. These findings support arguments for an evolutionary basis--most likely in dialectical manner including both biological and cultural mechanisms--of human egalitarianism given the rapidly developing nature of other-regarding preferences and their role in the evolution of human-specific forms of cooperation. Future work of this kind will help determine to what extent uniquely human sociality and morality depend on other-regarding preferences emerging early in life.
Giant unilamellar vesicles or GUVs are systems of choice as biomimetic models of cellular membranes. Although a variety of procedures exist for making single walled vesicles of tens of microns in ...size, the range of lipid compositions that can be used to grow GUVs by the conventional methods is quite limited, and many of the available methods involve energy input that can damage the lipids or other molecules present in the growing solution for embedment in the membrane or in the vesicle interior. Here, we show that a wide variety of lipids or lipid mixtures can grow into GUVs by swelling lipid precursor films on top of a dried polyvinyl alcohol gel surface in a swelling buffer that can contain diverse biorelevant molecules. Moreover, we show that the encapsulation potential of this method can be enhanced by combining polyvinyl alcohol-mediated growth with inverse-phase methods, which allow (bio)molecule complexation with the lipids.
Young Children Enforce Social Norms Schmidt, Marco F. H.; Tomasello, Michael
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
08/2012, Volume:
21, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children's ...behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic motives; it is more likely a result of children's growing identification with their cultural group, which leads to prosocial motives for preserving its ways of doing things.
This paper brings deep learning at the forefront of research into time series classification (TSC). TSC is the area of machine learning tasked with the categorization (or labelling) of time series. ...The last few decades of work in this area have led to significant progress in the accuracy of classifiers, with the state of the art now represented by the HIVE-COTE algorithm. While extremely accurate, HIVE-COTE cannot be applied to many real-world datasets because of its high training time complexity in
O
(
N
2
·
T
4
)
for a dataset with
N
time series of length
T
. For example, it takes HIVE-COTE more than 8 days to learn from a small dataset with
N
=
1500
time series of short length
T
=
46
. Meanwhile deep learning has received enormous attention because of its high accuracy and scalability. Recent approaches to deep learning for TSC have been scalable, but less accurate than HIVE-COTE. We introduce InceptionTime—an ensemble of deep Convolutional Neural Network models, inspired by the Inception-v4 architecture. Our experiments show that InceptionTime is on par with HIVE-COTE in terms of accuracy while being much more scalable: not only can it learn from 1500 time series in one hour but it can also learn from 8M time series in 13 h, a quantity of data that is fully out of reach of HIVE-COTE.
The success of advanced quantum communication relies crucially on non-classical light sources emitting single indistinguishable photons at high flux rates and purity. We report on deterministically ...fabricated microlenses with single quantum dots inside which fulfil these requirements in a flexible and robust quantum device approach. In our concept we combine cathodoluminescence spectroscopy with advanced in situ three-dimensional electron-beam lithography at cryogenic temperatures to pattern monolithic microlenses precisely aligned to pre-selected single quantum dots above a distributed Bragg reflector. We demonstrate that the resulting deterministic quantum-dot microlenses enhance the photon-extraction efficiency to (23±3)%. Furthermore we prove that such microlenses assure close to pure emission of triggered single photons with a high degree of photon indistinguishability up to (80±7)% at saturation. As a unique feature, both single-photon purity and photon indistinguishability are preserved at high excitation power and pulsed excitation, even above saturation of the quantum emitter.
Cells both actively generate and sensitively react to forces through their mechanical framework, the cytoskeleton, which is a nonequilibrium composite material including polymers and motor proteins. ...We measured the dynamics and mechanical properties of a simple three-component model system consisting of myosin II, actin filaments, and cross-linkers. In this system, stresses arising from motor activity controlled the cytoskeletal network mechanics, increasing stiffness by a factor of nearly 100 and qualitatively changing the viscoelastic response of the network in an adenosine triphosphate-dependent manner. We present a quantitative theoretical model connecting the large-scale properties of this active gel to molecular force generation.
We consider a quantum Otto cycle for a time-dependent harmonic oscillator coupled to a squeezed thermal reservoir. We show that the efficiency at maximum power increases with the degree of squeezing, ...surpassing the standard Carnot limit and approaching unity exponentially for large squeezing parameters. We further propose an experimental scheme to implement such a model system by using a single trapped ion in a linear Paul trap with special geometry. Our analytical investigations are supported by Monte Carlo simulations that demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal. For realistic trap parameters, an increase of the efficiency at maximum power of up to a factor of 4 is reached, largely exceeding the Carnot bound.
Vitrimers were created from a commercial high-performance anhydride-cured epoxy in the presence of various metal transesterification catalysts. Compressive creep strains greater than 50% were ...observed in samples containing dibutyltin diacetate or dibutyltin bis(2,4-pentanedionate) via a compression set experiment. Stress relaxation experiments were carried out in a parallel plate geometry and analyzed with a newly modified exponential model proposed to better describe the relaxation process. The results demonstrate that it is not only possible to realize reworkability on relatively short time scales (hundreds of seconds) without compromising the mechanical properties of these networks at elevated temperatures but that, with proper catalyst selection, this may be accomplished with negligible activity under curing conditions. This effort also highlights differences in the behavior of different transesterification catalysts in this context. The approach to the selection and analysis of the materials reported here has implications for the design of new vitrimers more generally.
To increase product yields and to ensure consistent product quality, key issues of industrial fermentations, process optimization and scale up are aimed at maintaining optimum and homogenous reaction ...conditions minimizing microbial stress exposure and enhancing metabolic accuracy. For each individual product, process and facility, suitable strategies have to be elaborated by a comprehensive and detailed process characterization, identification of the most relevant process parameters influencing product yield and quality and their establishment as scale-up parameters to be kept constant as far as possible. Physical variables, which can only be restrictedly kept constant as single parameters, may be combined with other pertinent parameters to appropriate mathematical groups or dimensionless terms. Process characterization is preferably based on real-time or near real-time data collected by in situ and on-line measurements and may be facilitated by supportive approaches and tools like neural network based chemometric data analysis and modelling, clarification of the mixing and stream conditions through computational fluid dynamics and scale-down simulations. However, as fermentation facilities usually are not strictly designed according to scale-up criteria and the process conditions in the culture vessels thus may differ significantly and since any strategy and model can only insufficiently consider and reflect the highly complex interdependence and mutual interaction of fermentation parameters, successful scale up in most cases is not the result of a conclusive and straight-lined experimental strategy, but rather will be the outcome of a separate process development and optimization on each scale. This article gives an overview on the problems typically coming along with fermentation process optimization and scale up, and presents currently applied scale-up strategies while considering future technologies, with emphasis on Escherichia coli as one of the most commonly fermented organisms.
Myosin motor proteins drive vigorous steady-state fluctuations in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. Endogenous embedded semiflexible filaments such as microtubules, or added filaments such as ...single-walled carbon nanotubes are used as novel tools to noninvasively track equilibrium and nonequilibrium fluctuations in such biopolymer networks. Here, we analytically calculate shape fluctuations of semiflexible probe filaments in a viscoelastic environment, driven out of equilibrium by motor activity. Transverse bending fluctuations of the probe filaments can be decomposed into dynamic normal modes. We find that these modes no longer evolve independently under nonequilibrium driving. This effective mode coupling results in nonzero circulatory currents in a conformational phase space, reflecting a violation of detailed balance. We present predictions for the characteristic frequencies associated with these currents and investigate how the temporal signatures of motor activity determine mode correlations, which we find to be consistent with recent experiments on microtubules embedded in cytoskeletal networks.
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