The Pioneering Role of Sci in Post Publication Public Peer Review (P4R)

Scientists observe, discover, justify and eventually share their findings with the scientific community. Dissemination is an integral aspect of scientific discovery, since discoveries which go unnoticed have no or little impact on science. Today, peer review is part of this process of scientific dissemination as it contributes proactively to the quality of a scientific article. As the numbers of scientific journals and scientific articles published therein are increasing steadily, processes such as the single-blind or double-blind peer review are facing a near collapse situation. In fact, these traditional forms of reviewing have reached their limits and, because of this, are also increasingly considered as unfair, sloppy, superficial and even biased. In this manuscript, we propose forms of post-publication public peer review (P4R) as valuable alternatives to the traditional blind peer review system. We describe how the journal Sci has explored such an approach and provide first empirical evidence of the benefits and also challenges, such a P4R approach faces

Small Molecule Catalysts with Therapeutic Potential

Catalysts are employed in many areas of research and development where they combine high efficiency with often astonishing selectivity for their respective substrates. In biology, biocatalysts are omnipresent. Enzymes facilitate highly controlled, sophisticated cellular processes, such as metabolic conversions, sensing and signalling, and are prominent targets in drug development. In contrast, the therapeutic use of catalysts per se is still rather limited. Recent research has shown that small molecule catalytic agents able to modulate the redox state of the target cell bear considerable promise, particularly in the context of inflammatory and infectious diseases, stroke, ageing and even cancer. Rather than being “active” on their own in a more traditional sense, such agents develop their activity by initiating, promoting, enhancing or redirecting reactions between biomolecules already present in the cell, and their activity therefore depends critically on the predisposition of the target cell itself. Redox catalysts, for instance, preferably target cells with a distinct sensitivity towards changes in an already disturbed redox balance and/or increased levels of reactive oxygen species. Indeed, certain transition metal, chalcogen and quinone agents may activate an antioxidant response in normal cells whilst at the same time triggering apoptosis in cancer cells with a different pre-existing “biochemical redox signature” and closer to the internal redox threshold. In pharmacy, catalysts therefore stand out as promising lead structures, as sensor/effector agents which are highly effective, fairly selective, active in catalytic, i.e., often nanomolar concentrations and also very flexible in their structural design

Unleashing the Biological Potential of Fomes fomentarius via Dry and Wet Milling

Fomes fomentarius, usually referred to as tinder conk, is a common wood-based fungus rich in many interesting phytochemicals and with an unique porous structure. Dry or wet ball milling of this sponge on a planetary mill results in small particles with sizes in the range of 10 µm or below. Suspended in water and without preservatives or other stabilizers, the resulting micro-suspensions are sterile for around six days, probably due to the increased temperatures of around 80 ◦C especially during the wet milling process. The suspensions also exhibit excellent antioxidant activities as determined in the DPPH, ferric reducing antioxidant potential (FRAP) and 2,20 -azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid (ABTS) assays. In the DPPH assay, IC50 values of 0.02–0.04% w/v and 0.04% w/v were observed for dry and wet milled samples, respectively. In the FRAP assay, IC50 values of <0.02% w/v and 0.04% w/v were observed for dry and wet milled samples, respectively. In contrast, the ABTS assay provided IC50 values of 0.04% w/v and 0.005% w/v, respectively. Notably, this activity is mostly—albeit not exclusively—associated with the highly porous particles and their large surfaces, although some active ingredients also diffuse into the surrounding aqueous medium. Such suspensions of natural particles carrying otherwise insoluble antioxidants on their surfaces provide an interesting avenue to unleash the antioxidant potential of materials such as sponges and barks. As dry milling also enables longer storage and transport, applications in the fields of medicine, nutrition, agriculture, materials and cosmetics are feasible

Selenomethionine: A Pink Trojan Redox Horse with Implications in Aging and Various Age-Related Diseases

Selenium is an essential trace element. Although this chalcogen forms a wide variety of compounds, there are surprisingly few small-molecule organic selenium compounds (OSeCs) in biology. Besides its more prominent relative selenocysteine (SeCys), the amino acid selenomethionine (SeMet) is one example. SeMet is synthesized in plants and some fungi and, via nutrition, finds its way into mammalian cells. In contrast to its sulfur analog methionine (Met), SeMet is extraordinarily redox active under physiological conditions and via its catalytic selenide (RSeR’)/selenoxide (RSe(O)R’) couple provides protection against reactive oxygen species (ROS) and other possibly harmful oxidants. In contrast to SeCys, which is incorporated via an eloquent ribosomal mechanism, SeMet can enter such biomolecules by simply replacing proteinogenic Met. Interestingly, eukaryotes, such as yeast and mammals, also metabolize SeMet to a small family of reactive selenium species (RSeS). Together, SeMet, proteins containing SeMet and metabolites of SeMet form a powerful triad of redox-active metabolites with a plethora of biological implications. In any case, SeMet and its family of natural RSeS provide plenty of opportunities for studies in the fields of nutrition, aging, health and redox biology

A Whiff of Sulfur: One Wind a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

