Tyro-3 family receptors are essential regulators of mammalian spermatogenesis

We have generated and analysed null mutations in the mouse genes encoding three structurally related receptors with tyrosine kinase activity: Tyro 3, Axl, and Mer. Mice lacking any single receptor, or any combination of two receptors, are viable and fertile, but male animals that lack all three receptors produce no mature sperm, owing to the progressive death of differentiating germ cells. This degenerative phenotype appears to result from a failure of the tropic support that is normally provided by Sertoli cells of the seminiferous tubules, whose function depends on testosterone and additional factors produced by Leydig cells. Tyro 3, Axl and Mer are all normally expressed by Sertoli cells during postnatal development, whereas their ligands, Gas6 and protein S, are produced by Leydig cells before sexual maturity, and by both Leydig and Sertoli cells thereafter. Here we show that the concerted activation of Tyro 3, Axl and Mer in Sertoli cells is critical to the role that these cells play as nurturers of developing germ cells. Additional observations indicate that these receptors may also be essential for the tropic maintenance of diverse cell types in the mature nervous, immune and reproductive systems.     

Nanostructure. Epitaxial diamond polytypes on silicon

Carbon is unique in the variety of configurations it can adopt with itself and other elements. Here we show how ion beams can be used to nanostructure various diamond polytypes, epitaxially aligning them to a silicon substrate. The ready controllability of ion beams, which are already used to manufacture submicrometre-scale devices, means that our findings should enable new carbon and non-carbon materials to be nanostructured for a host of applications.     

Rapid planetesimal formation in turbulent circumstellar disks

During the initial stages of planet formation in circumstellar gas disks, dust grains collide and build up larger and larger bodies. How this process continues from metre-sized boulders to kilometre-scale planetesimals is a major unsolved problem: boulders are expected to stick together poorly, and to spiral into the protostar in a few hundred orbits owing to a 'headwind' from the slower rotating gas. Gravitational collapse of the solid component has been suggested to overcome this barrier. But even low levels of turbulence will inhibit sedimentation of solids to a sufficiently dense midplane layer, and turbulence must be present to explain observed gas accretion in protostellar disks. Here we report that boulders can undergo efficient gravitational collapse in locally overdense regions in the midplane of the disk. The boulders concentrate initially in transient high pressure regions in the turbulent gas, and these concentrations are augmented a further order of magnitude by a streaming instability driven by the relative flow of gas and solids. We find that gravitationally bound clusters form with masses comparable to dwarf planets and containing a distribution of boulder sizes. Gravitational collapse happens much faster than radial drift, offering a possible path to planetesimal formation in accreting circumstellar disks.     

基于改进孪生网络结构的相似法律案例检索研究

针对现有的基于孪生网络结构的文档相似度计算方法大多将整个文档看成模型的输入序列, 易导致数据稀疏的问题, 提出利用层级注意力机制来改进孪生网络结构中的文档表示。针对基于层级注意力机制的孪生网络计算模型在输入时有可能忽略文档中重要句子的问题, 进一步提出一种引入文档内容压缩的两步骤文档相似度计算方法。利用开发的法律案例文档相似度标注数据集进行实验, 结果表明所提方法明显优于基于长短期记忆模型的孪生网络计算模型。     

A Study on Nanoparticle Aerosol Filtration via Different Fibrous Filters by Using CFD Approach

Fibrous filters such as nonwoven media are generally characterized by their collection efficiency and pressure drop. The traditional computational studies in this area typically based on unrealistic over-simplified geometries with the fibers placed in a lattice perpendicular to the flow. This paper describes the filter properties made of different Nonwoven materials by using Computational Fluid Dynamics （CFD） approach. In this study, for the first time, a virtual 3- D web is generated based on the fiber orientation information obtaining from analyzing microscopic images of both long-fiber and short-fiber nonwoven structures. Pressure drop and collection efflcicucy of our virtual filter are simulated and compared with the previous analytical and numerical models as well as experiment.     

Realization of the Cirac-Zoller controlled-NOT quantum gate

Quantum computers have the potential to perform certain computational tasks more efficiently than their classical counterparts. The Cirac-Zoller proposal for a scalable quantum computer is based on a string of trapped ions whose electronic states represent the quantum bits of information (or qubits). In this scheme, quantum logical gates involving any subset of ions are realized by coupling the ions through their collective quantized motion. The main experimental step towards realizing the scheme is to implement the controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate operation between two individual ions. The CNOT quantum logical gate corresponds to the XOR gate operation of classical logic that flips the state of a target bit conditioned on the state of a control bit. Here we implement a CNOT quantum gate according to the Cirac-Zoller proposal. In our experiment, two 40Ca+ ions are held in a linear Paul trap and are individually addressed using focused laser beams; the qubits are represented by superpositions of two long-lived electronic states. Our work relies on recently developed precise control of atomic phases and the application of composite pulse sequences adapted from nuclear magnetic resonance techniques.