Scenarios about the long-time damage of silicon as material and detectors operating beyond LHC collider conditions

For the new hadron collider LHC and some of its updates in luminosity and energy, as SLHC and VLHC, the silicon detectors could represent an important option, especially for the tracking system and calorimetry. The main goal of this paper is to analyse the expected long-time degradation in the bulk of the silicon as material and for silicon detectors, in continuous radiation field, in these hostile conditions. The behaviour of silicon in relation to various scenarios for upgrade in energy and luminosity is discussed in the frame a phenomenological model developed previously by the authors. Different silicon material parameters resulting from different technologies are considered to evaluate what materials are harder to radiation and consequently could minimise the degradation of device parameters in conditions of continuous long time operation.Comment: submitted to Physica Scripta Work in the frame of CERN RD-50 Collaboratio

The pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics knowledge base: accentuating the knowledge

PharmGKB is a knowledge base that captures the relationships between drugs, diseases/phenotypes and genes involved in pharmacokinetics (PK) and pharmacodynamics (PD). This information includes literature annotations, primary data sets, PK and PD pathways, and expert-generated summaries of PK/PD relationships between drugs, diseases/phenotypes and genes. PharmGKB's website is designed to effectively disseminate knowledge to meet the needs of our users. PharmGKB currently has literature annotations documenting the relationship of over 500 drugs, 450 diseases and 600 variant genes. In order to meet the needs of whole genome studies, PharmGKB has added new functionalities, including browsing the variant display by chromosome and cytogenetic locations, allowing the user to view variants not located within a gene. We have developed new infrastructure for handling whole genome data, including increased methods for quality control and tools for comparison across other data sources, such as dbSNP, JSNP and HapMap data. PharmGKB has also added functionality to accept, store, display and query high throughput SNP array data. These changes allow us to capture more structured information on phenotypes for better cataloging and comparison of data. PharmGKB is available at www.pharmgkb.or

Optimising ‘cash flows’:Converting corporate finance to hard currency

Following recent works that have underlined the increasing search for liquidity in economic exchange, this article studies how illiquid forms of money are converted into liquid forms by corporate finance actors. In the name of ‘shareholder value’, the various forms of value generated by companies (such as ‘trade credit’) tend to be increasingly transformed into liquid forms of money that are easily distributable to shareholders (‘cash flows’). Describing this phenomenon as an example of what anthropologists of money call ‘conversion’, this paper highlights how such a conversion process was necessary for the historical development of ‘shareholder value’ policies in corporate finance. Considering documentary sources and interviews with consultants, auditors, and private equity fund managers involved in ‘cash flow’ optimisation practices, this paper details this conversion phenomenon and shows how it has relied on the historical elaboration of specific metrological, technical, legal, and moral norms

p53 as a potential predictive factor of response to chemotherapy: feasibility of p53 assessment using a functional test in yeast from trucut biopsies in breast cancer patients

Assessment of the predictive value of p53 requires the testing of large numbers of samples from patients enrolled in prospective phase III clinical trials. The goal of this study was to determine whether p53 status can be determined by p53 yeast functional assay using the limiting amounts of material that can typically be obtained in prospective phase III trials (particularly when chemotherapy is given before surgery). All patients presenting with a clinically palpable tumour which could be considered large enough to perform a trucut biopsy (⩾2 cm breast tumour) were eligible for this study. Two trucut biopsies and one incisional biopsy were performed on the surgical specimens (mastectomy or tumourectomy). Samples were snap frozen and cryostat sections were taken for histology and p53 testing. Thirty patients were included. Three samples out of 90 failed to give any p53 PCR products, probably because these samples contained almost entirely fibrous tissue. Of the 87 samples that could be tested, the incisional and trucut biopsies results were fully concordant in every case. p53 could be defined in 97% of patients by double trucut biopsy. Eight out of 30 tumours tested were mutant for p53 (27%). p53 status can be reliably determined by yeast assay from single frozen sections of trucut biopsies. Histological examination before p53 testing is essential to exclude cases where the p53 result may reflect only the status of the normal cells in the biopsy

