The Assessment of Mongolian Sovereign Funds

Mongolia is the one of the resource rich countries facing natural resource curse, relatively transparent with satisfactory resource governance. Some would argue establishing sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is beneficial those countries with natural resource curse while others against it. Mongolian government established several SWFs and namely Human Development Fund (HDF- afterwards renamed as Future Heritage Fund) and Fiscal Stability Fund (FSF) but still facing to create an efficient SWF. Some scholars would agree that it is important to find causal relations between management of SWF and its efficiency to establish an efficient and beneficial SWFs. There are several ways to reveal such relations, however, most research centres are using following major methods such as Resource Governance Index (RGI), Truman scoreboard and Linaburg- Maduell Transparency Index (LMTI) and Santiago Principles. This paper is examined Mongolian SWFs namely Human Development Fund (HDF) and Fiscal Stability Fund (FSF) using some of these methods

Excitation and superfocusing of the radially polarized conical surface plasmon polaritons

With our analytical study, we showed the different characteristics of the modes in the tapered region of the fiber based scanning near-field optical (SNOM) tips and their field evolution during the propagation to understand the functionality of the tips. Compared with other types of fiber based SNOM tips, the plasmonic tip, which is a fully metal coated tapered vortex fiber tip, provides an improvement in the field localization at the tip apex and in the conversion efficiency from the far- to near-fields (~ 70%) owing to the superfocusing effect and the resonant coupling process. The superfocusing effect enables the confinement of fields longitudinally and transversally and the enhancement of field amplitude resulting in a strong and highly confined field at the tip apex. We fabricated plasmonic tips by using the vortex fiber, which has double ring cores, and explored experimentally the near-field excitation and detection characteristics of the plasmonic tips. By selectively exciting only the radially polarized fiber mode and analyzing the far-field emission images of the tip apex, we showed that the fundamental radially polarized plasmonic mode, that has the superfocusing capability, is successfully excited. We also probed the plasmonic tips apex near-field with an annular grating on a planar gold surface. The results showed that the plasmonic tip excites planar SPPs to all radial directions indicating that the field at the tip apex is longitudinally oscillating along the tip axis. Due to this longitudinal field at the apex, the plasmonic tip also detects the longitudinal field in transmission that has been demonstrated by scanning over tightly focused linearly and radially polarized beams. Lastly, we measured the near-field of fluorescent beads with the plasmonic tip and demonstrated that the tip and the longitudinal plasmonic field at its apex act back on the beads improving the absorption of the fluorescent beads and thus the fluorescence emission

Medical Metaphor as an Instrument of Increasing Performance of International Students from the Preparatory Department

The aim of the article is to decrease the academic difficulties of international students studying "Biology" in Russian within the pre-university program. The authors discussed the educational expediency of using metaphors in the teaching process for international students wishing to take a medical program in the future. The occurrence of new medical metaphors and their usefulness in the frame of a Biology course are demonstrated. Examples of problems designed with medical metaphors are shown. The authors reveal the essence of medical metaphors and classification principles of metaphorical terms. Lexical analysis of medical-biological literature was conducted to identify metaphors and their distribution in the methodical materials for students. The metaphorization helped to identify interdisciplinary bonds between the natural-scientific and humanitarian courses. The authors proposed to include the supplementary material "Medical metaphors" for teaching Russian language and to expand the set of educational materials for international students of medical-biological profile within the pre-university program

Second-harmonic-generation of [(Se,Te)Cl3_{3}]+^{+} [GaCl4_{4}]–^{–} with aligned ionic tetrahedra

