The admixed brushtail possum genome reveals invasion history in New Zealand and novel imprinted genes.

Combining genome assembly with population and functional genomics can provide valuable insights to development and evolution, as well as tools for species management. Here, we present a chromosome-level genome assembly of the common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula), a model marsupial threatened in parts of their native range in Australia, but also a major introduced pest in New Zealand. Functional genomics reveals post-natal activation of chemosensory and metabolic genes, reflecting unique adaptations to altricial birth and delayed weaning, a hallmark of marsupial development.

Computational role of sleep in memory reorganization.

Sleep is considered to play an essential role in memory reorganization. Despite its importance, classical theoretical models did not focus on some sleep characteristics. Here, we review recent theoretical approaches investigating their roles in learning and discuss the possibility that non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep selectively consolidates memory, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep reorganizes the representations of memories.

Electrical Properties of Taste Sensors with Positively Charged Lipid Membranes Composed of Amines and Ammonium Salts.

Currently, taste sensors utilizing lipid polymer membranes are utilized to assess the taste of food products quantitatively. During this process, it is crucial to identify and quantify basic tastes, e.g.

Spatiotemporal single-cell tracking analysis in 3D tissues to reveal heterogeneous cellular response to mechanical stimuli.

Mechanical stimuli have been recognized as important for tissue maturation, homeostasis and constructing engineered three-dimensional (3D) tissues. However, we know little about the cellular mechanical response in tissues that could be considerably heterogeneous and spatiotemporally dynamic due to the complex structure of tissues. Here, we report a spatiotemporal single-cell tracking analysis of in vitro 3D tissues under mechanical stretch, to reveal the heterogeneous cellular behavior by using a developed stretch and optical live imaging system.

Effects of fermentative quality of corn silage on lactation, blood metabolites, and rumen fermentation in dairy cows.

We investigated the effect of fermentation quality of corn silage on dry matter intake (DMI), milk yield, ruminal fermentation, methane (CH ) emissions, and plasma metabolites in lactating cows. Six lactating Holstein cows were used in a 2 × 2 crossover design with two dietary treatments containing high quality corn silage with lower pH (high group) or low quality corn silage with higher pH (low group). The cows were fed partial mixed ration (PMR containing 50%DM of each corn silage) ad libitum plus 0.

Improvement of ethanol and 2,3-butanediol production in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by ATP wasting.

Background: "ATP wasting" has been observed in C metabolic flux analyses of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a yeast strain commonly used to produce ethanol. Some strains of S. cerevisiae, such as the sake strain Kyokai 7, consume approximately two-fold as much ATP as laboratory strains.

Small-artery-mimicking multi-layered 3D co-culture in a self-folding porous graphene-based film.

vessel-mimicking models have been spotlighted as a powerful tool for investigating cellular behaviours in vascular development and diseases. However, it is still challenging to create micro-scale tubular tissues while mimicking the structural features of small arteries. Here, we propose a 3D culture model of small vascular tissue using a self-folding graphene-based porous film.

Non-autistic persons modulate their speech rhythm while talking to autistic individuals.

How non-autistic persons modulate their speech rhythm while talking to autistic (AUT) individuals remains unclear. We investigated two types of phonological characteristics: (1) the frequency power of each prosodic, syllabic, and phonetic rhythm and (2) the dynamic interaction among these rhythms using speech between AUT and neurotypical (NT) individuals. Eight adults diagnosed with AUT (all men; age range, 24-44 years) and eight age-matched non-autistic NT adults (three women, five men; age range, 23-45 years) participated in this study.

The left-right reversed visual feedback of the hand affects multisensory interaction within peripersonal space.

The interaction between vision and touch, known as the crossmodal congruency effect, has been extensively investigated in several research studies. Recent studies have revealed that the crossmodal congruency effect involves body representations. However, it is unclear how bodily information (e.

Effects of bone-conducted vibration stimulation of various frequencies on the vertical vection.

Illusory self-motion ("vection") has been used to present a sense of movement in virtual reality (VR) and other similar applications. It is crucial in vection research to present a stronger sense of movement. Bone-conducted vibration (BCV) is a small and generally acceptable method for enhancing the sense of movement in VR.

