Constant connection: College students’ smartphones attachment and close relationship attachments across domains

This study aims to conceptualize the way individuals, more notably college students and emerging adults, use their smartphones, applying an attachment framework. Recently, research has shifted from using vocabulary akin to addiction, and researchers are beginning to see similarities and consistencies in how individuals relate to their phones and how attachment was originally conceptualized in the infant-mother relationship. Moreover, research is moving away from considering attachment as categorical, and is instead considering it continuous, and as varying in domains from individual to individual. This research used a new assessment tool (the YAPS) to assess college students’ attachment to phones, their important relationship attachments (ECR-RS) and their perceived relationship quality (PRQC). Research found that though many important relationship domains, notably parents, were related to smartphone attachment; however, there was no relationship between smartphone attachment and perceived relationship quality or its constructs. Future research should aim to validate the biological attachment between humans and smartphones, as well as tease out any impact smartphones and our attachments to them may have on relationships and our perception and threshold of intimacy

N=1 Super QCD and Fractional Branes

We show how to get the one-loop beta function and the chiral anomaly of N=1 Super QCD from a stack of fractional N D3-branes localized inside the world-volume of 2M fractional D7-branes on the orbifold C^3/(Z_2 x Z_2). They are obtained by analyzing the classical supergravity background generated by such a brane configuration, in the spirit of the gauge/gravity correspondence.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX. Talk given at the IXth International Symposium on Particles, Strings and Cosmology PASCOS '03, Mumbai-India, January 3-8 2003. To appear in a special issue of Praman

A method for calculating temperature-dependent photodissociation cross sections and rates

The destruction of molecules by photodissociation plays a major role in many radiation-rich environments, including the evolution of the atmospheres of exoplanets, which often exist close to UV-rich stars. Most current photodissociation calculations and databases assume T = 0 K, which is inadequate for hot exoplanets and stars. A method is developed for computing photodissociation spectra of diatomic molecules as a function of temperature exploiting bound state variational nuclear motion program Duo and post-processing program ExoCross. Discrete transition intensities are spread out to represent a continuous photodissociation spectrum either by Gaussian smoothing or by averaging calculations over a range of different grid sizes. Our approach is tested on four different chemical species (HCl, HF, NaCl and BeH+), showing its ability to reproduce photodissociation cross sections and rates computed with other approaches and experiment. The temperature dependence of photodissociation cross sections and rates is studies showing strong temperature variation of the photodissociation cross sections

Repurposing designed mutants: a valuable strategy for computer-aided laccase engineering – the case of POXA1b

The broad specificity of laccases, a direct consequence of their shallow binding site, makes this class of enzymes a suitable template to build specificity toward putative substrates. In this work, a computational methodology that accumulates beneficial interactions between the enzyme and the substrate in productive conformations is applied to oxidize 2,4-diamino-benzenesulfonic acid with POXA1b laccase. Although the experimental validation of two designed variants yielded negative results, most likely due to the hard oxidizability of the target substrate, molecular simulations suggest that a novel polar binding scaffold was designed to anchor negatively charged groups. Consequently, the oxidation of three such molecules, selected as representative of different classes of substances with different industrial applications, significantly improved. According to molecular simulations, the reason behind such an improvement lies in the more productive enzyme–substrate binding achieved thanks to the designed polar scaffold. In the future, mutant repurposing toward other substrates could be first carried out computationally, as done here, testing molecules that share some similarity with the initial target. In this way, repurposing would not be a mere safety net (as it is in the laboratory and as it was here) but rather a powerful approach to transform laccases into more efficient multitasking enzymes.This work was funded by INDOX (KBBE-2013-7-613549) European project and CTQ2013-48287-R Spanish National Project. V. G. and E. M. acknowledge Università degli Studi di Napoli and Generalitat de Catalunya for their respective predoctoral fellowships.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Conversion of no/low value waste frying oils into biodiesel and polyhydroxyalkanoates

A sustainable bioprocess was developed for the valorization of a no/low value substrate, i.e. waste frying oils (WFOs) with high content of free fatty acids (FFAs), otherwise unsuitable for biodiesel production. The bioprocess was verified using both recombinant (Escherichia coli) and native (Pseudomonas resinovorans) polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) producing cell factories. Microbial fermentation of WFOs provided a 2-fold advantage: i) the reduction of FFAs content resulting into an upgrading of the "exhausted waste oils" and ii) the production of a bio-based microbial polymer. Proper strain designing and process optimization allowed to achieve up to 1.5 g L-1 of medium chain length, mcl-PHAs, together with an efficient conversion (80% yield) of the treated WFO into biodiesel

