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The success of our project depended on forming a trusting, collaborative relationship with teachers and conducting in-depth interviews with adolescents who had never met our team. Yet, when we were ready to launch this work, it was not safe to meet with teachers or students in-person due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nor was it possible to conduct site visits to the school. How could we continue collaborative module development and conduct meaningful research when the in-person methods we planned for our study were no longer feasible given the health and safety challenges of the pandemic? Our team had to make important decisions about module development and deployment while keeping students' and teachers' health and safety in mind. Rather than focusing on the problems of being unable to perform face-to-face data collection or module development, we began exploring new and alternative technological solutions. Building trust and engaging teachers while negotiating the communicative and relational restrictions inherent in online interactions was another challenge addressed in the paper. 

Galactic plane radio surveys play a key role in improving our understanding of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. Performing such a survey using the latest interferometric telescopes produces large data rates necessitating a shift towards fully or quasi-real-time data analysis with data being stored for only the time required to process them. We present here the overview and set-up for the 3000-h Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR)–MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey (MMGPS). The survey is unique by operating in a commensal mode, addressing key science objectives of the survey including the discovery of new pulsars and transients and studies of Galactic magnetism, the interstellar medium and star formation rates. We explain the strategy coupled with the necessary hardware and software infrastructure needed for data reduction in the imaging, spectral, and time domains. We have so far discovered 78 new pulsars including 17 confirmed binary systems of which two are potential double neutron star systems. We have also developed an imaging pipeline sensitive to the order of a few tens of micro-Jansky ($\mu{\rm Jy}$) with a spatial resolution of a few arcseconds. Further science operations with an in-house built S-band receiver operating between 1.7 and 3.5 GHz are about to commence. Early spectral line commissioning observations conducted at S-band, targeting transitions of the key molecular gas tracer CH at 3.3 GHz already illustrate the spectroscopic capabilities of this instrument. These results lay a strong foundation for future surveys with telescopes like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

 

We present a novel method that automatically measures quality of sentential paraphrasing. Our method balances two conflicting criteria: semantic similarity and lexical diversity. Using a diverse annotated corpus, we built learning to rank models on edit distance, BLEU, ROUGE, and cosine similarity features. Extrinsic evaluation on STS Benchmark and ParaBank Evaluation datasets resulted in a model ensemble with moderate to high quality. We applied our method on both small benchmarking and large-scale datasets as resources for the community. 

The transcriptional coactivator YAP1 (yes-associated protein 1) is a critical nuclear effector of the Hippo pathway. The serine/threonine protein kinases STK3/4 and LATS1/2, core components of the Hippo pathway, phosphorylate and inhibit YAP1 nuclear localization. Previously, we reported that the interaction of nuclear YAP1 with androgen receptor (AR) might play a critical role in prostate cancer progression and therapeutic relapse (Kuser-Abali et al., Nat. Commun. 2015). Here, we investigated the regulation of YAP1 by androgens in isogenic, androgen-responsive LNCaP and androgen non-responsive C4-2 prostate cancer cell models. We demonstrated that androgen suppressed the inhibitory phospho-Ser127 site on YAP1 in LNCaP cells, but the effects of androgen on phospho-Ser127 was modest in C4-2 cells. In agreement with this observation, androgen increased the presence of nuclear YAP1 in LNCaP cells, whereas regardless of androgen exposure the YAP1 protein was primarily expressed in C4-2 cell nuclei. We also demonstrated that androgen exposure suppressed the levels of phospho-Ser127 induced by okadaic acid, which is a potent inhibitor of the Ser/Thr phosphatases PP1 and PP2A. Moreover, the pharmacological inhibition of androgen receptor (AR) signaling by enzalutamide reversed the inhibitory effects of androgen on phospho-Ser127, which coincided with the inhibition of YAP1 nuclear localization. Similarly, the genetic inhibition of AR signaling by small interfering RNA (siRNA) reduced phospho-Ser127 levels. Additionally, the silencing of the STK3/4 and LATS1/2 signaling by siRNA resulted in increases in YAP1 protein levels. Furthermore, our analysis of the TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) prostate adenocarcinoma data set indicates that the levels of YAP1 and AR mRNA expression were positively correlated in prostate cancer clinical samples. These observations suggest that AR signaling promotes YAP1 nuclear localization by suppressing phospho-Ser127, possibly through the protein phosphatases PP1 and PP2A, and supporting a new mechanism of YAP1 regulation and YAP1-mediated cancer cell growth and survival. 

The nature and extent of the spin-entanglement in the triplet-triplet biexciton with total spin zero in correlated-electron π-conjugated systems continues to be an enigma. Differences in the ultrafast transient absorption spectra of free triplets versus the triplet-triplet can give a measure of the entanglement. This, however, requires theoretical understandings of transient absorptions from the optical spin-singlet, the lowest spin-triplet exciton, as well as from the triplet-triplet state, whose spectra are often overlapping and hence difficult to distinguish. We present a many-electron theory of the electronic structure of the triplet-triplet, and of complete wavelength-dependent excited state absorptions (ESAs) from all three states in a heteroacene dimer of interest in the field of intramolecular singlet fission. The theory allows direct comparisons of ESAs with existing experiments as well as experimental predictions, and gives physical understandings of transient absorptions within a pictorial exciton basis that can be carried over to other experimental systems. 

We present Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (Fermi-GBM) and Swift Burst Alert Telescope (Swift-BAT) searches for gamma-ray/X-ray counterparts to gravitational-wave (GW) candidate events identified during the third observing run of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. Using Fermi-GBM onboard triggers and subthreshold gamma-ray burst (GRB) candidates found in the Fermi-GBM ground analyses, the Targeted Search and the Untargeted Search, we investigate whether there are any coincident GRBs associated with the GWs. We also search the Swift-BAT rate data around the GW times to determine whether a GRB counterpart is present. No counterparts are found. Using both the Fermi-GBM Targeted Search and the Swift-BAT search, we calculate flux upper limits and present joint upper limits on the gamma-ray luminosity of each GW. Given these limits, we constrain theoretical models for the emission of gamma rays from binary black hole mergers.