Composite rotor blades for large wind energy installations

The design of large wind power systems in Germany is reviewed with attention given to elaboration of the total wind energy system, aerodynamic design of the rotor blade, and wind loading effects. Particular consideration is given to the development of composite glass fiber/plastic or carbon fiber/plastic rotor blades for such installations

Surprise! Look what we have!

Creating an inventory of your digital assets seems like an easy task—and it may be quite simple. But what if your assets are spread out and located in various locations? Defining these locations may be the first challenge, followed by finding the correct people to contact, and then determining the best tools to capture and document the information your inventory requires. The University of Minnesota Libraries Digital Preservation and Repositories Technologies department recently completed an inventory as an early step in developing its digital preservation program. This high-level view allows us to better understand our assets and begin to move forward as we build our program and make policy decisions. Data assets were located in various databases, on various servers, as well as local computers requiring the use of multiple tools. Individual results were used to produce graphic representation for each collection, and then combined to produce graphic representations of the entire set of materials that require long-term management. This session will highlight the steps in completing the inventory for the UMN Libraries, including the tools used and work done to compile results

Using Freely Available Tools to Protect Your Digital Content

Managing digital content over time can be challenging as one has to protect against loss of data, format obsolescence, natural and man-made disasters. There are small steps you can take now to help ensure access to your digital content in the future. If you want to determine that the files you are storing have not become corrupt, or be able to better track how much digital content you have and the file formats used, you may want to attend this hands-on lab. Presenters will show you how to use some of the freely available tools out there to help you monitor the health of your digital files. Checksum tools that tell you if your files have changed over time at the bit level will be demonstrated like Exact File and Hash My Files, and more. You will have a chance to work with file duplicate detection tools as well as with DROID, which assists with file format identification, captures file property information, and displays information to you in a readable report

Nutriproteomics: technologies and applications for identification and quantification of biomarkers and ingredients

Nutrition refers to the process by which a living organism ingests and digests food and uses the nutrients therein for growth, tissue maintenance and all other functions essential to life. Food components interact with our body at molecular, cellular, organ and system level. Nutrients come in complex mixtures, in which the presence and concentration of single compounds as well as their interactions with other compounds and the food matrix influence their bioavailability and bioefficacy. Traditionally, nutrition research mainly concentrated on supplying nutrients of quality to nourish populations and on preventing specific nutrient deficiencies. More recently, it investigates health-related aspects of individual ingredients or of complete diets, in view of health promotion, performance optimisation, disease prevention and risk assessment. This review focuses on proteins and peptides, their role as nutrients and biomarkers and on the technologies developed for their analysis. In the first part of this review, we provide insights into the way proteins are currently characterised and analysed using classical and emerging proteomic approaches. The scope of the second part is to review major applications of proteomics to nutrition, from characterisation of food proteins and peptides, via investigation of health-related food benefits to understanding disease-related mechanism

Demystifying Digital Records Processing... Step by Step, Byte by Byte

After briefly providing some background information on the acquisition of a digital processing workstation and the development of digital records processing workflows, this hands-on work session will provide an overview of at least one possible workflow for accessioning and processing born digital archival records. Attendees will walk through the process themselves and learn how to use specific (free) tools to better understand and process the materials at hand. Some possible tasks could include documenting basic file structure for ingesting and processing digital files, generating basic metadata about files (e.g. identify the number, size, and types/formats of files), identifying duplicate files and/or empty directories, and creating checksums (as a baseline for preservation). Come and take the next step with us

Nutrigenomics: where are we with genetic and epigenetic markers for disposition and susceptibility?

The revelation of the human genome has enabled scientists to assess the disposition and response of an organism to an environmental stimulus; transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabonomics can each generate such holistic views. Nutrigenomic techniques help researchers elucidate individual responses to nutritional interventions holistically and help with the design of personalized diets adapted to individual needs. Human genetics has revealed insights into health and disease susceptibility and can help differentiate responders from nonresponders in dietary interventions, but the predictive power of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in disease susceptibility genes has so far been limited in terms of helping to foresee a health trajectory. Epigenetics encompasses alterations of genetic material that do not affect the DNA nucleotide sequence; these include DNA methylation patterns, chromatin structure, histone codes, and non-coding small RNAs. DNA methylation is modified particularly around the time of birth; therefore, early-life nutrition may affect health outcomes later in lif

Exosomics - A Review Of Biophysics, Biology And Biochemistry Of Exosomes With A Focus On Human Breast Milk

Exosomes are biomolecular nanostructures released from cells. They carry specific biomolecular information and are mainly researched for their exquisite properties as a biomarker source and delivery system. We introduce exosomes in the context of other extracellular vesicles, describe their biophysical isolation and characterisation and discuss their biochemical profiling. Motivated by our interest in early-life nutrition and health, and corresponding studies enrolling lactating mothers and their infants, we zoom into exosomes derived from human breast milk. We argue that these should be more extensively studied at proteomic and micronutrient profiling level, because breast milk exosomes provide a more specific window into breast milk quality from an immunological (proteomics) and nutritional (micronutrient) perspective. Such enhanced breast milk exosome profiling would thereby complement and enrich the more classical whole breast milk analysis and is expected to deliver more functional insights than the rather descriptive analysis of human milk, or larger fractions thereof, such as milk fat globule membrane. We substantiate our arguments by a bioinformatic analysis of two published proteomic data sets of human breast milk exosomes

Combining Graphics Processing Units, Simplified Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory, and Finite-Difference Couplings to Accelerate Nonadiabatic Molecular Dynamics

Starting from our recently published implementation of nonadiabatic molecular dynamics (NAMD) on graphics processing units (GPUs), we explore further approaches to accelerate ab initio NAMD calculations at the time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) level of theory. We employ (1) the simplified TDDFT schemes of Grimme et al. and (2) the Hammes-Schiffer−Tully approach to obtain nonadiabatic couplings from finite-difference calculations. The resulting scheme delivers an accurate physical picture while virtually eliminating the two computationally most demanding steps of the algorithm. Combined with our GPU-based integral routines for SCF, TDDFT, and TDDFT derivative calculations, NAMD simulations of systems of a few hundreds of atoms at a reasonable time scale become accessible on a single compute node. To demonstrate this and to present a first, illustrative example, we perform TDDFT/MM-NAMD simulations of the rhodopsin protein