Experimental determination of ruthenium L-shell fluorescence yields and Coster-Kronig transition probabilities

The L-shell fluorescence yields and the Coster-Kronig factors of ruthenium (and the corresponding uncertainty) were determined for the first time experimentally by applying radiometrically calibrated instrumentation of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. The resulting fluorescence yields ($\omega_{L_3}=0.0459(20)$, $\omega_{L_2}=0.0415(26)$, $\omega_{L_1}=0.0109(9)$) and the Coster-Kronig factors ($f_{23}=0.177(32)$, $f_{13}=0.528(90)$, $f_{12}=0.173(73)$) agree reasonable well with parts of the data from the literature

Method for quick evaluation of synthesis routes based on exergy balances

Heutige chemische Produkte basieren fast ausschließlich auf erdölbasierten Rohstoffen. Aufgrund weltweiter Bemühungen, die Abhängigkeit von fossilen Rohstoffen zu reduzieren, wird in den letzten Jahren verstärkt die Nutzung alternativer Kohlenstoffquellen wie Biomasse oder CO2 erforscht. Die alternativen Kohlenstoffquellen unterscheiden sich hinsichtlich ihrer Zusammensetzung und Stoffeigenschaften teilweise deutlich von fossilen Rohstoffen. Aus diesem Grund müssen Syntheserouten und darauf aufbauende Prozesse neu entwickelt werden. Da zum einen sehr viele Syntheserouten prinzipiell denkbar sind und zum anderen die Entwicklung der entsprechenden Prozesse aufwendig ist, wird eine Möglichkeit benötigt, begrenzte Entwicklungsressourcen sinnvoll zu steuern. Dazu sollte bereits in einem frühen Entwicklungsstadium ein quantitativer Vergleich der Syntheserouten erfolgen, um diejenigen zu identifizieren, die das größte wirtschaftliche Potential versprechen. In diesem Vortrag wird eine Methodik vorgestellt, um eine schnelle erste, auf Exergie basierte Bewertung des wirtschaftlichen Potentials einer Syntheseroute bereits in einem frühen Entwicklungsstadium durchzuführen, in dem nur wenige Informationen vorliegen. Die Idee der Methodik ist, Syntheserouten in standardisierten Prozessen abzubilden, wodurch eine automatisierte Auswertung und somit ein schnelles Screening möglich wird. Die standardisierten Prozesse umfassen sowohl den Einfluss der Reaktion durch Abbildung der Reaktionsbedingungen, Stöchiometrie, Umsatz und Selektivität als auch die Auswirkungen der Trennaufgabe. Ebenso berücksichtigt wird die Rückführung von Lösungsmitteln und ggf. nicht umgesetzten Edukten. Als zentrale Bewertungsgröße zur Abschätzung des wirtschaftlichen Potentials wird eine Kombination aus Exergie- und Rohstoffeinsatz herangezogen. Der Vorteil von Exergiebilanzen gegenüber Energiebilanzen ist, dass die Produktion von Entropie berücksichtigt wird und so die Auswirkungen einzelner Prozessschritte untersucht und zwischen verschiedenen Energieformen unterschieden werden kann. Durch Berechnung der Exergieverluste, also der Verluste von Exergie aufgrund von Entropieerzeugung in den Prozessen, ergibt sich ein quantitativer Vergleich verschiedener Syntheserouten

The unexpectedly short Holocene Humid Period in Northern Arabia

The early to middle Holocene Humid Period led to a greening of today’s arid Saharo-Arabian desert belt. While this phase is well defined in North Africa and the Southern Arabian Peninsula, robust evidence from Northern Arabia is lacking. Here we fill this gap with unprecedented annually to sub-decadally resolved proxy data from Tayma, the only known varved lake sediments in Northern Arabia. Based on stable isotopes, micro-facies analyses and varve and radiocarbon dating, we distinguish five phases of lake development and show that the wet phase in Northern Arabia from 8800–7900 years BP is considerably shorter than the commonly defined Holocene Humid Period (~11,000–5500 years BP). Moreover, we find a two century-long peak humidity at times when a centennial-scale dry anomaly around 8200 years BP interrupted the Holocene Humid Period in adjacent regions. The short humid phase possibly favoured Neolithic migrations into Northern Arabia representing a strong human response to environmental changes

Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension

The animacy distinction is deeply rooted in the language faculty. A key example is differential object marking, the phenomenon where animate sentential objects receive specific marking. We used event-related potentials to examine the neural processing consequences of case-marking violations on animate and inanimate direct objects in Spanish. Inanimate objects with incorrect prepositional case marker ‘a’ (‘al suelo’) elicited a P600 effect compared to unmarked objects, consistent with previous literature. However, animate objects without the required prepositional case marker (‘el obispo’) only elicited an N400 effect compared to marked objects. This novel finding, an exclusive N400 modulation by a straightforward grammatical rule violation, does not follow from extant neurocognitive models of sentence processing, and mirrors unexpected “semantic P600” effects for thematically problematic sentences. These results may reflect animacy asymmetry in competition for argument prominence: following the article, thematic interpretation difficulties are elicited only by unexpectedly animate objects

