FirstLight: Pluggable Optical Interconnect Technologies for Polymeric Electro-Optical Printed Circuit Boards in Data Centers

The protocol data rate governing data storage devices will increase to over 12 Gb/s by 2013 thereby imposing unmanageable cost and performance burdens on future digital data storage systems. The resulting performance bottleneck can be substantially reduced by conveying high-speed data optically instead of electronically. A novel active pluggable 82.5 Gb/s aggregate bit rate optical connector technology, the design and fabrication of a compact electro-optical printed circuit board to meet exacting specifications, and a method for low cost, high precision, passive optical assembly are presented. A demonstration platform was constructed to assess the viability of embedded electro-optical midplane technology in such systems including the first ever demonstration of a pluggable active optical waveguide printed circuit board connector. High-speed optical data transfer at 10.3125 Gb/s was demonstrated through a complex polymer waveguide interconnect layer embedded into a 262 mm × 240 mm × 4.3 mm electro-optical midplane. Bit error rates of less than 10-12 and optical losses as low as 6 dB were demonstrated through nine multimode polymer wave guides with an aggregate data bandwidth of 92.8125 Gb/s

Progress in the Development of the 1 m Model of the 70 mm Aperture Quadrupole for the LHC Low-β\beta Insertions

Within the LHC magnet development program Oxford Instruments has built a one metre model of the 70 mm aperture low-beta quadrupole. The magnet features a four layer coil wound from two 8.2 mm wide graded NbTi cables, and is designed for 250 T/m at 1.9 K. The magnet has previously been tested between 4.5 K and 2.3 K. In this paper we review the magnet rebuild and the subsequent tests. Results on magnet training at 4.3 K and 1.9 K are presented along with the results related to quench protection studies.

Colossal magnetocapacitance and scale-invariant dielectric response in phase-separated manganites

Thin films of strongly-correlated electron materials (SCEM) are often grown epitaxially on planar substrates and typically have anisotropic properties that are usually not captured by edge-mounted four-terminal electrical measurements, which are primarily sensitive to in-plane conduction paths. Accordingly, the correlated interactions in the out-of-plane (perpendicular) direction cannot be measured but only inferred. We address this shortcoming and show here an experimental technique in which the SCEM under study, in our case a 600 Angstrom-thick (La1-yPry)0.67Ca0.33MnO3 (LPCMO) film, serves as the base electrode in a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) trilayer capacitor structure. This unconventional arrangement allows for simultaneous determination of colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) associated with dc transport parallel to the film substrate and colossal magnetocapacitance (CMC) associated with ac transport in the perpendicular direction. We distinguish two distinct strain-related direction-dependent insulator-metal (IM) transitions and use Cole-Cole plots to establish a heretofore unobserved collapse of the dielectric response onto a universal scale-invariant power-law dependence over a large range of frequency, temperature and magnetic field.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figures, Supplementary section included, Submitted to Nature Physic

Quench Performance and Field Quality Measurements of the First LHC low-β\beta Quadrupole Model

As part of the LHC magnet development program, CERN in collaboration with Oxford Instruments has designed, built and tested a one metre model of a 70 mm aperture low-beta quadrupole. The magnet features a four layer coil, and is designed for 250 T/m at 1.9 K. We review the results of the magnet training and quench propagation studies performed at 4.3 K and 1.9 K, and report on the magnetic field measurements

The CALBC Silver Standard Corpus for Biomedical Named Entities - A Study in Harmonizing the Contributions from Four Independent Named Entity Taggers

The production of gold standard corpora is time-consuming and costly. We propose an alternative: the 'silver standard corpus' (SSC), a corpus that has been generated by the harmonisation of the annotations that have been delivered from a selection of annotation systems. The systems have to share the type system for the annotations and the harmonisation solution has use a suitable similarity measure for the pair-wise comparison of the annotations. The annotation systems have been evaluated against the harmonised set (630.324 sentences, 15, 956, 841 tokens). We can demonstrate that the annotation of proteins and genes shows higher diversity across all used annotation solutions leading to a lower agreement against the harmonised set in comparison to the annotations of diseases and species. An analysis of the most frequent annotations from all systems shows that a high agreement amongst systems leads to the selection of terms that are suitable to be kept in the harmonised set. This is the first large-scale approach to generate an annotated corpus from automated annotation systems. Further research is required to understand, how the annotations from different systems have to be combined to produce the best annotation result for a harmonised corpus

Brain iron accumulation affects myelin-related molecular systems implicated in a rare neurogenetic disease family with neuropsychiatric features

