Pre-fabrication for providing biocapacity to support vaccine manufacturing

The industry landscape is evolving rapidly and requires new and innovative approaches for more rapidly addressing the growing global demand for drug products as well as the challenges of unpredictability and inflexibility that have historically burdened the industry. Over the past two years, the industry’s herculean response to the COVID-19 pandemic has proven that with the proper focus, investment, science, and manufacturing technologies, these historic challenges can be overcome as well as establishing new benchmarks for how the industry can perform in the future to ensure availability of drug products and therapies to the global patient base Prefabricated modular construction of cleanrooms, utilities, and facility structures, is an innovative approach to building new manufacturing facilities that the industry has benefited from and is currently being utilised in critical COVID related projects. Prefabricated and modular facilities have been utilized in many industries such as food, chemical, and consumer products in the past, and have started to see significant adoption within the pharma and biopharma industries over the past ten years. This has largely been driven by the need to reduce project timelines, improve capability and flexibility, and minimize the risks associated with traditional construction for manufacturing facilities. It has helped as well to make Biopharma manufacturing more accessible to emerging regions, where in the past biomanufacturing was too complex to establish. Please click Download on the upper right corner to see the full abstract

A Pure Java Parallel Flow Solver

In this paper an overview is given on the "Have Java" project to attain a pure Java parallel Navier-Stokes flow solver (JParNSS) based on the thread concept and remote method invocation (RMI). The goal of this project is to produce an industrial flow solver running on an arbitrary sequential or parallel architecture, utilizing the Internet, capable of handling the most complex 3D geometries as well as flow physics, and also linking to codes in other areas such as aeroelasticity etc. Since Java is completely object-oriented the code has been written in an object-oriented programming (OOP) style. The code also includes a graphics user interface (GUI) as well as an interactive steering package for the parallel architecture. The Java OOP approach provides profoundly improved software productivity, robustness, and security as well as reusability and maintainability. OOP allows code construction similar to the aerodynamic design process because objects can be software coded and integrated, reflecting actual design procedures. In addition, Java is the programming language of the Internet and thus Java is the programming language of the Internet and thus Java objects on disparate machines or even separate networks can be connected. We explain the motivation for the design of JParNSS along with its capabilities that set it apart from other solvers. In the first two sections we present a discussion of the Java language as the programming tool for aerospace applications. In section three the objectives of the Have Java project are presented. In the next section the layer structures of JParNSS are discussed with emphasis on the parallelization and client-server (RMI) layers. JParNSS, like its predecessor ParNSS (ANSI-C), is based on the multiblock idea, and allows for arbitrarily complex topologies. Grids are accepted in GridPro property settings, grids of any size or block number can be directly read by JParNSS without any further modifications, requiring no additional preparation time for the solver input. In the last section, computational results are presented, with emphasis on multiprocessor Pentium and Sun parallel systems run by the Solaris operating system (OS)

Adversarial Smoothed Analysis

The purpose of this note is to extend the results on uniform smoothed analysis of condition numbers from \cite{BuCuLo:07} to the case where the perturbation follows a radially symmetric probability distribution. In particular, we will show that the bounds derived in \cite{BuCuLo:07} still hold in the case of distributions whose density has a singularity at the center of the perturbation, which we call {\em adversarial}.Comment: 8 page

A Multilingual Simplified Language News Corpus

Simplified language news articles are being offered by specialized web portals in several countries. The thousands of articles that have been published over the years are a valuable resource for natural language processing, especially for efforts towards automatic text simplification. In this paper, we present SNIML, a large multilingual corpus of news in simplified language. The corpus contains 13k simplified news articles written in one of six languages: Finnish, French, Italian, Swedish, English, and German. All articles are shared under open licenses that permit academic use. The level of text simplification varies depending on the news portal. We believe that even though SNIML is not a parallel corpus, it can be useful as a complement to the more homogeneous but often smaller corpora of news in the simplified variety of one language that are currently in use

