Dihydroxyacetone conversion into lactic acid in an aqueous medium in the presence of metal salts: influence of the ionic thermodynamic equilibrium on the reaction performance

International audienceThe catalytic conversion of dihydroxyacetone (DHA) to lactic acid (LA) via pyruvaldehyde (PA) in aqueous media was studied using different homogeneous metal salts. A kinetic model was developed and the parameters corresponding to each reaction steps were estimated. Agreement between experiments and simulated results was excellent and the performance of the different catalysts was consistent with previous studies described in the literature. Aluminium salts, which show the best performance, were tested in a whole range of concentrations and at different pH, in order to identify the catalytically active ionic species. It was confirmed that the DHA to pyruvaldehyde (PA) dehydration step is catalyzed by both Brønsted and Lewis acids whereas the consecutive reaction of PA to LA is solely catalyzed by Lewis acids. Moreover, comparing thermodynamic analysis of the reaction media and kinetic parameters demonstrated that cationic hydroxyl-aluminium complexes [Al(OH)h] (3-h)+ formed in situ by the hydrolysis of the aluminium aqua complexes like [Al(OH2)6] 3+ are the most active Lewis acids

Investigation of conduction band structure, electron scattering mechanisms and phase transitions in indium selenide by means of transport measurements under pressure

In this work we report on Hall effect, resistivity and thermopower measurements in n-type indium selenide at room temperature under either hydrostatic and quasi-hydrostatic pressure. Up to 40 kbar (= 4 GPa), the decrease of carrier concentration as the pressure increases is explained through the existence of a subsidiary minimum in the conduction band. This minimum shifts towards lower energies under pressure, with a pressure coefficient of about -105 meV/GPa, and its related impurity level traps electrons as it reaches the band gap and approaches the Fermi level. The pressure value at which the electron trapping starts is shown to depend on the electron concentration at ambient pressure and the dimensionality of the electron gas. At low pressures the electron mobility increases under pressure for both 3D and 2D electrons, the increase rate being higher for 2D electrons, which is shown to be coherent with previous scattering mechanisms models. The phase transition from the semiconductor layered phase to the metallic sodium cloride phase is observed as a drop in resistivity around 105 kbar, but above 40 kbar a sharp nonreversible increase of the carrier concentration is observed, which is attributed to the formation of donor defects as precursors of the phase transition.Comment: 18 pages, Latex, 10 postscript figure

The open future, bivalence and assertion

It is highly intuitive that the future is open and the past is closed—whereas it is unsettled whether there will be a fourth world war, it is settled that there was a first. Recently, it has become increasingly popular to claim that the intuitive openness of the future implies that contingent statements about the future, such as ‘there will be a sea battle tomorrow,’ are non-bivalent (neither true nor false). In this paper, we argue that the non-bivalence of future contingents is at odds with our pre-theoretic intuitions about the openness of the future. These are revealed by our pragmatic judgments concerning the correctness and incorrectness of assertions of future contingents. We argue that the pragmatic data together with a plausible account of assertion shows that in many cases we take future contingents to be true (or to be false), though we take the future to be open in relevant respects. It follows that appeals to intuition to support the non-bivalence of future contingents is untenable. Intuition favours bivalence

Development and clinical validation of real-time artificial intelligence diagnostic companion for fetal ultrasound examination

