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Many countries’ curriculum reforms focus on developing the next generations’ competencies of self-directed learning (SDL) to address rapid social changes and sustainable environmental development. Taiwan’s curriculum reform corresponds with the global trend in education. The latest curriculum reform, which proposed a 12-year basic education, was implemented in 2018 and included SDL explicitly in its guidelines. The reformed curriculum guidelines have been followed for over 3 years. Thus, it is necessary to conduct a large-scale survey to examine its impact on Taiwanese students. However, existing research instruments help provide a generalized analysis of SDL and have yet to be designed specifically for SDL of mathematics. Therefore, we developed a mathematics SDL scale (MSDLS) and examined its reliability and validity in this study. Subsequently, MSDLS was utilized to investigate Taiwanese students’ SDL of mathematics. The MSDLS consists of four sub-scales with 50 items. It has acceptable reliability, validity, and measurement invariance across gender and grade groups. The MSDLS was administered online to 5,575 junior high school students, and 5,456 valid responses were collected. The findings highlight the gender and grade differences in SDL of mathematics. Male students are higher than female students in many factors. It is noted that the SDL in mathematics does not increase with grade. In sum, the MSDLS is a helpful instrument for examining secondary school students’ SDL of mathematics.

BackgroundMonoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and their derivatives are the fastest expanding category of pharmaceuticals. Efficient screening and generation of appropriate therapeutic human antibodies are important and urgent issues in the field of medicine. The successful in vitro biopanning method for antibody screening largely depends on the highly diverse, reliable and humanized CDR library. To rapidly obtain potent human antibodies, we designed and constructed a highly diverse synthetic human single-chain variable fragment (scFv) antibody library greater than a giga in size by phage display. Herein, the novel TIM-3-neutralizing antibodies with immunomodulatory functions derived from this library serve as an example to demonstrate the library’s potential for biomedical applications.MethodsThe library was designed with high stability scaffolds and six complementarity determining regions (CDRs) tailored to mimic human composition. The engineered antibody sequences were optimized for codon usage and subjected to synthesis. The six CDRs with variable length CDR-H3s were individually subjected to β-lactamase selection and then recombined for library construction. Five therapeutic target antigens were used for human antibody generation via phage library biopanning. TIM-3 antibody activity was verified by immunoactivity assays.ResultsWe have designed and constructed a highly diverse synthetic human scFv library named DSyn-1 (DCB Synthetic-1) containing 2.5 × 1010 phage clones. Three selected TIM-3-recognizing antibodies DCBT3-4, DCBT3-19, and DCBT3-22 showed significant inhibition activity by TIM-3 reporter assays at nanomolar ranges and binding affinities in sub-nanomolar ranges. Furthermore, clone DCBT3-22 was exceptionally superior with good physicochemical property and a purity of more than 98% without aggregation.ConclusionThe promising results illustrate not only the potential of the DSyn-1 library for biomedical research applications, but also the therapeutic potential of the three novel fully human TIM-3-neutralizing antibodies.

We present a self-trainable method, Mask2Hand, which learns to solve the challenging task of predicting 3D hand pose and shape from a 2D binary mask of hand silhouette/shadow without additional manually-annotated data. Given the intrinsic camera parameters and the parametric hand model in the camera space, we adopt the differentiable rendering technique to project 3D estimations onto the 2D binary silhouette space. By applying a tailored combination of losses between the rendered silhouette and the input binary mask, we are able to integrate the self-guidance mechanism into our end-to-end optimization process for constraining global mesh registration and hand pose estimation. The experiments show that our method, which takes a single binary mask as the input, can achieve comparable prediction accuracy on both unaligned and aligned settings as state-of-the-art methods that require RGB or depth inputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/lijenchang/Mask2Hand.

Indoor pollutants include CO 2 , CO, HCHO, TVOC, bacteria, fungi, PM 10 , PM 2.5 , and O 3 (Environmental Protection Administration, Executive Yuan, R.O.C. [Taiwan]). Because people spend approximately 80%–90% of their time indoors, indoor environment quality has a major effect on people’s work quality, work efficiency, and even physical and mental health. Staying indoors for an extended period of time also induces the onset of sick building syndrome.Factors influencing indoor air quality include temperature, humidity, and air flow. CO 2 content is the most critical chemical indicator of indoor air quality and a crucial indicator determining whether staff density is too high and whether the air change rate is appropriate. Studies have noted that plant evapotranspiration and photosynthesis can induce indoor air flow, remove pollutants, and purify indoor air, which results in an indoor environment comfortable for its occupants.According to the experiment results of Lin et al. [2], which reported that bird nest ferns undergo the most evapotranspiration, this study selected these plants for experimentation. Then, this study referenced the literature and introduced four plant layouts (Type A –D). The size of the experiment space and number of participants were determined. Based on the results, the effects of plant evapotranspiration.

