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Abstract The shape and internal structure of an atomic nucleus can change significantly with increasing excitation energy, angular momentum, or isospin asymmetry. As an example of this structural evolution, linear-chain configurations in carbon or heavier isotopes have been predicted for decades. Recent studies have found non-stability of this structure in 12C while evidenced its appearance in 16C. It is then necessary to investigate the linear-chain molecular structures in 14C to clarify the exact location on the nuclear chart where this structure begins to emerge, and thus to benchmark theoretical models. Here we show a cluster-decay experiment for 14C with all final particles coincidentally detected, allowing a high Q-value resolution, and thus a clear decay-path selection. Unambiguous spin-parity analyses are conducted, strongly evidencing the emergence of the π-bond linear-chain molecular rotational band in 14C. The present results encourage further studies on even longer chain configurations in heavier neutron-rich nuclei.

Neural models are widely applied to headline generation. Template-based methods are a promising direction to overcome the shortcomings of the neural headline generation (NHG) model in generating duplicate or extra words. Previous works often retrieve relevant headlines from the training data and adopt them as the soft template to guide the NHG model. However, these works had two drawbacks: reliance on additional retrieval tools, and uncertainty regarding semantic consistency between the retrieved headline and the source article. The NHG model uncertainty can be utilized to generate hypotheses. The hypotheses generated based on a well-trained NHG model not only contain salient information but also exhibit diversity, making them suitable as soft templates. In this study, we use a basic NHG model to generate multiple diverse hypotheses as candidate templates. Then, we propose a novel Multiple-Hypotheses-based NHG (MH-NHG) model. Experiments on English headline generation tasks demonstrate that it outperforms several baseline systems and achieves a comparable performance with the state-of-the-art system. This indicates that MH-NHG can generate more accurate headlines guided by multiple hypotheses.

The mechanical properties of Co–Cr–Mo (CCM) alloys are advantageous in various biomedical applications. However, because of their bioinert surface, CCM alloys exhibit poor endothelial cell attachment properties; thus, problems of biocompatibility remain. In this study, we aimed to improve the biocompatibility of the CCM alloy surface using solid-binding peptides. We selected peptides with high binding affinity for cast CCM alloy surfaces through in vitro evolution by the phage display method. The peptides were functionalized on the CCM alloy surfaces by simple immersion in the peptide solution. The peptide bound to both cast and 3D-printed CCMs with the same affinity. The peptides linked to the amino acid motif that promotes cell adhesion, and improved the attachment of endothelial cells on the 3D-printed CCM in serum and serum-free conditions. Hence, CCM-binding peptides are attractive tools for constructing a biofunctional surface on CCM-based biodevices.

The dynamics of the spreading of the COVID-19 virus has similar features to turbulent flow, chaotic maps, and other non-linear systems: a small seed grows exponentially and eventually saturates. Like in the percolation model, the virus is most dangerous if the probability of transmission (or the bond probability p in the percolation model) is high. This suggests a relation with the population density, ρs, which must be higher than a certain value (ρs > 1,000 persons/km2). A “seed' implanted in such populations grows vigorously and affects nearby places at distance x. Thus, the spreading is governed by the ratio ρ = ρs/x. Assuming a power law dependence τ of the number of positives to the virus N+ from ρ, we find τ = 0.55, 0.75, and 0.96 for South Korea, Italy, and China, respectively.

Three-dimensional (3D) metal printing is an attractive technique for fabricating biomedical devices. The microstructures and mechanical properties of the fabricated 3D metal printed products show anisotropy because the grains grow along the z-axis direction. However, the effects of different printing directions on the cytocompatibility of the products are unknown. In the present study, cobalt–chromium–molybdenum (Co–Cr–Mo) alloy cylinders were fabricated along the z-axis (vertical) and x-axis (horizontal), respectively, and the effect of build direction on the cytocompatibility was evaluated. The build direction of 3D printed Co–Cr–Mo alloy changed grain anisotropy; however, there was no statistical difference in grain size. The wettability, protein adsorption, cell attachment, and cell proliferation on the disks of vertical and horizontal products were similar to those on cast alloy; they were significantly lower than those of commercially pure titanium and tissue culture polystyrene. The build direction of 3D printed Co–Cr–Mo alloy does not affect osteoblast compatibility.

In this paper, some characterizations of k-strictly convex (k-smooth, respectively) spaces are given. As special cases for k=1, some characterizations of strictly convex (smooth, respectively) spaces are given.

Two characterizations of k-uniformly extremely convex spaces are given in this paper. As special cases for k=1, two necessary and sufficient conditions of uniform extreme convexity are presented and a characteristic inequality of uniformly extremely convex spaces is given.

The large scale genome wide association studies (GWAS) have identified approximately 80 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) conferring susceptibility to type 2 diabetes (T2D). However, most of these loci have not been replicated in diverse populations and much genetic heterogeneity has been observed across ethnic groups. We tested 28 SNPs previously found to be associated with T2D by GWAS in a Mongolian sample of Northern China (497 diagnosed with T2D and 469 controls) for association with T2D and diabetes related quantitative traits. We replicated T2D association of 11 SNPs, namely, rs7578326 (IRS1), rs1531343 (HMGA2), rs8042680 (PRC1), rs7578597 (THADA), rs1333051 (CDKN2), rs6723108 (TMEM163), rs163182 and rs2237897 (KCNQ1), rs1387153 (MTNR1B), rs243021 (BCL11A), and rs10229583 (PAX4) in our sample. Further, we showed that risk allele of the strongest T2D associated SNP in our sample, rs757832 (IRS1), is associated with increased level of TG. We observed substantial difference of T2D risk allele frequency between the Mongolian sample and the 1000G Caucasian sample for a few SNPs, including rs6723108 (TMEM163) whose risk allele reaches near fixation in the Mongolian sample. Further study of genetic architecture of these variants in susceptibility of T2D is needed to understand the role of these variants in heterogeneous populations.

We discuss a new class of Banach spaces which are the generalization of uniformly extremely convex spaces introduced by Wulede and Ha. We prove that the new class of Banach spaces lies strictly between either the classes of k-uniformly rotund spaces and k-strongly convex spaces or classes of fully k-convex spaces and k-strongly convex spaces and has no inclusive relation with the class of locally k-uniformly convex spaces. We obtain in addition some characterizations and properties of this new class of Banach spaces. In particular, our results contain the main results of Wulede and Ha.

A new characterization of k-uniformly rotund Banach space with 1