On the relationship between ENSO and overland accumulated cyclone energy of landfalling tropical cyclones over the western North Pacific

This study investigates the relationship between El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and overland accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) of tropical cyclones (TCs) over the western North Pacific (WNP). We find that there is only a weak correlation between ENSO and overland ACE during 1979–2019, compared to the significant relationship between ENSO and basinwide ACE over the WNP as reported in previous publications. Overland ACE is generally smaller in El Niño and La Niña years than that in neutral years, which mainly results from lower landfall frequency and shorter duration after landfall. Relative to neutral years, overland ACE is lower over almost the entire China mainland in both El Niño and La Niña years, which can be related to the changes in the formation and movement of landfalling TCs. During El Niño and La Niña years, fewer landfalling TCs form over the western WNP, mainly resulting from reduced 850-hPa humidity, which leads to a less chance of TCs making landfall over China mainland. In addition, the eastward (westward) shift of the western Pacific subtropical high in El Niño (La Niña) years steers more TCs to make landfall over the southern (northern) China

A sheep pangenome reveals the spectrum of structural variations and their effects on tail phenotypes

Structural variations (SVs) are a major contributor to genetic diversity and phenotypic variations, but their prevalence and functions in domestic animals are largely unexplored. Here we generated high-quality genome assemblies for 15 individuals from genetically diverse sheep breeds using Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) high-fidelity sequencing, discovering 130.3 Mb nonreference sequences, from which 588 genes were annotated. A total of 149,158 biallelic insertions/deletions, 6531 divergent alleles, and 14,707 multiallelic variations with precise breakpoints were discovered. The SV spectrum is characterized by an excess of derived insertions compared to deletions (94,422 vs. 33,571), suggesting recent active LINE expansions in sheep. Nearly half of the SVs display low to moderate linkage disequilibrium with surrounding single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and most SVs cannot be tagged by SNP probes from the widely used ovine 50K SNP chip. We identified 865 population-stratified SVs including 122 SVs possibly derived in the domestication process among 690 individuals from sheep breeds worldwide. A novel 168-bp insertion in the 5' untranslated region (5' UTR) of HOXB13 is found at high frequency in long-tailed sheep. Further genome-wide association study and gene expression analyses suggest that this mutation is causative for the long-tail trait. In summary, we have developed a panel of high-quality de novo assemblies and present a catalog of structural variations in sheep. Our data capture abundant candidate functional variations that were previously unexplored and provide a fundamental resource for understanding trait biology in sheep

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Simultaneous removal of nitrobenzene and phenol by homogenous catalytic wet air oxidation

The simultaneous wet air oxidation of nitrobenzene (NB) and phenol with homogenous catalyst was carried out in a stainless autoclave in a temperature range of 150-210 degrees C and at a partial oxygen pressure of 1.0 MPa. Compared with the non-catalytic co-oxidation of NB and phenol, the presence of the homogeneous catalyst greatly improved the conversion of both compounds. The transition metal ions Cu2+, Co2+ and Ni2+ were found to be effective catalysts, with Cu2+ affording the best results. How phenol was added to the autoclave was investigated and was found to affect the conversion of NB. Adding phenol in smaller portions can help to degrade NB more effectively. As an example, two additions of phenol with Cu2+ as the homogenous catalyst allowed 95% conversion of NB at 200 degrees C in 1 h. This catalytic co-oxidation method incorporating the addition of phenol initiator batches therefore provides an alternative and effective means of removing persistent organic pollutants from the environment. (C) 2015, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved