Thermal Conversion of Guanylurea Dicyanamide into Graphitic Carbon Nitride via Prototype CNx Precursors

Guanylurea dicyanamide, [(H2N)C(-O)NHC(NH2)2][N(CN)2], has been synthesized by ion exchange reaction in aqueous solution and structurally characterized by single-crystal X-ray diffraction (C2/c, a = 2249.0(5) pm, b = 483.9(1) pm, c = 1382.4(3) pm, β = 99.49(3)°, V = 1483.8(5) × 106 pm3, T = 130 K). The thermal behavior of the molecular salt has been studied by thermal analysis, temperature-programmed X-ray powder diffraction, FTIR spectroscopy, and mass spectrometry between room temperature and 823 K. The results were interpreted on a molecular level in terms of a sequence of thermally induced addition, cyclization, and elimination reactions. As a consequence, melamine (2,4,6-triamino-1,3,5-triazine) is formed with concomitant loss of HNCO. Further condensation of melamine yields the prototypic CNx precursor melem (2,6,10-triamino-s-heptazine, C6N7(NH2)3), which alongside varying amounts of directly formed CNxHy material transforms into layered CNxHy phases without significant integration of oxygen into the core framework owing to the evaporation of HNCO. Thus, further evidence can be added to melamine and its condensation product melem acting as “key intermediates” in the synthetic pathway toward graphitic CNxHy materials, whose exact constitution is still a point at issue. Due to the characteristic formation process and hydrogen content a close relationship with the polymer melon is evident. In particular, the thermal transformation of guanylurea dicyanamide clearly demonstrates that the formation of volatile compounds such as HNCO during thermal decomposition may render a large variety of previously not considered molecular compounds suitable CNx precursors despite the presence of oxygen in the starting material

Züchterische Bearbeitung von Süßlupinen für den ökologischen Landbau - Variabilität wichtiger Inhaltsstoffe in Abhängigkeit vom Standort -

Lupines are used as protein-rich feeding stuff with high quality for the organic farming. Therefore important quality parameters are estimated in different cultivars and breed-ing lines of blue lupins in relation to location. Protein content, amino acid composition, fat and fatty acid composition, as well as antinutritive substances (raffinose oligosac-charides and alkaloids) were often more different between locations than cultivars. The reason for differences in content and composition of the ingredients is caused probably by diverse environmental conditions especially soil acidity (pH-value)

Clinical results of resection arthrodesis by triangular external fixation for posttraumatic arthrosis of the ankle joint in 89 cases

The methods for ankle arthrodesis differ significantly, probably a sign that no method is clearly superior to others. In the last ten years there is a clear favour toward internal fixation. We retrospectively evaluate the technique and evaluate the clinical long term results of external fixation in a triangular frame

Auditory and Visual Integration for Emotion Recognition and Compensation for Degraded Signals are Preserved With Age

Since emotion recognition involves integration of the visual and auditory signals, it is likely that sensory impairments worsen emotion recognition. In emotion recognition, young adults can compensate for unimodal sensory degradations if the other modality is intact. However, most sensory impairments occur in the elderly population and it is unknown whether older adults are similarly capable of compensating for signal degradations. As a step towards studying potential effects of real sensory impairments, this study examined how degraded signals affect emotion recognition in older adults with normal hearing and vision. The degradations were designed to approximate some aspects of sensory impairments. Besides emotion recognition accuracy, we recorded eye movements to capture perceptual strategies for emotion recognition. Overall, older adults were as good as younger adults at integrating auditory and visual information and at compensating for degraded signals. However, accuracy was lower overall for older adults, indicating that aging leads to a general decrease in emotion recognition. In addition to decreased accuracy, older adults showed smaller adaptations of perceptual strategies in response to video degradations. Concluding, this study showed that emotion recognition declines with age, but that integration and compensation abilities are retained. In addition, we speculate that the reduced ability of older adults to adapt their perceptual strategies may be related to the increased time it takes them to direct their attention to scene aspects that are relatively far away from fixation

Degraded visual and auditory input individually impair audiovisual emotion recognition from speech-like stimuli, but no evidence for an exacerbated effect from combined degradation