The ‘neurodegeneration with brain iron accumulation’ (NBIA) disease family entails movement or cognitive impairment, often with psychiatric features. To understand how iron loading affects the brain, we studied mice with disruption of two iron regulatory genes, hemochromatosis (Hfe) and transferrin receptor 2 (Tfr2). Inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy demonstrated increased iron in the Hfe-/- × Tfr2mut brain (P=0.002, n =5/group), primarily localized by Perls’ staining to myelinated structures. Western immunoblotting showed increases of the iron storage protein ferritin light polypeptide and microarray and real-time reverse transcription-PCR revealed decreased transcript levels (P<0.04, n =5/group) for five other NBIA genes, phospholipase A2 group VI, fatty acid 2-hydroxylase, ceruloplasmin, chromosome 19 open reading frame 12 and ATPase type 13A2. Apart from the ferroxidase ceruloplasmin, all are involved in myelin homeostasis; 16 other myelin-related genes also showed reduced expression (P<0.05), although gross myelin structure and integrity appear unaffected (P>0.05). Overlap (P<0.0001) of differentially expressed genes in Hfe-/- × Tfr2mut brain with human gene co-expression networks suggests iron loading influences expression of NBIA-related and myelin-related genes co-expressed in normal human basal ganglia. There was overlap (P<0.0001) of genes differentially expressed in Hfe-/- × Tfr2mut brain and post-mortem NBIA basal ganglia. Hfe-/- × Tfr2mut mice were hyperactive (P<0.0112) without apparent cognitive impairment by IntelliCage testing (P>0.05). These results implicate myelin-related systems involved in NBIA neuropathogenesis in early responses to iron loading. This may contribute to behavioral symptoms in NBIA and hemochromatosis and is relevant to patients with abnormal iron status and psychiatric disorders involving myelin abnormalities or resistant to conventional treatments

An ontology-based search engine for protein-protein interactions

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Keyword matching or ID matching is the most common searching method in a large database of protein-protein interactions. They are purely syntactic methods, and retrieve the records in the database that contain a keyword or ID specified in a query. Such syntactic search methods often retrieve too few search results or no results despite many potential matches present in the database.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have developed a new method for representing protein-protein interactions and the Gene Ontology (GO) using modified Gödel numbers. This representation is hidden from users but enables a search engine using the representation to efficiently search protein-protein interactions in a biologically meaningful way. Given a query protein with optional search conditions expressed in one or more GO terms, the search engine finds all the interaction partners of the query protein by unique prime factorization of the modified Gödel numbers representing the query protein and the search conditions.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Representing the biological relations of proteins and their GO annotations by modified Gödel numbers makes a search engine efficiently find all protein-protein interactions by prime factorization of the numbers. Keyword matching or ID matching search methods often miss the interactions involving a protein that has no explicit annotations matching the search condition, but our search engine retrieves such interactions as well if they satisfy the search condition with a more specific term in the ontology.</p

Double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of mifepristone on cognition and depression in alcohol dependence

Background: Alcohol dependence is a significant issue contributing to disease burden. Changes in cortisol concentrations during alcohol withdrawal are associated with cognitive deficits and symptoms of depression. Current treatments are only successful for a small proportion of people and do not target cognitive deficits and symptoms of depression experienced by those who are alcohol dependent. The aim of this research is to determine the potential efficacy of mifepristone, a type II glucocorticoid receptor antagonist, to prevent symptoms of depression and cognitive deficits following alcohol detoxification. Methods: This was a phase 2 therapeutic use trial. It was a double-blind randomised controlled clinical trial of mifepristone versus inactive placebo treatment. The trial aimed to recruit 120 participants who met the inclusion criteria: (1) male, (2) aged 18-60 years inclusive, and (3) alcohol dependent for 5 or more years. Participants were randomised to 600 mg a day mifepristone (200 mg morning, afternoon, and evening) for 7 days and 400 mg for the subsequent 7 days (200 mg morning and evening) or the equivalent number of placebo tablets for 14 days. Primary outcome measures were cognitive function (measured using the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB)) and symptoms of depression (measured using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI)) at 4 weeks post-randomisation. Results: Difficulties recruiting participants due to significant changes in the provision of inpatient care for alcohol dependence resulted in only 27 participants recruited to the trial, with data available for 21 participants. Fourteen participants were randomised to receive mifepristone and 13 to receive placebo. Conclusion: Larger trials would be needed to draw conclusions about the efficacy of mifepristone