Isotopic fractionation in proteins as a measure of hydrogen bond length

If a deuterated molecule containing strong intramolecular hydrogen bonds is placed in a hydrogenated solvent, it may preferentially exchange deuterium for hydrogen. This preference is due to the difference between the vibrational zero-point energy for hydrogen and deuterium. It is found that the associated fractionation factor (I) is correlated with the strength of the intramolecular hydrogen bonds. This correlation has been used to determine the length of the H-bonds (donor-acceptor separation) in a diverse range of enzymes and has been argued to support the existence of short low-barrier H-bonds. Starting with a potential energy surface based on a simple diabatic state model for H-bonds, we calculate (I) as a function of the proton donor-acceptor distance R. For numerical results, we use a parameterization of the model for symmetric 0-H. ``.0 bonds R. H. McKenzie, Chem. Phys. Lett. 535, 196 (2012)]. We consider the relative contributions of the 0-H stretch vibration, O-H bend vibrations (both in plane and out of plane), tunneling splitting effects at finite temperature, and the secondary geometric isotope effect. We compare our total (I) as a function of R with NMR experimental results for enzymes, and in particular with an earlier model parametrization (D(R), used previously to determine bond lengths. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.

QoS Aware Trust Metric based Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks have gained popularity due to their real time applications and low-cost nature. These networks provide solutions to scenarios that are critical, complicated and sensitive like military fields, habitat monitoring, and disaster management. The nodes in wireless sensor networks are highly resource constrained. Routing protocols are designed to make efficient utilization of the available resources in communicating a message from source to destination. In addition to the resource management, the trustworthiness of neighboring nodes or forwarding nodes and the energy level of the nodes to keep the network alive for longer duration is to be considered. This paper proposes a QoS Aware Trust Metric based Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks. The proposed framework safeguards a wireless sensor network from intruders by considering the trustworthiness of the forwarder node at every stage of multi-hop routing. Increases network lifetime by considering the energy level of the node, prevents the adversary from tracing the route from source to destination by providing path variation. The framework is built on NS2 Simulator. Experimental results show that the framework provides energy balance through establishment of trustworthy paths from the source to the destination. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Investigation of Annealing Induced Yttria Segregation in Sputtered Yttria-Stabilized Zirconia Thin Films

8mol% yttria-stabilized zirconia (8YSZ) is an extensively studied solid electrolyte. But there is no consistency in the reported ionic conductivity values of 8YSZ thin films. Interfacial segregation in YSZ thin films can affect its ionic conductivity by locally altering the surface chemistry. This article presents the effects of annealing temperature and film thickness on free surface yttria segregation behavior in 8YSZ thin film by Angle Resolved XPS and its influence on the ionic conductivity of sputtered 8YSZ thin films. Surface yttria concentration of about 32, 20, and 9mol% have been found in 40nm 8YSZ films annealed at 1273, 1173, and 1073K, respectively. Yttria segregation is found to increase with increase in annealing temperature and film thickness. Ionic conductivities of 0.23, 0.16, and 0.08Scm(-1) are observed at 923K for 40nm 8YSZ films annealed at 1073, 1173, and 1273K, respectively. The decrease in conductivity with increase in annealing temperature is attributed to the increased yttria segregation with annealing. Neither segregation nor film thickness is found to affect the activation energy of oxygen ion conduction. Target purity is found to play a key role in determining free surface yttria segregation in 8YSZ thin films.

Analysis of five glucometers available in India

In this study, we report on the accuracy, precision and clinical acceptability of the five blood glucose meters available in India. Glucose levels of 100 blood samples were measured with each meter, at IISc health centre laboratory under same conditions and the results were compared with laboratory reference standard. In order to calculate the coefficient of variation (CV), each sample was tested three times. None of the glucometer showed 100 % compliance on CV measure. In terms of accuracy, none of the glucometer satisfied the most stringent ADA-1994 standard. In general all the glucometers showed improved accuracy with respect to the most relaxed ISO 1597:2003 standard. The Clarke error grid analysis was performed to assess the clinical acceptability of the glucometers. All five glucometers had more than 90 % of test results in Zone A and B. Bland-Altman analysis indicates that all glucometers show a positive bias, indicating that the measured values tend to be higher than the laboratory reference standard.

Speaker verification based on the fusion of speech acoustics and inverted articulatory signals

We propose apractical, feature-level and score-level fusion approach by combining acoustic and estimated articulatory information for both text independent and text dependent speaker verification. From a practical point of view, we study how to improve speaker verification performance by combining dynamic articulatory information with the conventional acoustic features. On text independent speaker verification, we find that concatenating articulatory features obtained from measured speech production data with conventional Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) improves the performance dramatically. However, since directly measuring articulatory data is not feasible in many real world applications, we also experiment with estimated articulatory features obtained through acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. We explore both feature level and score level fusion methods and find that the overall system performance is significantly enhanced even with estimated articulatory features. Such a performance boost could be due to the inter-speaker variation information embedded in the estimated articulatory features. Since the dynamics of articulation contain important information, we included inverted articulatory trajectories in text dependent speaker verification. We demonstrate that the articulatory constraints introduced by inverted articulatory features help to reject wrong password trials and improve the performance after score level fusion. We evaluate the proposed methods on the X-ray Microbeam database and the RSR 2015 database, respectively, for the aforementioned two tasks. Experimental results show that we achieve more than 15% relative equal error rate reduction for both speaker verification tasks. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Action of Hopf on the twisted modular Hecke operator

Let Gamma subset of SL2(Z) be a principal congruence subgroup. For each sigma is an element of SL2(Z), we introduce the collection A(sigma)(Gamma) of modular Hecke operators twisted by sigma. Then, A(sigma)(Gamma) is a right A(Gamma)-module, where A(Gamma) is the modular Hecke algebra introduced by Connes and Moscovici. Using the action of a Hopf algebra h(0) on A(sigma)(Gamma), we define reduced Rankin-Cohen brackets on A(sigma)(Gamma). Moreover A(sigma)(Gamma) carries an action of H 1, where H 1 is the Hopf algebra of foliations of codimension 1. Finally, we consider operators between the levels A(sigma)(Gamma), sigma is an element of SL2(Z). We show that the action of these operators can be expressed in terms of a Hopf algebra h(Z).

No More HF: Teflon-Assisted Ultrafast Removal of Silica to Generate High-Surface-Area Mesostructured Carbon for Enhanced CO2 Capture and Supercapacitor Performance

An innovative technique to obtain high-surface-area mesostructured carbon (2545m(2)g(-1)) with significant microporosity uses Teflon as the silica template removal agent. This method not only shortens synthesis time by combining silica removal and carbonization in a single step, but also assists in ultrafast removal of the template (in 10min) with complete elimination of toxic HF usage. The obtained carbon material (JNC-1) displays excellent CO2 capture ability (ca. 26.2wt% at 0 degrees C under 0.88bar CO2 pressure), which is twice that of CMK-3 obtained by the HF etching method (13.0wt%). JNC-1 demonstrated higher H-2 adsorption capacity (2.8wt%) compared to CMK-3 (1.2wt%) at -196 degrees C under 1.0bar H-2 pressure. The bimodal pore architecture of JNC-1 led to superior supercapacitor performance, with a specific capacitance of 292Fg(-1) and 182Fg(-1) at a drain rate of 1Ag(-1) and 50Ag(-1), respectively, in 1m H2SO4 compared to CMK-3 and activated carbon.

No More HF: Teflon-Assisted Ultrafast Removal of Silica to Generate High-Surface-Area Mesostructured Carbon for Enhanced CO2 Capture and Supercapacitor Performance

An innovative technique to obtain high-surface-area mesostructured carbon (2545m(2)g(-1)) with significant microporosity uses Teflon as the silica template removal agent. This method not only shortens synthesis time by combining silica removal and carbonization in a single step, but also assists in ultrafast removal of the template (in 10min) with complete elimination of toxic HF usage. The obtained carbon material (JNC-1) displays excellent CO2 capture ability (ca. 26.2wt% at 0 degrees C under 0.88bar CO2 pressure), which is twice that of CMK-3 obtained by the HF etching method (13.0wt%). JNC-1 demonstrated higher H-2 adsorption capacity (2.8wt%) compared to CMK-3 (1.2wt%) at -196 degrees C under 1.0bar H-2 pressure. The bimodal pore architecture of JNC-1 led to superior supercapacitor performance, with a specific capacitance of 292Fg(-1) and 182Fg(-1) at a drain rate of 1Ag(-1) and 50Ag(-1), respectively, in 1m H2SO4 compared to CMK-3 and activated carbon.

