Sicherheit im Umgang mit chemischen Stoffen im globalen Umfeld

We are taking part in an intense change in industry and social environment. Today's industrial and business network is rapidly expanding to global dimension. Workplace, production, product shipment and business process is under rapid change and global adaptation. The ongoing setting of direction noticeably includes the scope of regulatory requirements. It's clearly evident: the safe handling of hazardous chemicals is given sustainable priority, from local to global scale.The broad commitment to safety- and health-related information (to safety data sheet, label, classification of substances and mixtures, risk assessment, waste handling), from a multi language perspective, reflects the concern for a safe operation in the broadest sense (safe workplace, health protection, product stewardship).There is a shift in mind-set. Emphasis is on wide-scale conceptual solution, cost-effective, rapidly doable, tuned for integration and adaptability to change ('less complex', 'dynamic', adaptable to the business requirements). Modern hardware-, software- and communication technologies allow having the safety information for hazardous products available, through today's communication network, wherever needed, for the benefit of the producer and user.The following article is written from a practical viewpoint and with the scope of a large international company. The content describes the development and implementation of information systems relating to safety data sheets, product labels, classification (expert system), in review over the recent years. The focus is on various perspectives, i.e. workprocess, information technology, value creation (productivity gain and competitive edge)

The microbiology of Lascaux Cave

Lascaux Cave (Montignac, France) contains paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period. Shortly after its discovery in 1940, the cave was seriously disturbed by major destructive interventions. In 1963, the cave was closed due to algal growth on the walls. In 2001, the ceiling, walls and sediments were colonized by the fungus Fusarium solani. Later, black stains, probably of fungal origin, appeared on the walls. Biocide treatments, including quaternary ammonium derivatives, were extensively applied for a few years, and have been in use again since January 2008. The microbial communities in Lascaux Cave were shown to be composed of human-pathogenic bacteria and entomopathogenic fungi, the former as a result of the biocide selection. The data show that fungi play an important role in the cave, and arthropods contribute to the dispersion of conidia. A careful study on the fungal ecology is needed in order to complete the cave food web and to control the black stains threatening the Paleolithic paintings. © 2010 SGM.We thank support from the Ministry of Culture and Communication, France, the Spanish project CGL2006-07424/BOS, and facilities from DRAC Aquitaine. This is a TCP CSD2007-00058 paper.Peer Reviewe

Article Fast Track Disproportional Plastome-Wide Increase of Substitution Rates and Relaxed Purifying Selection in Genes of Carnivorous Lentibulariaceae

Abstract Carnivorous Lentibulariaceae exhibit the most sophisticated implementation of the carnivorous syndrome in plants. Their unusual lifestyle coincides with distinct genomic peculiarities such as the smallest angiosperm nuclear genomes and extremely high nucleotide substitution rates across all genomic compartments. Here, we report the complete plastid genomes from each of the three genera Pinguicula, Utricularia, and Genlisea, and investigate plastome-wide changes in their molecular evolution as the carnivorous syndrome unfolds. We observe a size reduction by up to 9% mostly due to the independent loss of genes for the plastid NAD(P)H dehydrogenase and altered proportions of plastid repeat DNA, as well as a significant plastome-wide increase of substitution rates and microstructural changes. Protein-coding genes across all gene classes show a disproportional elevation of nonsynonymous substitutions, particularly in Utricularia and Genlisea. Significant relaxation of purifying selection relative to noncarnivores occurs in the plastid-encoded fraction of the photosynthesis ATP synthase complex, the photosystem I, and in several other photosynthesis and metabolic genes. Shifts in selective regimes also affect housekeeping genes including the plastid-encoded polymerase, for which evidence for relaxed purifying selection was found once during the transition to carnivory, and a second time during the diversification of the family. Lentibulariaceae significantly exhibit enhanced rates of nucleotide substitution in most of the 130 noncoding regions. Various factors may underlie the observed patterns of relaxation of purifying selection and substitution rate increases, such as reduced net photosynthesis rates, alternative paths of nutrient uptake (including organic carbon), and impaired DNA repair mechanisms

