Incipient ferroelectricity is known to occur in perovskites such as SrTiO3, KTaO3, and CaTiO3. For the first time it is shown that the intensively researched HfO2 thin films (16 nm) also possess ...ferroelectric properties when aluminium is incorporated into the host lattice. Polarization measurements on Al:HfO2 based metal–insulator–metal capacitors show an antiferroelectric‐to‐ferroelectric phase transition depending on annealing conditions and aluminium content. Structural investigation of the electrically characterized capacitors by grazing incidence X‐ray diffraction is presented in order to gain further insight on the potential origin of ferroelectricity. The non‐centrosymmetry of the elementary cell, which is essential for ferroelectricity, is assumed to originate from an orthorhombic phase of space group Pbc21 stabilized for low Al doping in HfO2. The ferroelectric properties of the modified HfO2 thin films yield high potential for various ferroelectric, piezoelectric, and pyroelectric applications. Furthermore, due to the extensive knowledge accumulated by various research groups regarding the HfO2 dielectric, an immediate relevance of ferroelectric hafnium oxide thin films is anticipated by the authors.
Polarization measurements show antiferroelectric‐to‐ferroelectric transitions in 16 nm thin film capacitors depending on annealing conditions and the molar concentration of incorporated aluminium. The ferroelectricity is attributed to a centrosymmetric to non‐centrosymmetric phase transition with decreasing aluminium content in the HfO2 host lattice. The incipient ferroelectric properties of the investigated material system hold the potential for various ferroelectric, piezoelectric, and semiconductor applications.
Mitochondria play a vital role in cellular metabolism and are central mediator of intracellular signalling, cell differentiation, morphogenesis and demise. An increasingly higher number of ...pathologies is linked with mitochondrial dysfunction, which can arise from either genetic defects affecting core mitochondrial components or malfunctioning pathways impairing mitochondrial homeostasis. As such, mitochondria are considered an important target in several pathologies spanning from neoplastic to neurodegenerative diseases as well as metabolic syndromes. In this review we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in mitochondrial pharmacology, focusing on the novel compounds that have been generated in the bid to correct mitochondrial aberrations. Our work aims to serve the scientific community working on translational medical science by highlighting the most promising pharmacological approaches to target mitochondrial dysfunction in disease.
This review covers and discusses various aspects of carotenoids including their chemistry, classification, biosynthesis, extraction methods (conventional and non-conventional), analytical techniques ...and biological roles in living beings. Carotenoids play a very crucial role in human health through foods, cosmetics, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals. Among carotenoids, lycopene acts as best antioxidant. Various extraction methods have been employed for extraction of carotenoids: solvent extraction, soxhlet extraction, centrifugation and non-conventional methods of extraction such as ultrasound-assisted, microwave-assisted, enzymatic and the innovative technique supercritical carbondioxide (SC-CO
2
) extraction. The green and environmentally friendly technique for extraction of carotenoids is SC-CO
2
extraction which extracts pure compound in high yield without the use of harmful organic solvents, it operates at lower temperature so it is useful for extraction of thermolabile compounds. This technique uses SC-CO
2
as green solvent and other solvents as modifiers which are generally recognized as safe (GRAS) solvents. Green technology is the need of present time in order to keep environment healthy, pollution free and sustainable for coming generation. Present review includes several analytical techniques used to identify and quantify carotenoids are: thin layer chromatography (TLC), high performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), ultra performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometer (UPLC-MS), UV-Vis (Ultraviolet-Visible) spectrophotometry; out of these, NMR and FTIR have been explored the least for carotenoid analysis.
This review covers and discusses various aspects of carotenoids including their chemistry, classification, biosynthesis, extraction methods (conventional and non-conventional), analytical techniques and biological roles in living beings.
Long mammalian introns make it challenging for the RNA processing machinery to identify exons accurately. We find that LINE-derived sequences (LINEs) contribute to this selection by recruiting dozens ...of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) to introns. This includes MATR3, which promotes binding of PTBP1 to multivalent binding sites within LINEs. Both RBPs repress splicing and 3′ end processing within and around LINEs. Notably, repressive RBPs preferentially bind to evolutionarily young LINEs, which are located far from exons. These RBPs insulate the LINEs and the surrounding intronic regions from RNA processing. Upon evolutionary divergence, changes in RNA motifs within LINEs lead to gradual loss of their insulation. Hence, older LINEs are located closer to exons, are a common source of tissue-specific exons, and increasingly bind to RBPs that enhance RNA processing. Thus, LINEs are hubs for the assembly of repressive RBPs and also contribute to the evolution of new, lineage-specific transcripts in mammals.
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•Multivalent binding sites in young LINEs mainly recruit repressive RBPs•PTBP1 and MATR3 co-bind and repress RNA processing within and around young LINEs•1-kb exclusion zone of LINEs from vicinity of exons reflects their repressive effects•Sequence-driven RBP remodeling on old LINEs drives evolution of tissue-specific exons
LINE elements recruit RNA-binding proteins to mammalian introns, influencing splicing and playing a key role in the evolution of tissue-specific exons.