Developing Recombinant Antibodies by Phage Display Against Infectious Diseases and Toxins for Diagnostics and Therapy

Antibodies are essential molecules for diagnosis and treatment of diseases caused by pathogens and their toxins. Antibodies were integrated in our medical repertoire against infectious diseases more than hundred years ago by using animal sera to treat tetanus and diphtheria. In these days, most developed therapeutic antibodies target cancer or autoimmune diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic was a reminder about the importance of antibodies for therapy against infectious diseases. While monoclonal antibodies could be generated by hybridoma technology since the 70ies of the former century, nowadays antibody phage display, among other display technologies, is robustly established to discover new human monoclonal antibodies. Phage display is an in vitro technology which confers the potential for generating antibodies from universal libraries against any conceivable molecule of sufficient size and omits the limitations of the immune systems. If convalescent patients or immunized/infected animals are available, it is possible to construct immune phage display libraries to select in vivo affinity-matured antibodies. A further advantage is the availability of the DNA sequence encoding the phage displayed antibody fragment, which is packaged in the phage particles. Therefore, the selected antibody fragments can be rapidly further engineered in any needed antibody format according to the requirements of the final application. In this review, we present an overview of phage display derived recombinant antibodies against bacterial, viral and eukaryotic pathogens, as well as microbial toxins, intended for diagnostic and therapeutic applications

Ancient Plasmodium genomes shed light on the history of human malaria

Malaria-causing protozoa of the genus Plasmodium have exerted one of the strongest selective pressures on the human genome, and resistance alleles provide biomolecular footprints that outline the historical reach of these species1. Nevertheless, debate persists over when and how malaria parasites emerged as human pathogens and spread around the globe1,2. To address these questions, we generated high-coverage ancient mitochondrial and nuclear genome-wide data from P. falciparum, P. vivax and P. malariae from 16 countries spanning around 5,500 years of human history. We identified P. vivax and P. falciparum across geographically disparate regions of Eurasia from as early as the fourth and first millennia bce, respectively; for P. vivax, this evidence pre-dates textual references by several millennia3. Genomic analysis supports distinct disease histories for P. falciparum and P. vivax in the Americas: similarities between now-eliminated European and peri-contact South American strains indicate that European colonizers were the source of American P. vivax, whereas the trans-Atlantic slave trade probably introduced P. falciparum into the Americas. Our data underscore the role of cross-cultural contacts in the dissemination of malaria, laying the biomolecular foundation for future palaeo-epidemiological research into the impact of Plasmodium parasites on human history. Finally, our unexpected discovery of P. falciparum in the high-altitude Himalayas provides a rare case study in which individual mobility can be inferred from infection status, adding to our knowledge of cross-cultural connectivity in the region nearly three millennia ago.This project was funded by the National Science Foundation, grants BCS-2141896 and BCS-1528698; the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, grants 851511-MICROSCOPE (to S. Schiffels), 771234-PALEoRIDER (to W.H.) and starting grant 805268-CoDisEASe (to K.I.B.); and the ERC starting grant Waves ERC758967 (supporting K. Nägele and S.C.). We thank the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean for supporting M. Michel, E. Skourtanioti, A.M., R.A.B., L.C.B., G.U.N., N.S., V.V.-M., M. McCormick, P.W.S., C.W. and J.K.; the Kone Foundation for supporting E.K.G. and A.S.; and the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Helsinki for grants to E.K.G. A.S. thanks the Magnus Ehrnrooth Foundation, the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Academy of Finland, the Life and Health Medical Foundation and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. M.C.B. acknowledges funding from: research project PID2020-116196GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033; the Spanish Ministry of Culture; the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation; Fundación Palarq; the EU FP7 Marie Curie Zukunftskolleg Incoming Fellowship Programme, University of Konstanz (grant 291784); STAR2-Santander Universidades and Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports; and CEI 2015 project Cantabria Campus Internacional. M.E. received support from the Czech Academy of Sciences award Praemium Academiae and project RVO 67985912 of the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. This work has been funded within project PID2020-115956GB-I00 ‘Origen y conformación del Bronce Valenciano’, granted by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain, and grants from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (MZI187236), Research Nova Scotia (RNS 2023-2565) and The Center for Health Research in Developing Countries. D.K. is the Canada research chair in translational vaccinology and inflammation. R.L.K. acknowledges support from a 2019 University of Otago research grant (Human health and adaptation along Silk Roads, a bioarchaeological investigation of a medieval Uzbek cemetery). P.O. thanks the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Academy of Finland. S. Peltola received support from the Emil Aaltonen Foundation and the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation. D.C.S.-G. thanks the Generalitat Valenciana (CIDEGENT/2019/061). E.W.K. acknowledges support from the DEEPDEAD project, HERA-UP, CRP (15.055) and the Horizon 2020 programme (grant 649307). M. Spyrou thanks the Elite program for postdocs of the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung. Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society