e23062 Background: The analysis of EGFR, KRAS, and BRAF mutations and Alk fusion is critical for guiding targeted therapy selection, detecting drug resistance, and monitoring residual disease in patients with NSCLC. Designing next-generation sequencing (NGS) assays for detecting low-frequency variants, however, is an ongoing challenge. The limited availability of cfDNA combined with the breadth of coverage necessary to create meaningful, clinically-actionable results requires a solution with multiplex capacity which, in turn, requires greater technological sensitivity and specificity. Here we aim to develop such a solution: an ultra-accurate NGS technology using concatmer-based error correction with amplicon workflow for fast detection of rare mutations including SNV and fusion. Methods: We developed an amplicon-based panel covering variants of EGFR, BRAF, and KRAS, as well as a panel to detect Alk fusion. CfDNA simulate and cfDNA from healthy individuals were used to test assay sensitivity and specificity. Further validation was performed via a comparative analysis of 64 late-stage lung cancer patients using both Firefly -Comet and ddPCR. Results: Analytical sensitivity of the EGFR-TKI 3-gene panel was 100% detection at an allele frequency of 0.1% for 20ng of cfDNA input. Similarly, analytical sensitivity of the Alk fusion panel was 75% detection at an allele frequency of 0.1% and 100% at an allele frequency of 0.25% for the same input. Among our patient cohort, 5 EGFR variants (19del, T790M, L858R, G719X, L861X) and 2 KRAS variant (G12X) were detected. Firefly-Comet demonstrated strong per-variant detection-rate concordance ( > 99%) compared to ddPCR results. The PPV is 100% and the NPV is 98.7%. Statistical analysis of reported allele frequency concordance between Firefly-Comet and ddPCR reveals R-Sq > 0.9. Conclusions: In summary, we have developed Firefly-Comet, an easy-to-use amplicon-based NGS assay capable of detecting single-digit copies of somatic mutants and gene fusions in cfDNA. The multiplex capacity of Firefly-Comet makes it well-suited for supporting targeted therapy selection, drug resistance detection, and treatment monitoring.

The Fermi surface topology of $cI$16 Li at high pressures is studied using a recently developed first-principles unfolding method. We find the occurrence of a Lifshitz transition at $\sim$43 GPa, which explains the experimentally observed anomalous onset of the superconductivity enhancement toward lowered pressure. Furthermore we identify, in comparison with previous reports, additional nesting vectors that contribute to the $cI$16 structural stability. Our study highlights the importance of three-dimensional unfolding analyses for first-principles studies of Fermi surface topologies and instabilities in general., Comment: 5 pages and 4 figures

An unexpected insensitivity of the Fermi surface to impurity scattering is found in Ru substituted BaFe$_2$As$_2$ from first-principles theory, offering a natural explanation of the unusual resilience of transport and superconductivity to a high level of disordered substitution in this material. This robustness is shown to originate from a coherent interference of correlated on-site and inter-site impurity scattering, similar in spirit to the microscopic mechanism of superdiffusion in one dimension. Our result also demonstrates a strong substitution dependence of the Fermi surface and carrier concentration, and provides a natural resolution to current discrepancies in recent photoelectron spectroscopy. These effects offer a natural explanation of the diminishing long-range magnetic, orbital and superconducting order with high substitution., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, plus supplementary materials

Covalent modifications of histones, such as acetylation, methylation, phosphorylation and ubiquitination, have an important role in regulating gene expression. Histone methylation is implicated in both gene activation and repression depending on the methylation site and the state of methylation (Li et al., 2007a). Historically, histone methylation was considered to be a static modification. Recent discoveries of histone demethylases demonstrate that histone methylation is reversible. Numerous studies have shown that dynamic regulation of histone methylation plays an important role in many cellular processes (Cloos et al., 2008). However, mechanisms governing the targeting and regulation of histone demethylation remain elusive. \ud In this thesis, I identified two Drosophila melanogaster JmjC domain-containing proteins, dKDM4A and dDKM4B, which are histone H3K36 demethylases. Affinity purification and mass spectrometry analysis revealed that Heterochromatin Protein 1a (HP1a) associates with dKDM4A. I found that the chromoshadow domain of HP1a and a HP1-interacting motif within dKDM4A are responsible for this interaction. HP1a stimulates the histone H3K36 demethylation activity of dKDM4A and this stimulation depends on HP1a binding to the H3K9me. Loss of HP1a leads to increased level of histone H3K36me3. By chromatin immunoprecipitation using an antibody against H3K36me3 in wild type and dKDM4A mutant embryos, I identified candidate target genes of dKDM4A. A subset of dKDM4A target genes are also shown to be bound by HP1a, suggesting dKDM4A-HP1a complex may function in regulating H3K36 levels at these genes.

We demonstrate a spin pump to generate pure spin current of tunable intensity and polarization in the absence of charge current. The pumping functionality is achieved by means of an ac gate voltage that modulates the Rashba constant dynamically in a local region of a quantum channel with both static Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interactions. Spin-resolved Floquet scattering matrix is calculated to analyze the whole scattering process. Pumped spin current can be divided into spin-preserved transmission and spin-flip reflection parts. These two terms have opposite polarization of spin current and are competing with each other. Our proposed spin-based device can be utilized for non-magnetic control of spin flow by tuning the ac gate voltage and the driving frequency., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures