Aryl-triazolyl peptides for efficient phase selective gelation and easy removal of dyes from water

RSC Advances ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (35) ◽  
pp. 29197-29201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhartendu K. Srivastava ◽  
Muraleedharan K. Manheri

Fine-tuning the gelation ability of aryl triazolyl peptide 1 by C-terminal modification led to the identification of 2 with the remarkable ability to form highly transparent gels in a wide range of solvents including oils.

Author(s):  
Freideriki Michailidou ◽  
Andrea Rentmeister

Enzyme-mediated methylation is a very important reaction in nature, yielding a wide range of modified natural products, diversifying small molecules and fine-tuning the activity of biomacromolecules. The field has attracted...


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaniv Eliezer ◽  
Geyang Qu ◽  
Wenhong Yang ◽  
Yujie Wang ◽  
Hasan Yılmaz ◽  
...  

AbstractA metasurface hologram combines fine spatial resolution and large viewing angles with a planar form factor and compact size. However, it suffers coherent artifacts originating from electromagnetic cross-talk between closely packed meta-atoms and fabrication defects of nanoscale features. Here, we introduce an efficient method to suppress all artifacts by fine-tuning the spatial coherence of illumination. Our method is implemented with a degenerate cavity laser, which allows a precise and continuous tuning of the spatial coherence over a wide range, with little variation in the emission spectrum and total power. We find the optimal degree of spatial coherence to suppress the coherent artifacts of a meta-hologram while maintaining the image sharpness. This work paves the way to compact and dynamical holographic displays free of coherent defects.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taeho Kang ◽  
José Manuel González ◽  
Zi-Qi Li ◽  
Klement Foo ◽  
Peter Cheng ◽  
...  

A versatile method to access differentially substituted 1,3- and 1,4-diamines via a nickel-catalyzed three-component 1,2-carboamination of alkenyl amines with aryl/alkenylboronic ester nucleophiles and N–O electrophiles is reported. The reaction proceeds efficiently with free primary and secondary amines without needing a directing auxiliary or protecting group, and is enabled by fine-tuning the leaving group on the N–O reagent. The transformation is highly regioselective and compatible with a wide range of coupling partners and alkenyl amine substrates, all performed at room temperature. A series of kinetic studies support a mechanism in which alkene coordination to the nickel catalyst is turnover-limiting.


2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (03) ◽  
pp. 219-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Scollie ◽  
Danielle Glista ◽  
Julie Seto ◽  
Andrea Dunn ◽  
Brittany Schuett ◽  
...  

Background: Although guidelines for fitting hearing aids for children are well developed and have strong basis in evidence, specific protocols for fitting and verifying technologies can supplement such guidelines. One such technology is frequency-lowering signal processing. Children require access to a broad bandwidth of speech to detect and use all phonemes including female /s/. When access through conventional amplification is not possible, the use of frequency-lowering signal processing may be considered as a means to overcome limitations. Fitting and verification protocols are needed to better define candidacy determination and options for assessing and fine tuning frequency-lowering signal processing for individuals. Purpose: This work aims to (1) describe a set of calibrated phonemes that can be used to characterize the variation in different brands of frequency-lowering processors in hearing aids and the verification with these signals and (2) determine whether verification with these signal are predictive of perceptual changes associated with changes in the strength of frequency-lowering signal processing. Finally, we aimed to develop a fitting protocol for use in pediatric clinical practice. Study Sample: Study 1 used a sample of six hearing aids spanning four types of frequency lowering algorithms for an electroacoustic evaluation. Study 2 included 21 adults who had hearing loss (mean age 66 yr). Data Collection and Analysis: Simulated fricatives were designed to mimic the level and frequency shape of female fricatives extracted from two sources of speech. These signals were used to verify the frequency-lowering effects of four distinct types of frequency-lowering signal processors available in commercial hearing aids, and verification measures were compared to extracted fricatives made in a reference system. In a second study, the simulated fricatives were used within a probe microphone measurement system to verify a wide range of frequency compression settings in a commercial hearing aid, and 27 adult listeners were tested at each setting. The relation between the hearing aid verification measures and the listener’s ability to detect and discriminate between fricatives was examined. Results: Verification measures made with the simulated fricatives agreed to within 4 dB, on average, and tended to mimic the frequency response shape of fricatives presented in a running speech context. Some processors showed a greater aided response level for fricatives in running speech than fricatives presented in isolation. Results with listeners indicated that verified settings that provided a positive sensation level of /s/ and that maximized the frequency difference between /s/ and /∫/ tended to have the best performance. Conclusions: Frequency-lowering signal processors have measureable effects on the high-frequency fricative content of speech, particularly female /s/. It is possible to measure these effects either with a simple strategy that presents an isolated simulated fricative and measures the aided frequency response or with a more complex system that extracts fricatives from running speech. For some processors, a more accurate result may be achieved with a running speech system. In listeners, the aided frequency location and sensation level of fricatives may be helpful in predicting whether a specific hearing aid fitting, with or without frequency-lowering, will support access to the fricatives of speech.