Morphological Evolution During Synthesis of New AlPO4 Center dot H2O Crystal

A new crystal of aluminophosphate, AIPO(4)(.)H(2)O, is synthesized from two-batch aqueous solution under hydrothermal conditions. Three types of the crystal habits, i.e. the tetragonal double pyramid, the tetragonal prism and the plate-type tetragonal prism, are found from batch-A solution. Two types of the crystal habits, i.e. the hexagonal pyramid and the strip-type tetragonal prism, are found from batch-B solution. The change of crystal morphology is originated from the fluctuation of the synthesis conditions, such as the supersaturation, the temperature and the impurity content. It causes change of the step energies, the defect density and the step roughness, and further, change of the growth rates. Since the crystal morphology is sensitive to the mass transport mechanism, the crystal habits could be changed under the microgravity.

Evaluación de la diversidad de macroinvertebrados edáficos en cinco microcuencas del Río Estelí y Río Viejo Nicaragua

En investigación se determinó la densidad, número de familia y composición de familias de macroinvertebrados encontradas en tres microcuencas de la Subcuenca del Río Estelí y dos microcuenca de la Subcuenca del Río Viejo. En el marco del proyecto UNA/CARE/MARENA/PIMCHAS, 2010. Al mismo tiempo se realizó comparación de la densidad con respecto al uso de suelo. De igual manera, se determinó el cambio de macroinvertebrados en tres profundidades de muestreo (hojarasca, 1 -10cmy 10-25cm) y se agruparon por sus hábitos alimenticios. Para la toma de datos se exploraron los macroinvertebrados en 171 monolitos de 20x20x25 cm repartidos en los sitios de acción del proyecto UNA-CARE-MARENA- PIMCHAS de las microcuencas El Coyote, Las Chichiguas, La Pita, La Laguneta y Tomabú. Los 2,920 individuos identificados se determinaron en 52 familias, 22 órdenes, 7 clases y 4 filums. El número de familias y su composición no varió significativamente entre microcuencas ni entre sitios. Las familias que obtuvieron los mayores valores de abundancia en general fueron: Carabidae, Staphylinidae, Curculionidae, miembros de la clase Diplopoda- d, Formicidae y Scolopendridae. La densidad y el número de familias no variaron significativamente en las tres profundidades estudiadas , pero sí varió la composición de familias. Los individuos con hábitos alimenticios fitófagos y depredadores, además de estar entre los grupos con más individuos por m2 , junto a los fungívoros y xilófagos, tuvieron la mayor variedad de familias. Los usos de tierra en donde se reportaron los mayores números de individuos por m 2 fueron de manera descendente: café con sombra, bosque, granos básicos y pasto. El número de familias no varió significativamente entre los usos, sin embargo la composición de familia si varió.

Estudio del efecto de la regulación de la iluminación en pollos de engorde de la linea Hubbard Peterson en la granja avícola Belén, El Viejo, Chinandega

