Optical monitoring of gamma-ray source fields

The three gamma-ray burst source fields GBS1028+46, GBS1205+24, and GBS2252-03 have been monitored for transient optical emission for a combined total of 52 hours. No optical events were seen. The limiting magnitude for the search was M sub V = 15.8 longer and M sub V = 17.0 for 6.0 s or longer

ON THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CATALYTIC ACTIVITY AND MORPHOLOGY OF THE METALLIC PHASE IN CATALYSTS PREPARED BY CHEMISORPTION-HYDROLYSIS

Chemisorption\u2013hydrolysis (CH) represents a fruitful preparation method, as it combines the simplicity of impregnation techniques, both in terms of handiness and cheapness, with the high metal dispersion obtained by anchoring techniques. In this work different Cu, Co and Co-Cu catalysts were prepared by CH. The characterization of CH copper silica materials agree on the formation of finely dispersed phase of CuO, easily reducible to metal copper at any copper loading. In particular CH method allows to keep a great dispersion obtaining very small copper particles also to an higher metal loading (up to 15%). Moreover CH offers the possibility to tune the nature of the copper phase using different supports during catalyst preparation. In fact, if on SiO2 small and well-dispersed and easily reducible CuO particles are formed either at low and high metal loading, whereas on SiO2-Al2O3 the nature of Cu species depends on the copper amount: up to about 5 wt% only hardly reducible Cu\u3b4+ (+1 64 \u3b4 64 +2) is formed on the catalyst, while after this loading a CuO phase easy reducible to well formed Cu (0) begins to form on the surface. Copper CH catalysts were tested in the direct epoxidation of propene with O2. Catalysts exposing only metallic copper (thus silica based ones) were those that revealed the best activity: Cu (0) appears to be the active site for the reaction. Copper catalyst are well known to catalyze hydrogenation reaction, moreover Zaccheria et al. reported a bifunctional process of etherification starting from 4-methoxyacetophenone in presence of 2-propanol. Two steps are involved in the process: the hydrogenation of ketone to the alcohol and the subsequent acid reaction with 2-propanol and 1-(4-methoxyphenyl)ethanol to give the corresponding ether. The structure sensitivity of these two separate reactions was studied on 8.5 and 15 wt% reduced Cu/SiO2 Chrom CH catalysts. The results indicates that both the reactions depend on terrace atoms. Also well dispersed Co/SiO2 and CO-Cu/SiO2 catalysts were successfully prepared with a modified CH method. A Co (II) hardy reducible phase was generated on Co/SiO2, while on the bimetallic materials more easily reducible Co species were formed. Catalytic experiments on methanol decomposition indicate that Co-Cu/SiO2 catalysts show higher CH3OH conversion and higher CO selectivity compared to single Co and Cu catalysts with the same total amount of metal. The control of morphology (size, shape and surface structures) is a very important method in order to tune catalytic, electronic and optical proprieties of metal nanoparticles. An ideal heterogeneous catalyst should be composed by exactly the same nanometric size metal nanoparticles, uniformly dispersed in the support. Bovine serum albumin (BSA) was used as surfactant for the shape controlled synthesis of Au nanoparticles by a modified polyol processs. We successfully prepared Au nanocrystals of different shape: octahedra, cubes and tetrahxaedra. In particular the innovative use of BSA allows one to synthesize tetrahexahedra, an unusual shape for metal nanocrystals. The shape controlled synthesis of metal nanocrystals bounded by high-index facets (such as tetrahexahedra) is a potential route to obtain materials with enhanced catalytic performances, since high-index crystal planes generally show much higher activity than that of the most common stable low-index planes, due to high surface energy and roughness

Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship Modeling and Docking of Monoterpenes with Insecticidal Activity Against Reticulitermes chinensis Snyder and Drosophila melanogaster

The goal of this study was to perform in silico identification of bioinsecticidal potential of 42 monoterpenes against Drosophila melanogaster and Reticulitermes chinensis Snyder. Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) modeling was performed for both organisms, while docking and molecular dynamics were used only for Drosophila melanogaster. Neryl acetate has the lowest interaction energy (-87 kcal/mol) against active site of acetylcholinesterase, which is comparable to the ones of methiocarb and pirimicarb (-90 kcal/mol) and reported PDB binder 9-(3-iodobenzylamino)-1,2,3,4-tetrahydroacridine (-112.67 kcal/mol). Interaction stability was verified by molecular dynamics simulations and showed that the stability of ACHE active site complexes with three selected terpenes is comparable to the one of the pirimicarb and methiocarb. Overall, our results suggest that pulegone, citronellal, carvacrol, linalyl acetate, neryl acetate, citronellyl acetate, and geranyl acetate may be considered as a potential pesticide candidates

Medical Information Extraction with Large Language Models

The increase in clinical text data following the adoption of electronic health records offers benefits for medical practice and introduces challenges in automatic data extraction. Since manual extraction is often inefficient and error-prone, with this work, we explore the use of open, small-scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate and improve the extraction of medication and timeline data. With our experiments, we aim to assess the effectiveness of different prompting strategies –zero-shot, few-shots, and sequential prompting– on LLMs to generate a mixture of structured and unstructured information starting from a reference document. The results show that even a zero-shot learning approach can be sufficient to extract medication information with high precision. The main issues in generating the required information seem to be completeness and redundancy. However, prompt tuning alone seems to be sufficient to achieve good results using these LLMs, even in specific domains like the medical one. Besides medical information extraction, in this work, we address the problem of explainability, introducing a line-number referencing method to enhance transparency and trust in the generated results. Finally, to underscore the viability of applying these LLM-based solutions to medical information extraction, we deployed the developed pipelines within a demo application