Eliminating fuzzy duplicates in crowdsourced lexical resources

Collaboratively created lexical resources is a trending approach to creating high quality thesauri in a short time span at a remarkably low price. The key idea is to invite non-expert participants to express and share their knowledge with the aim of constructing a resource. However, this approach tends to be noisy and error-prone, thus making data cleansing a highly topical task to perform. In this paper, we study different techniques for synset deduplication including machine- and crowd-based ones. Eventually, we put forward an approach that can solve the deduplication problem fully automatically, with the quality comparable to the expert-based approach

YARN : spinning-in-progress

YARN (Yet Another RussNet), a project started in 2013, aims at creating a large open WordNet-like thesaurus for Russian by means of crowdsourcing. The first stage of the project was to create noun synsets. Currently, the resource comprises 100K+ word entries and 46K+ synsets. More than 200 people have taken part in assembling synsets throughout the project. The paper describes the linguistic, technical, and organizational principles of the project, as well as the evaluation results, lessons learned, and the future plans

Lipidni profil u novorođenčadi niske porođajne mase

The aim of the study was to assess lipid metabolism in premature infants to identify common patterns depending on birth weight. The levels of cholesterol, triglycerides, high- and low-density lipoproteins were determined in 173 infants with moderately low birth weight, very low birth weight and extremely low birth weight, including infants with intrauterine growth restriction, each weight category recorded during the neonatal period. The study showed that extremely low birth weight newborns with intrauterine growth restriction and very low birth weight newborns had significantly lower levels of lipid profile than infants with moderately low birth weight. It is necessary to expand the study of methods for correcting lipid spectrum in low birth weight infants for rehabilitation of low birth weight infants.Cilj istraživanja bio je procijeniti metabolizam lipida u nedonoščadi kako bi se utvrdili češći uzorci ovisno o porođajnoj masi. Razine kolesterola, triglicerida, lipoproteina niske i visoke gustoće mjerene su u 173 novorođenčadi umjereno niske, vrlo niske i iznimno niske porođajne mase, uključujući novorođenčad s intrauterinim zastojem rasta, a svaka se težinska kategorija bilježila tijekom neonatalnog razdoblja. Istraživanje je pokazalo da novorođenčad iznimno niske porođajne mase s intrauterinim zastojem rasta i novorođenčad vrlo niske porođajne mase ima značajno niže razine lipidnog profila nego novorođenčad umjereno niske porođajne mase. Potrebno je proširiti istraživanje metoda za ispravljanje lipidnog spektra kod novorođenčadi niske porođajne mase radi njihove rehabilitacije

Protective Allele for Multiple Sclerosis HLA-DRB1*01:01 Provides Kinetic Discrimination of Myelin and Exogenous Antigenic Peptides.

Risk of the development of multiple sclerosis (MS) is known to be increased in individuals bearing distinct class II human leukocyte antigen (HLA) variants, whereas some of them may have a protective effect. Here we analyzed distribution of a highly polymorphous HLA-DRB1 locus in more than one thousand relapsing-remitting MS patients and healthy individuals of Russian ethnicity. Carriage of HLA-DRB1*15 and HLA-DRB1*03 alleles was associated with MS risk, whereas carriage of HLA-DRB1*01 and HLA-DRB1*11 was found to be protective. Analysis of genotypes revealed the compensatory effect of risk and resistance alleles in trans. We have identified previously unknown MBP153−161 peptide located at the C-terminus of MBP protein and MBP90−98 peptide that bound to recombinant HLA-DRB1*01:01 protein with affinity comparable to that of classical antigenic peptide 306-318 from the hemagglutinin (HA) of the influenza virus demonstrating the ability of HLA-DRB1*01:01 to present newly identified MBP153−161 and MBP90−98 peptides. Measurements of kinetic parameters of MBP and HA peptides binding to HLA-DRB1*01:01 catalyzed by HLA-DM revealed a significantly lower rate of CLIP exchange for MBP153−161 and MBP90−98 peptides as opposed to HA peptide. Analysis of the binding of chimeric MBP-HA peptides demonstrated that the observed difference between MBP153−161, MBP90−98, and HA peptide epitopes is caused by the lack of anchor residues in the C-terminal part of the MBP peptides resulting in a moderate occupation of P6/7 and P9 pockets of HLA-DRB1*01:01 by MBP153−161 and MBP90−98 peptides in contrast to HA308−316 peptide. This leads to the P1 and P4 docking failure and rapid peptide dissociation and release of empty HLA-DM–HLA-DR complex. We would like to propose that protective properties of the HLA-DRB1*01 allele could be directly linked to the ability of HLA-DRB1*01:01 to kinetically discriminate between antigenic exogenous peptides and endogenous MBP derived peptides

Some universal trends of the Mie(n,m) fluid thermodynamics

By using canonical Monte Carlo simulation, the liquid-vapor phase diagram, surface tension, interface width, and pressure for the Mie(n,m) model fluids are calculated for six pairs of parameters $m$ and $n$. It is shown that after certain re-scaling of fluid density the corresponding states rule can be applied for the calculations of the thermodynamic properties of the Mie model fluids, and for some real substancesComment: 4 figure

