We consider one-dimensional topological insulators hosting fractionally charged midgap states in the presence and absence of induced superconductivity pairing. Under the protection of a discrete ...symmetry, relating positive and negative energy states, the solitonic midgap states remain pinned at zero energy when superconducting correlations are induced by proximity effect. When the superconducting pairing dominates the initial insulating gap, Majorana fermion phases develop for a class of insulators. As a concrete example, we study the Creutz model with induced s-wave superconductivity and repulsive Hubbard-type interactions. For a finite wire, without interactions, the solitonic modes originating from the nonsuperconducting model survive at zero energy, revealing a fourfold-degenerate ground state. However, interactions break the aforementioned discrete symmetry and completely remove this degeneracy, thereby producing a unique ground state which is characterized by a topological bulk invariant with respect to the product of fermion parity and bond inversion. In contrast, the Majorana edge modes are globally robust to interactions. Moreover, the parameter range for which a topological Majorana phase is stabilized expands when increasing the repulsive Hubbard interaction. The topological phase diagram of the interacting model is obtained using a combination of mean-field theory and density matrix renormalization group techniques.
NW Iberia is dominated by Atlantic climate areas that favour pollen preservation, useful for palaeoecological studies. However, the region also includes Mediterranean sectors in which preservation of ...such palaeoenvironmental evidence is more difficult. To overcome these constraints, archaeological plant macroremains can be used to help characterize flora and vegetation dynamics at a local and regional level. To fill the gap in knowledge in an understudied Mediterranean region, a large archaeobotanical study was conducted at the river Sabor valley, NE Portugal. With 13 archaeological sites sampled for charcoal, fruits and seeds, it allowed the study of vegetation throughout the Holocene, starting in the Mesolithic up to Modern times, with some chronological gaps. Tree taxa dominates the older period and an expansion of shrubby taxa since Bronze age was observed. Diversification of plants used during the Iron Age and Roman period suggests an intensification of resources exploitation and deforestation. These trends seem to be related with changes in human settlements and productive strategies. During Prehistory, agricultural fields were established in flat and wide areas, and, during Iron Age, fortified granaries were used to store large amounts of grains, particularly free-threshing wheat. Drastic changes in settlement during Roman times and the establishment of small farms producing wine and/or olive oil were testified by the occurrence of Olea and Vitis in both anthracological and carpological datasets. Data from more recent periods is scarce. Results highlight that the combination of several proxies and integration of archaeological evidence helps to understand ecological dynamics in areas without pollen data and contributes to the characterization of heterogeneous areas under diverse climatic conditions and with a variety of social trends.
Microbial nucleic acid recognition serves as the major stimulus to an antiviral response, implying a requirement to limit the misrepresentation of self nucleic acids as non-self and the induction of ...autoinflammation. By systematic screening using a panel of interferon-stimulated genes we identify two siblings and a singleton variably demonstrating severe neonatal anemia, membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis, liver fibrosis, deforming arthropathy and increased anti-DNA antibodies. In both families we identify biallelic mutations in DNASE2, associated with a loss of DNase II endonuclease activity. We record increased interferon alpha protein levels using digital ELISA, enhanced interferon signaling by RNA-Seq analysis and constitutive upregulation of phosphorylated STAT1 and STAT3 in patient lymphocytes and monocytes. A hematological disease transcriptomic signature and increased numbers of erythroblasts are recorded in patient peripheral blood, suggesting that interferon might have a particular effect on hematopoiesis. These data define a type I interferonopathy due to DNase II deficiency in humans.
Some of the earliest Western European macroremains of rye (Secale cereale) have been recently recovered in Northwest Iberia. However, the chronological and cultural contexts of these remains have not ...been yet exhaustively analysed. To address this gap of research, previous and unpublished assemblages have been reviewed and analysed through an analytical set of methods: biometry, radiocarbon dates and integrating the remains of rye in the broad archaeobotanical record of the region. Results show the earliest macroremains of rye in the Iberian Peninsula date to a period between the 3rd century and the first half of the 1st century BCE. Rye was usually found in assemblages dominated by spelt and other cereals, in whose fields it was likely acting as a weed. There is no record of rye for about the two following centuries, after which it is probably reintroduced, now as a crop. It is found in several sites from the 3rd-4th centuries CE onwards, suggesting it is a staple crop as in other regions in Europe. Significant differences in grain size are only recorded in a 10th-11th century settlement, suggesting few changes in grain morphometry before Medieval times.
-related leukoencephalopathy is a new diagnostic entity linked to heterozygous gain-of-function variants in
that neuroradiologically show some overlap with the inflammatory microangiopathy ...Aicardi-Goutières syndrome (AGS). To report a 16-year-old boy harbouring a novel
mutation who presented neuroradiological features suggestive of enhanced type I interferon signalling. We describe five years of follow-up and review the current literature on
-related leukoencephalopathy. Clinical evaluation, standardised scales (SPRS, SARA, CBCL, CDI-2:P, WISCH-IV and VABS-2) and neuroradiological studies were performed, as well as blood DNA analysis. For the literature review, a search was performed on Pubmed, Scopus and Web of Science up to December 2023 using the following text word search strategy: (
) AND (leukoencephalopathy). Our patient presents clinical features consistent with other reported cases with NOTCH1 mutations but is among the minority of patients with an onset after infancy. During the five-year follow-up, we observed an increase in the severity of spasticity and ataxia. However, at the age of 16 years, our proband is still ambulatory. As for other reported patients, he manifests psychiatric features ranging from hyperactivity during childhood to anxiety and depression during adolescence. The neuroradiological picture remained essentially stable over five years. In addition to the typical findings of leukoencephalopathy with cysts and calcifications already described, we report the presence of T2-hyperintensity and T1-hypotensity of the transverse pontine fibres, enhancement in the periventricular white matter after gadolinium administration and decreased NAA and Cho peaks in the periventricular white matter on MRS. We identified a novel heterozygous variant in
(c.4788_4799dup), a frame insertion located in extracellular negative regulatory region (NRR)-domain as in previously published cases. Blood interferon signalling was not elevated compared to controls. This case provides further data on a new diagnostic entity, i.e., NOTCH1-related leukoencephalopathy. By describing a standardised five-year follow-up in one case and reviewing the other patients described to date, we outline recommendations relating to monitoring in this illness, emphasising the importance of psychiatric and gastroenterological surveillance alongside neurological and neuropsychological management. Studies are needed to better understand the factors influencing disease onset and severity, which are heterogeneous.
Service robots are expected to be more autonomous and work effectively in human-centric environments. This implies that robots should have special capabilities, such as learning from past experiences ...and real-time object category recognition. This paper proposes an open-ended 3D object recognition system which concurrently learns both the object categories and the statistical features for encoding objects. In particular, we propose an extension of Latent Dirichlet Allocation to learn structural semantic features (i.e., visual topics), from low-level feature co-occurrences, for each category independently. Moreover, topics in each category are discovered in an unsupervised fashion and are updated incrementally using new object views. In this way, the advantages of both the (hand-crafted) local features and the (learned) structural semantic features have been considered and combined in an efficient way. An extensive set of experiments has been performed to assess the performance of the proposed Local-LDA in terms of descriptiveness, scalability, and computation time. Experimental results show that the overall classification performance obtained with Local-LDA is clearly better than the best performances obtained with the state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the best scalability, in terms of number of learned categories, was obtained with the proposed Local-LDA approach, closely followed by a Bag-of-Words (BoW) approach. Concerning computation time, the best result was obtained with BoW, immediately followed by the Local-LDA approach.
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