Long Waves in World Industrial Production, Energy Consumption, Innovations, Inventions, and Patents and their Identification by Spectral Analysis

Scientists like to make the irregular regular, to draw curves even in cases where nothing can be seen at all. Periodical wave curves are an excellent means of organizing the unorganized, of arranging the unarranged. Recent studies on long waves in economic development have found a periodicity in the time series of inventions and innovations that works exactly like a clock with an accelerating mechanism. What we have done here is simply to collect some interesting empirical figures and to exploit them by spectral analysis in order to find out whether regularities exist, and if so, whether they are statistically significant

COVID-19 publications: Database coverage, citations, readers, tweets, news, Facebook walls, Reddit posts

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00066The COVID-19 pandemic requires a fast response from researchers to help address biological, medical and public health issues to minimize its impact. In this rapidly evolving context, scholars, professionals and the public may need to quickly identify important new studies. In response, this paper assesses the coverage of scholarly databases and impact indicators during 21 March to 18 April 2020. The rapidly increasing volume of research, is particularly accessible through Dimensions, and less through Scopus, the Web of Science, and PubMed. Google Scholar’s results included many false matches. A few COVID-19 papers from the 21,395 in Dimensions were already highly cited, with substantial news and social media attention. For this topic, in contrast to previous studies, there seems to be a high degree of convergence between articles shared in the social web and citation counts, at least in the short term. In particular, articles that are extensively tweeted on the day first indexed are likely to be highly read and relatively highly cited three weeks later. Researchers needing wide scope literature searches (rather than health focused PubMed or medRxiv searches) should start with Dimensions (or Google Scholar) and can use tweet and Mendeley reader counts as indicators of likely importance

Low Momentum Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction and Fermi Liquid Theory

We use the induced interaction of Babu and Brown to derive two novel relations between the quasiparticle interaction in nuclear matter and the unique low momentum nucleon-nucleon interaction V_low k in vacuum. These relations provide two independent constraints on the Fermi liquid parameters of nuclear matter. We derive the full renormalization group equations in the particle-hole channels from the induced interaction. The new constraints, together with the Pauli principle sum rules, define four combinations of Fermi liquid parameters that are invariant under the renormalization group flow. Using empirical values for the spin-independent Fermi liquid parameters, we are able to compute the major spin-dependent ones by imposing the new constraints and the Pauli principle sum rules. The effects of tensor forces are discussed.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, uses feynmp.sty (included), minor revisions, to appear in Nucl. Phys.

Ultrasensitive investigations of biological systems by fluorescence correlation spectroscopy

Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) extracts information about molecular dynamics from the tiny fluctuations that can be observed in the emission of small ensembles of fluorescent molecules in thermodynamic equilibrium. Employing a confocal setup in conjunction with highly dilute samples, the average number of fluorescent particles simultaneously within the measurement volume (similar to1 fl) is minimized. Among the multitude of chemical and physical parameters accessible by FCS are local concentrations, mobility coefficients, rate constants for association and dissociation processes, and even enzyme kinetics. As any reaction causing an alteration of the primary measurement parameters such as fluorescence brightness or mobility can be monitored, the application of this noninvasive method to unravel processes in living cells is straightforward. Due to the high spatial resolution of less than 0.5 mum, selective measurements in cellular compartments, e.g., to probe receptor-ligand interactions on cell membranes, are feasible. Moreover, the observation of local molecular dynamics provides access to environmental parameters such as local oxygen concentrations, pH, or viscosity. Thus, this versatile technique is of particular attractiveness for researchers striving for quantitative assessment of interactions and dynamics of small molecular quantities in biologically relevant systems. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved

QuantiFERON®-TB gold in-tube performance for diagnosing active tuberculosis in children and adults in a high burden setting.

