464 research outputs found
Proximate content and lipid profile of seeds from rapanea melanophloeos (the Cape beech) tree
Abstract: Rapanea melanophloeos (Cape beech) is a fruit-bearing tree indigenous to Southern Africa which produces edible fruit. Previous studies have focussed on investigating the nutritional potential of the tree’s fruit pulp. The nutritional potential of R. melanophloeos seeds is unknown. Seed samples obtained from ripe fruit of the Cape beech trees had their proximate analysis and lipid profiling done. The dry matter and ash contributed 91.29 ± 0.00 %, 1.50 ± 0.01 % of the mass of the seed. Whilst the other proximate analytes namely crude fibre, crude protein and ether extract made up 5.71 ± 0.43 % , 10.50 ± 0.49 % and 4.75 ± 0.09 % the mass of the seeds respectively. The fatty acid profile of the seed oil revealed Linoleic acid (50.43 ± 0.38 %) to be the most dominant. R. melanophloeos seeds are not a viable source of nutrients
Diffractive Meson Production and the Quark-Pomeron Coupling
Diffractive meson production at HERA offers interesting possibilities to
investigate diffractive processes and thus to learn something about the
properties of the pomeron. The most succesful phenomenological description of
the pomeron so far assumes it to couple like a isoscalar photon to
single quarks. This coupling leads, however, to problems for exclusive
diffractive reactions. We propose a new phenomenological pomeron vertex, which
leads to very good fits to the known data, but avoids the problems of the old
vertex.Comment: 20 pages, latex with uuencoded postscript, revised versio
Multi Scale Curriculum CNN for Context-Aware Breast MRI Malignancy Classification
Classification of malignancy for breast cancer and other cancer types is
usually tackled as an object detection problem: Individual lesions are first
localized and then classified with respect to malignancy. However, the drawback
of this approach is that abstract features incorporating several lesions and
areas that are not labelled as a lesion but contain global medically relevant
information are thus disregarded: especially for dynamic contrast-enhanced
breast MRI, criteria such as background parenchymal enhancement and location
within the breast are important for diagnosis and cannot be captured by object
detection approaches properly.
In this work, we propose a 3D CNN and a multi scale curriculum learning
strategy to classify malignancy globally based on an MRI of the whole breast.
Thus, the global context of the whole breast rather than individual lesions is
taken into account. Our proposed approach does not rely on lesion
segmentations, which renders the annotation of training data much more
effective than in current object detection approaches.
Achieving an AUROC of 0.89, we compare the performance of our approach to
Mask R-CNN and Retina U-Net as well as a radiologist. Our performance is on par
with approaches that, in contrast to our method, rely on pixelwise
segmentations of lesions.Comment: Accepted to MICCAI 201
An ultraviolet simulator for the incident Martian surface radiation and its applications
Ultraviolet (UV) radiation can act on putative organic/biological matter at the Martian surface in several ways. Only absorbed, but not transmitted or reflected, radiation energy can be photo-chemically effective. The most important biological UV effects are due to photochemical reactions in nucleic acids, DNA or RNA, which constitute the genetic material of all cellular organisms and viruses. Protein or lipid effects generally play a minor role, but they are also relevant in some cases. UV radiation can induce wavelengths-specific types of DNA damage. At the same time it can also induce the photo-reversion reaction of a UV induced DNA photoproduct of nucleic acid bases, the pyrimidine dimers. Intense UVB and UVC radiation, experienced on early Earth and present-day Mars, has been revealed to be harmful to all organisms, including extremophile bacteria and spores. Moreover, the formation of oxidants, catalytically produced in the Martian environment through UV irradiation, may be responsible for the destruction of organic matter on Mars. Following this, more laboratory simulations are vital in order to investigate and understand UV effects on organic matter in the case of Mars. We have designed a radiation apparatus that simulates the anticipated Martian UV surface spectrum between 200 and 400 nm (UVC-UVA). The system comprises a UV enhanced xenon arc lamp, special filter-sets and mirrors to simulate the effects of the Martian atmospheric column and dust loading. We describe the technical setup and performance of the system and discuss its uses for different applications. The design is focused on portability, therefore, the Mars-UV simulator represents a device for several different Mars simulation facilities with specific emphasis on Mars research topics
Charm Contribution to the Structure Function in Diffractive Deep Inelastic Scattering
The charm contribution to the structure functions of diffractive deep
inelastic scattering is considered here within the context of the
Ingelman-Schlein model. Numerical estimations of this contribution are made
from parametrizations of the HERA data. Influence of the Pomeron flux factor is
analized as well as the effect of the shape of the initial parton distribution
employed in the calculations. The obtained results indicate that the charm
contribution to diffractive deep inelastic process might be large enough to be
measured in the HERA experiments.Comment: 16 pages, RevTeX, 6 figures, to be published in Physical Review
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A behavioral comparison of male and female adults with high functioning autism spectrum conditions
Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) affect more males than females in the general population. However, within ASC it is unclear if there are phenotypic sex differences. Testing for similarities and differences between the sexes is important not only for clinical assessment but also has implications for theories of typical sex differences and of autism. Using cognitive and behavioral measures, we investigated similarities and differences between the sexes in age- and IQ-matched adults with ASC (high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome). Of the 83 (45 males and 38 females) participants, 62 (33 males and 29 females) met Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) cut-off criteria for autism in childhood and were included in all subsequent analyses. The severity of childhood core autism symptoms did not differ between the sexes. Males and females also did not differ in self-reported empathy, systemizing, anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive traits/symptoms or mentalizing performance. However, adult females with ASC showed more lifetime sensory symptoms (p = 0.036), fewer current socio-communication difficulties (p = 0.001), and more self-reported autistic traits (p = 0.012) than males. In addition, females with ASC who also had developmental language delay had lower current performance IQ than those without developmental language delay (p<0.001), a pattern not seen in males. The absence of typical sex differences in empathizing-systemizing profiles within the autism spectrum confirms a prediction from the extreme male brain theory. Behavioral sex differences within ASC may also reflect different developmental mechanisms between males and females with ASC. We discuss the importance of the superficially better socio-communication ability in adult females with ASC in terms of why females with ASC may more often go under-recognized, and receive their diagnosis later, than males
Measurement of the open-charm contribution to the diffractive proton structure function
Production of D*+/-(2010) mesons in diffractive deep inelastic scattering has
been measured with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of
82 pb^{-1}. Diffractive events were identified by the presence of a large
rapidity gap in the final state. Differential cross sections have been measured
in the kinematic region 1.5 < Q^2 < 200 GeV^2, 0.02 < y < 0.7, x_{IP} < 0.035,
beta 1.5 GeV and |\eta(D*+/-)| < 1.5. The measured cross
sections are compared to theoretical predictions. The results are presented in
terms of the open-charm contribution to the diffractive proton structure
function. The data demonstrate a strong sensitivity to the diffractive parton
densities.Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures, 6 table
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