Some shocking aspects of EMU enlargement

This paper uses a structural vector autoregression to examine differences in demand and supply shocks and the response to these shocks between EMU member countries and three other groups of countries. The first group includes non-EMU EU countries, the second group EFTA countries and the third group central and eastern European countries which seek EU membership over the next years. Our results suggest that, so far, EMU enlargement towards central and eastern European countries would involve significantly higher costs than EMU enlargement towards countries of the other two groups. --European Monetary Integration,International Monetary Arrangements and Institutions

Color-spin locking in a self-consistent Dyson-Schwinger approach

We investigate the color-spin locked (CSL) phase of spin-one color- superconducting quark matter using a truncated Dyson-Schwinger equation for the quark propagator in Landau gauge. Starting from the most general parity conserving ansatz allowed by the CSL symmetry, the Dyson-Schwinger equation is solved self-consistently and dispersion relations are discussed. We find that chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken due to terms which have previously been neglected. As a consequence, the excitation spectrum contains only gapped modes even for massless quarks. Moreover, at moderate chemical potentials the quasiparticle pairing gaps are several times larger than expected from extrapolated weak-coupling results.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Pseudoscalar Goldstone bosons in the color-flavor locked phase at moderate densities

The properties of the pseudoscalar Goldstone bosons in the color-flavor locked phase at moderate densities are studied within a model of the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio type. The Goldstone bosons are constructed explicitly by solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation for quark-quark scattering in random phase approximation. Main focus of our investigations are (i) the weak decay constant in the chiral limit, (ii) the masses of the flavored (pseudo-) Goldstone bosons for non-zero but equal quark masses, (iii) their masses and effective chemical potentials for non-equal quark masses, and (iv) the onset of kaon condensation. We compare our results with the predictions of the low-energy effective field theory. The deviations from results obtained in the weak-coupling limit are discussed in detail.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figure

On kk-free numbers in cyclotomic fields: entropy, symmetries and topological invariants

Point sets of number-theoretic origin, such as the visible lattice points or the $k$-th power free integers, have interesting geometric and spectral properties and give rise to topological dynamical systems that belong to a large class of subshifts with positive topological entropy. Among them are \cB-free systems in one dimension and their higher-dimensional generalisations, most prominently the $k$-free integers in algebraic number fields. Here, we extend previous work on quadratic fields to the class of cyclotomic fields. In particular, we discuss their entropy and extended symmetries, with special focus on the interplay between dynamical and number-theoretic notions.Comment: 22 page

Schwamm drüber! - Vom Hygieneartikel zum Arzneilieferant aus dem Meer

Jeder kennt ihn, viele besitzen ihn: den Badeschwamm. Doch Schwämme sind von weit höherem Nutzen: Sie produzieren eine Vielzahl bioaktiver Substanzen von großem pharmazeutischen Wert. Im Meer schützen sich die festgewachsenen Schwämme dadurch vor dem Gefressen- und Überwachsenwerden. Aber auch beim Kampf um neuen Lebensraum, zum Beispiel im dichtbesiedelten Korallenriff, werden die chemischen „Kampfstoffe“ eingesetzt (Abb. 1,2). Diese Substanzen können bisher jedoch nicht in großem Maßstab gewonnen und genutzt werden. Abhilfe können neue Methoden zur Kultivierung von Schwämmen im Meer und in Aquarien sowie zur Züchtung von Schwammzellen in der Petrischale oder im Bioreaktor leisten. Erstmals wird in einem bundesweiten Projekt die nachhaltige Nutzung mariner Schwämme in Zusammenarbeit mit internationalen Gruppen fokussiert. Durch die Bündelung und Vernetzung der Kompetenzen sollen die ersten Erfolge der am Forschungsvorhaben BIOTECmarin beteiligten Gruppen weiterentwickelt werden, Extrakte hinsichtlich der pharmazeutischen Produkte untersucht und biotechnologische Verfahren zur Produktion erarbeitet werden

Annotation of primate miRNAs by high throughput sequencing of small RNA libraries

BACKGROUND: In addition to genome sequencing, accurate functional annotation of genomes is required in order to carry out comparative and evolutionary analyses between species. Among primates, the human genome is the most extensively annotated. Human miRNA gene annotation is based on multiple lines of evidence including evidence for expression as well as prediction of the characteristic hairpin structure. In contrast, most miRNA genes in non-human primates are annotated based on homology without any expression evidence. We have sequenced small-RNA libraries from chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan and rhesus macaque from multiple individuals and tissues. Using patterns of miRNA expression in conjunction with a model of miRNA biogenesis we used these high-throughput sequencing data to identify novel miRNAs in non-human primates. RESULTS: We predicted 47 new miRNAs in chimpanzee, 240 in gorilla, 55 in orangutan and 47 in rhesus macaque. The algorithm we used was able to predict 64% of the previously known miRNAs in chimpanzee, 94% in gorilla, 61% in orangutan and 71% in rhesus macaque. We therefore added evidence for expression in between one and five tissues to miRNAs that were previously annotated based only on homology to human miRNAs. We increased from 60 to 175 the number miRNAs that are located in orthologous regions in humans and the four non-human primate species studied here. CONCLUSIONS: In this study we provide expression evidence for homology-based annotated miRNAs and predict de novo miRNAs in four non-human primate species. We increased the number of annotated miRNA genes and provided evidence for their expression in four non-human primates. Similar approaches using different individuals and tissues would improve annotation in non-human primates and allow for further comparative studies in the future

Learning to Rank Question Answer Pairs with Holographic Dual LSTM Architecture

We describe a new deep learning architecture for learning to rank question answer pairs. Our approach extends the long short-term memory (LSTM) network with holographic composition to model the relationship between question and answer representations. As opposed to the neural tensor layer that has been adopted recently, the holographic composition provides the benefits of scalable and rich representational learning approach without incurring huge parameter costs. Overall, we present Holographic Dual LSTM (HD-LSTM), a unified architecture for both deep sentence modeling and semantic matching. Essentially, our model is trained end-to-end whereby the parameters of the LSTM are optimized in a way that best explains the correlation between question and answer representations. In addition, our proposed deep learning architecture requires no extensive feature engineering. Via extensive experiments, we show that HD-LSTM outperforms many other neural architectures on two popular benchmark QA datasets. Empirical studies confirm the effectiveness of holographic composition over the neural tensor layer.Comment: SIGIR 2017 Full Pape