In this paper, we investigate the qualitative properties of positive solutions for a two-coupled elliptic system in the punctured space. We establish a monotonicity formula that completely characterizes the singularity of positive solutions. We prove a sharp global estimate for both components of positive solutions. We also prove the nonexistence of positive semi-singular solutions, which means that one component is bounded near the singularity and the other component is unbounded near the singularity.

In this paper, we develop high-order bound-preserving (BP) discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for the coupled system of compressible miscible displacements on triangular meshes. We consider the problem with multi-component fluid mixture and the (volumetric) concentration of the $j$th component, $c_j$, should be between 0 and 1. There are three main difficulties. Firstly, $c_j$ does not satisfy a maximum-principle. Therefore, the numerical techniques introduced in (X. Zhang and C.-W. Shu, Journal of Computational Physics, 229 (2010), 3091-3120) cannot be applied directly. The main idea is to apply the positivity-preserving techniques to all $c_j's$ and enforce $\sum_jc_j=1$ simultaneously to obtain physically relevant approximations. By doing so, we have to treat the time derivative of the pressure $dp/dt$ as a source in the concentration equation and choose suitable fluxes in the pressure and concentration equations. Secondly, it is not easy to construct first-order numerical fluxes for interior penalty DG methods on triangular meshes. One of the key points in the high-order BP technique applied in this paper is the combination of high-order and lower-order numerical fluxes. We will construct second-order BP schemes and use the second-order numerical fluxes as the lower-order one. Finally, the classical slope limiter cannot be applied to $c_j$. To construct the BP technique, we will not approximate $c_j$ directly. Therefore, a new limiter will be introduced. Numerical experiments will be given to demonstrate the high-order accuracy and good performance of the numerical technique.

The single-stranded RNA Flavivirus, Zika virus (ZIKV), has recently re-emerged and spread rapidly across the western hemispheres equatorial countries, primarily through Aedes mosquito transmission. While symptoms in adult infections appear to be self-limiting and mild, severe birth defects, such as microcephaly, have been linked to infection during early pregnancy. Recently, Tang et al. (Cell Stem Cell 2016, doi: 10.1016/j.stem.2016.02.016 ) demonstrated that ZIKV efficiently infects induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived human neural progenitor cells (hNPCs), resulting in cell cycle abnormalities and apoptosis. Consequently, hNPCs are a suggested ZIKV target. We analyzed the transcriptomic sequencing (RNA-seq) data (GEO: GSE78711) of ZIKV (Strain: MR766) infected hNPCs. For comparison to the ZIKV-infected hNPCs, the expression data from hNPCs infected with human cytomegalovirus (CMV) (Strain: AD169) was used (GEO: GSE35295). Utilizing a combination of Gene Ontology, database of human diseases, and pathway analysis, we generated a putative systemic model of infection supported by known molecular pathways of other highly related viruses. We analyzed RNA-sequencing data for transcript expression alterations in ZIKV-infected hNPCs, and then compared them to expression patterns of iPSC-derived hNPCs infected with CMV, a virus that can also induce severe congenital neurological defects in developing fetuses. We demonstrate for the first time that many of cellular pathways correlate with clinical pathologies following ZIKV infection such as microcephaly, congenital nervous

In this paper, we give the sharp upper bound for the number of vertices with positive curvature in a planar graph with nonnegative combinatorial curvature. Based on this, we show that the automorphism group of a planar—possibly infinite—graph with nonnegative combinatorial curvature and positive total curvature is a finite group, and give an upper bound estimate for the order of the group.

We present a multivariate version of Hidden Field Equations (HFE) over a finite field of odd characteristic, with an extra "embedding'' modifier. Combining these known ideas makes our new MPKC (multivariate public key cryptosystem) more efficient and scalable than any other extant multivariate encryption scheme. Switching to odd characteristics in HFE-like schemes affects how an attacker can make use of field equations. Extensive empirical tests (using MAGMA-2.14, the best commercially available \mathbold{F_4} implementation) suggests that our new construction is indeed secure against algebraic attacks using Gröbner Basis algorithms. The "embedding'' serves both to narrow down choices of pre-images and to guard against a possible Kipnis-Shamir type (rank-based) attack. We may hence reasonably argue that for practical sizes, prior attacks take exponential time. We demonstrate that our construction is in fact efficient by implementing practical-sized examples of our "odd-char HFE'' with 3 variables (`"THFE'') over GF(31). To be precise, our preliminary THFE implementation is 15x--20x the speed of RSA-1024.