Author(s):  
Haidi Hasan Badr ◽  
Nayer Mahmoud Wanas ◽  
Magda Fayek

Since labeled data availability differs greatly across domains, Domain Adaptation focuses on learning in new and unfamiliar domains by reducing distribution divergence. Recent research suggests that the adversarial learning approach could be a promising way to achieve the domain adaptation objective. Adversarial learning is a strategy for learning domain-transferable features in robust deep networks. This paper introduces the TSAL paradigm, a two-step adversarial learning framework. It addresses the real-world problem of text classification, where source domain(s) has labeled data but target domain (s) has only unlabeled data. TSAL utilizes joint adversarial learning with class information and domain alignment deep network architecture to learn both domain-invariant and domain-specific features extractors. It consists of two training steps that are similar to the paradigm, in which pre-trained model weights are used as initialization for training with new data. TSAL’s two training phases, however, are based on the same data, not different data, as is the case with fine-tuning. Furthermore, TSAL only uses the learned domain-invariant feature extractor from the first training as an initialization for its peer in subsequent training. By doubling the training, TSAL can emphasize the leverage of the small unlabeled target domain and learn effectively what to share between various domains. A detailed analysis of many benchmark datasets reveals that our model consistently outperforms the prior art across a wide range of dataset distributions.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabi Socolovsky ◽  
Maoz Shamir

Rhythmic activity in the gamma band (30-100Hz) has been observed in numerous animal species ranging from insects to humans, and in relation to a wide range of cognitive tasks. Various experimental and theoretical studies have investigated this rhythmic activity. The theoretical efforts have mainly been focused on the neuronal dynamics, under the assumption that network connectivity satisfies certain fine-tuning conditions required to generate gamma oscillations. However, it remains unclear how this fine tuning is achieved.Here we investigated the hypothesis that spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) can provide the underlying mechanism for tuning synaptic connectivity to generate rhythmic activity in the gamma band. We addressed this question in a modeling study. We examined STDP dynamics in the framework of a network of excitatory and inhibitory neuronal populations that has been suggested to underlie the generation of gamma. Mean field Fokker Planck equations for the synaptic weights dynamics are derived in the limit of slow learning. We drew on this approximation to determine which types of STDP rules drive the system to exhibit gamma oscillations, and demonstrate how the parameters that characterize the plasticity rule govern the rhythmic activity. Finally, we propose a novel mechanism that can ensure the robustness of self-developing processes, in general and for rhythmogenesis in particular.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Yuan ◽  
Lei Lin

Satellite image time series (SITS) classification is a major research topic in remote sensing and is relevant for a wide range of applications. Deep learning approaches have been commonly employed for SITS classification and have provided state-of-the-art performance. However, deep learning methods suffer from overfitting when labeled data is scarce. To address this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised pre-training scheme to initialize a Transformer-based network by utilizing large-scale unlabeled data. In detail, the model is asked to predict randomly contaminated observations given an entire time series of a pixel. The main idea of our proposal is to leverage the inherent temporal structure of satellite time series to learn general-purpose spectral-temporal representations related to land cover semantics. Once pre-training is completed, the pre-trained network can be further adapted to various SITS classification tasks by fine-tuning all the model parameters on small-scale task-related labeled data. In this way, the general knowledge and representations about SITS can be transferred to a label-scarce task, thereby improving the generalization performance of the model as well as reducing the risk of overfitting. Comprehensive experiments have been carried out on three benchmark datasets over large study areas. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, leading to a classification accuracy increment up to 1.91% to 6.69%. <div><b>This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.</b></div>


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Schleicher ◽  
Stephan Rein ◽  
Boris Illarionov ◽  
Ariane Lehmann ◽  
Tarek Al Said ◽  
...  