OBJECTIVE: Prenatal diagnosis of a rare disease on ultrasound relies on a physician's ability to remember an intractable amount of knowledge. We developed a real-time decision support system (DSS) that suggests, at each step of the examination, the next phenotypic feature to assess, optimizing the diagnostic pathway to the smallest number of possible diagnoses. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of this real-time DSS using clinical data. METHODS: This validation study was conducted on a database of 549 perinatal phenotypes collected from two referral centers (one in France and one in the UK). Inclusion criteria were: at least one anomaly was visible on fetal ultrasound after 11 weeks' gestation; the anomaly was confirmed postnatally; an associated rare disease was confirmed or ruled out based on postnatal/postmortem investigation, including physical examination, genetic testing and imaging; and, when confirmed, the syndrome was known by the DSS software. The cases were assessed retrospectively by the software, using either the full phenotype as a single input, or a stepwise input of phenotypic features, as prompted by the software, mimicking its use in a real-life clinical setting. Adjudication of discordant cases, in which there was disagreement between the DSS output and the postnatally confirmed (‘ascertained’) diagnosis, was performed by a panel of external experts. The proportion of ascertained diagnoses within the software's top-10 differential diagnoses output was evaluated, as well as the sensitivity and specificity of the software to select correctly as its best guess a syndromic or isolated condition. RESULTS: The dataset covered 110/408 (27%) diagnoses within the software's database, yielding a cumulative prevalence of 83%. For syndromic cases, the ascertained diagnosis was within the top-10 list in 93% and 83% of cases using the full-phenotype and stepwise input, respectively, after adjudication. The full-phenotype and stepwise approaches were associated, respectively, with a specificity of 94% and 96% and a sensitivity of 99% and 84%. The stepwise approach required an average of 13 queries to reach the final set of diagnoses. CONCLUSIONS: The DSS showed high performance when applied to real-world data. This validation study suggests that such software can improve perinatal care, efficiently providing complex and otherwise overlooked knowledge to care-providers involved in ultrasound-based prenatal diagnosis. © 2023 The Authors. Ultrasound in Obstetrics & Gynecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology

Chiral doublers of heavy-light baryons

We discuss the consequences of the chiral doubling scenario for baryons built of heavy and light quarks. In particular, we use the soliton description for baryons, demonstrating why each heavy-light baryon should be accompanied by the opposite parity partner. Our argumentation holds both for ordinary baryons and for exotic heavy pentaquarks which are required by the symmetries of QCD to appear in parity doublets, seperated by the mass shift of the chiral origin. Interpreting the recently observed by BaBaR, CLEO and Belle charmed mesons with assignment $(0^+,1^+)$ as the chiral partners of known $D$ and $D^*$ mesons, allows us to estimate the parameters of the mesonic effective lagrangian, and in consequence, estimate the masses of ground states and excited states of both parities. In particular, we interpret the state recently reported by the H1 experiment at HERA as a chiral partner $\tilde{\Theta}_c^0(3099)$ of yet undiscovered ground state pentaquark $\Theta_c^0(2700)$.Comment: 10 pages, in v2 some typos corrected, references adde

Calculation of αˉQ.E.D.\bar{\alpha}_{\rm Q.E.D.} on the Z

We perform a new, detailed calculation of the hadronic contributions to the running electromagnetic coupling, $\bar{\alpha}$, defined on the Z particle (91 GeV). We find for the hadronic contribution, including radiative corrections, 10^5\times \deltav_{\rm had.}\alpha(M_Z^2)= 2740\pm12, or, excluding the top quark contribution, 10^5\times \deltav_{\rm had.}\alpha^{(5)}(M_Z^2)= 2747\pm12. Adding the pure QED corrections we get a value for the running electromagnetic coupling of $$\bar{\alpha}_{\rm Q.E.D.}(M_Z^2)= {{1}\over{128.965\pm0.017}}.$$Comment: Version to appear in Phys. Rev. D. Plain TeX fil

Mesons with Beauty and Charm: Spectroscopy

Applying knowledge of the interaction between heavy quarks derived from the study of $c\overline{c}$ and $b\overline{b}$ bound states, we calculate the spectrum of $c\overline{b}$ mesons. We compute transition rates for the electromagnetic and hadronic cascades that lead from excited states to the $^1\text{S}_0$ ground state, and briefly consider the prospects for experimental observation of the spectrum.Comment: 32 pages + 2 uuencoded PostScript figures Fermilab-Pub-94/032-

Search for color-suppressed B hadronic decay processes at the Υ(4S) resonance

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.57.5363.Using 3.1fb(-1) of data accumulated at the Υ(4S) by the CLEO-II detector, corresponding to 3.3×10(6) BB¯ pairs, we have searched for the color-suppressed B hadronic decay processes B(0)→D(0)(D*(0))X(0), where X(0) is a light neutral meson π(0), ρ(0(, η, η′ or ω. The D*(0) mesons are reconstructed in D*(0)→D(0)π(0) and the D(0) mesons in D(0)→K(-)π(+), K(-)π(+)π(0) and K(-)π(+)π(+)π(-) decay modes. No obvious signal is observed. We set 90% C.L. upper limits on these modes, varying from 1.2×10(-4) for B(0)→D(0)π(0) to 1.9×10(-3) for B(0)→D*(0)η′