2,709 research outputs found
Methane activation and exchange by titanium-carbon multiple bonds
We demonstrate that a titanium-carbon multiple bond, specifically an alkylidyne ligand in the transient complex, (PNP)Ti≡C^(t)Bu (A) (PNP^− = N[2-P(CHMe_2)_(2)-4-methylphenyl]_2), can cleanly activate methane at room temperature with moderately elevated pressures to form (PNP)Ti=CHtBu(CH_3). Isotopic labeling and theoretical studies suggest that the alkylidene and methyl hydrogens exchange, either via tautomerization invoking a
methylidene complex, (PNP)Ti=CH_(2)(CH_(2)^(t)Bu), or by forming the methane adduct (PNP)Ti≡C^(t)Bu(CH_4). The thermal, fluxional and chemical behavior of (PNP)Ti=CH^(t)Bu(CH_3) is also presented in this study
Asthma Length of Stay in Hospitals in London 2001–2006: Demographic, Diagnostic and Temporal Factors
Asthma is a condition of significant public health concern associated with morbidity, mortality and healthcare utilisation. This study identifies key determinants of length of stay (LOS) associated with asthma-related hospital admissions in London, and further explores their effects on individuals. Subjects were primarily diagnosed and admitted for asthma in London between 1st January 2001 and 31st December 2006. All repeated admissions were treated uniquely as independent cases. Negative binomial regression was used to model the effect(s) of demographic, temporal and diagnostic factors on the LOS, taking into account the cluster effect of each patient's hospital attendance in London. The median and mean asthma LOS over the period of study were 2 and 3 days respectively. Admissions increased over the years from 8,308 (2001) to 10,554 (2006), but LOS consistently declined within the same period. Younger individuals were more likely to be admitted than the elderly, but the latter significantly had higher LOS (p<0.001). Respiratory related secondary diagnoses, age, and gender of the patient as well as day of the week and year of admission were important predictors of LOS. Asthma LOS can be predicted by socio-demographic factors, temporal and clinical factors using count models on hospital admission data. The procedure can be a useful tool for planning and resource allocation in health service provision
In-situ Generation and Grain Growth of Ceo2 Nanocrystals in AC/DC Electrical Fields
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Phase stability of lanthanum orthovanadate at high-pressure
When monoclinic monazite-type LaVO4 (space group P21/n) is squeezed up to 12
GPa at room temperature, a phase transition to another monoclinic phase has
been found. The structure of the high-pressure phase of LaVO4 is indexed with
the same space group (P21/n), but with a larger unit-cell in which the number
of atoms is doubled. The transition leads to an 8% increase in the density of
LaVO4. The occurrence of such a transition has been determined by x-ray
diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, and ab initio calculations. The combination of
the three techniques allows us to also characterize accurately the pressure
evolution of unit-cell parameters and the Raman (and IR)-active phonons of the
low- and high-pressure phase. In particular, room-temperature equations of
state have been determined. The changes driven by pressure in the crystal
structure induce sharp modifications in the color of LaVO4 crystals, suggesting
that behind the monoclinic-to-monoclinic transition there are important changes
of the electronic properties of LaVO4.Comment: 39 pages, 6 tables, 7 figure
Numerical propagation of high energy cosmic rays in the Galaxy I: technical issues
We present the results of a numerical simulation of propagation of cosmic
rays with energy above eV in a complex magnetic field, made in
general of a large scale component and a turbulent component. Several
configurations are investigated that may represent specific aspects of a
realistic magnetic field of the Galaxy, though the main purpose of this
investigation is not to achieve a realistic description of the propagation in
the Galaxy, but rather to assess the role of several effects that define the
complex problem of propagation. Our simulations of Cosmic Rays in the Galaxy
will be presented in Paper II. We identified several effects that are difficult
to interpret in a purely diffusive approach and that play a crucial role in the
propagation of cosmic rays in the complex magnetic field of the Galaxy. We
discuss at length the problem of the extrapolation of our results to much lower
energies where data are available on the confinement time of cosmic rays in the
Galaxy. The confinement time and its dependence on particles' rigidity are
crucial ingredients for 1) relating the source spectrum to the observed cosmic
ray spectrum; 2) quantifying the production of light elements by spallation; 3)
predicting the anisotropy as a function of energy.Comment: 29 pages, 12 figures, submitted to JCA
parSMURF, a high-performance computing tool for the genome-wide detection of pathogenic variants.