To determine whether QuantiFERON®-TB Gold In-Tube (QFT) can contribute to the diagnosis of active tuberculosis (TB) in children in a high-burden setting and to assess the performance of QFT and tuberculin skin test (TST) in a prospective cohort of TB suspect children compared to adults with confirmed TB in Tanzania. Sensitivity and specificity of QFT and TST for diagnosing active TB as well as indeterminate QFT rates and IFN-γ levels were assessed in 211 TB suspect children in a Tanzanian district hospital and contrasted in 90 adults with confirmed pulmonary TB. Sensitivity of QFT and TST in children with confirmed TB was 19% (5/27) and 6% (2/31) respectively. In adults sensitivity of QFT and TST was 84% (73/87) and 85% (63/74). The QFT indeterminate rate in children and adults was 27% and 3%. Median levels of IFN-γ were lower in children than adults, particularly children <2 years and HIV infected. An indeterminate result was associated with age <2 years but not malnutrition or HIV status. Overall childhood mortality was 19% and associated with an indeterminate QFT result at baseline. QFT and TST showed poor performance and a surprisingly low sensitivity in children. In contrast the performance in Tanzanian adults was good and comparable to performance in high-income countries. Indeterminate results in children were associated with young age and increased mortality. Neither test can be recommended for diagnosing active TB in children with immature or impaired immunity in a high-burden setting

On the discovery of doubly-magic 48^{48}Ni

The paper reports on the first observation of doubly-magic Nickel-48 in an experimental at the SISSI/LISE3 facility of GANIL. Four Nickel-48 isotopes were identified. In addition, roughly 100 Nickel-49, 50 Iron-45, and 290 Chromium-42 isotopes were observed. This opens the possibility to search for two-proton emission from these nuclei.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Religion and the Sustainable Development Goals

© 2019, © 2019 Institute for Global Engagement. Religion is a major cultural, social, political, and economic factor in many official development assistance (ODA) recipient countries. After decades of being ignored by global development processes, greater portions of development aid are now channeled via faith-based organizations, and religion is increasingly recognized as a human resource rather than just an obstacle to development. This essay explores the role that faith actors are playing in the Sustainable Development Goals process. It is based upon findings from a research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)—“Keeping Faith in 2030: Religions and the SDGs.”.AHR

Disentangling astroglial physiology with a realistic cell model in silico

Electrically non-excitable astroglia take up neurotransmitters, buffer extracellular K+ and generate Ca2+ signals that release molecular regulators of neural circuitry. The underlying machinery remains enigmatic, mainly because the sponge-like astrocyte morphology has been difficult to access experimentally or explore theoretically. Here, we systematically incorporate multi-scale, tri-dimensional astroglial architecture into a realistic multi-compartmental cell model, which we constrain by empirical tests and integrate into the NEURON computational biophysical environment. This approach is implemented as a flexible astrocyte-model builder ASTRO. As a proof-of-concept, we explore an in silico astrocyte to evaluate basic cell physiology features inaccessible experimentally. Our simulations suggest that currents generated by glutamate transporters or K+ channels have negligible distant effects on membrane voltage and that individual astrocytes can successfully handle extracellular K+ hotspots. We show how intracellular Ca2+ buffers affect Ca2+ waves and why the classical Ca2+ sparks-and-puffs mechanism is theoretically compatible with common readouts of astroglial Ca2+ imaging

Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy of the binding of nucleotide excision repair protein XPC-hHr23B with DNA substrates

The interaction of the nucleotide excision repair (NER) protein dimeric complex XPC-hHR23B, which is implicated in the DNA damage recognition step, with three Cy3.5 labeled 90-bp double-stranded DNA substrates (unmodified, with a central unpaired region, and cholesterol modified) and a 90-mer single-strand DNA was investigated in solution by fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. Autocorrelation functions obtained in the presence of an excess of protein show larger diffusion times (τ d) than for free DNA, indicating the presence of DNA-protein bound complexes. The fraction of DNA bound (θ), as a way to describe the percentage of protein bound to DNA, was directly estimated from FCS data. A significantly stronger binding capability for the cholesterol modified substrate (78% DNA bound) than for other double-stranded DNA substrates was observed, while the lowest affinity was found for the single-stranded DNA (27%). This is in accordance with a damage recognition role of the XPC protein. The similar affinity of XPC for undamaged and 'bubble' DNA sub