A Co-axial Multi-tube Heat Exchanger Applicable for a Geothermal ORC Power Plant

AbstractThe study proposes a Co-axial multi-tube heat exchanger (CMTHE) applicable to geothermal heat extraction. The heat exchanger is integrated with a 50kW geothermal ORC power plant having a working fluid of R-245fa. Two field tests were performed to examine the system response of the ORC system subject to change of CMTHE. In case 1 where the flow rate in the shell-side of CMTHE is maintained, the pressure variation in the shell-side of CMTHE casts minor variations on heat extraction, ORC power generation, and ORC efficiency during the transient. Moreover, the effect of pressure has barely any influence of the final states of heat extraction, ORC power generation, and ORC efficiency. In case 2 where the pressure is preserved in the CMTHE, it is found that a decrease of flow rate in the CMTHE results in degradation of heat extraction, ORC power generation and ORC system efficiency. On the contrary, increasing the flow rate in the CMTHE leads to a rise of heat extraction, ORC power generation and ORC system efficiency. Unlike that in case 1, the effect of flow rate has a detectable effect on the final states of heat extraction, ORC power generation, and ORC efficiency

Dual-acting stapled peptides target both HIV-1 entry and assembly

Background: Previously, we reported the conversion of the 12-mer linear and cell-impermeable peptide CAI to a cell-penetrating peptide NYAD-1 by using an i,i + 4 hydrocarbon stapling technique and confirmed its binding to the C-terminal domain (CTD) of the HIV-1 capsid (CA) protein with an improved affinity (Kd ~ 1 μM) compared to CAI (Kd ~ 15 μM). NYAD-1 disrupts the formation of both immature- and mature-like virus particles in in vitro and cell-based assembly assays. In addition, it displays potent anti-HIV-1 activity in cell culture against a range of laboratory-adapted and primary HIV-1 isolates.<p></p> Results: In this report, we expanded the study to i,i + 7 hydrocarbon-stapled peptides to delineate their mechanism of action and antiviral activity. We identified three potent inhibitors, NYAD-36, -66 and -67, which showed strong binding to CA in NMR and isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) studies and disrupted the formation of mature-like particles. They showed typical α-helical structures and penetrated cells; however, the cell penetration was not as efficient as observed with the i,i + 4 peptides. Unlike NYAD-1, the i,i + 7 peptides did not have any effect on virus release; however, they impaired Gag precursor processing. HIV-1 particles produced in the presence of these peptides displayed impaired infectivity. Consistent with an effect on virus entry, selection for viral resistance led to the emergence of two mutations in the gp120 subunit of the viral envelope (Env) glycoprotein, V120Q and A327P, located in the conserved region 1 (C1) and the base of the V3 loop, respectively.<p></p> Conclusion: The i,i + 7 stapled peptides derived from CAI unexpectedly target both CA and the V3 loop of gp120. This dual-targeted activity is dependent on their ability to penetrate cells as well as their net charge. This mechanistic revelation will be useful in further modifying these peptides as potent anti-HIV-1 agents.<p></p&gt

A study of the social and physical environment in catering kitchens and the role of the chef in promoting positive health and safety behaviour

This is the account of a mixed method study of chefs and their kitchens in order to identify the nature of their workplace and how this affects their ability to manage health and safety in the kitchen. It included extended periods of observation, monitoring of physical parameters, analysis of records of reported accidents, and a series of reflexive interviews. The findings were integrated and then fed back in a smaller number of second interviews in order to test whether the findings fitted in with the chefs' understanding of their world. Major factors identified included survival in a market environment, the status of the chef (and the kitchen) within organisations, marked autocracy of chefs, and an increasing tempo building up to service time with commensurate heat, noise, and activity. In particular during the crescendo, a threshold shift in risk tolerance was identified. The factors, their interplay, and their implications for health and safety in the catering kitchen are discussed

