Polaribacter septentrionalilitoris sp. nov., isolated from the biofilm of a stone from the North Sea

A new member of the family Flavobacteriaceae was isolated from the biofilm of a stone at Nordstrand, a peninsula at the German North Sea shore. Phylogenetic analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequence showed that strain ANORD1T was most closely related to the validly described type strains Polaribacter porphyrae LNM-20T (97.0 %) and Polaribacter reichenbachii KMM 6386T (96.9 % 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity) and clustered with Polaribacter gangjinensis K17-16T (96.0 %). Strain ANORD1T was determined to be mesophilic, Gram-negative, non-motile and strictly aerobic. Optimal growth was observed at 20–30 °C, within a salinity range of 2–7 % sea salt and from pH 7–10. Like other type strains of the genus Polaribacter, ANORD1T was tested negative for flexirubin-type pigments, while carotenoid-type pigments were detected. The DNA G+C content of strain ANORD1T was 30.6 mol%. The sole respiratory quinone detected was menaquinone 6 (MK-6). The major fatty acids identified were C15 : 0, iso-C15 : 0, C15 : 1 ω6c and iso-C15 : 0 3-OH. Based on the polyphasic approach, strain ANORD1T represents a novel species in the genus Polaribacter, with the name Polaribacter septentrionalilitoris sp. nov. being proposed. The type strain is ANORD1T (=DSM 110039T=NCIMB 15081T=MTCC 12685T)

Schottky Solar Cells with CuInS₂ Nanocrystals as Absorber Material

Colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals with tunable optical properties are promising materials for light harvesting in solar cells. So far, in particular cadmiumand lead chalcogenide nanocrystals were intensively studied in this respect, and the device performance has made rapid progress in recent years. In contrast, less research efforts were undertaken to develop solar cells based on Cd- and Pb-free nanoparticles as absorbermaterial. In the present work, we report on Schottky solar cells with the absorber layermade of colloidal copper indiumdisulfide nanocrystals. Absorber films with up to ∼ 500 nm thickness were realized by a solution-based layer-by-layer deposition technique. The device performance was systematically studied dependent on the absorber layer thickness. Decreasing photocurrent densities with increasing thickness revealed charge transport to be a limiting factor for the device performance

Roadmap to Gigahertz Organic Transistors

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MEDBERT.de: A Comprehensive German BERT Model for the Medical Domain

This paper presents medBERTde, a pre-trained German BERT model specifically designed for the German medical domain. The model has been trained on a large corpus of 4.7 Million German medical documents and has been shown to achieve new state-of-the-art performance on eight different medical benchmarks covering a wide range of disciplines and medical document types. In addition to evaluating the overall performance of the model, this paper also conducts a more in-depth analysis of its capabilities. We investigate the impact of data deduplication on the model's performance, as well as the potential benefits of using more efficient tokenization methods. Our results indicate that domain-specific models such as medBERTde are particularly useful for longer texts, and that deduplication of training data does not necessarily lead to improved performance. Furthermore, we found that efficient tokenization plays only a minor role in improving model performance, and attribute most of the improved performance to the large amount of training data. To encourage further research, the pre-trained model weights and new benchmarks based on radiological data are made publicly available for use by the scientific community.Comment: Keno K. Bressem and Jens-Michalis Papaioannou and Paul Grundmann contributed equall

DFB Lasers Between 760 nm and 16 μm for Sensing Applications

Recent years have shown the importance of tunable semiconductor lasers in optical sensing. We describe the status quo concerning DFB laser diodes between 760 nm and 3,000 nm as well as new developments aiming for up to 80 nm tuning range in this spectral region. Furthermore we report on QCL between 3 μm and 16 μm and present new developments. An overview of the most interesting applications using such devices is given at the end of this paper

The three stages of stress relaxation - Observations for the time-dependent behaviour of brittle rocks based on laboratory testing