Recht in der Krise

How does the law react to real crises and what is the problem-solving power of legal regulation in difficult situations? Conversely, do crises also have an impact on how the law works – and should they have one at all? In the XXIII. Volume of the APARIUZ publication series, young researchers from the University of Zurich from different legal areas deal with how the law deals with crises. The starting point for reflections on the interplay between crises and law is not only the corona pandemic, but also a wide variety of other situations that encourage - or force - criticism and rethinking.Wie reagiert das Recht auf reale Krisen und worin liegt die Problemlösungskraft rechtlicher Regulierung in schwierigen Situationen? Haben umgekehrt auch Krisen einen Einfluss darauf, wie das Recht funktioniert – und sollten sie überhaupt einen haben? Im XXIII. Band der Schriftenreihe APARIUZ setzen sich Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen der Universität Zürich aus unterschiedlichen Rechtsbereichen mit dem Umgang des Rechts mit Krisen auseinander. Ausgangspunkt für Reflexionen über das Wechselspiel zwischen Krisen und Recht bildet dabei nicht nur die Corona-Pandemie, sondern auch verschiedenste andere Situationen, die zu Kritik und Umdenken anspornen – oder zwingen

Benchmarking weakly-supervised deep learning pipelines for whole slide classification in computational pathology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can extract visual information from histopathological slides and yield biological insight and clinical biomarkers. Whole slide images are cut into thousands of tiles and classification problems are often weakly-supervised: the ground truth is only known for the slide, not for every single tile. In classical weakly-supervised analysis pipelines, all tiles inherit the slide label while in multiple-instance learning (MIL), only bags of tiles inherit the label. However, it is still unclear how these widely used but markedly different approaches perform relative to each other. We implemented and systematically compared six methods in six clinically relevant end-to-end prediction tasks using data from N=2980 patients for training with rigorous external validation. We tested three classical weakly-supervised approaches with convolutional neural networks and vision transformers (ViT) and three MIL-based approaches with and without an additional attention module. Our results empirically demonstrate that histological tumor subtyping of renal cell carcinoma is an easy task in which all approaches achieve an area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC) of above 0.9. In contrast, we report significant performance differences for clinically relevant tasks of mutation prediction in colorectal, gastric, and bladder cancer. In these mutation prediction tasks, classical weakly-supervised workflows outperformed MIL-based weakly-supervised methods for mutation prediction, which is surprising given their simplicity. This shows that new end-to-end image analysis pipelines in computational pathology should be compared to classical weakly-supervised methods. Also, these findings motivate the development of new methods which combine the elegant assumptions of MIL with the empirically observed higher performance of classical weakly-supervised approaches. We make all source codes publicly available at https://github.com/KatherLab/HIA, allowing easy application of all methods to any similar task

Recht in der Krise

How does the law react to real crises and what is the problem-solving power of legal regulation in difficult situations? Conversely, do crises also have an impact on how the law works – and should they have one at all? In the XXIII. Volume of the APARIUZ publication series, young researchers from the University of Zurich from different legal areas deal with how the law deals with crises. The starting point for reflections on the interplay between crises and law is not only the corona pandemic, but also a wide variety of other situations that encourage - or force - criticism and rethinking

An estimate of the number of tropical tree species

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher’s alpha and an approximate pantropical stem total to estimate the minimum number of tropical forest tree species to fall between ∼40,000 and ∼53,000, i.e. at the high end of previous estimates. Contrary to common assumption, the Indo-Pacific region was found to be as species-rich as the Neotropics, with both regions having a minimum of ∼19,000–25,000 tree species. Continental Africa is relatively depauperate with a minimum of ∼4,500–6,000 tree species. Very few species are shared among the African, American, and the Indo-Pacific regions. We provide a methodological framework for estimating species richness in trees that may help refine species richness estimates of tree-dependent taxa

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio