STEM materials: a new frontier for an intelligent sustainable world

Materials are addressed as possible enablers for solutions to many global societal challenges. A foresight exercise has been conducted to identify research paths to design, with a new approach, a generation of materials which can provide multi-functionalities. These material systems have been named ???stem???, in analogy to living cells where a base of primitive units can be designed and assembled for self-reacting to external inputs. These materials will embed a concept of ???internet in things???, where their processing capacity will enable the systems to interact with the environment and express diverse functionalities. Stem materials do not exist yet, but many clues from diferent theoretical and experimental results suggest they can be developed, and because living organisms exist. This article aims at launching this new approach and promoting the structuring of a multi-disciplinary community to fll the research gaps

Overview of the BlockNormal Event Trigger Generator

In the search for unmodeled gravitational wave bursts, there are a variety of methods that have been proposed to generate candidate events from time series data. Block Normal is a method of identifying candidate events by searching for places in the data stream where the characteristic statistics of the data change. These change-points divide the data into blocks in which the characteristics of the block are stationary. Blocks in which these characteristics are inconsistent with the long term characteristic statistics are marked as Event-Triggers which can then be investigated by a more computationally demanding multi-detector analysis.Comment: GWDAW-8 proceedings, 6 pages, 2 figure

Combating STI Epidemic: Community Perspectives Learned from Mixed-Gender Focus Group Study

Background. Since 2004, Douglas County in Nebraska has been experiencing higher rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) than the rest of the state. Northern Omaha has been considered to be one of the “hot spots” for STIs in the county. In 2011-2012, a focus group study was conducted to investigate the community’s perception of STIs and to identify strategies to increase the testing and treatment of STIs. Methods. Fourteen young adults were recruited to participate in two mixed-gender focus group sessions, each lasting 1.5 hours. Sessions covered various topics on STIs. Audio-recorded sessions were transcribed and analyzed by the study team. Results. Participants were aware of the STI problem in their community. They identified risk factors for STIs included careless sexual behavior, unprotected sex, and lack of communication with parents. Participants believed that the club environment and drug and alcohol use contribute to risky sexual behavior. Participants perceived lack of confidentiality as the most important barrier to getting tested. The most important reason for not seeking treatment was lack of awareness about the signs of infection. Participants called for measures to increase trustworthy relationships with the health care system and suggested opening more testing and treatment sites. Discussion. The uniqueness of our study is that it is the first conducted epidemiological study in this population to better understand risk factors of STIs specific to this population. The study identified several important factors that may assist in future interventions to reduce STIs in this population

Hybridisation-based target enrichment of phenology genes to dissect the genetic basis of yield and adaptation in barley

Plant Biotechnology Journal published by Society for Experimental Biology and The Association of Applied Biologists and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is a major cereal grain widely used for livestock feed, brewing malts and human food. Grain yield is the most important breeding target for genetic improvement and largely depends on optimal timing of flowering. Little is known about the allelic diversity of genes that underlie flowering time in domesticated barley, the genetic changes that have occurred during breeding, and their impact on yield and adaptation. Here, we report a comprehensive genomic assessment of a worldwide collection of 895 barley accessions based on the targeted resequencing of phenology genes. A versatile target-capture method was used to detect genome-wide polymorphisms in a panel of 174 flowering time-related genes, chosen based on prior knowledge from barley, rice and Arabidopsis thaliana. Association studies identified novel polymorphisms that accounted for observed phenotypic variation in phenology and grain yield, and explained improvements in adaptation as a result of historical breeding of Australian barley cultivars. We found that 50% of genetic variants associated with grain yield, and 67% of the plant height variation was also associated with phenology. The precise identification of favourable alleles provides a genomic basis to improve barley yield traits and to enhance adaptation for specific production areas

Hybridisation-based target enrichment of phenology genes to dissect the genetic basis of yield and adaptation in barley

Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is a major cereal grain widely used for livestock feed, brewing malts and human food. Grain yield is the most important breeding target for genetic improvement and largely depends on optimal timing of flowering. Little is known about the allelic diversity of genes that underlie flowering time in domesticated barley, the genetic changes that have occurred during breeding, and their impact on yield and adaptation. Here we report a comprehensive genomic assessment of a worldwide collection of 895 barley accessions based on the targeted resequencing of phenology genes. A versatile target‐capture method was used to detect genome‐wide polymorphisms in a panel of 174 flowering time‐related genes, chosen based on prior knowledge from barley, rice, and Arabidopsis thaliana. Association studies identified novel polymorphisms that accounted for observed phenotypic variation in phenology and grain yield, and explained improvements in adaptation as a result of historical breeding of Australian barley cultivars. We found that 50% of genetic variants associated with grain yield, and 67% of the plant height variation was also associated with phenology. The precise identification of favourable alleles provides a genomic basis to improve barley yield traits and to enhance adaptation for specific production areas