Con el fin de determinar el programa de iluminación más adecuado que permita maximizar los rendimientos productivos y disminuir los costos de producción en pollos de engorde, se realizó el presente ensayo en condiciones de producción comercial, bajo un sistema tradicional. El total de aves utilizadas fueron 196, pertenecientes a la línea Hubbard Peterson, de un día de nacidas, mixtas. Estas fueron alojadas en una galera (rancho de palma) con dimensiones de 29 m de largo * 1O m de ancho* 5 m de alto, y capacidad total de alojamiento de 2900 aves; por un período de 42 días. Para efectos experimentales las aves fueron agrupadas aleatoriamente en dos cubículos, a razón de 98/ grupo, utilizando una densidad de alojamiento de 9 8 aves 1m2. Los tratamientos evaluados fueron: T1= 23 hrs luz + 1 hr de oscuridad y T2 = 23 hrs luz + 1 hr de oscuridad hasta las dos semanas, en adelante hasta el sacrificio sólo luz natural. Las variables de respuesta fueron: Peso Final (PF) Consumo de Alimento (CAl) , Ganancia Media Diaria (GMD) e índice de Conversión Alimenticia (ICA), Margen Bruto (MB) y Relación Beneficio Costo (8\C). Para el análisis estadístico se utilizó un DCA con arreglo bifactoríal y prueba de separación de medías por Tukey, mediante el paquete estadístico SAS, 1991. Con base en los resultados de los análisis, no se encontraron diferencias significativas entre los tratamientos para las variables GMD e ICA; no así para CAL, y PF. Los valores promedios semanales a lo largo del período (6 semanas), pera las variables evaluadas, fueron los siguientes: Para T1, CAl= 87.37g, GM0=57.17g, ICA= 1.66 y PF= 1.895kg: para T2, CAL= 83.68g, GMD= 54.81g, ICA= 1.58 y PF= 1.833kg. En el análisis financiero, el tratamiento con un periodo de 12 horas de iluminación, se obtuvo una reducción del 66.66% en los costos de iluminación, y una superioridad del 19% en el margen bruto y 6.15% en la relación beneficio costo en relación al periodo de 23 horas luz.

Comportamiento productivo del pasto gamba (Andropogon gayanus Kunth CIAT 621), en condiciones con y sin quemas, Finca Santa Rosa, UNA, Managua, 2005-2006

Con el objeto de determinar el comportamiento productivo del pasto gamba (Andropogon gayanus), en condiciones de quema y no quema, se estableció el presente trabajo en la Finca Santa Rosa de la Universidad Nacional Agraria, con una extensión de 196 mz., ubicada de la entrada a la Zona Franca 4 Km sur, del desvío a Sabana Grande 200 m Norte, 100 m Oeste. Con coordenadas geográficas de 12° 08’ 15.20” latitud norte, y 86° 09’ 45.12” longitud oeste, con una elevación de 56 msnm. Para ello se selecciono un área de 4 ha con pasto gamba, el cual al momento de inicio del estudio una parte estaba quemada y la otra no aproximadamente el 50 %). El área se dividió en dos lotes con áreas de 225 m2, una presentaba quema y la otra no. De esta área se utilizó parcelas de 100 m2 para la toma de datos, en dichas parcelas de se realizaron 5 submuestreos para la colecta de datos según las variables a evaluar. En cada sumbuestreo se determinó la producción de biomasa fresca y la altura, posteriormente se peso y separó el material forrajero del no forrajero y se separo tallos y hojas, para la determinación de la producción de ambos. El material fresco colectado se seco al sol por periodos de 72 horas, para la determinación de la producción seca. Para la determinación de la biomasa fresca y seca, se utilizo una balanza de reloj, donde se realizaron los pesos totales y parciales de las plantas. Para la determinación de la altura se utilizó una regla milimetrada de dos metros lineal, dicha altura se tomo de la base de los macollos hasta el ápice de las hojas mas altas, seleccionándose 5 muestras por parcela. Previo al estudio se realizó un corte de uniformidad. No se aplicó ningún tipo de manejo agronómico al área en estudio. Las variables a medir fueron: Producción de biomasa (fresca y seca), Producción de hoja, Producción de tallos y Altura. Se realizaron cortes cada 22 días. Se observó que la producción de biomasa fresca total y de hojas fue fluctuante, con incrementos cada 22 a 44 días. Así mismo que la producción de hojas es proporcional a la producción de biomasa total, en condiciones con y sin quema. Además se observó que la producción de hoja fue siempre mayor del 60% de la biomasa total, en las condiciones de con y sin quema. Con respecto a las quemas se logró apreciar que las condiciones con quema, sobre todo las iniciales, presentaron mejores resultados, que cuando no se aplica quema y que las quemas continuas en la misma área actúan en detrimento de la producción de biomasa total, y de hojas. Finalmente se determinó que existe una marcada relación entre la altura de corte y la producción de biomasa. Adicionalmente se encontró que los contenidos de nitrógeno y proteína cruda fueron mayores nominalmente en las condiciones sin quema.