Underground openings can experience time-dependent deformations and stress changes. Studying time-dependent rock behaviour is commonly done with static load (creep) tests in the laboratory which typically exhibit three distinct stages of behaviour. In this study relaxation tests were conducted to examine if three stages also exist under constant strain boundary conditions and to understand how the relaxation behaviour changes as the driving stress to strength ratio is increased. Tests were conducted on two types of limestone. At different load levels similar stress-time responses were measured indicating three distinct stages of stress relaxation. The first stage of stress relaxation (RI) where the stress relaxes with a decreasing rate is followed by the second stage (RII) in which the stress decrease approaches a constant rate and in the third stage (RIII) no further stress relaxation takes place. In the first stage 55% to 95% of the total stress relaxation takes place. The test results are compared with literature data to understand the influence of the stiffness on the magnitude and time to reach the maximum stress relaxation. Relaxation tests could be used to derive numerical model inputs to describe the time-dependent behaviour in a manner similar to static load tests

Feature extraction from event logs for predictive monitoring of business processes

In this master’s thesis, we investigate feature extraction techniques for event log traces. We provide an overview over the field of predictive monitoring and analyze existing trace profiles proposed in the literature. Based on this, we apply the results obtained in recent research on process discovery to find meaningful abstractions over related subsequences of events. We assess different feature sets by evaluating their predictive power in a supervised classification setting as well as a semi-supervised outlier detection setting. For this purpose, we use two datasets from public administration, describing complex processes in EU agricultural subsidy management. Our particular goal in this domain is to predict negative outcomes, for instance, additional work due to legal claims or corrections necessary after initial payment decisions

Grass growth and ▫N2ON_2O▫ emissions from soil after application of jellyfish in coastal areas

The supply of nutrients for agricultural production faces enormous challenges as food security and sustainability goals have to be ensured. Processing of marine biomass has high potential to provide nutrients for agricultural purposes in coastal areas. One underexplored resource are jellyfish, which occur as blooms and by-catch of the fishing industry. In this context, a pot experiment investigated the effects of jellyfish as a fertilizer on biomass accumulation of annual ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum), and its effect on the important greenhouse gas N2O as a sustainability indicator of novel fertilizers. Dried and ground jellyfish was applied [3 species: Aurelia aurita (AA), Cyanea capillata (CC), Periphylla periphylla (PP)] and compared with an unfertilized and a mineral fertilized (calcium-ammonium-nitrate, CAN) treatment. Dried jellyfish and CAN were applied at equal N rates of 5 g N per m2. The N2O-fluxes from soil were measured over 56 days after fertilizer application. Grass dry matter yields, when using CC and PP treatments, were not significantly different to the CAN treatment (p > 0.05). After reducing its salinity, AA also showed no differences to CAN on plant growth and the lowest coefficient of variation for dry matter yield as an indicator for yield stability. Accumulated N2O-emissions were lowest in the control and were 3-times higher in AA and CC compared to CAN (p < 0.05). If salinity levels are moderate, jellyfish application to soil can compete with artificial mineral fertilizers in terms of N-supply for above- and belowground yield response, regardless of jellyfish species used. However, elevated N2O-emissions are likely to affect its suitability for large-scale application. Nevertheless, if energy-efficient methods of drying and desalination of jellyfish can be developed, in coastal areas dried jellyfish is a valuable fertilizer in coastal areas, particularly in situations where nutrient supplies for agriculture are limited

HPI-DHC @ BC8 SympTEMIST Track: Detection and Normalization of Symptom Mentions with SpanMarker and xMEN

&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abstract&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Signs and symptoms of patients are frequently reported in clinical text documents. Therefore, accurate automated extraction of symptom information is essential for their integration into downstream clinical applications. In this work, we describe our contribution to the BioCreative VIII SympTEMIST shared task, a benchmark for the detection and normalization of symptom mentions in Spanish-language clinical case reports. Our systems for subtasks 1 and 2 are built upon two state-of-the-art, open-source information extraction tools: (1) SpanMarker for named entity recognition with document-level context and (2) xMEN for normalizing symptom mentions to their corresponding SNOMED CT code. For subtask 1, our best submitted run achieves an F1 score of 0.7363, which exceeds the median across all submissions by more than 3pp. Our experiments underline the positive impact of including document-level context for named entity taggers. For subtask 2, our best system for entity normalization obtains an accuracy of 0.6070, an improvement of more than 8pp over the median.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This article is part of the &lt;a href="https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10103190"&gt;Proceedings of the BioCreative VIII Challenge and Workshop: Curation and Evaluation in the era of Generative Models&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt