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.

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.

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.

氧等离子体硫化法制作可变形聚二甲基硅氧烷薄膜培养基底

发展了氧等离子体硫化法制作可变形聚二甲基硅氧烷薄膜培养基底的技术。与传统的加热硫化法相比，该法制作的基底表面具有亲水性，细胞的粘附、铺展以及基底皱褶变形的发展均非常迅速。此外，观察了细胞松弛素D处理过程中基底皱褶的变化，结果表明这种技术具有较高的时间分辨率。

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.

Producción acelerada de semilla de dos cultivares de quequisque (Xanthosoma spp.) a partir de plantas in vitro en la zona de Quilalí, Nueva Segovia

El cultivo del quequisque ( Xanthosoma spp.) fue establecido en el campo el 2 de diciembre del 2005 en Quilalí, Nueva Segovia. Se eval uó el potencial de propagación, utilizando la técnica de reproducción acelerada de semilla de vitroplantas de los cultivares de quequisque Blanco (Bco) y Nueva Guinea (NG), además el comportamiento morfológico, rendimiento y la incidencia del Virus del Mosaico del Dasheen (DsMV). El ensayo se estableció utilizando un esquema de diseño BCA con 4 bloques y densidad de 17,000 plantas ha -1 (1.0 x 0.60 m). Seis surcos de 25 plantas confor maron el bloque (150 plantas/bloque). Se analizaron estadísticamente las variables morfoló gicas, de rendimiento y de propagación. El cultivar Bco registró los mejores promedios en las variables morfológicas a excepción en número de hojas que fue obtenido por el cultivar NG. En el primer periodo de crecimiento a los 89 dds 9-12 % de las plantas presentaban síntomas de DsMV y más del 50 % de ellas estaban infectadas (prueba ELISA). A los 168 dds 100 % estaban ya infectadas. El peso de cormelos por hectárea en NG (6,270 kg ha -1 ) y Bco (5,100 kg ha -1 ) fue estadísticamente similar. El peso de cormelos por planta en NG (0.369 kg) fue superior estadísticamente que en Bco (0.29 kg). El cultivar Bco registró 47.57 y NG 31.42 yemas totales/planta. Con el total de plantas en el campo 2200 del cultivar NG y 2000 del cultivar Bco multiplicadas por el número total de yemas totales/planta se obtuvieron 164,264 plantas de buena calidad a ser establecidas en 9.6 ha. Con el numero de yemas obtenidas en cada cultivar por la densidad de siembra por hectárea se obtuvier on 808,690 plantas para el cultivar NG y 534,140 plantas para el cultivar Bco

Los gitanos en la España del siglo XV y su vinculación a Hungría

Rara vez el público relaciona la llegada de los gitanos a los reinos de España con el siglo XV. Para muchos lo gitano es la esencia más española, de cuya tradición beben escritores y músicos. Esto no es así, los “egipcianos” llegaron hace seis siglos en calidad de penitentes refugiados que huían del turco, lo que en historia no es mucho tiempo atrás. Llegaron a la península cruzando Europa, entrando a ésta por el Reino de Hungría, siguiendo las rutas de peregrinación como forma de subsistencia. Su inadaptación al modelo de vasallo de la Monarquía absoluta trajo su persecución. Los vientos de la reforma y del erasmismo tampoco les favorecieron.

Numerical Investigation On Detonation Cell Evolution In A Channel With Area-Changing Cross Section

The two-dimensional cellular detonation propagating in a channel with area-changing cross section was numerically simulated with the dispersion-controlled dissipative scheme and a detailed chemical reaction model. Effects of the flow expansion and compression on the cellular detonation cell were investigated to illustrate the mechanism of the transverse wave development and the cellular detonation cell evolution. By examining gas composition variations behind the leading shock, the chemical reaction rate, the reaction zone length, and thermodynamic parameters, two kinds of the abnormal detonation waves were identified. To explore their development mechanism, chemical reactions, reflected shocks and rarefaction waves were discussed, which interact with each other and affect the cellular detonation in different ways.

The Head-On Colliding Process Of Binary Liquid Droplets At Low Velocity: High-Speed Photography Experiments And Modeling

The experimental and theoretical studies are reported in this paper for the head-on collisions of a liquid droplet with another of the same fluid resting on a solid substrate. The droplet on the hydrophobic polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate remains in a shape of an approximately spherical segment and is isometric to an incoming droplet. The colliding process of the binary droplets was recorded with high-speed photography. Head-on collisions saw four different types of response in our experiments: complete rebound, coalescence, partial rebound With conglutination, and coalescence accompanied by conglutination. For a complete rebound, both droplets exhibited remarkable elasticity and the contact time of the two colliding droplets was found to be in the range of 10-20 ms. With both droplets approximately considered as elastic bodies, Hertz contact theory was introduced to estimate the contact time for the complete rebound case. The estimated result Was found to be on the same order of magnitude as the experimental data, which indicates that the present model is reasonable. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Scaling Functions In Conical Indentation Of Elastic-Plastic Solids

The finite element method was used to simulate the conical indentation of elastic-plastic solids with work hardening. The ratio of the initial yield strength to the Young's modulus Y/E ranged from 0 to 0.02. Based on the calculation results, two sets of scaling functions for non-dimensional hardness H/K and indenter penetration h are presented in the paper, which have closed simple mathematical form and can be used easily for engineering application. Using the present scaling functions, indentation hardness and indentation loading curves can be easily obtained for a given set of material properties. Meanwhile one can use these scaling functions to obtain material parameters by an instrumented indentation load-displacement curve for loading and unloading if Young's modulus E and Poisson's ratio nu are known.