Liquid crystal based continuous phase retarder: From optically neutral to a quarter waveplate in 200 microseconds

Liquid crystal variable phase retarders have been incorporated into prototype devices for optical communications system applications, both as endless polarization controllers 1,2,3, and as holographic beam steerers 4. Nematic liquid crystals allow continuous control of the degree of retardation induced at relatively slow switching speeds, while ferroelectric liquid crystal based devices allow fast (sub millisecond) switching, but only between two bistable states. The flexoelectro-optic effect 5,6 in short-pitch chiral nematic liquid crystals allows both fast switching of the optic axis and continuous, electric field dependent control of the degree of rotation of the optic axis. A novel geometry for the flexoelectro-optic effect is presented here, in which the helical axis of the chiral nematic is perpendicular to the cell walls (grandjean texture) and the electric field is applied in the plane of the cell. This facilitates deflection of the optic axis of the uniaxial negatively birefringent material from lying along the direction of propagation to having some component in the polarization plane of the light. The device is therefore optically neutral at zero field for telecommunications wavelengths (1550nm), and allows a continuously variable degree of phase excursion to be induced, up to 2π/3 radians achieved so far in a 40μm thick cell. The retardation has been shown both to appear, on application of the field, and disappear on removal, at speeds of 100-500 μs. The direction of deflection of the optic axis is also dependent on the direction of the field, allowing the possibility, in a converging electrode "cartwheel cell", of endless rotation of the liquid crystal waveplate at a higher rate than achievable through dielectric coupling to plain nematic materials.

Benjamín de Tudela y los motivos del viaje : la educación del judío y el encuentro con la propia identidad a través del otro

Resumen: El presente trabajo aborda un tema concreto: el motivo u objeto con que el maestro y erudito español Benjamín de Tudela (1130-1173) abandona momentáneamente su país, España, para realizar un viaje de más de diez años por el Mediterráneo, el Asia Menor, el Medio Oriente y, aunque es menos probable, el Lejano Oriente. El corpus a considerar es su Libro de viajes (1160-1173), uno de los más completos y didácticos cuadernos de bitácora de la literatura occidental. Esta obra, que ha tenido grandes incidencias en la educación judía de siglos posteriores, es considerada hasta hoy como uno de los primeros documentos demográficos de las comunidades judías de la diáspora. Una vez identificados los motivos que impulsaron un periplo de tal calibre, procederé a analizar básicamente dos. Por un lado, la misión didáctica que él mismo se ha atribuido en consonancia con el precepto que ordena la transmisión intergeneracional de la fe y sus valores. Por otro lado, infiero un motivo que califico como de origen divino o sobrenatural, y que comparo con el viaje de Abraham desde Ur de Caldea hasta la Tierra Prometida. Para desarrollar este punto parto de un fragmento de la Biblia denominado en la tradición judía Lej lejá (Génesis XII:1-XVII:27), del que tomo los dos versículos iniciales, y aplico un análisis hecho por la licenciada y rabina Silvina Chemen con motivo del diálogo interreligioso.

Automatic transcription of conversational telephone speech

This paper discusses the Cambridge University HTK (CU-HTK) system for the automatic transcription of conversational telephone speech. A detailed discussion of the most important techniques in front-end processing, acoustic modeling and model training, language and pronunciation modeling are presented. These include the use of conversation side based cepstral normalization, vocal tract length normalization, heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis for feature projection, minimum phone error training and speaker adaptive training, lattice-based model adaptation, confusion network based decoding and confidence score estimation, pronunciation selection, language model interpolation, and class based language models. The transcription system developed for participation in the 2002 NIST Rich Transcription evaluations of English conversational telephone speech data is presented in detail. In this evaluation the CU-HTK system gave an overall word error rate of 23.9%, which was the best performance by a statistically significant margin. Further details on the derivation of faster systems with moderate performance degradation are discussed in the context of the 2002 CU-HTK 10 × RT conversational speech transcription system. © 2005 IEEE.