On the Zero-Slope Limit of the Compactified Closed Bosonic String

In the framework of the compactified closed bosonic string theory with the extra spatial coordinates being circular with radius $R$, we perform both the zero-slope limit and the $R \rightarrow 0$ limit of the tree scattering amplitude of four massless scalar particles. We explicitly show that this double limit leads to amplitudes involving scalars which interact through the exchange of a scalar, spin 1 and spin 2 particle. In particular, this latter case reproduces the same result obtained in linearized quantum gravity.Comment: 10 pages, LaTex file, DSF-T-43/9

Fak signaling in rhabdomyosarcoma

Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is the most common soft tissue sarcoma of children and adolescents. The fusion-positive (FP)-RMS variant expressing chimeric oncoproteins such as PAX3-FOXO1 and PAX7-FOXO1 is at high risk. The fusion negative subgroup, FN-RMS, has a good prognosis when non-metastatic. Despite a multimodal therapeutic approach, FP-RMS and metastatic FN-RMS often show a dismal prognosis with 5-year survival of less than 30%. Therefore, novel targets need to be discovered to develop therapies that halt tumor progression, reducing long-term side effects in young patients. Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) is a non-receptor tyrosine kinase that regulates focal contacts at the cellular edges. It plays a role in cell motility, survival, and proliferation in response to integrin and growth factor receptors’ activation. FAK is often dysregulated in cancer, being upregulated and/or overactivated in several adult and pediatric tumor types. In RMS, both in vitro and preclinical studies point to a role of FAK in tumor cell motility/invasion and proliferation, which is inhibited by FAK inhibitors. In this review, we summarize the data on FAK expression and modulation in RMS. Moreover, we give an overview of the approaches to inhibit FAK in both preclinical and clinical cancer settings

p53 and bcl-2 expression in high-grade B-cell lymphomas: correlation with survival time.

B-cell high-grade lymphomas are heterogeneous in terms of histology, clinical presentation, treatment response and prognosis. As bcl-2 and p53 gene deregulations are frequently involved in several types of lymphoid malignancies, we aimed our investigation at the study of the relation between bcl-2 and p53 expression and survival probability in a group of 119 patients with B-cell high-grade lymphoma. These were obtained from the Virgen de la Salud Hospital, Toledo, Spain (73 cases), John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK (31 cases), and the Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy (15 cases). The relation between bcl-2 protein expression and survival was small, depending on the primary localisation of the tumour (in lymph node of mucosae), and lacked a significant correlation with overall survival. In contrast with this, p53 expression was related to survival probability in our series, this relation being both significant and independent of histological diagnosis. p53-positive patients showed a sudden decrease in life expectancy in the first months after diagnosis. Multivariant regression analysis confirmed that the only parameters significantly related with survival were extranodal origin, which is associated with a better prognosis, and p53 expression, which indicates a poor prognosis. Simultaneous expression of bcl-2 and p53 was associated with a poorer prognosis than p53 alone. This is particularly significant for large B-cell lymphomas presenting in lymph nodes. The cumulative poor effect of both p53 and bcl-2 in large B-cell lymphomas, which is more significant in nodal tumours, could confirm the existence of a multistep genetic deregulation in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. This indicates that the genetic mechanisms controlling apoptosis and their disregulation are critical steps in the progression of lymphomas

On the Number of Cosmic Strings

The number of cosmic strings in the observable universe is relevant in determining the probability of detecting such cosmic defects through their gravitational signatures. In particular, we refer to the observation of gravitational lensing events and anisotropy in the CMB radiation induced by cosmic strings. In this paper, a simple method is adopted to obtain an approximate estimate of the number of segments of cosmic strings, crossing the particle horizon, which fall inside the observed part of the universe. We show that there is an appreciable difference in the expected number of segments which differentiates cosmic strings arising in Abelian Higgs and Nambu-Goto models, and that a different choice of setting for the cosmological model can lead to significant differences in the expected number of cosmic string segments. Of this number, the fraction realistically detectable may be considerably smaller.Comment: LaTex2e, 15 pages, 1 figure, 5 tables. Subject extended to other cosmological scenarios from Sect. 3 on hence, it follows a modification in the title; three tables and references added. Version to appear in MNRA