Visualizing genotype × phenotype relationships in the GAW15 simulated data

We have developed a graphical display tool called SIMLAPLOT for visualizing different ways in which continuous covariates may influence the genotype-specific risk for complex human diseases. The purpose of our study was to examine continuous covariates in the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 simulated data set using our novel graphical display tool, with knowledge of the answers. The generated plots provide information about genetic models for the simulated continuous covariates and may help identify the single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the underlying quantitative trait loci

A new Eumerus hoverfly (Diptera: Syrphidae) from Namibia and South Africa, with notes on similar species

Within the pollinator family Syrphidae, Eumerus Meigen, 1822 is a diverse genus with over 70 species recorded in the Afrotropical Region. A new species is described here from Namibia and South Africa. Adults are small to medium size flies, with spur-like expansions in the metatarsomeres 2 and 3. DNA sequences of the Cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene were obtained from Namibian specimens. This is only the second Eumerus species documented from Namibia, where it was recorded from The National Botanic Garden, Windhoek. The new species is compared with similar species such as Eumerus vestitus Bezzi, 1912, for which a lectotype is designated. In addition, a new and preliminary morphological concept of the Eumerus obliquus group is proposed and a key to its African species is provided.Antonio Ricarte’s position (Ref. UATAL05) at the University of Alicante is funded by the ‘Vicerrectorado de Investigación y Transferencia de Conocimiento’. This study belongs to Project PGC2018-095851-A-C65 of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities

What do Eumerus Meigen larvae feed on? New immature stages of three species (Diptera: Syrphidae) breeding in different plants

The genus Eumerus Meigen 1822 (Diptera: Syrphidae) is widely distributed in the Old World, though recently introduced into America, and their larvae feed on decaying vegetal material and/or inside underground storage organs of many plants, sometimes generating economic losses as pests. However, little is known about Eumerus larval cycles and their interactions with host plants. Here, immatures of three Eumerus species from different continents are described, noting their feeding habits and host plants. Larvae of Eumerus figurans Walker 1859 were obtained from Hawaiian cultured ginger roots; puparium of Eumerus alpinus Rondani 1857 originated from larvae collected in Asphodelus ramosus L. in France; puparia of Eumerus superbus Shannon 1927 were reared from larvae found in two Zamiaceae species from Australia. Mitochondrial COI sequences served for diagnosing E. figurans larvae. Optical and scanning electron microscopy were used to describe body features, head skeletons, anterior spiracles, pupal spiracles, and posterior respiratory processes. Overall, E. alpinus resembles E. nudus Loew 1848 immatures. Eumerus superbus has a remarkable morphology among all described immatures of the genus, being the only Eumerus reported from gymnosperms. Head skeleton of E. figurans suggests this species is a filtering one. Present findings show that larvae of Eumerus can be separated at the species level and that this genus is polyphagous, feeding on a wide range of plant tissues and taxa, including commercial species. This study emphasizes immature stages and breeding sites as important means to understand species life cycles and the interactions with their host plants and ecosystems.This study is part of Gabriel J. Souba-Dols’ PhD thesis. His position at the University of Alicante (FPU-UA 2016), as well as that of Antonio Ricarte (Ref. UATAL05), are funded by the “Vicerrectorado de Investigación y Transferencia del Conocimiento.” Additionally, this research was partly funded by the Project PGC2018-095851-A-C65 of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities

Migration of Interplanetary Dust

We numerically investigate the migration of dust particles with initial orbits close to those of the numbered asteroids, observed trans-Neptunian objects, and Comet Encke. The fraction of silicate asteroidal particles that collided with the Earth during their lifetime varied from 1.1% for 100 micron particles to 0.008% for 1 micron particles. Almost all asteroidal particles with diameter d>4 microns collided with the Sun. The peaks in the migrating asteroidal dust particles' semi-major axis distribution at the n:(n+1) resonances with Earth and Venus and the gaps associated with the 1:1 resonances with these planets are more pronounced for larger particles. The probability of collisions of cometary particles with the Earth is smaller than for asteroidal particles, and this difference is greater for larger particles.Comment: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 15 pages, 8 Figures, submitte