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The vertical distribution patterns of daily primary production and dark carbon fixation were investigated at three stations in the East/Japan Sea (hereafter East Sea), a semi-enclosed marginal sea in the northwest Pacific Ocean. Our results displayed consistent vertical patterns of daily primary production at two of the stations, while the third station exhibited a markedly different distribution pattern, highlighting localized variations in production dynamics. In contrast, dark carbon fixations displaying varying vertical patterns among the stations are not specific enough to have much meaning. Water column-integral values showed differences in the contribution of dark carbon fixation to total primary production, ranging from 4.5% to 27.1%. These variations may reflect environmental parameters such as nutrient concentrations. However, our study is limited by the lack of direct data on the microbial community structure and chemoautotrophic activities, which are crucial for a more comprehensive understanding of these patterns. Understanding the environmental drivers of dark carbon fixation is crucial for elucidating carbon cycling dynamics in the East Sea. Notably, dark carbon fixation could contribute up to one-third of primary production in the region as an additional source of newly produced organic matter, highlighting the need for further investigation into this previously overlooked process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate a possibility of producing the quantitative optical metrics to characterize the evolution of gastric tissue from healthy conditions via inflammation to cancer by using Mueller microscopy of gastric biopsies, regression model and statistical analysis of the predicted images. For this purpose the unstained sections of human gastric tissue biopsies at different pathological conditions were measured with the custom-built Mueller microscope. Polynomial regression model was built using the maps of transmitted intensity, retardance, dichroism and depolarization to generate the predicted images. The statistical analysis of predicted images of gastric tissue sections with multi-curve fit suggests that Mueller microscopy combined with data regression and statistical analysis is an effective approach for quantitative assessment of the degree of inflammation in gastric tissue biopsies with a high potential in clinical applications.

Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is a tickborne zoonosis caused by the SFTS virus (SFTSV) (1); >1,000 SFTS cases have been reported in South Korea (2). The SFTS prevalence [...]

In reinforcement learning, the reward function has a significant impact on the performance of the agent. However, determining the appropriate value of this reward function requires many attempts and trials. Although many automated reinforcement learning methods have been proposed to find an appropriate reward function, their proof is lacking in complex environments such as quadrupedal locomotion. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically tune the scale of the dominant reward functions in reinforcement learning of a quadrupedal robot. Reinforcement learning of the quadruped robot is very sensitive to the reward function, and recent outstanding research results have put a lot of effort into reward shaping. In this paper, we propose an automated reward shaping method that automatically adjusts the reward function scale appropriately. We select some dominant reward functions, arrange their weights in a certain unit, and then calculate their gait scores so that we can select the agent with the highest score. This gait score was defined to reflect the stable walking of the quadrupedal robot. Additionally, quadrupedal locomotion learning requires reward functions of different scales depending on the robot's size and shape. Therefore, we evaluate the performance of the proposed method on two different robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]