Nanophotonic integration in state-of-the-art CMOS foundries

We demonstrate a monolithic photonic integration platform that leverages the existing state-of-the-art CMOS foundry infrastructure. In our approach, proven XeF2 post-processing technology and compliance with electronic foundry process flows eliminate the need for specialized substrates or wafer bonding. This approach enables intimate integration of large numbers of nanophotonic devices alongside high-density, high-performance transistors at low initial and incremental cost. We demonstrate this platform by presenting grating-coupled, microring-resonator filter banks fabricated in an unmodified 28 nm bulk-CMOS process by sharing a mask set with standard electronic projects. The lithographic fidelity of this process enables the high-throughput fabrication of second-order, wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) filter banks that achieve low insertion loss without post-fabrication trimming

Learning and memory in nucleus basalis magnocellularis-lesioned rats after transplantation of fetal frontal cortex

The effect of fetal frontal cortex transplantation on behaviour performance was examined in adult male Wistar rats with lesions of the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM). Compared to intact and sham-operated controls, the rats tested ten or twenty days after bilateral electrolytic lesions of NBM exhibited the significant learning and memory impairments (acquisition and performance of two-way active avoidance) whereas spontaneous motor activity was not significantly altered. The animals which received allotransplants of fetal frontal cortex (from 18-day gestational rat fetuses) into NBM, two (''early'' transplantation -NBM-ET) or ten (''delayed'' transplantation-NBM-DT) days after lesioning, respectively, manifested the complete amelioration of noticed impairments when tested ten days after transplantation procedure. Corresponding sham-transplants groups (NBM-SET and NBM-SDT) showed only slightly improvement of acquisition but not performance of two-way active avoidance. The ability of the transplants to restore learning and memory in the NBM lesioned rats suggests that graft of fetal frontal cortex can functionally influence neuronal activity of the lesioned host brain

What Do the Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights Tell About Property Rights Across Europe?

Despite the important role that institutions play in explaining economic growth, there exist few objective quantitative measures of institutional quality. We propose a new quantitative index that allows comparing the strength of property rights across the member states of the Council of Europe. To construct the index, we analyzed all judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) related to property rights for all member states and identified whether the ECtHR had found a violation of property rights in the domestic courts’ decisions. The resulting data were used to calculate the likelihood of finding violation in the judgments of national courts. Assuming that the ECtHR is impartial and unbiased, higher probability of overruling the judgments of local courts from a given country implies that the level of property rights protection is low. Our constructed measure is highly correlated with a number of indices of property rights protection used in the literature and serves as a strong objective foundation for these indices. Furthermore, we found that the ECtHR had received more applications from countries with higher likelihood of national court judgments violating property rights