The repeatability of cognitive performance:A meta-analysis

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from The Royal Society via the DOI in this record.Behavioural and cognitive processes play important roles in mediating an individual's interactions with its environment. Yet, while there is a vast literature on repeatable individual differences in behaviour, relatively little is known about the repeatability of cognitive performance. To further our understanding of the evolution of cognition, we gathered 44 studies on individual performance of 25 species across six animal classes and used meta-analysis to assess whether cognitive performance is repeatable. We compared repeatability (R) in performance (1) on the same task presented at different times (temporal repeatability), and (2) on different tasks that measured the same putative cognitive ability (contextual repeatability). We also addressed whether R estimates were influenced by seven extrinsic factors (moderators): type of cognitive performance measurement, type of cognitive task, delay between tests, origin of the subjects, experimental context, taxonomic class and publication status. We found support for both temporal and contextual repeatability of cognitive performance, with mean R estimates ranging between 0.15 and 0.28. Repeatability estimates were mostly influenced by the type of cognitive performance measures and publication status. Our findings highlight the widespread occurrence of consistent inter-individual variation in cognition across a range of taxa which, like behaviour, may be associated with fitness outcomes.PKYC is supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (PE1801); JOvH was funded by an ERC consolidator grant (616474). MC and this research was supported by a grant from the Human Frontier Science Program to ASC and JM-F (RGP0006/2015)

Genomic Profiling Identifies GATA6 as a Candidate Oncogene Amplified in Pancreatobiliary Cancer

Pancreatobiliary cancers have among the highest mortality rates of any cancer type. Discovering the full spectrum of molecular genetic alterations may suggest new avenues for therapy. To catalogue genomic alterations, we carried out array-based genomic profiling of 31 exocrine pancreatic cancers and 6 distal bile duct cancers, expanded as xenografts to enrich the tumor cell fraction. We identified numerous focal DNA amplifications and deletions, including in 19% of pancreatobiliary cases gain at cytoband 18q11.2, a locus uncommonly amplified in other tumor types. The smallest shared amplification at 18q11.2 included GATA6, a transcriptional regulator previously linked to normal pancreas development. When amplified, GATA6 was overexpressed at both the mRNA and protein levels, and strong immunostaining was observed in 25 of 54 (46%) primary pancreatic cancers compared to 0 of 33 normal pancreas specimens surveyed. GATA6 expression in xenografts was associated with specific microarray gene-expression patterns, enriched for GATA binding sites and mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation activity. siRNA mediated knockdown of GATA6 in pancreatic cancer cell lines with amplification led to reduced cell proliferation, cell cycle progression, and colony formation. Our findings indicate that GATA6 amplification and overexpression contribute to the oncogenic phenotypes of pancreatic cancer cells, and identify GATA6 as a candidate lineage-specific oncogene in pancreatobiliary cancer, with implications for novel treatment strategies

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource (http://obi-ontology.org) providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. The current release of OBI is available at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi.owl

PERCEPTION DE LA COLORATION D'UN BRUIT BLANC DUE À UN ÉCHO LATÉRAL

In this paper, the coloration, which is a modification of timbre, is more precisely defined. The classical results, concerning coloration of a white noise due to its echo, both with the same frontal direction, are presented. Given the importance of lateral echoes to the quality of room acoustics, we got interested in coloration with a lateral echo. From the first results, it seems that the coloration thresholds are much lower than those with a frontal echo. However, they appear to be the results of two cues : a spectral one (the coloration, we are interested in) and a spatial one. As we reduce step by step the latter one, the results with the lateral echo get closer and closer to the results with a frontal echo. Then, the perception of coloration does not seem to depend on the azimuth of the echo, and our first results were, in fact, based on a spatial cue

[Aversion pour le risque et mouvement chaotique sur les marchés agricoles]

National audienceCette communication présente les tout premiers résultats d'expérimentations informatiques. Un modèle récursif de type cobweb, où la décision de temps t se matérialise (et affecte les marchés) au temps t+1 est réalisé. L'introduction du risque dans un tel modèle le rend non linéaire pour les prix et les quantités, de telle sorte qu'on puisse générer pour ces variables un chemin chaotique temporel. Mais un régime chaotique est très sujet à discussion. En réalité ce mouvement chaotique est la seule source d'introduction du risque dans le modèle. La genèse du risque est donc endogène à celui-ci. Une telle approche ouvre la voie à la reconsidération d'un grand nombre de croyances largement partagées concernant les politiques de stabilisation des prix, en particulier en agriculture