BACKGROUND: Several prediction problems in computational biology and genomic medicine are characterized by both big data as well as a high imbalance between examples to be learned, whereby positive examples can represent a tiny minority with respect to negative examples. For instance, deleterious or pathogenic variants are overwhelmed by the sea of neutral variants in the non-coding regions of the genome: thus, the prediction of deleterious variants is a challenging, highly imbalanced classification problem, and classical prediction tools fail to detect the rare pathogenic examples among the huge amount of neutral variants or undergo severe restrictions in managing big genomic data.
RESULTS: To overcome these limitations we propose parSMURF, a method that adopts a hyper-ensemble approach and oversampling and undersampling techniques to deal with imbalanced data, and parallel computational techniques to both manage big genomic data and substantially speed up the computation. The synergy between Bayesian optimization techniques and the parallel nature of parSMURF enables efficient and user-friendly automatic tuning of the hyper-parameters of the algorithm, and allows specific learning problems in genomic medicine to be easily fit. Moreover, by using MPI parallel and machine learning ensemble techniques, parSMURF can manage big data by partitioning them across the nodes of a high-performance computing cluster. Results with synthetic data and with single-nucleotide variants associated with Mendelian diseases and with genome-wide association study hits in the non-coding regions of the human genome, involhing millions of examples, show that parSMURF achieves state-of-the-art results and an 80-fold speed-up with respect to the sequential version.
CONCLUSIONS: parSMURF is a parallel machine learning tool that can be trained to learn different genomic problems, and its multiple levels of parallelization and high scalability allow us to efficiently fit problems characterized by big and imbalanced genomic data. The C++ OpenMP multi-core version tailored to a single workstation and the C++ MPI/OpenMP hybrid multi-core and multi-node parSMURF version tailored to a High Performance Computing cluster are both available at https://github.com/AnacletoLAB/parSMURF
Fragments of the nonlytic proline-rich antimicrobial peptide Bac5 kill Escherichia coli cells by inhibiting protein synthesis
Unlike most antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), the main mode of action of
the subclass of proline-rich antimicrobial peptides (PrAMPs) is not based on disruption
of the bacterial membrane. Instead, PrAMPs exploit the inner membrane transporters
SbmA and YjiL/MdtM to pass through the bacterial membrane and enter the
cytosol of specific Gram-negative bacteria, where they exert an inhibitory effect on
protein synthesis. Despite sharing a high proline and arginine content with other
characterized PrAMPs, the PrAMP Bac5 has a low sequence identity with them. Here
we investigated the mode of action of three N-terminal Bac5 fragments, Bac5(1-15),
Bac5(1-25), and Bac5(1-31). We show that Bac5(1-25) and Bac5(1-31) retained excellent
antimicrobial activity toward Escherichia coli and low toxicity toward eukaryotic
cells, whereas Bac5(1-15) was inactive. Bac5(1-25) and Bac5(1-31) inhibited bacterial
protein synthesis in vitro and in vivo. Competition assays suggested that the binding
site of Bac5 is within the ribosomal tunnel, where it prevents the transition from the
initiation to the elongation phase of translation, as reported for other PrAMPs, such
as the bovine PrAMP Bac7. Surprisingly, unlike Bac7, Bac5(1-25) exhibited speciesspecific
inhibition, being an excellent inhibitor of protein synthesis on E. coli ribosomes
but a poor inhibitor on Thermus thermophilus ribosomes. This indicates that
while Bac5 most likely has an overlapping binding site with Bac7, the mode of interaction
is distinct, suggesting that Bac5 fragments may be interesting alternative lead
compounds for the development of new antimicrobial agents
Early Postoperative Exposure to High-Fat Diet Does Not Increase Long-Term Weight Loss or Fat Avoidance After Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass in Rats
