Tuning into infrared

Tuning into Places

In the human brain, the inferior temporal cortex contains areas that seem to respond selectively to particular types of visual stimuli, such as faces or animals. One such region—the parahippocampal place area, or PPA—responds most strongly to images of places instead of faces, but how this higher-order selectivity is achieved remains unclear. In a new study in PLoS Biology, Rajimehr et al. iden...

Pressure tuning of an ionic insulator into a heavy electron metal: an infrared study of YbS.

Optical conductivity [sigma(omega)] of YbS has been measured under pressure up to 20 GPa. Below 8 GPa, sigma(omega) is low since YbS is an insulator with an energy gap between a fully occupied 4f state and an unoccupied conduction (c) band. Above 8 GPa, however, sigma(omega) increases dramatically, developing a Drude component due to heavy carriers and characteristic infrared peaks. It is shown...

Tuning linear copolymers into protein-specific hosts.

Improving machine translation into Chinese by tuning against Chinese MEANT

We present the first ever results showing that Chinese MT output is significantly improved by tuning a MT system against a semantic frame based objective function, MEANT, rather than an n-gram based objective function, BLEU, as measured across commonly used metrics and different test sets. Recent work showed that by preserving the meaning of the translations as captured by semantic frames in th...

Converting normal insulators into topological insulators via tuning orbital levels

Wu-Jun Shi,1,2 Junwei Liu,3 Yong Xu,1,4,5,* Shi-Jie Xiong,2 Jian Wu,1,4 and Wenhui Duan1,4,† 1State Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Quantum Physics, and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, People’s Republic of China 2National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, and Department of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, People’s Republic of China 3Department ...