Peer review is the backbone of academia and humans constitute a cornerstone of this process, being responsible for reviewing submissions and making the final acceptance/rejection decisions. Given ...that human decision-making is known to be susceptible to various cognitive biases, it is important to understand which (if any) biases are present in the peer-review process, and design the pipeline such that the impact of these biases is minimized. In this work, we focus on the dynamics of discussions between reviewers and investigate the presence of herding behaviour therein. Specifically, we aim to understand whether reviewers and discussion chairs get disproportionately influenced by the first argument presented in the discussion when (in case of reviewers) they form an independent opinion about the paper before discussing it with others. In conjunction with the review process of a large, top tier machine learning conference, we design and execute a randomized controlled trial that involves 1,544 papers and 2,797 reviewers with the goal of testing for the conditional causal effect of the discussion initiator's opinion on the outcome of a paper. Our experiment reveals no evidence of herding in peer-review discussions. This observation is in contrast with past work that has documented an undue influence of the first piece of information on the final decision (e.g., anchoring effect) and analyzed herding behaviour in other applications (e.g., financial markets). Regarding policy implications, the absence of the herding effect suggests that the current status quo of the absence of a unified policy towards discussion initiation does not result in an increased arbitrariness of the resulting decisions.
This paper builds theoretical foundations for the recovery of a newly proposed class of smooth graph signals, approximately bandlimited graph signals, under three sampling strategies: uniform ...sampling, experimentally designed sampling, and active sampling. We then state minimax lower bounds on the maximum risk for the approximately bandlimited class under these three sampling strategies and show that active sampling cannot fundamentally outperform experimentally designed sampling. We propose a recovery strategy to compare uniform sampling with experimentally designed sampling. As the proposed recovery strategy lends itself well to statistical analysis, we derive the exact mean square error for each sampling strategy. To study convergence rates, we introduce two types of graphs and find that 1) the proposed recovery strategy achieves the optimal rates; and 2) the experimentally designed sampling fundamentally outperforms uniform sampling for Type-2 class of graphs. To validate our proposed recovery strategy, we test it on five specific graphs: a ring graph with k nearest neighbors, an Erdos-Rényi graph, a random geometric graph, a small-world graph, and a power-law graph and find that experimental results match the proposed theory well. This paper also presents a comprehensive explanation for when and why sampling for semi-supervised learning with graphs works.
Classroom deliberations in an inclusive environment is challenging yet rewarding. Teaching students with varied needs under the same roof provides the teachers with the opportunity to bring out their ...best and to help students to attain an optimum level of learning. The purpose set for this paper is to conduct a rigorous review of inclusive teaching-learning practices across countries to understand and present the best ways of conducting an inclusive classroom. To explore the stated objective the researchers opted for an extensive desk review method to review the available related literature in a systematic manner. As a result of conducting a systematic review analysis, certain themes have emerged under which plausible inclusive practices have been presented as a finding of the research. The study presented five categories of best teaching practices that emerged from the review. This paper presented a concise and accumulated version of the best practices and methods adopted by the practitioners in inclusive education across the world. Amalgamated findings present that using ICT, individualised learning and various classroom management techniques, collaboration and curriculum adaptations provide the best ways to promote inclusion.
Quantifying differences or similarities in connectomes has been a challenge due to the immense complexity of global brain networks. Here we introduce a noninvasive method that uses diffusion MRI to ...characterize whole-brain white matter architecture as a single local connectome fingerprint that allows for a direct comparison between structural connectomes. In four independently acquired data sets with repeated scans (total N = 213), we show that the local connectome fingerprint is highly specific to an individual, allowing for an accurate self-versus-others classification that achieved 100% accuracy across 17,398 identification tests. The estimated classification error was approximately one thousand times smaller than fingerprints derived from diffusivity-based measures or region-to-region connectivity patterns for repeat scans acquired within 3 months. The local connectome fingerprint also revealed neuroplasticity within an individual reflected as a decreasing trend in self-similarity across time, whereas this change was not observed in the diffusivity measures. Moreover, the local connectome fingerprint can be used as a phenotypic marker, revealing 12.51% similarity between monozygotic twins, 5.14% between dizygotic twins, and 4.51% between none-twin siblings, relative to differences between unrelated subjects. This novel approach opens a new door for probing the influence of pathological, genetic, social, or environmental factors on the unique configuration of the human connectome.
A cloud computing environment offers a simplified, centralized platform or resources for use when needed at a low cost. One of the key functionalities of this type of computing is to allocate the ...resources on an individual demand. However, with the expanding requirements of cloud user, the need of efficient resource allocation is also emerging. The main role of service provider is to effectively distribute and share the resources which otherwise would result into resource wastage. In addition to the user getting the appropriate service according to request, the cost of respective resource is also optimized. In order to surmount the mentioned shortcomings and perform optimized resource allocation, this research proposes a new Agent based Automated Service Composition (A2SC) algorithm comprising of request processing and automated service composition phases and is not only responsible for searching comprehensive services but also considers reducing the cost of virtual machines which are consumed by on-demand services only.
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