Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Sustainable Agriculture? A Research Agenda

Global warming and the increasing food demand are problems of the current generation and require a change towards sustainable agriculture. In recent years, research in the field of artificial intelligence has made considerable progress. Thus, the use of artificial intelligence in agriculture can be a promising solution to ensure sufficient food supply on a global scale. To investigate the state-of-the-art in the use of artificial intelligence-based systems in agriculture, we provide a structured literature review. We show that research has been done in the field of irrigation and plant growth. In this regard, camera systems often provide images as training/input data for artificial intelligence-based systems. Finally, we provide a research agenda to pave the way for further research on the use of artificial intelligence in sustainable agriculture

Transient laboratory X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy on thin films demonstrated with F8BT

We present advanced instrumentation for the investigation of thin organic films offered by a laboratory X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) spectrometer for the soft X-ray range. The transmission spectrometer is based on a laser-produced plasma source in combination with a twin-arm reflection zone plate spectrometer. The efficiency and stability of the spectrometer allow for single shot measurements within 500 ps with a resolving power of E/ΔE ~ 900 in a range between 200 eV and 1300 eV. Through the implementation of an optical pump beam, also transient absorption measurements can be performed. The merits of the spectrometer are demonstrated through the investigation of poly[(9,9-dioctylfluorenyl- 2,7-diyl)-alt-co-(1,4-benzo-{2,1‘,3}-thiadiazole)] (F8BT), a polyfluorene copolymer. Transient optical pump soft X-ray probe spectroscopy with 500 ps time resolution detects changes in the C K edge spectrum which can be attributed to the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals of the molecules in the benzothiadiazole unit

Iminoboronates as Dual-Purpose Linkers in Chemical Probe Development

Chemical probes that covalently modify proteins of interest are powerful tools for the research of biological processes. Important in the design of a probe is the choice of reactive group that forms the covalent bond, as it decides the success of a probe. However, choosing the right reactive group is not a simple feat and methodologies for expedient screening of different groups are needed. We herein report a modular approach that allows easy coupling of a reactive group to a ligand. α-Nucleophile ligands are combined with 2-formylphenylboronic acid derived reactive groups to form iminoboronate probes that selectively label their target proteins. A transimination reaction on the labeled proteins with an α-amino hydrazide provides further modification, for example to introduce a fluorophore.</p

Regioselective oxidation of unprotected 1,4 linked glucans

Palladium-catalyzed alcohol oxidation allows the chemo- and regioselective modification of unprotected 1,4 linked glucans. This is demonstrated in the two-step bisfunctionalization of 1,4 linked glucans up to the 7-mer. Introduction of an anomeric azide is followed by a highly regioselective mono-oxidation of the terminal C3-OH functionality. The resulting orthogonal bis-functionalized oligosaccharides are a viable alternative to PEG-spacers as demonstrated in the conjugation of a cysteine mutant of 4-oxalocrotonate tautomerase with biotin

Calcium Influx through Plasma-Membrane Nanoruptures Drives Axon Degeneration in a Model of Multiple Sclerosis

Axon loss determines persistent disability in multiple sclerosis patients. Here, we use in vivo calcium imaging in a multiple sclerosis model to show that cytoplasmic calcium levels determine the choice between axon loss and survival. We rule out the endoplasmic reticulum, glutamate excitotoxicity, and the reversal of the sodium-calcium exchanger as sources of intra-axonal calcium accumulation and instead identify nanoscale ruptures of the axonal plasma membrane as the critical path of calcium entry

Direct frequency-comb spectroscopy of a dipole-forbidden clock transition in trapped 40Ca+ ions

We demonstrate direct frequency-comb (FC) spectroscopy of the dipole-forbidden 4

Online consultations in mental healthcare: Modelling determinants of use and experience based on an international survey study at the onset of the pandemic

Introduction: While online consultations have shown promise to be a means for the effective delivery of high -quality mental healthcare and the first implementations of these digital therapeutic contacts go back nearly two decades, uptake has remained limited over the years. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered this relative standstill and created a unique turning point, with a massive amount of both professionals and clients having first hands-on experiences with technology in mental healthcare.Objective: The current study aimed to document the uptake of online consultations and explore if specific characteristics of mental health professionals across and beyond Europe could predict this.Methods: An international survey was designed to assess mental health professionals' (initial) experiences with online consultations at the onset of the pandemic: their willingness to make use of them and their prior and current experiences, alongside several personal characteristics. Logistic mixed-effects models were used to identify predictors of the use of online consultations, personal experience with this modality, and the sense of telepresence.Results: A total of 9115 healthcare professionals from 73 countries participated of which about two-thirds used online consultations during the initial COVID-19 outbreak. The current study identifies multiple determinants relating to the use and experience of online consultations, including the professionals' age, experience with the technology before the outbreak, the professional context, and training.Conclusions: Despite strong evidence supporting the relevance of training in digital mental health, this is clearly still lacking. Nevertheless, the COVID-19 pandemic presented a first, and potentially transformative, experience with online consultations for many healthcare professionals. The insights from this study can help supportprofessionals and, importantly, (mental) healthcare organisations to create optimal circumstances for selective and high-quality continued use of online consultations

Proceedings of the 4th bwHPC Symposium

The bwHPC Symposium 2017 took place on October 4th, 2017, Alte Aula, Tübingen. It focused on the presentation of scientific computing projects as well as on the progress and the success stories of the bwHPC realization concept. The event offered a unique opportunity to engage in an active dialogue between scientific users, operators of bwHPC sites, and the bwHPC support team

Assessment of NER solutions against the first and second CALBC Silver Standard Corpus

Background Competitions in text mining have been used to measure the performance of automatic text processing solutions against a manually annotated gold standard corpus (GSC). The preparation of the GSC is time-consuming and costly and the final corpus consists at the most of a few thousand documents annotated with a limited set of semantic groups. To overcome these shortcomings, the CALBC project partners (PPs) have produced a large-scale annotated biomedical corpus with four different semantic groups through the harmonisation of annotations from automatic text mining solutions, the first version of the Silver Standard Corpus (SSC-I). The four semantic groups are chemical entities and drugs (CHED), genes and proteins (PRGE), diseases and disorders (DISO) and species (SPE). This corpus has been used for the First CALBC Challenge asking the participants to annotate the corpus with their text processing solutions. Results All four PPs from the CALBC project and in addition, 12 challenge participants (CPs) contributed annotated data sets for an evaluation against the SSC-I. CPs could ignore the training data and deliver the annotations from their genuine annotation system, or could train a machine-learning approach on the provided pre-annotated data. In general, the performances of the annotation solutions were lower for entities from the categories CHED and PRGE in comparison to the identification of entities categorized as DISO and SPE. The best performance over all semantic groups were achieved from two annotation solutions that have been trained on the SSC-I. The data sets from participants were used to generate the harmonised Silver Standard Corpus II (SSC-II), if the participant did not make use of the annotated data set from the SSC-I for training purposes. The performances of the participants’ solutions were again measured against the SSC-II. The performances of the annotation solutions showed again better results for DISO and SPE in comparison to CHED and PRGE. Conclusions The SSC-I delivers a large set of annotations (1,121,705) for a large number of documents (100,000 Medline abstracts). The annotations cover four different semantic groups and are sufficiently homogeneous to be reproduced with a trained classifier leading to an average F-measure of 85%. Benchmarking the annotation solutions against the SSC-II leads to better performance for the CPs’ annotation solutions in comparison to the SSC-I