Information extraction from Webpages based on DOM distances

Retrieving information from Internet is a difficult task as it is demonstrated by the lack of real-time tools able to extract information from webpages. The main cause is that most webpages in Internet are implemented using plain (X)HTML which is a language that lacks structured semantic information. For this reason much of the efforts in this area have been directed to the development of techniques for URLs extraction. This field has produced good results implemented by modern search engines. But, contrarily, extracting information from a single webpage has produced poor results or very limited tools. In this work we define a novel technique for information extraction from single webpages or collections of interconnected webpages. This technique is based on DOM distances to retrieve information. This allows the technique to work with any webpage and, thus, to retrieve information online. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate the usefulness of the technique.Castillo, C.; Valero Llinares, H.; Guadalupe Ramos, J.; Silva Galiana, JF. (2012). Information extraction from Webpages based on DOM distances. En Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Springer Verlag (Germany). 181-193. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28601-8_16S181193Dalvi, B., Cohen, W.W., Callan, J.: Websets: Extracting sets of entities from the web using unsupervised information extraction. Technical report, Carnegie Mellon School of computer Science (2011)Kushmerick, N., Weld, D.S., Doorenbos, R.: Wrapper induction for information extraction. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 1997) (1997)Cohen, W.W., Hurst, M., Jensen, L.S.: A flexible learning system for wrapping tables and lists in html documents. In: Proceedings of the international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2002), pp. 232–241 (2002)Lee, P.Y., Hui, S.C., Fong, A.C.M.: Neural networks for web content filtering. IEEE Intelligent Systems 17(5), 48–57 (2002)Anti-Porn Parental Controls Software. Porn Filtering (March 2010), http://www.tueagles.com/anti-porn/Kang, B.-Y., Kim, H.-G.: Web page filtering for domain ontology with the context of concept. IEICE - Trans. Inf. Syst. E90, D859–D862 (2007)Henzinger, M.: The Past, Present and Future of Web Information Retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 23th ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (2004)W3C Consortium. Resource Description Framework (RDF), www.w3.org/RDFW3C Consortium. Web Ontology Language (OWL), www.w3.org/2004/OWLMicroformats.org. The Official Microformats Site (2009), http://microformats.orgKhare, R., Çelik, T.: Microformats: a Pragmatic Path to the Semantic Web. In: Proceedings of the 15h International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 865–866 (2006)Khare, R.: Microformats: The Next (Small) Thing on the Semantic Web? IEEE Internet Computing 10(1), 68–75 (2006)Gupta, S., et al.: Automating Content Extraction of HTML Documents. World Wide Archive 8(2), 179–224 (2005)Li, P., Liu, M., Lin, Y., Lai, Y.: Accelerating Web Content Filtering by the Early Decision Algorithm. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems E91-D, 251–257 (2008)W3C Consortium, Document Object Model (DOM), www.w3.org/DOMBaeza-Yates, R., Castillo, C.: Crawling the Infinite Web: Five Levels Are Enough. In: Leonardi, S. (ed.) WAW 2004. LNCS, vol. 3243, pp. 156–167. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Micarelli, A., Gasparetti, F.: Adaptative Focused Crawling. In: The Adaptative Web, pp. 231–262 (2007)Nielsen, J.: Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis (2010) ISBN 1-56205-810-XZhang, J.: Visualization for Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series. Springer, Heidelberg (2007) ISBN 3-54075-1475Hearst, M.A.: TileBars: Visualization of Term Distribution Information. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Denver, CO, pp. 59–66 (May 1995)Gottron, T.: Evaluating Content Extraction on HTML Documents. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications, pp. 123–132 (2007)Apache Foundation. The Apache crawler Nutch (2010), http://nutch.apache.or

Paclitaxel (Taxol)-induced Gene Expression and Cell Death Are Both Mediated by the Activation of c-Jun NH 2 -terminal Kinase (JNK/SAPK)

Paclitaxel (Taxol) is a novel anti-cancer drug that has shown efficacy toward several malignant tumors, particularly ovarian tumors. We reported previously that paclitaxel can induce interleukin (IL)-8 promoter activation in subgroups of ovarian cancer through the activation of both AP-1 and nuclear factor kappaB. Further analysis of paclitaxel analogs indicates that the degree of IL-8 induction by analysis correlates with the extent of cell death; however, IL-8 itself is not the cause of cell death. This suggests that pathways that lead to IL-8 and cell death may overlap, although IL-8 per se does not kill tumor cells. To decipher the upstream signals for paclitaxel-induced transcriptional activation and cell death, we studied the involvement of protein kinases that lead to the activation of AP-1, specifically the c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK1), p38, and the extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1 (ERK1). The role of IkappaB in paclitaxel-induced cell death was also analyzed. Paclitaxel activated JNK, and to a lesser degree p38, but not ERK1. Paclitaxel-induced IL-8 promoter activation was inhibited by dominant-inhibitory mutants of JNK, p38, and the super-repressor form of IkappaBalpha, but not by dominant-inhibitory forms of ERK1. Dominant-inhibitory mutants of JNK1 also greatly reduced paclitaxel-induced cell death, and the kinetics of JNK induction was closely followed by DNA fragmentation. These results indicate (i) that paclitaxel activates the JNK signaling pathway and (ii) that JNK activation is a common point of paclitaxel-induced gene induction and cell death