Reactive Sulfur Species (RSS), such as allicin from garlic or sulforaphane from broccoli, are fre-quently associated with biological activities and possible health benefits in animals and humans. Among these Organic Sulfur Compounds (OSCs) found in many plants and fungi, the Volatile Sulfur Compounds (VSCs) feature prominently, not only because of their often-pungent smell, but also because they are able to access places which solids and solutions cannot reach that easily. Indeed, inorganic RSS such as hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and sulfur dioxide (SO2 ) can be used to lit-erally fumigate entire rooms and areas. Similarly, metabolites of garlic, such as allyl methyl sulfide (AMS), are formed metabolically in humans in lower concentrations and reach the airways from inside the body as part of one’s breath. Curiously, H2S is also formed in the gastrointestinal tract by gut bacteria, and the question of if and for which purpose this gas then crosses the barriers and enters the body is indeed a delicate matter for equally delicate studies. In any case, nature is surprisingly rich in such VSCs, as fruits (for instance, the infamous durian) demonstrate, and therefore these VSCs represent a promising group of compounds for further studies

Origin : a 60 GHz radio-over-fiber home area network project

International audience

Enhanced Continuous Sign Language Recognition using PCA and Neural Network Features

In this work a Gaussian Hidden Markov Model (GHMM) based automatic sign language recognition system is built on the SIGNUM database. The system is trained on appearance-based features as well as on features derived from a multilayer perceptron (MLP). Appearance-based features are directly extracted from the original images without any colored gloves or sensors. The posterior estimates are derived from a neural network. Whereas MLP based features are well-known in speech and optical character recognition, this is the first time that these features are used in a sign language system. The MLP based features improve the word error rate (WER) of the system from 16 % to 13 % compared to the appearance-based features. In order to benefit from the different feature types we investigate a combination technique. The models trained on each feature set are combined during the recognition step. By means of the combination technique, we could improve the word error rate of our best system by more than 8% relative and outperform the best published results on this database by about 6 % relative. 1

The Pioneering Role of Sci in Post Publication Public Peer Review (P4R)

Scientists observe, discover, justify and eventually share their findings with the scientific community. Dissemination is an integral aspect of scientific discovery, since discoveries which go unnoticed have no or little impact on science. Today, peer review is part of this process of scientific dissemination as it contributes proactively to the quality of a scientific article. As the numbers of scientific journals and scientific articles published therein are increasing steadily, processes such as the single-blind or double-blind peer review are facing a near collapse situation. In fact, these traditional forms of reviewing have reached their limits and, because of this, are also increasingly considered as unfair, sloppy, superficial and even biased. In this manuscript, we propose forms of post-publication public peer review (P4R) as valuable alternatives to the traditional blind peer review system. We describe how the journal Sci has explored such an approach and provide first empirical evidence of the benefits and also challenges, such a P4R approach faces

Improving Continuous Sign Language Recognition: Speech Recognition Techniques and System Design

Automatic sign language recognition (ASLR) is a special case of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and computer vision (CV) and is currently evolving from using artificial labgenerated data to using ’real-life ’ data. Although ASLR still struggles with feature extraction, it can benefit from techniques developed for ASR. We present a large-vocabulary ASLR system that is able to recognize sentences in continuous sign language and uses features extracted from standard single-view video cameras without using additional equipment. ASR techniques such as the multi-layer-perceptron (MLP) tandem approach, speaker adaptation, pronunciation modelling, and parallel hidden Markov models are investigated. We evaluate the influence of each system component on the recognition performance. On two publicly available large vocabulary databases representing lab-data (25 signer, 455 sign vocabulary, 19k sentence) and unconstrained ’real-life ’ sign language (1 signer, 266 sign vocabulary, 351 sentences) we can achieve 22.1 % respectively 38.6 % WER

Unleashing the Biological Potential of Fomes fomentarius via Dry and Wet Milling

Fomes fomentarius, usually referred to as tinder conk, is a common wood-based fungus rich in many interesting phytochemicals and with an unique porous structure. Dry or wet ball milling of this sponge on a planetary mill results in small particles with sizes in the range of 10 µm or below. Suspended in water and without preservatives or other stabilizers, the resulting micro-suspensions are sterile for around six days, probably due to the increased temperatures of around 80 °C especially during the wet milling process. The suspensions also exhibit excellent antioxidant activities as determined in the DPPH, ferric reducing antioxidant potential (FRAP) and 2,2′-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid (ABTS) assays. In the DPPH assay, IC50 values of 0.02–0.04% w/v and 0.04% w/v were observed for dry and wet milled samples, respectively. In the FRAP assay, IC50 values of &lt;0.02% w/v and 0.04% w/v were observed for dry and wet milled samples, respectively. In contrast, the ABTS assay provided IC50 values of 0.04% w/v and 0.005% w/v, respectively. Notably, this activity is mostly—albeit not exclusively—associated with the highly porous particles and their large surfaces, although some active ingredients also diffuse into the surrounding aqueous medium. Such suspensions of natural particles carrying otherwise insoluble antioxidants on their surfaces provide an interesting avenue to unleash the antioxidant potential of materials such as sponges and barks. As dry milling also enables longer storage and transport, applications in the fields of medicine, nutrition, agriculture, materials and cosmetics are feasible