BackgroundBariatric surgery alters food preferences in rats and reportedly decreases desire to consume high-fat high-sugar food in humans. The aim of this study was to investigate whether early post-operative exposure to high-fat food could increase body weight loss after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) by triggering fat avoidance.MethodsMale Wistar rats underwent either RYGB (n = 15) or sham-operations (n = 16). Preoperatively a standardized 4-choice cafeteria diet [dietary options: low-fat/low-sugar (LFLS), low-fat/high-sugar (LFHS), high-fat/low-sugar (HFLS), high-fat/high-sugar (HFHS)] was offered. First, each option was available for 4 days, thereafter rats were offered the 4 options simultaneously for 3 days preoperatively. Post-surgery, 8 rats in the RYGB- and 8 in the sham-group were exposed to a high-fat content diet (Oatmeal + 30% lard, OM+L) for 10 days, while 7 RYGB rats and 8 sham-rats received OM alone. From the 11th postoperative day, the 4-choice cafeteria diet was reintroduced for 55-days. The intake of all available food items, macronutrients and body weight changes were monitored over 8 weeks. Main outcomes were long-term body-weight and daily change in relative caloric intake during the postoperative cafeteria period compared to the preoperative cafeteria.ResultsDuring the first 12 days of postoperative cafeteria access, RYGB-rats exposed to OM+L had a higher mean caloric intake per day than RYGB rats exposed to OM alone (Δ10 kCal, P = 0.004), but this difference between the RYGB groups disappeared thereafter. Consequently, in the last 33 days of the postoperative cafeteria diet, the mean body weight of the RYGB+OM+L group was higher compared to RYGB+OM (Δ51 g, P < 0.001). RYGB rats, independently from the nutritional intervention, presented a progressive decrease in daily consumption of calories from fat and increased their daily energy intake mainly from non-sugar carbohydrates. No such differences were detected in sham-operated controls exposed to low- or high fat postoperative interventions.ConclusionA progressive decrease in daily fat intake over time was observed after RYGB, independently from the nutritional intervention. This finding confirms that macronutrient preferences undergo progressive changes over time after RYGB and supports the role of ingestive adaptation and learning. Early postoperative exposure to high-fat food failed to accentuate fat avoidance and did not lead to superior weight loss in the long-term
Discovery of soft and hard X-ray time lags in low-mass AGNs
The scaling relations between the black hole (BH) mass and soft lag
properties for both active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and BH X-ray binaries
(BHXRBs) suggest the same underlying physical mechanism at work in accreting BH
systems spanning a broad range of mass. However, the low-mass end of AGNs has
never been explored in detail. In this work, we extend the existing scaling
relations to lower-mass AGNs, which serve as anchors between the normal-mass
AGNs and BHXRBs. For this purpose, we construct a sample of low-mass AGNs
() from the XMM-Newton archive and
measure frequency-resolved time delays between the soft (0.3-1 keV) and hard
(1-4 keV) X-ray emissions. We report that the soft band lags behind the hard
band emission at high frequencies Hz, which is
interpreted as a sign of reverberation from the inner accretion disc in
response to the direct coronal emission. At low frequencies ( Hz), the hard band lags behind the soft band variations, which we
explain in the context of the inward propagation of luminosity fluctuations
through the corona. Assuming a lamppost geometry for the corona, we find that
the X-ray source of the sample extends at an average height and radius of and , respectively. Our results confirm that the
scaling relations between the BH mass and soft lag amplitude/frequency derived
for higher-mass AGNs can safely extrapolate to lower-mass AGNs, and the
accretion process is indeed independent of the BH mass.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables, Published in MNRA
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