Developmental origins of natural sound perception.

Infants are exposed to a myriad of sounds early in life, including caregivers' speech, songs, human-made and natural (non-anthropogenic) environmental sounds. While decades of research have established that infants have sophisticated perceptual abilities to process speech, less is known about how they perceive natural environmental sounds. This review synthesizes current findings about the perception of natural environmental sounds in the first years of life, emphasizing their role in auditory development and describing how these studies contribute to the emerging field of human auditory ecology.

Entanglement Generation in Weakly Driven Arrays of Multilevel Atoms via Dipolar Interactions.

We investigate the driven-dissipative dynamics of multilevel atomic arrays interacting via dipolar interactions at subwavelength spacings. Unlike two-level atoms in the weakly excited regime, multilevel atoms can become strongly entangled. The entanglement manifests as the growth of spin waves in the ground-state manifold and survives after turning off the drive.

Structure of the aminoterminal domain of the birnaviral multifunctional VP3 protein and its unexplored critical role.

To overcome their limited genetic capacity, numerous viruses encode multifunctional proteins. The birnavirus VP3 protein plays key roles during infection, including scaffolding of the viral capsid during morphogenesis, recruitment, and regulation of the viral RNA polymerase, shielding of the double-stranded RNA genome and targeting of host endosomes for genome replication, and immune evasion. The dimeric form of VP3 is critical for these functions.

Continuous Quasi-Attractors dissolve with too much - or too little - variability.

Recent research involving bats flying in long tunnels has confirmed that hippocampal place cells can be active at multiple locations, with considerable variability in place field size and peak rate. With self-organizing recurrent networks, variability implies inhomogeneity in the synaptic weights, impeding the establishment of a continuous manifold of fixed points. Are continuous attractor neural networks still valid models for understanding spatial memory in the hippocampus, given such variability? Here, we ask what are the noise limits, in terms of an experimentally inspired parametrization of the irregularity of a single map, beyond which the notion of continuous attractor is no longer relevant.

Cerium(III) yldiide complexes with divergent CO reactivity.

Synthesis of cerium yldiide complexes and their reactivity with CO is demonstrated. In the case of the sulphur-tethered yldiide, the ketenyl complex is formed with release of PPh, while PhPCCO is formed along with a sulfinato ligand in the case of the tosyl-substituted yldiide. Computational analysis shows that this diverging reactivity is due to the stability of the two isomers in the first step of each mechanism.

Entanglement and Mutual Information in Molecules: Comparing Localized and Delocalized Orbitals.

The use of the mutual information (MI) as a measure of the entanglement in quantum systems has gained a consensus in recent years, even if there is an ongoing effort to distinguish the classical and quantum contributions contained therein. This quantity has been first introduced in condensed matter physics, in particular, in studies based on the density matrix renormalization group method. This method has been successfully adapted to quantum chemistry problems, opening the way to compute MI also in molecular systems.

Identifying Markov Chain Models from Time-to-Event Data: An Algebraic Approach.

Many biological and medical questions can be modeled using time-to-event data in finite-state Markov chains, with the phase-type distribution describing intervals between events. We solve the inverse problem: given a phase-type distribution, can we identify the transition rate parameters of the underlying Markov chain? For a specific class of solvable Markov models, we show this problem has a unique solution up to finite symmetry transformations, and we outline a recursive method for computing symbolic solutions for these models across any number of states. Using the Thomas decomposition technique from computer algebra, we further provide symbolic solutions for any model.

Separable Hamiltonian neural networks.

Hamiltonian neural networks (HNNs) are state-of-the-art models that regress the vector field of a dynamical system under the learning bias of Hamilton's equations. A recent observation is that embedding a bias regarding the additive separability of the Hamiltonian reduces the regression complexity and improves regression performance. We propose separable HNNs that embed additive separability within HNNs using observational, learning, and inductive biases.

Connecting the changing trace elements spectrum and survival in sarcoma: a pilot study.

Objectives: While some metals have been reported as carcinogens or potential carcinogens, only few modern-standard datasets including a large number of elements are available. The present analysis established a first trace elements spectrum by relating the concentration of metals and trace elements in the serum of sarcoma patients with survival data.