[SeCl$_{3}$][GaCl$_{4}$] (1) and [TeCl$_{3}$][GaCl$_{4}$] (2) are prepared via Lewis-acid–base reaction of SeCl$_{4}$ or TeCl$_{4}$ with GaCl$_{3}$ at 50 °C (1) and 140 °C (2) in quantitative yield. The ionic compounds contain pseudo-tetrahedral [SeCl$_{3}$]$^{+}$/[TeCl$_{3}$]$^{+}$ cations with a prominent stereochemically active electron lone pair at Se(IV)/Te(IV) as well as tetrahedral [GaCl$_{4}$]$^{–}$ anions. Both compounds crystallize in the polar chiral space group P1 with an unidirectional alignment of all tetrahedral building units. They can be considered as the first examples of a much larger group of ionic compounds [MX$_{3}$]$^{+}$[M′X$_{4}$]$^{–}$ (M, M′: metal or main-group element, X: halogen) showing nonlinear optical effects. Material characterization is performed by X-ray structure analysis based on single crystals and powder samples, thermogravimetry, optical spectroscopy, infrared and Raman spectroscopy. Second harmonic generation (SHG) is observed with intensities about 3-times stronger than for potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP) in the visible spectral regime with narrow-band-gap materials (2.8, 3.2 eV). Density functional theory calculations are employed to complement the experimental findings, interpret the Raman spectra, visualize the stereochemically active lone electron pair, and compute the SHG tensor

MoRFPred-plus: Computational Identification of MoRFs in Protein Sequence using physicochemical properties and HMM profiles

Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs) lack stable tertiary structure and they actively participate in performing various biological functions. These IDPs expose short binding regions called Molecular Recognition Features (MoRFs) that permit interaction with structured protein regions. Upon interaction they undergo a disorder-to-order transition as a result of which their functionality arises. Predicting these MoRFs in disordered protein sequences is a challenging task. In this study, we present MoRFpred-plus, an improved predictor over our previous proposed predictor to identify MoRFs in disordered protein sequences. Two separate independent propensity scores are computed via incorporating physicochemical properties and HMM profiles, these scores are combined to predict final MoRF propensity score for a given residue. The first score reflects the characteristics of a query residue to be part of MoRF region based on the composition and similarity of assumed MoRF and flank regions. The second score reflects the characteristics of a query residue to be part of MoRF region based on the properties of flanks associated around the given residue in the query protein sequence. The propensity scores are processed and common averaging is applied to generate the final prediction score of MoRFpred-plus. Performance of the proposed predictor is compared with available MoRF predictors, MoRFchibi, MoRFpred, and ANCHOR. Using previously collected training and test sets used to evaluate the mentioned predictors, the proposed predictor outperforms these predictors and generates lower false positive rate. In addition, MoRFpred-plus is a downloadable predictor, which makes it useful as it can be used as input to other computational tools

Antioxidant properties of pancreatic hydrolysates from various protein sources

Antioxidant activity of pancreatic hydrolysates of casein, spent brewer’s yeast, bovine liver and tendon was evaluated in comparison to unhydrolised substrates by ABTS assay. In the result of enzymic treatment ABTS cation radical scavenging activity of spent brewer’s yeast, bovine liver and bovine tendon was increased in 4.8, 3.3, and 2.3 times respectively, except casein.  The IC50 values of ABTS cation radical scavenging for casein and it’s hydrolysate were similar. The IC50 values of DPPH radical scavenging activity for pancreatic hydrolysates of casein, spent brewer’s yeast, bovine liver and tendon  were 1.8±0.1 mg/ml,  1.3±0.1 mg/ml, 1.7±0.1 mg/ml, and 6.2±0.1 mg/ml respectively. Above mentioned hydrolysates of various origin were produced at the same conditions (temperature 50oC, pH 7.5-8.9, duration 5 hours) using fresh bovine pancreatic tissue as an enzyme source. The extent of hydrolysis expressed as AN/TN (amino nitrogen/total nitrogen) for hydrolysates had  values from 0.36±0.02 to 0.46±0.04.DOI: http://doi.dx.org/10.5564/mjc.v15i0.321 Mongolian Journal of Chemistry 15 (41), 2014, p43-4

Antioxidative activity of Silibum marianum cultivated in Mongolia

Silibum marianum (Milk thistle) contains high amount of phenolic compounds with antioxidant properties. The aim of this work was to evaluate the antioxidant activity of  phenolic compounds included in Milk thistle. The  antioxidant properties of the leaves and seeds of milk thistle were examined by determining its ability to scavenge the 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical. The results obtained from DPPH assay confirm that Milk thistle extracts have high antioxidative activity.DOI: http://doi.dx.org/10.5564/mjc.v15i0.323 Mongolian Journal of Chemistry 15 (41), 2014, p53-5