Patent Eligibility: Exploring the Intersection Between Patent Law and Biomedical Data

The world was fundamentally changed by the rampant spread of COVID-19 in 2020. This is not the first and will not be the last time the world is faced with a pandemic. Thus, it is essential to  take the necessary steps now to be prepared in the future. This Note will address how patent law can protect inventions incorporating the biomedical data to prevent future pandemics. The Note compares U.S. and European Patent Regimes to determine which system is better at protecting biomedical data. Lastly, this Note proposes changes to the U.S. Patent Regime to help increase its compatibility with biomedical data

To Plea Or Not to Plea: The Question Posed by Federal Rule 11

Effective July 1, 1966, Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure placed a burden on federal judges to personally address the defendant to ascertain whether or not he knowingly, willingly and intelligently waived the constitutional rights and privileges attendant to a trial by jury when such defendant entered a plea of guilty. Adoption of the rule stemmed from a desire to insure fairness and adequacy in accepting a guilty plea when it was realized that a majority of defendants in the federal court pleaded guilty and did not proceed to trial. There are several underlying reasons for the Rule 11 requirement that a defendant be personally addressed by the court when entering a plea of guilty: (1) in order that the plea reflect the defendant’s own choice he must be aware of the charges and consequences of his conviction; (2) it is important that the defendant realize that the court is concerned with preserving his rights and in so doing, impress upon the defendant the court’s fairness; and, (3) a record will be provided which will minimize later claims of error

Exploration of Hydrocarbon Degrading Bacteria on Soils Contaminated by Crude Oil From South Sumatera

The goal of this research was to explore hydrocarbon degrading bacteria on crude oil contaminated soil with potential to degrade hydrocarbon in oil pollutant. The research started by early August 2013 till January 2014. Soil sampling for this research was taken on several places with contaminated soil location such as Benakat, Rimau, and Pengabuan all of it located in South Sumatera. Conclusion from this research Isolates obtained from three (3) sites of contaminated soil and treated using SBS medium were Bacillus cereus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pnumoniae, Streptococcus beta hemolisa, Proteus mirabilis, Staphylococcus epidermis and Acinotobacter calcoaceticus. Isolates that survived on 300 ppm of hydrocarbon concentration were Bacillus cereus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter cakciaceticus Selected isolates posses the ability to degrade hydrocarbon by breaking hydrocarbon substance as the energy source to support isolates existence up to 1,67 TPH level. Based on results accomplish by this research, we urge for further research involving the capacity of isolates to degrade wide variety of hydrocarbon substance and more to develop the potential of these bacteria for bioremediation

Pemanfaatan Limbah Cair Industri Tahu sebagai Pupuk Cair Organik terhadap Pertumbuhan dan Produksi Tanaman Kangkung Darat (Ipomoea Reptans Poir)

Penelitian tentang Pemanfaatan Limbah Cair Industri Tahu Sebagai Pupuk Cair Organik Terhadap Pertumbuhan Dan Produksi Tanaman Kangkung Darat (Ipomoea reptans Poir) ini telah dilaksanakan pada Ja-nuari - Maret 2013. Tujuan penelitian ini untuk mengetahui pemanfaatan limbah cair industri tahu agar dapat digunakan sebagai pupuk cair organik untuk tanaman kangkung darat. Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan meng-gunakan Rancang Acak Kelompok (RAK), dengan perlakuan konsentrasi pupuk cair organik dari limbah tahu sebesar 0%, 2,5%, 5%, 7,5%, 10%, 12,5% dan 15%. Dan masing-masing perlakukan diulang sebanyak 3 kali. Ha-sil penelitian menunjukan bahwa pupuk cair organik tersebut dapat meningkatkan pertumbuhan dan produksi tanaman kangkung darat. Pengaruh yang signifikan dan nyata terlihat dari perlakuan pemberian konsentrasi pupuk cair sebesar 7,5%, 10%, 12,5% dan 15% yang berpengaruh terhadap berat basah tanaman kangkung da-rat yaitu 10,89 gr, 16,32 gr, 23,47 gr dan 37,61 gr. Sedangkan perlakuan terhadap berat kering tanaman kang-kung darat yaitu 2,59 gr, 3,28 gr, 4,11 gr, 5,31 gr dan 9,60 gr. Dari analisis sidik ragam pada taraf Uji 5%, di-dapat nilai F hitung (349,677) lebih tinggi dari nilai F tabel (2,209) pada berat basah tanaman kangkung darat. Sebaliknya untuk berat kering didapat nilai F hitung (412,665) lebih tinggi dari nilai F tabel (2,209). Sehingga dari analisis tersebut terdapat pengaruh yang signifikan dan nyata antara pemberian konsentrasi pupuk cair limbah tahu terhadap produksi tanaman kangkung darat (H1 diterima dan H0 ditolak)