AbstractFlavocoenzymes are nearly ubiquitous cofactors that are involved in the catalysis and regulation of a wide range of biological processes including some light-induced ones, such as the photolyase-mediated DNA repair, magnetoreception of migratory birds, and the blue-light driven phototropism in plants. One of the factors that enable versatile flavin-coenzyme biochemistry and biophysics is the fine-tuning of the cofactor’s frontier orbital by interactions with the protein environment. Probing the singly-occupied molecular orbital (SOMO) of the intermediate radical state of flavins is therefore a prerequisite for a thorough understanding of the diverse functions of the flavoprotein family. This may be ultimately achieved by unravelling the hyperfine structure of a flavin by electron paramagnetic resonance. In this contribution we present a rigorous approach to obtaining a hyperfine map of the flavin’s chromophoric 7,8-dimethyl isoalloxazine unit at an as yet unprecedented level of resolution and accuracy. We combine powerful high-microwave-frequency/high-magnetic-field electron–nuclear double resonance (ENDOR) with 13C isotopologue editing as well as spectral simulations and density functional theory calculations to measure and analyse 13C hyperfine couplings of the flavin cofactor in DNA photolyase. Our data will provide the basis for electronic structure considerations for a number of flavin radical intermediates occurring in blue-light photoreceptor proteins.


Author(s):  
Matteo Cerutti ◽  
Nicola Giannini ◽  
Bruno Schuermans ◽  
Riccardo Brenci ◽  
Alessandro Marini ◽  
...  

Abstract This paper describes the development phases of a damping system for combustion instability reduction in an annular type combustor for heavy-duty gas turbine applications. As reported by the authors in a previous paper, the full scale annular test rig allowed for an extensive characterization of the combustor with realistic acoustic boundaries at engine-relevant conditions. Emissions and operability assessment over a wide range of load conditions was performed, allowing the evaluation of the response of the system near the thermo-acoustic instability onset. The instability is quantified by its acoustic growth rate. This quantity is a crucial input in the design process of dampers. A methodology has been used to extract these growth rates form measured pulsation data. Experimentally determined growth rates have been evaluated for different fuel flow rate split between the main and the pilot injections, providing input to dampers preliminary design. Given current combustor architecture constraints, a first attempt configuration has been proposed and performances evaluated in the full annular rig. Dampers have been equipped with dynamic sensors and thermocouples with the purpose of measuring the growth rate abatement and the consequent NOx emissions reduction. A dedicated numerical toolbox, in-house developed by GE Power, has been used for both dampers preliminary design and growth rate reduction evaluation. Fine tuning of dampers elements as well as design assumptions adjustments required additional experimental evaluations and design iterations. Encouraged by the successful test in the concept phase, an optimized design for engine implementation was defined, that featured a significant increased damper volume, involving combustor parts re-design. The optimized configuration was finally tested in full annular rig and results demonstrated an important enhancement of operability while maintaining NOx emissions below the target levels.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (05) ◽  
pp. 1942001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leandros Perivolaropoulos ◽  
Lavrentios Kazantzidis

General Relativity (GR) is consistent with a wide range of experiments/observations from millimeter scales up to galactic scales and beyond. However, there are reasons to believe that GR may need to be modified because it includes singularities (it is an incomplete theory) and also it requires fine-tuning to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe through the cosmological constant. Therefore, it is important to check various experiments and observations beyond the above range of scales for possible hints of deviations from the predictions of GR. If such hints are found it is important to understand which classes of modified gravity theories are consistent with them. The goal of this review is to summarize recent progress on these issues. On sub-millimeter scales, we show an analysis of the data of the Washington experiment [D. J. Kapner, T. S. Cook, E. G. Adelberger, J. H. Gundlach, B. R. Heckel, C. D. Hoyle and H. E. Swanson, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 (2007) 021101, arXiv:hep-ph/0611184 [hep-ph]] searching for modifications of Newton’s Law on sub-millimeter scales and demonstrate that a spatially oscillating signal is hidden in this dataset. We demonstrate that even though this signal cannot be explained in the context of standard modified theories (viable scalar tensor and [Formula: see text] theories), it is a rather generic prediction of nonlocal gravity theories. On cosmological scales we review recent analyses of Redshift Space Distortion (RSD) data which measure the growth rate of cosmological perturbations at various redshifts and show that these data are in some tension with the [Formula: see text]CDM parameter values indicated by Planck/2015 CMB data at about [Formula: see text] level. This tension can be reduced by allowing for an evolution of the effective Newton constant that determines the growth rate of cosmological perturbations. We conclude that even though this tension between the data and the predictions of GR could be due to systematic/statistical uncertainties of the data, it could also constitute early hints pointing towards a new gravitational theory.


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