Methods: Patients with sarcoma and controls were retrospectively selected from the International Sarcoma Kindred Study database (ISKS).

Chirality and odd mechanics in active columnar phases.

Chiral active materials display odd dynamical effects in both their elastic and viscous responses. We show that the most symmetric mesophase with 2D odd elasticity in three dimensions is chiral, polar, and columnar, with 2D translational order in the plane perpendicular to the columns and no elastic restoring force for their relative sliding. We derive its hydrodynamic equations from those of a chiral active variant of model H.

Irreversible Boltzmann samplers in dense liquids: Weak-coupling approximation and mode-coupling theory.

Exerting a nonequilibrium drive on an otherwise equilibrium Langevin process brings the dynamics out of equilibrium but can also speed up the approach to the Boltzmann steady state. Transverse forces are a minimal framework to achieve dynamical acceleration of the Boltzmann sampling. We consider a simple liquid in three space dimensions subjected to additional transverse pairwise forces, and quantify the extent to which transverse forces accelerate the dynamics.

Predominant Binding Mode of Palmatine to DNA.

Palmatine is a protoberberine alkaloid, which may produce singlet oxygen under visible light irradiation and binds to DNA. The fact that singlet oxygen activation in palmatine may be triggered by environmental conditions, and in particular its interaction with nucleic acids, makes it a most suitable candidate for photodynamic therapy and DNA-targeted noninvasive anticancer strategies. Despite these remarkable properties, the actual binding mode between palmatine and DNA has not been resolved, yet.

Multi-qubit gates and Schrödinger cat states in an optical clock.

Many-particle entanglement is a key resource for achieving the fundamental precision limits of a quantum sensor. Optical atomic clocks, the current state of the art in frequency precision, are a rapidly emerging area of focus for entanglement-enhanced metrology. Augmenting tweezer-based clocks featuring microscopic control and detection with the high-fidelity entangling gates developed for atom-array information processing offers a promising route towards making use of highly entangled quantum states for improved optical clocks.

Impact of Thickness-Dependent Nanophotonic Effects on the Optical Response of Color Centers in Hexagonal Boron Nitride.

Among a broad diversity of color centers hosted in layered van der Waals materials, the negatively charged boron vacancy (V) center in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is garnering considerable attention for the development of quantum sensing units on a two-dimensional platform. In this work, we investigate how the optical response of an ensemble of V centers evolves with the hBN thickness in a range of a few to hundreds of nanometers. We show that the photoluminescence intensity features a nontrivial evolution with thickness, which is quantitatively reproduced by numerical calculations taking into account thickness-dependent variations of the absorption, radiative lifetime, and radiation pattern of V centers.

Large Scale Simulations of Photosynthetic Antenna Systems: Interplay of Cooperativity and Disorder.

Large-scale simulations of light-matter interaction in natural photosynthetic antenna complexes containing more than one hundred thousands of chlorophyll molecules, comparable with natural size, have been performed. Photosynthetic antenna complexes present in Green sulfur bacteria and Purple bacteria have been analyzed using a radiative non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, well-known in the field of quantum optics, instead of the widely used dipole-dipole Frenkel Hamiltonian. This approach allows us to study ensembles of emitters beyond the small volume limit (system size much smaller than the absorbed wavelength), where the Frenkel Hamiltonian fails.

Probing the Local Rapidity Distribution of a One-Dimensional Bose Gas.

One-dimensional Bose gases with contact repulsive interactions are characterized by the presence of infinite-lifetime quasiparticles whose momenta are called the "rapidities." Here, we develop a probe of the local rapidity distribution, based on the fact that rapidities are the asymptotic momenta of the particles after a long one-dimensional expansion. This is done by performing an expansion of a selected slice of the gas.

The order of stimuli matters when learning second-order transitional probabilities.

The order of stimuli within sequences and the transitional probabilities (TPs) it generates are central information in sequence processing. However, less is known about what type of information and how it is extracted by general learning mechanisms. The present study focused on statistical learning of second-order TPs.