The introns of five c-type lysozymes were translated into amino acid sequences: parts of them corresponded to fragments of biologically active proteins. The amino acid sequences of translated introns seem to have a similar behavior as those arising from exons.
The deposition of solid material from the gas phase via chemical vapor transport (CVT) is a well-known process of industrial and geochemical relevance. There is strong evidence that this type of thermodynamically driven chemical transport reaction plays a significant role in certain natural processes. This article presents detailed evidence that CVT is a highly plausible...
Abstract Isolated cases of experimental evidence over the last few decades have shown that, where specifically tested, both prokaryotes and eukaryotes have specific lipid species bound to nucleoproteins of the genome. In vitro, some of these lipid species exhibit stoichiometric association with DNA polynucleotides with differential affinities toward certain secondary and tertiary...
Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used in academic personnel decisions as a measure of teaching effectiveness. We show: SET are biased against female instructors by an amount that is large and statistically significant. The bias affects how students rassignments are graded. The bias varies by discipline and by student gender, among other things. It is not possible...
Cognitive reserve (CR) helps explain the mismatch between expected cognitive decline and observed maintenance of cognitive functioning in older age. Factors such as education, literacy, lifestyle, and social networking are usually considered to be proxies of CR and its variability between individuals. A more direct approach to examine CR is through the assessment of capacity to...
Abstract Peer review is almost universally seen as the crux of scientific journal publishing. The role of peer reviewers is (1) to help avoid unnecessary errors in the published article, and (2) to judge publication-worthiness (in the journal that arranges for the review). This happens. Sometimes. But the notion of peer review is rather vague, and since most of it is anonymous...
Abstract This paper makes the strong, fact-based case for a large-scale transformation of the current corpus of scientific subscription journals to an open access business model. The existing journals, with their well-tested functionalities, should be retained and developed to meet the demands of 21st-century research, while the underlying payment streams undergo a major...
Organocatalysis, that is the use of small organic molecules to catalyze organic transformations, has been included among the most successful concepts in asymmetric catalysis, and it has been used for the enantioselective construction of C–C, C–N, C–O, C–S, C–P and C–halide bonds. Since the seminal works in early 2000, the scientific community has been paying an ever-growing...
We present a case of arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy with biventricular involvement and strong arrhythmic substrate, highlighting the need to consider more than a single diagnostic option when facing arrhythmic presentations in young patients and the growing contribution provided by the genetic laboratory and contrast CMR to clinical management.
We report theoretical investigations on azobenzene-based indandiazocines, novel chiral systems that perform unidirectional cis ↔ trans isomerizations upon photoexcitation. For three different systems of this kind, we have simulated excited-state surface-hopping trajectories for both isomerization directions, using a configuration-interaction treatment based on system-specifically...
The activation of aromatic diaryl isoxazoles with strong electron-withdrawing groups, such as the nitro, triflyl and the phenylsulfonyl groups, at the 4-position has enabled the first regio- and diastereoselective difluoromethylation at the 5-position of isoxazoles by nucleophilic addition using (difluoromethyl)trimethylsilane, Me3SiCF2H, to provide difluoromethylated...
Abstract: Mitral regurgitation is associated with a worsened prognosis in dilated cardiomyopathy. First standard therapy consists of a mitral valve reconstruction through heart surgery including heart lung machine. In patients with high co-morbidity, catheter-based techniques, have been developed. In the Evolution I study the MONARC-system which was implanted in the coronary...
We report vibrational Raman spectra of small extended perfluoro-n-alkanes (CnF2n+2 with n = 6, 8–10, 12–14) isolated in supersonic jet expansions and use wavenumbers of longitudinal acoustic vibrations to extrapolate the elastic modulus of cold, isolated polytetrafluoroethylene filaments. The derived value E = 209(10) GPa defines an upper limit for the elastic modulus of the...
Cognitive reserve (CR) helps explain the mismatch between expected cognitive decline and observed maintenance of cognitive functioning in older age. Factors such as education, literacy, lifestyle, and social networking are usually considered to be proxies of CR and its variability between individuals. A more direct approach to examine CR is through the assessment of capacity to...
We analytically compute the long-term orbital variations of a test particle orbiting a central body acted upon by an incident monochromatic plane gravitational wave. We assume that the characteristic size of the perturbed two-body system is much smaller than the wavelength of the wave. Moreover, we also suppose that the wave's frequency νg is much smaller than the particle's...