Controlling chaos in diluted networks with continuous neurons

Diluted neural networks with continuous neurons and nonmonotonic transfer function are studied, with both fixed and dynamic synapses. A noisy stimulus with periodic variance results in a mechanism for controlling chaos in neural systems with fixed synapses: a proper amount of external perturbation forces the system to behave periodically with the same period as the stimulus.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Model of ionic currents through microtubule nanopores and the lumen

It has been suggested that microtubules and other cytoskeletal filaments may act as electrical transmission lines. An electrical circuit model of the microtubule is constructed incorporating features of its cylindrical structure with nanopores in its walls. This model is used to study how ionic conductance along the lumen is affected by flux through the nanopores when an external potential is applied across its two ends. Based on the results of Brownian dynamics simulations, the nanopores were found to have asymmetric inner and outer conductances, manifested as nonlinear IV curves. Our simulations indicate that a combination of this asymmetry and an internal voltage source arising from the motion of the C-terminal tails causes a net current to be pumped across the microtubule wall and propagate down the microtubule through the lumen. This effect is demonstrated to enhance and add directly to the longitudinal current through the lumen resulting from an external voltage source, and could be significant in amplifying low-intensity endogenous currents within the cellular environment or as a nano-bioelectronic device.Comment: 43 pages, 6 figures, revised versio

Correlations between hidden units in multilayer neural networks and replica symmetry breaking

We consider feed-forward neural networks with one hidden layer, tree architecture and a fixed hidden-to-output Boolean function. Focusing on the saturation limit of the storage problem the influence of replica symmetry breaking on the distribution of local fields at the hidden units is investigated. These field distributions determine the probability for finding a specific activation pattern of the hidden units as well as the corresponding correlation coefficients and therefore quantify the division of labor among the hidden units. We find that although modifying the storage capacity and the distribution of local fields markedly replica symmetry breaking has only a minor effect on the correlation coefficients. Detailed numerical results are provided for the PARITY, COMMITTEE and AND machines with K=3 hidden units and nonoverlapping receptive fields.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, RevTex, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Storage capacity of correlated perceptrons

We consider an ensemble of $K$ single-layer perceptrons exposed to random inputs and investigate the conditions under which the couplings of these perceptrons can be chosen such that prescribed correlations between the outputs occur. A general formalism is introduced using a multi-perceptron costfunction that allows to determine the maximal number of random inputs as a function of the desired values of the correlations. Replica-symmetric results for $K=2$ and $K=3$ are compared with properties of two-layer networks of tree-structure and fixed Boolean function between hidden units and output. The results show which correlations in the hidden layer of multi-layer neural networks are crucial for the value of the storage capacity.Comment: 16 pages, Latex2

Mechanism of Ivermectin Facilitation of Human P2X4 Receptor Channels

Ivermectin (IVM), a widely used antiparasitic agent in human and veterinary medicine, was recently shown to augment macroscopic currents through rat P2X4 receptor channels (Khakh, B.S., W.R. Proctor, T.V. Dunwiddie, C. Labarca, and H.A. Lester. 1999. J. Neurosci. 19:7289–7299.). In the present study, the effects of IVM on the human P2X4 (hP2X4) receptor channel stably transfected in HEK293 cells were investigated by recording membrane currents using the patch clamp technique. In whole-cell recordings, IVM (≤10 μM) applied from outside the cell (but not from inside) increased the maximum current activated by ATP, and slowed the rate of current deactivation. These two phenomena likely result from the binding of IVM to separate sites. A higher affinity site (EC50 0.25 μM) increased the maximal current activated by saturating concentrations of ATP without significantly changing the rate of current deactivation or the EC50 and Hill slope of the ATP concentration-response relationship. A lower affinity site (EC50 2 μM) slowed the rate of current deactivation, and increased the apparent affinity for ATP. In cell-attached patch recordings, P2X4 receptor channels exhibited complex kinetics, with multiple components in both the open and shut distributions. IVM (0.3 μM) increased the number of openings per burst, without significantly changing the mean open or mean shut time within a burst. At higher concentrations (1.5 μM) of IVM, two additional open time components of long duration were observed that gave rise to long-lasting bursts of channel activity. Together, the results suggest that the binding of IVM to the higher affinity site increases current amplitude by reducing channel desensitization, whereas the binding of IVM to the lower affinity site slows the deactivation of the current predominantly by stabilizing the open conformation of the channel

Finite size scaling in neural networks

We demonstrate that the fraction of pattern sets that can be stored in single- and hidden-layer perceptrons exhibits finite size scaling. This feature allows to estimate the critical storage capacity \alpha_c from simulations of relatively small systems. We illustrate this approach by determining \alpha_c, together with the finite size scaling exponent \nu, for storing Gaussian patterns in committee and parity machines with binary couplings and up to K=5 hidden units.Comment: 4 pages, RevTex, 5 figures, uses multicol.sty and psfig.st

Removing krypton from xenon by cryogenic distillation to the ppq level

The XENON1T experiment aims for the direct detection of dark matter in a cryostat filled with 3.3 tons of liquid xenon. In order to achieve the desired sensitivity, the background induced by radioactive decays inside the detector has to be sufficiently low. One major contributor is the $\beta$-emitter $^{85}$Kr which is an intrinsic contamination of the xenon. For the XENON1T experiment a concentration of natural krypton in xenon $\rm{^{nat}}$Kr/Xe < 200 ppq (parts per quadrillion, 1 ppq = 10$^{-15}$ mol/mol) is required. In this work, the design of a novel cryogenic distillation column using the common McCabe-Thiele approach is described. The system demonstrated a krypton reduction factor of 6.4$\cdot$10$^5$ with thermodynamic stability at process speeds above 3 kg/h. The resulting concentration of $\rm{^{nat}}$Kr/Xe < 26 ppq is the lowest ever achieved, almost one order of magnitude below the requirements for XENON1T and even sufficient for future dark matter experiments using liquid xenon, such as XENONnT and DARWIN