Human brain morphology undergoes complex changes over the lifespan. Despite recent progress in tracking brain development via normative models, current knowledge of underlying biological mechanisms is highly limited. We demonstrate that human cortical thickness development and aging trajectories unfold along patterns of molecular and cellular brain organization, traceable from population-level to individual developmental trajectories. During childhood and adolescence, cortex-wide spatial distributions of dopaminergic receptors, inhibitory neurons, glial cell populations, and brain-metabolic features explain up to 50% of variance associated with a lifespan model of regional cortical thickness trajectories. In contrast, modeled cortical thickness change patterns during adulthood are best explained by cholinergic and glutamatergic neurotransmitter receptor and transporter distributions. These relationships are supported by developmental gene expression trajectories and translate to individual longitudinal data from over 8,000 adolescents, explaining up to 59% of developmental change at cohort- and 18% at single-subject level. Integrating neurobiological brain atlases with normative modeling and population neuroimaging provides a biologically meaningful path to understand brain development and aging in living humans.

A seventh order ordinary differential equation (ODE) arising by reduction of the Drinfeld-Sokolov hierarchyis shown to be identical to a similarity reduction of an equationin the hierarchy of Sawada-Kotera.We also exhibit its link with a particular F-VI,a fourth order ODE isolated by Cosgrove which is likely to define a higher order Painlev\'e function.

The recent developments of quantum computing present novel potential pathways for quantum chemistry as the scaling of the computational power of quantum computers could be harnessed to naturally encode and solve electronic structure problems. Theoretically exact quantum algorithms for chemistry have been proposed (e.g., quantum phase estimation), but the limited capabilities of current noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices motivated the development of less demanding hybrid algorithms. In this context, the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm was successfully introduced as an effective method to compute the ground-state energies of small molecules. This study investigates the folded spectrum (FS) method as an extension of the VQE algorithm for the computation of molecular excited states. It provides the possibility of directly computing excited states around a selected target energy using the same quantum circuit as for the ground-state calculation. Inspired by the variance-based methods from the quantum Monte Carlo literature, the FS method minimizes the energy variance, thus, in principle, requiring a computationally expensive squared Hamiltonian to be applied. We alleviate this potentially poor scaling by employing a Pauli grouping procedure to identify sets of commuting Pauli strings that can be evaluated simultaneously. This allows for a significant reduction in the computational cost. We applied the FS-VQE method to small molecules (H2, LiH), obtaining all electronic excited states with chemical accuracy on ideal quantum simulators. Furthermore, we explore the application of quantum error mitigation techniques, demonstrating improved energy accuracy on noisy simulators compared with simulations without mitigation.

Several metal complexes with ribonuclease-like activity have been developed as chemical biology tools for RNA regulation. However, their RNA-cleavage activity is insufficient under physiological conditions. Here, we have identified novel dinuclear bismuth(III) complexes that contain dipyridine/dipicolinate-based ligands as artificial ribonucleases to induce efficient RNA cleavage. Our optimization studies of the ligand structure indicated that the dipyridine/dipicolinate scaffold of the ligands plays a key role in maintaining the dinuclear arrangement of the bismuth(III) centers and tuning the Lewis acidity of the bismuth(III) ions to achieve potent RNA-cleavage activity. The mechanistic analysis of the RNA-cleavage reaction suggested that cooperative activation of a phosphate group in RNAs and water molecules coordinated by two bismuth(III) centers results in a rapid nucleophilic attack of the 2′-hydroxy group of a ribose to the phosphate and facilitates the removal of a 5′-alkoxide by protonation to generate a 2′,3′-cyclic phosphate and a 5′-hydroxy product. Thus, the developed dinuclear bismuth(III) complexes represent promising tools for chemical biology studies.

AbstractA series of sulfonamide azobenzenes bearing alkyl substituents of increasing steric bulk at the position ortho to the N=N bond and their corresponding chloro(hexamethylbenzene)ruthenium(II) complexes were synthesized. The latter bearing mono‐substituted ligands exhibited an exocyclic azo bond under the E configuration, and underwent reversible E→Z photoisomerization upon irradiation with visible light, followed by thermal Z→E back isomerization upon resting in the dark at 20 °C. In contrast, the corresponding 2,6‐dimethyl substituted azobenzene complex, while also exhibiting an exocyclic azo bond, was isolated as the Z‐isomer and underwent uncommon solvent dependent irreversible photodissociation of azobenzene ligand upon visible light irradiation. Valuable insights into the photophysical and structural properties of these complexes were gained by combination of computational and X‐ray diffraction studies.

In this article, we propose a unified research framework for studying the impact of social and digital inequalities on four types of cultural practices: offline art-related practices, offline everyday cultural practices, online art-related practices, and online everyday cultural practices. In contrast to the research traditions that study them separately, we argue that the subject of further research should be the interplay between cultural practices in offline and online domains and that the impact of social and digital inequalities on cultural participation should be studied jointly. Based on empirical evidence from a large-scale research project carried out in nine European countries, we demonstrate the benefits of sidestepping what we see as a strange disconnect between the research traditions studying cultural practices and inequalities in the offline and online spheres separately. The results of our research show that only the inclusion of online and everyday cultural practices in the analysis does justice to the complexity of contemporary cultural participation and its relation to what we refer to as socio-digital inequalities.

Adolescent subcortical structural brain development might underlie psychopathological symptoms, which often emerge in adolescence. At the same time, sex differences exist in psychopathology, which might be mirrored in underlying sex differences in structural development. However, previous studies showed inconsistencies in subcortical trajectories and potential sex differences. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the subcortical structural trajectories and their sex differences across adolescence using for the first time a single cohort design, the same quality control procedure, software, and a general additive mixed modeling approach. We investigated two large European sites from ages 14 to 24 with 503 participants and 1408 total scans from France and Germany as part of the IMAGEN project including four waves of data acquisition. We found significantly larger volumes in males versus females in both sites and across all seven subcortical regions. Sex differences in age-related trajectories were observed across all regions in both sites. Our findings provide further evidence of sex differences in longitudinal adolescent brain development of subcortical regions and thus might eventually support the relationship of underlying brain development and different adolescent psychopathology in boys and girls.