Towards Asteroid Detection in Microlensing Surveys with Deep Learning

Asteroids are an indelible part of most astronomical surveys though only a few surveys are dedicated to their detection. Over the years, high cadence microlensing surveys have amassed several terabytes of data while scanning primarily the Galactic Bulge and Magellanic Clouds for microlensing events and thus provide a treasure trove of opportunities for scientific data mining. In particular, numerous asteroids have been observed by visual inspection of selected images. This paper presents novel deep learning-based solutions for the recovery and discovery of asteroids in the microlensing data gathered by the MOA project. Asteroid tracklets can be clearly seen by combining all the observations on a given night and these tracklets inform the structure of the dataset. Known asteroids were identified within these composite images and used for creating the labelled datasets required for supervised learning. Several custom CNN models were developed to identify images with asteroid tracklets. Model ensembling was then employed to reduce the variance in the predictions as well as to improve the generalisation error, achieving a recall of 97.67%. Furthermore, the YOLOv4 object detector was trained to localize asteroid tracklets, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 90.97%. These trained networks will be applied to 16 years of MOA archival data to find both known and unknown asteroids that have been observed by the survey over the years. The methodologies developed can be adapted for use by other surveys for asteroid recovery and discovery.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Astronomy and Computin

Isolation of Indigenous Bacteria from Paddy Field for Methomyl Degradation

Methomyl is an active ingredient of carbamate group pesticide. The uncontrolled application of methomyl may contaminate the water and soil. The objective of this research was to find indigenous bacteria that could degrade the methomyl. The soil samples were taken from the soil of the rice field located in Musi Rawas District, South Sumatera, Indonesia. The soil bacteria that were found to degrade methomyl were isolated by using a medium containing methomyl. There were 2 of 16 isolates that could grow in a high concentration of methomyl and they were Acinetobacter baumannii and Bacillus megaterium

ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF FUSARIUM HEAD BLIGHT IN WHEAT AND BARLEY: 1998-2000

Fusarium Head Blight (FHB), commonly known as scab, has been a severe problem for wheat and barley producers since 1993. This study provides an update of economic losses suffered by wheat and barley producers in scab-affected regions in the United States. Emphasis is placed on estimating direct and secondary economic impacts of yield and price losses suffered by wheat and barley producers from 1998 to 2000. Nine states are included in the analysis for three wheat classes. Three of the nine states were also used for the analysis of malting and feed barley. The cumulative direct economic losses from FHB in hard red spring (HRS) wheat, soft red winter (SRW) wheat, durum wheat, and barley is estimated at $870 million from 1998 through 2000. The combined direct and secondary economic losses for all the crops were estimated at$2.7 billion. Two states, North Dakota and Minnesota, account for about 55 percent of the total dollar losses.Fusarium Head Blight, scab, vomitoxin, crop losses, wheat, barley, Crop Production/Industries,

Analysis of Binding Site Hot Spots on the Surface of Ras GTPase

We have recently discovered an allosteric switch in Ras, bringing an additional level of complexity to this GTPase whose mutants are involved in nearly 30% of cancers. Upon activation of the allosteric switch, there is a shift in helix 3/loop 7 associated with a disorder to order transition in the active site. Here, we use a combination of multiple solvent crystal structures and computational solvent mapping (FTMap) to determine binding site hot spots in the “off” and “on” allosteric states of the GTP-bound form of H-Ras. Thirteen sites are revealed, expanding possible target sites for ligand binding well beyond the active site. Comparison of FTMaps for the H and K isoforms reveals essentially identical hot spots. Furthermore, using NMR measurements of spin relaxation, we determined that K-Ras exhibits global conformational dynamics very similar to those we previously reported for H-Ras. We thus hypothesize that the global conformational rearrangement serves as a mechanism for allosteric coupling between the effector interface and remote hot spots in all Ras isoforms. At least with respect to the binding sites involving the G domain, H-Ras is an excellent model for K-Ras and probably N-Ras as well. Ras has so far been elusive as a target for drug design. The present work identifies various unexplored hot spots throughout the entire surface of Ras, extending the focus from the disordered active site to well-ordered locations that should be easier to target