The chemiluminescent peroxyoxalate system: state of the art almost 50 years from its discovery

Almost fifty years after the discovery of the peroxyoxalate reaction by E. A. Chandross in the early nineteen sixties, this review article intends to give a general overview on mechanistic aspects of this system and to describe the principles of its analytical application. After a short general introduction on the principles of chemiluminescence and the history of peroxyoxalate discovery, mechanistic aspects of high-energy intermediate formation, its structure and its reaction with an activator in the peroxyoxalate system are discussed. Finally, analytical applications of peroxyoxalate chemiluminescence are exemplified using representative recent examples, including oxalic acid detection in biological samples.

Service Innovation: the state of the art and a proposal of a research agenda

The service sector has acquired a growing importance in every country economy, which has stimulated research in the field of service innovation, a new field in management studies. This text aimed to state a research agenda upon service innovation, based on an articulated discussion of the results of several articles that compose the state of the art of this concept. 73 empirical articles were analyzed, 33% of them exploring the innovation strategies and technology; 18% of the articles describe research on economic performance and enterprise productivity; 16% are related to antecedents and determinants of innovation; another 16% about network capacity development, alliances and collaboration among organizations; 9% of the articles explore service quality, innovation taxonomy, flexible systems and regional systems of innovation; and another 8% are related to themes such as intensive knowledge, research and development. The researches were concentrated in the Engineering & Technology and Hospitality Industries, which accounted for 31% and 24% of the texts, respectively. The remaining 45% of the articles referred to sectors such as Telecommunications, Health, Retail, Financial & Insurance and Public Services. The main gaps identified in these texts refer to the difficulties on measuring service innovation, besides the small number of researches on the public sector. At the end, a research agenda in the subject is presented, including the development of a scale for orientating the innovation and identifying the determining factors of the innovation in the public environment.

Tracking the impact of translational research in psychiatry: state of the art and perspectives

Personalized treatments have become a primary goal in translational psychiatric research. They include the identification of neural circuits associated with psychiatric disorders and definition of treatment according to individual characteristics. Many new tools and technologies have been developed but further efforts are required to provide clues on how these scientific advances in psychiatry may be translated into more effective therapeutic approaches. Obstacles to the progress of translational psychiatry also involve numerous scientific, financial, ethical, logistics and regulatory aspects. Also, the goal of DSM-5 to expand “signs and symptoms” classification to incorporate biological measures may help the development of new multifactorial and dimensional models able to better understand the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders and develop improved treatments. Finally, a better understanding on the significant response variability, cognitive functioning, role of comorbidities and treatment-resistant cases are critical for the development of prevention and intervention strategies that are more effective.

Study of the Influence of Localized Vibrational Modes in Charge Transport Properties at Nanoscale Systems.

In molecular and atomic devices the interaction between electrons and ionic vibrations has an important role in electronic transport. The electron-phonon coupling can cause the loss of the electron's phase coherence, the opening of new conductance channels and the suppression of purely elastic ones. From the technological viewpoint phonons might restrict the efficiency of electronic devices by energy dissipation, causing heating, power loss and instability. The state of the art in electron transport calculations consists in combining ab initio calculations via Density Functional Theory (DFT) with Non-Equilibrium Green's Function formalism (NEGF). In order to include electron-phonon interactions, one needs in principle to include a self-energy scattering term in the open system Hamiltonian which takes into account the effect of the phonons over the electrons and vice versa. Nevertheless this term could be obtained approximately by perturbative methods. In the First Born Approximation one considers only the first order terms of the electronic Green's function expansion. In the Self-Consistent Born Approximation, the interaction self-energy is calculated with the perturbed electronic Green's function in a self-consistent way. In this work we describe how to incorporate the electron-phonon interaction to the SMEAGOL program (Spin and Molecular Electronics in Atomically Generated Orbital Landscapes), an ab initio code for electronic transport based on the combination of DFT + NEGF. This provides a tool for calculating the transport properties of materials' specific system, particularly in molecular electronics. Preliminary results will be presented, showing the effects produced by considering the electron-phonon interaction in nanoscale devices.