Enhancing Offensive Language Detection with Data Augmentation and Knowledge Distillation.

Offensive language detection has received important attention and plays a crucial role in promoting healthy communication on social platforms, as well as promoting the safe deployment of large language models. Training data is the basis for developing detectors; however, the available offense-related dataset in Chinese is severely limited in terms of data scale and coverage when compared to English resources. This significantly affects the accuracy of Chinese offensive language detectors in practical applications, especially when dealing with hard cases or out-of-domain samples.

Tailored multi-organ segmentation with model adaptation and ensemble.

Multi-organ segmentation, which identifies and separates different organs in medical images, is a fundamental task in medical image analysis. Recently, the immense success of deep learning motivated its wide adoption in multi-organ segmentation tasks. However, due to expensive labor costs and expertise, the availability of multi-organ annotations is usually limited and hence poses a challenge in obtaining sufficient training data for deep learning-based methods.

Exploring cognitive individuality and the underlying creativity in statistical learning and phase entrainment.

Statistical learning starts at an early age and is intimately linked to brain development and the emergence of individuality. Through such a long period of statistical learning, the brain updates and constructs statistical models, with the model's individuality changing based on the type and degree of stimulation received. However, the detailed mechanisms underlying this process are unknown.

Development of Notch-Free, Pre-Bent Rod Applicable for Posterior Corrective Surgery of Thoracolumbar/Lumbar Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis.

Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS), the most common pediatric musculoskeletal disorder, causes a three-dimensional spine deformity. Lenke type 5 AIS is defined as a structural thoracolumbar/lumbar curve with nonstructural thoracic curves. Although a rod curvature will affect clinical outcomes, intraoperative contouring of the straight rod depends on the surgeon's knowledge and experience.

Fetal blockade of nicotinic acetylcholine transmission causes autism-like impairment of biological motion preference in the neonatal chick.

Several environmental chemicals are suspected risk factors for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including valproic acid (VPA) and pesticides acting on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), if administered during pregnancy. However, their target processes in fetal neuro-development are unknown. We report that the injection of VPA into the fetus impaired imprinting to an artificial object in neonatal chicks, while a predisposed preference for biological motion (BM) remained intact.

Asymmetric quantum decision-making.

Collective decision-making plays a crucial role in information and communication systems. However, decision conflicts among agents often impede the maximization of potential utilities within the system. Quantum processes have shown promise in achieving conflict-free joint decisions between two agents through the entanglement of photons or the quantum interference of orbital angular momentum (OAM).

Elucidation of binding mechanism, affinity, and complex structure between mWT1 tumor-associated antigen peptide and HLA-A*24:02.

We have applied our advanced computational and experimental methodologies to investigate the complex structure and binding mechanism of a modified Wilms' Tumor 1 (mWT1) protein epitope to the understudied Asian-dominant allele HLA-A*24:02 (HLA-A24) in aqueous solution. We have applied our developed multicanonical molecular dynamics (McMD)-based dynamic docking method to analyze the binding pathway and mechanism, which we verified by comparing the highest probability structures from simulation with our experimentally solved x-ray crystal structure. Subsequent path sampling MD simulations elucidated the atomic details of the binding process and indicated that first an encounter complex is formed between the N-terminal's positive charge of the 9-residue mWT1 fragment peptide and a cluster of negative residues on the surface of HLA-A24, with the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecule preferring a predominantly closed conformation.

Acceleration of Approximate Matrix Multiplications on GPUs.

Matrix multiplication is important in various information-processing applications, including the computation of eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and in combinatorial optimization algorithms. Therefore, reducing the computation time of matrix products is essential to speed up scientific and practical calculations. Several approaches have been proposed to speed up this process, including GPUs, fast matrix multiplication libraries, custom hardware, and efficient approximate matrix multiplication (AMM) algorithms.

A Boundary-Enhanced Liver Segmentation Network for Multi-Phase CT Images with Unsupervised Domain Adaptation.

Multi-phase computed tomography (CT) images have gained significant popularity in the diagnosis of hepatic disease. There are several challenges in the liver segmentation of multi-phase CT images. (1) Annotation: due to the distinct contrast enhancements observed in different phases (i.