Early mobilisation in critically ill COVID-19 patients: a subanalysis of the ESICM-initiated UNITE-COVID observational study

Background Early mobilisation (EM) is an intervention that may improve the outcome of critically ill patients. There is limited data on EM in COVID-19 patients and its use during the first pandemic wave. Methods This is a pre-planned subanalysis of the ESICM UNITE-COVID, an international multicenter observational study involving critically ill COVID-19 patients in the ICU between February 15th and May 15th, 2020. We analysed variables associated with the initiation of EM (within 72 h of ICU admission) and explored the impact of EM on mortality, ICU and hospital length of stay, as well as discharge location. Statistical analyses were done using (generalised) linear mixed-effect models and ANOVAs. Results Mobilisation data from 4190 patients from 280 ICUs in 45 countries were analysed. 1114 (26.6%) of these patients received mobilisation within 72 h after ICU admission; 3076 (73.4%) did not. In our analysis of factors associated with EM, mechanical ventilation at admission (OR 0.29; 95% CI 0.25, 0.35; p = 0.001), higher age (OR 0.99; 95% CI 0.98, 1.00; p ≤ 0.001), pre-existing asthma (OR 0.84; 95% CI 0.73, 0.98; p = 0.028), and pre-existing kidney disease (OR 0.84; 95% CI 0.71, 0.99; p = 0.036) were negatively associated with the initiation of EM. EM was associated with a higher chance of being discharged home (OR 1.31; 95% CI 1.08, 1.58; p = 0.007) but was not associated with length of stay in ICU (adj. difference 0.91 days; 95% CI − 0.47, 1.37, p = 0.34) and hospital (adj. difference 1.4 days; 95% CI − 0.62, 2.35, p = 0.24) or mortality (OR 0.88; 95% CI 0.7, 1.09, p = 0.24) when adjusted for covariates. Conclusions Our findings demonstrate that a quarter of COVID-19 patients received EM. There was no association found between EM in COVID-19 patients' ICU and hospital length of stay or mortality. However, EM in COVID-19 patients was associated with increased odds of being discharged home rather than to a care facility. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT04836065 (retrospectively registered April 8th 2021)

Methodik zur schnellen Bewertung von Syntheserouten auf Basis von Exergiebilanzen

Heutige chemische Produkte basieren fast ausschließlich auf erdölbasierten Rohstoffen. Aufgrund weltweiter Bemühungen, die Abhängigkeit von fossilen Rohstoffen zu reduzieren, wird in den letzten Jahren verstärkt die Nutzung alternativer Kohlenstoffquellen wie Biomasse oder CO2 erforscht. Die alternativen Kohlenstoffquellen unterscheiden sich hinsichtlich ihrer Zusammensetzung und Stoffeigenschaften teilweise deutlich von fossilen Rohstoffen. Aus diesem Grund müssen Syntheserouten und darauf aufbauende Prozesse neu entwickelt werden. Da zum einen sehr viele Syntheserouten prinzipiell denkbar sind und zum anderen die Entwicklung der entsprechenden Prozesse aufwendig ist, wird eine Möglichkeit benötigt, begrenzte Entwicklungsressourcen sinnvoll zu steuern. Dazu sollte bereits in einem frühen Entwicklungsstadium ein quantitativer Vergleich der Syntheserouten erfolgen, um diejenigen zu identifizieren, die das größte wirtschaftliche Potential versprechen. In diesem Vortrag wird eine Methodik vorgestellt, um eine schnelle erste, auf Exergie basierte Bewertung des wirtschaftlichen Potentials einer Syntheseroute bereits in einem frühen Entwicklungsstadium durchzuführen, in dem nur wenige Informationen vorliegen. Die Idee der Methodik ist, Syntheserouten in standardisierten Prozessen abzubilden, wodurch eine automatisierte Auswertung und somit ein schnelles Screening möglich wird. Die standardisierten Prozesse umfassen sowohl den Einfluss der Reaktion durch Abbildung der Reaktionsbedingungen, Stöchiometrie, Umsatz und Selektivität als auch die Auswirkungen der Trennaufgabe. Ebenso berücksichtigt wird die Rückführung von Lösungsmitteln und ggf. nicht umgesetzten Edukten. Als zentrale Bewertungsgröße zur Abschätzung des wirtschaftlichen Potentials wird eine Kombination aus Exergie- und Rohstoffeinsatz herangezogen. Der Vorteil von Exergiebilanzen gegenüber Energiebilanzen ist, dass die Produktion von Entropie berücksichtigt wird und so die Auswirkungen einzelner Prozessschritte untersucht und zwischen verschiedenen Energieformen unterschieden werden kann. Durch Berechnung der Exergieverluste, also der Verluste von Exergie aufgrund von Entropieerzeugung in den Prozessen, ergibt sich ein quantitativer Vergleich verschiedener Syntheserouten