Experience of hormone replacement therapy among women of Sarawak, Malaysia

Objectives To determine the usage of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and knowledge about HRT among women of Sarawak in Malaysia. Methods A prospective study using a face-to-face interview was conducted on 356 randomly selected Sarawakian women aged between 40 and 65 years. Results The mean age of respondents was 50.83+6.30 years and the mean age of menopause was 51.28+2.28 years. Twenty-three percent of women were premenopausal, 39.6% perimenopausal and 37.4% postmenopausal. Only 36% of the respondents were aware of the existence of HRT; this is especially among those who were younger women, better educated and working. The main sources of information on HRT were friends and relatives (92.2%), newspapers/magazines (89.1%) and television/radio (64.1%). HRT usage among respondents was low (8.1%), mainly for relief of menopausal symptoms such as night sweats (100%), mood swings (93.1%), irritability (93.1%), and hot flushes (86.2%); only 24.1% used it for the prevention of osteoporosis. All women on HRT had taken HRT for less than 3 years. The main reason given for not being on HRT was that it was not recommended by their doctors (56.6%); only 8.3% worried about the side-effects and 4.3% were on other forms of treatment. Conclusions The use of and knowledge about HRT among women of Sarawak were found to be low in our study. The main sources of information about HRT are from friends/relatives and the mass media. Health-care providers should play an important role in promoting, counseling and health education regarding HRT needs to rectify these problems

Molecular conservation of estrogen-response associated with cell cycle regulation, hormonal carcinogenesis and cancer in zebrafish and human cancer cell lines

BMC Medical Genomics4

Quantum Maxwell-Bloch equations for spatially inhomogeneous semiconductor lasers

We present quantum Maxwell-Bloch equations (QMBE) for spatially inhomogeneous semiconductor laser devices. The QMBE are derived from fully quantum mechanical operator dynamics describing the interaction of the light field with the quantum states of the electrons and the holes near the band gap. By taking into account field-field correlations and field-dipole correlations, the QMBE include quantum noise effects which cause spontaneous emission and amplified spontaneous emission. In particular, the source of spontaneous emission is obtained by factorizing the dipole-dipole correlations into a product of electron and hole densities. The QMBE are formulated for general devices, for edge emitting lasers and for vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, providing a starting point for the detailed analysis of spatial coherence in the near field and far field patterns of such laser diodes. Analytical expressions are given for the spectra of gain and spontaneous emission described by the QMBE. These results are applied to the case of a broad area laser, for which the frequency and carrier density dependent spontaneous emission factor beta and the evolution of the far field pattern near threshold are derived.Comment: 22 pages RevTex and 7 figures, submitted to Phys.Rev.A, revisions in abstract and in the discussion of temporal coherenc

The menopausal experience among indigenous women of Sarawak, Malaysia

Objectives To document the common menopausal symptoms and quality of life in indigenous women of Sarawak in Malaysia. Methods A face-to-face interview using the Menopause-specific Quality of Life questionnaire was conducted with 276 indigenous Sarawakian women aged 40–65 years to determine the mean age of menopause and common symptoms (divided into vasomotor, psychosocial, physical and sexual domains) associated with menopause. Results The mean age at menopause of postmenopausal women was 50.78+2.47 years (range 47.3–58.2 years). The most common symptoms reported were aching in muscles and joints (82.6%), lack of energy (77.5%) and low backache (77.2%). The typical menopausal symptoms of hot flushes, night sweats, sweating and vaginal dryness were experienced by 42.4%, 34.8%, 29.7% and 49.3%, respectively of the women studied. Perimenopausal women (n¼114) experienced the most physical and psychosocial symptoms, while postmenopausal women (n¼102) experienced most sexual symptoms. Perimenopausal and postmenopausal women were reported to suffer more than premenopausal women (p50.001) within the four domains of symptoms (vasomotor, psychosocial, physical and sexual). Conclusions The menopausal symptoms in this study correspond to those in other studies on Asian women but the prevalence of typical and classical menopausal symptoms was lower compared to studies on Caucasian women. The perimenopausal women had the most significant decrease in quality of life, followed by postmenopausal women and premenopausal women. Vasomotor symptoms had a predominant influence on the quality of life

Non-planar ABJM Theory and Integrability

Using an effective vertex method we explicitly derive the two-loop dilatation generator of ABJM theory in its SU(2)xSU(2) sector, including all non-planar corrections. Subsequently, we apply this generator to a series of finite length operators as well as to two different types of BMN operators. As in N=4 SYM, at the planar level the finite length operators are found to exhibit a degeneracy between certain pairs of operators with opposite parity - a degeneracy which can be attributed to the existence of an extra conserved charge and thus to the integrability of the planar theory. When non-planar corrections are taken into account the degeneracies between parity pairs disappear hinting the absence of higher conserved charges. The analysis of the BMN operators resembles that of N=4 SYM. Additional non-planar terms appear for BMN operators of finite length but once the strict BMN limit is taken these terms disappear.Comment: 1+26 pages, uses axodraw.sty. v2: typos fixed, references added. v3: more typos fixed, minor correction