High-bit rate ultra-compact light routing with mode-selective on-chip nanoantennas

Optical nanoantennas provide a promising pathway toward advanced manipulation of light waves, such as directional scattering, polarization conversion, and fluorescence enhancement. Although these functionalities were mainly studied for nanoantennas in free space or on homogeneous substrates, their integration with optical waveguides offers an important "wired" connection to other functional optical components. Taking advantage of the nanoantenna's versatility and unrivaled compactness, their imprinting onto optical waveguides would enable a marked enhancement of design freedom and integration density for optical on-chip devices. Several examples of this concept have been demonstrated recently. However, the important question of whether nanoantennas can fulfill functionalities for high-bit rate signal transmission without degradation, which is the core purpose of many integrated optical applications, has not yet been experimentally investigated. We introduce and investigate directional, polarization-selective, and mode-selective on-chip nanoantennas integrated with a silicon rib waveguide. We demonstrate that these nanoantennas can separate optical signals with different polarizations by coupling the different polarizations of light vertically to different waveguide modes propagating into opposite directions. As the central result of this work, we show the suitability of this concept for the control of optical signals with ASK (amplitude-shift keying) NRZ (nonreturn to zero) modulation [10 Gigabit/s (Gb/s)] without significant bit error rate impairments. Our results demonstrate that waveguide-integrated nanoantennas have the potential to be used as ultra-compact polarization-demultiplexing on-chip devices for high-bit rate telecommunication applications.The authors acknowledge support from the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF) Australian Capital Territory node; the Australian Research Council through Centres of Excellence, Discovery Project, Future Fellowship, and DECRA Fellowship grants; the Thuringian State Government within its ProExcellence initiative (ACP2020–Agenda für exzellente Photonik); the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FKZ 03ZZ0434 and FKZ 03ZZ0418); the German Research Foundation (NanoGuide); and the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD (PPP program project 57318571). The authors acknowledge funding from ARC Centre of Excellence CUDOS (Centre for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems)

Agrobacterium tumefaciens-Induced Bacteraemia Does Not Lead to Reporter Gene Expression in Mouse Organs

Agrobacterium tumefaciens is the main plant biotechnology gene transfer tool with host range which can be extended to non-plant eukaryotic organisms under laboratory conditions. Known medical cases of Agrobacterium species isolation from bloodstream infections necessitate the assessment of biosafety-related risks of A. tumefaciens encounters with mammalian organisms. Here, we studied the survival of A. tumefaciens in bloodstream of mice injected with bacterial cultures. Bacterial titers of 108 CFU were detected in the blood of the injected animals up to two weeks after intravenous injection. Agrobacteria carrying Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) 35S promoter-based constructs and isolated from the injected mice retained their capacity to promote green fluorescent protein (GFP) synthesis in Nicotiana benthamiana leaves. To examine whether or not the injected agrobacteria are able to express in mouse organs, we used an intron-containing GFP (GFPi) reporter driven either by a cytomegalovirus (CMV) promoter or by a CaMV 35S promoter. Western and northern blot analyses as well as RT-PCR analysis of liver, spleen and lung of mice injected with A. tumefaciens detected neither GFP protein nor its transcripts. Thus, bacteraemia induced in mice by A. tumefaciens does not lead to detectible levels of genetic transformation of mouse organs

Coulomb dissociation of O-16 into He-4 and C-12

We measured the Coulomb dissociation of O-16 into He-4 and C-12 within the FAIR Phase-0 program at GSI Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung Darmstadt, Germany. From this we will extract the photon dissociation cross section O-16(alpha,gamma)C-12, which is the time reversed reaction to C-12(alpha,gamma)O-16. With this indirect method, we aim to improve on the accuracy of the experimental data at lower energies than measured so far. The expected low cross section for the Coulomb dissociation reaction and close magnetic rigidity of beam and fragments demand a high precision measurement. Hence, new detector systems were built and radical changes to the (RB)-B-3 setup were necessary to cope with the high-intensity O-16 beam. All tracking detectors were designed to let the unreacted O-16 ions pass, while detecting the C-12 and He-4

Screening ethnically diverse human embryonic stem cells identifies a chromosome 20 minimal amplicon conferring growth advantage

The International Stem Cell Initiative analyzed 125 human embryonic stem (ES) cell lines and 11 induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines, from 38 laboratories worldwide, for genetic changes occurring during culture. Most lines were analyzed at an early and late passage. Single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis revealed that they included representatives of most major ethnic groups. Most lines remained karyotypically normal, but there was a progressive tendency to acquire changes on prolonged culture, commonly affecting chromosomes 1, 12, 17 and 20. DNA methylation patterns changed haphazardly with no link to time in culture. Structural variants, determined from the SNP arrays, also appeared sporadically. No common variants related to culture were observed on chromosomes 1, 12 and 17, but a minimal amplicon in chromosome 20q11.21, including three genes expressed in human ES cells, ID1, BCL2L1 and HM13, occurred in >20% of the lines. Of these genes, BCL2L1 is a strong candidate for driving culture adaptation of ES cells