Productive scientists are associated with lower disruption in scientific publishing

While scientific researchers often aim for high productivity, prioritizing the quantity of publications may come at the cost of time and effort dedicated to individual research. It is thus important to examine the relationship between productivity and disruption for individual researchers. Here, we show that with the increase in the number of published papers, the average citation per paper will be higher yet the mean disruption of papers will be lower. In addition, we find that the disruption of scientists’ papers may decrease when they are highly productive in a given year. The disruption of papers in each year is not determined by the total number of papers published in the author’s career, but rather by the productivity of that particular year. Besides, more productive authors also tend to give references to recent and high-impact research. Our findings highlight the potential risks of pursuing productivity and aim to encourage more thoughtful career planning among scientists

Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone

We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone. Our training dataset is a scaled-up version of the one used for phi-2, composed of heavily filtered publicly available web data and synthetic data. The model is also further aligned for robustness, safety, and chat format. We also provide parameter-scaling results with a 7B, 14B models trained for 4.8T tokens, called phi-3-small, phi-3-medium, both significantly more capable than phi-3-mini (e.g., respectively 75%, 78% on MMLU, and 8.7, 8.9 on MT-bench). To enhance multilingual, multimodal, and long-context capabilities, we introduce three models in the phi-3.5 series: phi-3.5-mini, phi-3.5-MoE, and phi-3.5-Vision. The phi-3.5-MoE, a 16 x 3.8B MoE model with 6.6 billion active parameters, achieves superior performance in language reasoning, math, and code tasks compared to other open-source models of similar scale, such as Llama 3.1 and the Mixtral series, and on par with Gemini-1.5-Flash and GPT-4o-mini. Meanwhile, phi-3.5-Vision, a 4.2 billion parameter model derived from phi-3.5-mini, excels in reasoning tasks and is adept at handling both single-image and text prompts, as well as multi-image and text prompts.24 page

Streaming velocity effects on the post-reionization 21-cm baryon acoustic oscillation signal

ABSTRACT The relative velocity between baryons and dark matter in the early Universe can suppress the formation of small-scale baryonic structure and leave an imprint on the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale at low redshifts after reionization. This ‘streaming velocity’ affects the post-reionization gas distribution by directly reducing the abundance of pre-existing mini-haloes ($\lesssim 10^7 {\rm M}_{\bigodot }$) that could be destroyed by reionization and indirectly modulating reionization history via photoionization within these mini-haloes. In this work, we investigate the effect of streaming velocity on the BAO feature in H i 21 cm intensity mapping after reionization, with a focus on redshifts 3.5 ≲ z ≲ 5.5. We build a spatially modulated halo model that includes the dependence of the filtering mass on the local reionization redshift and thermal history of the intergalactic gas. In our fiducial model, we find isotropic streaming velocity bias coefficients bv ranging from −0.0043 at z = 3.5 to −0.0273 at z = 5.5, which indicates that the BAO scale is stretched (i.e. the peaks shift to lower k). In particular, streaming velocity shifts the transverse BAO scale between 0.121 per cent (z = 3.5) and 0.35 per cent (z = 5.5) and shifts the radial BAO scale between 0.167 per cent (z = 3.5) and 0.505 per cent (z = 5.5). These shifts exceed the projected error bars from the more ambitious proposed hemispherical-scale surveys in H i (0.13 per cent at 1σ per Δz = 0.5 bin).</jats:p

Speckle-Based X-Ray Dark-Field Tomography of an Attenuating Object

Spatial resolution in standard phase-contrast X-ray imaging is limited by the finite number and size of detector pixels. This limits the size of features that can be seen directly in projection images or tomographic reconstructions. Dark-field imaging allows information regarding such features to be obtained, as the reconstructed image is a measure of the position-dependent small-angle X-ray scattering of incident rays from the unresolved microstructure. In this paper we utilize an intrinsic speckle-tracking-based X-ray imaging technique to obtain the effective dark-field signal from a wood sample. This effective dark-field signal is extracted using a Fokker-Planck type formalism, which models the deformations of illuminating reference-beam speckles due to both coherent and diffusive scatter from the sample. We here assume that (a) small-angle scattering fans at the exit surface of the sample are rotationally symmetric, and (b) the object has both attenuating and refractive properties. The associated inverse problem, of extracting the effective dark-field signal, is numerically stabilised using a "weighted determinants"approach. Effective dark-field projection images are presented, as well as the dark-field tomographic reconstructions obtained using Fokker-Planck implicit speckle-tracking

Nociceptive Sensory Neurons Mediate Inflammation Induced by Bacillus Anthracis Edema Toxin

Bacterial products are able to act on nociceptive neurons during pathogenic infection. Neurogenic inflammation is an active part of pain signaling and has recently been shown to impact host-pathogen defense. Bacillus anthracis Edema Toxin (ET) produces striking edema in peripheral tissues, but the cellular mechanisms involved in tissue swelling are not completely understood. Here, we find that nociceptive neurons play a role in ET-induced edema and inflammation in mice. Subcutaneous footpad infection of B. anthracis Sterne caused ET-dependent local mechanical allodynia, paw swelling and body weight gain. Subcutaneous administration of ET induced paw swelling and vascular leakage, the early phases of which were attenuated in the absence of Trpv1+ or Nav1.8+ nociceptive neurons. Nociceptive neurons express the anthrax toxin receptor ANTXR2, but this did not mediate ET-induced edema. ET induced local cytokine expression and neutrophil recruitment, which were dependent in part on Trpv1+ nociceptive neurons. Ablation of Trpv1+ or Nav1.8+ nociceptive neurons also attenuated early increases in paw swelling and body weight gain during live B. anthracis infection. Our findings indicate that nociceptive neurons play an active role in inflammation caused by B. anthracis and Edema Toxin to potentially influence bacterial pathogenesis.</jats:p

Local release of siRNA using polyplex-loaded thermosensitive hydrogels

An injectable thermosensitive hydrogel to promote local and sustained release of small nanosized (10–20 nm) siRNA polyplexes.</p