D6.7 Report on the experience of conducting the case studies

One of the main aims of the case studies was to publish improved market reports. The data collected as part of the six case studies have been, or will shortly be, published in the five improved national organic market reports and one first regional market report (MOAN case study). This will make a contribution towards filling the many gaps that continue to exist in organic market data collection in Europe

Observation of the decay \psip\rar\kstark

Using 14 million $\psi(2S)$ events collected with the BESII detector, branching fractions of \psip\rar\kstarkpm and \kstarknn are determined to be: \calB(\psip\rar\kstarkpm)=(2.9^{+1.3}_{-1.7}\pm0.4)\times 10^{-5} and \calB(\psip\rar\kstarknn)=(13.3^{+2.4}_{-2.7}\pm1.9)\times 10^{-5}. The results confirm the violation of the "12%" rule for these two decay channels with higher precision. A large isospin violation between the charged and neutral modes is observed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Heavy quarkonium: progress, puzzles, and opportunities

A golden age for heavy quarkonium physics dawned a decade ago, initiated by the confluence of exciting advances in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and an explosion of related experimental activity. The early years of this period were chronicled in the Quarkonium Working Group (QWG) CERN Yellow Report (YR) in 2004, which presented a comprehensive review of the status of the field at that time and provided specific recommendations for further progress. However, the broad spectrum of subsequent breakthroughs, surprises, and continuing puzzles could only be partially anticipated. Since the release of the YR, the BESII program concluded only to give birth to BESIII; the $B$-factories and CLEO-c flourished; quarkonium production and polarization measurements at HERA and the Tevatron matured; and heavy-ion collisions at RHIC have opened a window on the deconfinement regime. All these experiments leave legacies of quality, precision, and unsolved mysteries for quarkonium physics, and therefore beg for continuing investigations. The plethora of newly-found quarkonium-like states unleashed a flood of theoretical investigations into new forms of matter such as quark-gluon hybrids, mesonic molecules, and tetraquarks. Measurements of the spectroscopy, decays, production, and in-medium behavior of c\bar{c}, b\bar{b}, and b\bar{c} bound states have been shown to validate some theoretical approaches to QCD and highlight lack of quantitative success for others. The intriguing details of quarkonium suppression in heavy-ion collisions that have emerged from RHIC have elevated the importance of separating hot- and cold-nuclear-matter effects in quark-gluon plasma studies. This review systematically addresses all these matters and concludes by prioritizing directions for ongoing and future efforts.Comment: 182 pages, 112 figures. Editors: N. Brambilla, S. Eidelman, B. K. Heltsley, R. Vogt. Section Coordinators: G. T. Bodwin, E. Eichten, A. D. Frawley, A. B. Meyer, R. E. Mitchell, V. Papadimitriou, P. Petreczky, A. A. Petrov, P. Robbe, A. Vair

A common NKCC2 mutation in Costa Rican Bartter's syndrome patients : evidence of a founder effect

Contains fulltext : 25474___.PDF (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Discovery of novel cathepsin S inhibitors by pharmacophore-based virtual high-throughput screening

The cysteine protease cathepsin S (CatS) is involved in the pathogenesis of autoimmune disorders, atherosclerosis, and obesity. Therefore, it represents a promising pharmacological target for drug development. We generated ligand-based and structure-based pharmacophore models for noncovalent and covalent CatS inhibitors to perform virtual high-throughput screening of chemical databases in order to discover novel scaffolds for CatS inhibitors. An in vitro evaluation of the resulting 15 structures revealed seven CatS inhibitors with kinetic constants in the low micromolar range. These compounds can be subjected to further chemical modifications to obtain drugs for the treatment of autoimmune disorders and atherosclerosis

On Maximizing the Throughput of Multiprocessor Tasks

We consider the problem of scheduling n independent multiprocessor tasks with due dates and unit processing times, where the objective is to compute a schedule maximizing the throughput. We derive the complexity results and present several approximation algorithms. For the parallel variant of the problem, we introduce the rst- t increasing algorithm and the latest- t increasing algorithm, and prove that their worst-case ratios are 2 and 2 1=m, respectively (m 2 is the number of processors). Then we propose a revised algorithm with a worst-case ratio bounded by 3=2 1=(2m) (m is odd) and 3=2 1=(2m 2) (m is even). For the dedicated variant, we present a simple greedy algorithm. We show that its worst-case ratio is bounded by m + 1. We straighten this result by showing that the problem cannot be approximated within a factor of m for any " > 0, unless NP = ZPP