Emotion recognition requires optimal integration of the multisensory signals from vision and hearing. A sensory loss in either or both modalities can lead to changes in integration and related perceptual strategies. To investigate potential acute effects of combined impairments due to sensory information loss only, we degraded the visual and auditory information in audiovisual video-recordings, and presented these to a group of healthy young volunteers. These degradations intended to approximate some aspects of vision and hearing impairment in simulation. Other aspects, related to advanced age, potential health issues, but also long-term adaptation and cognitive compensation strategies, were not included in the simulations. Besides accuracy of emotion recognition, eye movements were recorded to capture perceptual strategies. Our data show that emotion recognition performance decreases when degraded visual and auditory information are presented in isolation, but simultaneously degrading both modalities does not exacerbate these isolated effects. Moreover, degrading the visual information strongly impacts recognition performance and on viewing behavior. In contrast, degrading auditory information alongside normal or degraded video had little (additional) effect on performance or gaze. Nevertheless, our results hold promise for visually impaired individuals, because the addition of any audio to any video greatly facilitates performance, even though adding audio does not completely compensate for the negative effects of video degradation. Additionally, observers modified their viewing behavior to degraded video in order to maximize their performance. Therefore, optimizing the hearing of visually impaired individuals and teaching them such optimized viewing behavior could be worthwhile endeavors for improving emotion recognition

Prion type 2 selection in sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease affecting peripheral ganglia

In sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (sCJD), the pathological changes appear to be restricted to the central nervous system. Only involvement of the trigeminal ganglion is widely accepted. The present study systematically examined the involvement of peripheral ganglia in sCJD utilizing the currently most sensitive technique for detecting prions in tissue morphologically. The trigeminal, nodose, stellate, and celiac ganglia, as well as ganglia of the cervical, thoracic and lumbar sympathetic trunk of 40 patients were analyzed with the paraffin-embedded tissue (PET)-blot method. Apart from the trigeminal ganglion, which contained protein aggregates in five of 19 prion type 1 patients, evidence of prion protein aggregation was only found in patients associated with type 2 prions. With the PET-blot, aggregates of prion protein type 2 were found in all trigeminal (17/17), in some nodose (5 of 7) and thoracic (3 of 6) ganglia, as well as in a few celiac (4 of 19) and lumbar (1 of 5) ganglia of sCJD patients. Whereas aggregates of both prion types may spread to dorsal root ganglia, more CNS-distant ganglia seem to be only involved in patients accumulating prion type 2. Whether the prion type association is due to selection by prion type-dependent replication, or due to a prion type-dependent property of axonal spread remains to be resolved in further studies

The robustness of speech representations obtained from simulated auditory nerve fibers under different noise conditions

Different methods of extracting speech features from an auditory model were systematically investigated in terms of their robustness to different noises. The methods either computed the average firing rate within frequency channels (spectral features) or inter-spike-intervals (timing features) from the simulated auditory nerve response. When used as the front-end for an automatic speech recognizer, timing features outperformed spectral features in Gaussian noise. However, this advantage was lost in babble, because timing features extracted the spectro-temporal structure of babble noise, which is similar to the target speaker. This suggests that different feature extraction methods are optimal depending on the background noise

Development of an Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) for the Quantification of ARID1A in Tissue Lysates

ARID1A is a subunit of the mammalian SWI/SNF complex, which is thought to regulate gene expression through restructuring chromatin structures. Its gene ARID1A is frequently mutated and ARID1A levels are lowered in several human cancers, especially gynecologic ones. A functional ARID1A loss may have prognostic or predictive value in terms of therapeutic strategies but has not been proposed based on a quantitative method. Hardly any literature is available on ARID1A levels in tumor samples. We developed an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for ARID1A based on the current EMA and FDA criteria. We demonstrated that our ELISA provides the objective, accurate, and precise quantification of ARID1A concentrations in recombinant protein solutions, cell culture standards, and tissue lysates of tumors. A standard curve analysis yielded a ‘goodness of fit’ of R2 = 0.99. Standards measured on several plates and days achieved an inter-assay accuracy of 90.26% and an inter-assay precision with a coefficient of variation of 4.53%. When tumor lysates were prepared and measured multiple times, our method had an inter-assay precision with a coefficient of variation of 11.78%. We believe that our suggested method ensures a high reproducibility and can be used for a high sample throughput to determine the ARID1A concentration in different tumor entities. The application of our ELISA on various tumor and control tissues will allow us to explore whether quantitative ARID1A measurements in tumor samples are of predictive value