How New Individuals Behave in a Heterogeneous Community: A Computational Approach to Norm Assimilation Using Agent-Based Systems

Heterogeneous community entails a number of social groups that adopt similar/different social norms. In such community, new individuals who join a new social group should be able to decide with which group they could assimilate based on their capabilities/values/manners. Otherwise, they would be penalized by other members in the group for violating some norms which they cannot comply.Using this approach, software agents would have better reasoning in simulating human society. In this paper, the authors propose a norms assimilation theory, in which a new agent attempts to assimilate with a social group's norms. This theory builds an approach to norm assimilation, analyzes the cases for an agent to decide to assimilate with a social group and develops a mathematical model to measure the assimilation cost and the agent's ability. The approach is developed based on the agent's internal belief about its ability and desire, and its external belief about the cost of assimilating with a number of social groups. The significance of this research is two-fold. Firstly, the study paves the way to future design of intelligent systems, i.e., software agents or robots, to closely mimic human social interactions.Secondly, the norm assimilation using agent-based system could be potentially utilized to simulate some social issues such as immigrants, new students, expatriate etc. The experiments that have been conducted demonstrate that an agent in the domain is able to calculate the assimilation cost and decide which social group to join.     

Prophenolase and the role of Mehlis' gland in helminths

Zusammenfassung Die Phenoloxydase der Vittellinzellen von Trematoden wirkt als inaktive Prophenoloxydase und bedingt, dass die von Dotterstockzellen synthetisierten Vorläufer von Sklerotin in situ nicht tanniert werden. Das Sekret der Mehlis-Drüse beeinflusst die Fermentaktivierung.     

Novel roles for insulin receptor (IR) in adipocytes and skeletal muscle cells via new and unexpected substrates

The insulin signaling pathway regulates whole-body glucose homeostasis by transducing extracellular signals from the insulin receptor (IR) to downstream intracellular targets, thus coordinating a multitude of biological functions. Dysregulation of IR or its signal transduction is associated with insulin resistance, which may culminate in type 2 diabetes. Following initial stimulation of IR, insulin signaling diverges into different pathways, activating multiple substrates that have roles in various metabolic and cellular processes. The integration of multiple pathways arising from IR activation continues to expand as new IR substrates are identified and characterized. Accordingly, our review will focus on roles for IR substrates as they pertain to three primary areas: metabolism/glucose uptake, mitogenesis/growth, and aging/longevity. While IR functions in a seemingly pleiotropic manner in many cell types, through these three main roles in fat and skeletal muscle cells, IR multi-tasks to regulate whole-body glucose homeostasis to impact healthspan and lifespan.     

Dependence of single-molecule junction conductance on molecular conformation

Since it was first suggested that a single molecule might function as an active electronic component, a number of techniques have been developed to measure the charge transport properties of single molecules. Although scanning tunnelling microscopy observations under high vacuum conditions can allow stable measurements of electron transport, most measurements of a single molecule bonded in a metal-molecule-metal junction exhibit relatively large variations in conductance. As a result, even simple predictions about how molecules behave in such junctions have still not been rigorously tested. For instance, it is well known that the tunnelling current passing through a molecule depends on its conformation; but although some experiments have verified this effect, a comprehensive mapping of how junction conductance changes with molecular conformation is not yet available. In the simple case of a biphenyl--a molecule with two phenyl rings linked by a single C-C bond--conductance is expected to change with the relative twist angle between the two rings, with the planar conformation having the highest conductance. Here we use amine link groups to form single-molecule junctions with more reproducible current-voltage characteristics. This allows us to extract average conductance values from thousands of individual measurements on a series of seven biphenyl molecules with different ring substitutions that alter the twist angle of the molecules. We find that the conductance for the series decreases with increasing twist angle, consistent with a cosine-squared relation predicted for transport through pi-conjugated biphenyl systems.