bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Exploiting the natural poly(3-hydroxyalkanoates) production capacity of AntarcticPseudomonasstrains: from unique phenotypes to novel biopolymers
Authors: Pacheco Nicolas , Orellana-Saez Matias , Pepczynska Marzena , Enrione Javier , Bassas-Galia Monica , Borrero-de Acuña Jose M , Zacconi Flavia C , Marcoleta Andrés E , Poblete-Castro Ignacio 
Published: May 2019

AbstractExtreme environments are a unique source of microorganisms encoding metabolic capacities that remain largely unexplored. In this work, we isolated two Antarctic bacterial strains able to produce poly(3-hydroxyalkanoates) (PHAs), which were classified after 16S rRNA analysis as Pseudomonas sp. MPC5 and MPC6. The MPC6 strain presented nearly the same specific growth rate whether subjected to a temperature of 4 °C 0.18 (1/h) or 30 °C 0.2 (1/h) on glycerol. Both Pseudomonas strains produced high levels of PHAs and exopolysaccharides from glycerol at 4 °C and 30 °C in batch cultures, an attribute that has not been previously described for bacteria of this genus. The MPC5 strain produced the distinctive medium-chain-length-PHA whereas Pseudomonas sp. MPC6 synthesized a novel polyoxoester composed of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyhexanoate-co-3-hydroxyoctanoate-co-3-hydroxydecanoate-co-3-hydroxydodecanoate). Batch bioreactor production of PHAs in MPC6 resulted in a titer of 2.6 (g/L) and 1.3 (g/L), accumulating 47.3% and 34.5% of the cell dry mass as PHA, at 30 and 4 °C, respectively. This study paves the way for using Antarctic Pseudomonas strains for biosynthesizing novel PHAs from low-cost substrates such as glycerol and the possibility to carry out the bioconversion process for biopolymer synthesis without the need for temperature control.
Co-cultivation of the anaerobic fungus Anaeromyces robustus with Methanobacterium bryantii enhances transcription of carbohydrate active enzymes
Authors: Swift Candice L , Brown Jennifer L , Seppälä Susanna , O’Malley Michelle A 
Published: May 2019

Abstract
Anaerobic gut fungi are biomass degraders that form syntrophic associations with other microbes in their native rumen environment. Here, RNA-Seq was used to track and quantify carbohydrate active enzyme (CAZyme) transcription in a synthetic consortium composed of the anaerobic fungus Anaeromyces robustus with methanogen Methanobacterium bryantii. Approximately 5% of total A. robustus genes were differentially regulated in co-culture with M. bryantii relative to cultivation of A. robustus alone. We found that 105 CAZymes (12% of the total predicted CAZymes of A. robustus) were upregulated while 29 were downregulated. Upregulated genes encode putative proteins with a wide array of cellulolytic, xylanolytic, and carbohydrate transport activities; 75% were fused to fungal dockerin domains, associated with a carbohydrate binding module, or both. Collectively, this analysis suggests that co-culture of A. robustus with M. bryantii remodels the transcriptional landscape of CAZymes and associated metabolic pathways in the fungus to aid in lignocellulose breakdown.
Associations of major depressive disorder with chronic physical conditions, obesity and medication use: Results from the PISMA-ep study
Authors: Rivera Margarita , Porras-Segovia Alejandro , Rovira Paula , Molina Esther , Gutiérrez Blanca , Cervilla Jorge 
Published: May 2019

AbstractBackground:Life expectancy of people with depression is on average 15 years less than that of the general population. This excess of mortality is largely attributed to a deteriorated physical health. Evidence about the association between major depressive disorder (MDD) and physical health is still lacking in some areas. The aim of this study was to explore the association between MDD and physical health-related variables in southern Spain.Methods:The PISMA-ep is a cross-sectional study based on community-dwelling adult population. Our main outcome was current prevalence of MDD. Independent variables explored were: lifetime prevalence of twenty-one chronic physical conditions (CPCs), anthropometric measures (height, weight, body max index, and hip and waist circumferences), general health status, and medication use.Results:MDD was significantly associated with any CPC (OR = 2.60; 95% CI: 2.01–3.35; p < 0.001). Increases in BMI were associated with MDD in women (OR=1.08; 95% CI: 1.05–1.11; p < 0.001), but not in men (OR=0.99; 95% CI: 0.95–1.05; p = 0.916). Variables associated with MDD in the multivariate model were: female gender, obesity, general health status, cancer, peptic ulcer, tinnitus and vertigo. 21.4% of participants with MDD received antidepressant treatment.Conclusions:MDD is associated with CPCs, obesity, and increased use of medication. The high rates of comorbidity between MDD and CPCs call for a more holistic management of patients in the clinical practice. The low rate of antidepressant use may be indicating underdiagnosis. Anthropometric variables were differently associated with MDD depending on gender, suggesting a strong influence of psychosocial factors.
Co-operative 3D salvo attack of multiple missiles under switching topologies subject to time-varying communication delays
Authors: Ai X.L. , Wang L.L. , Shen Y.C. 
Published: May 2019

ABSTRACTThis study focuses on the co-operative salvo attack problem of multiple missiles against a stationary target under jointly connected switching topologies subject to time-varying communication delays. By carefully exploring certain features of the typical pure proportional navigation guidance law, a two-stage distributed guidance scheme is proposed without any information on time-to-go in this study to realise the simultaneous attack of multiple missiles. In the first guidance stage, a co-operative guidance law is proposed using local neighbouring communications only to achieve consensus on range-to-go and heading error to provide favourable initial conditions for the latter phase, in which switching topologies and time-varying communication delays are taken into account when obtaining sufficient conditions of consensus in terms of linear matrix inequalities. Then, missiles disconnect from each other and are guided individually by the typical pure proportional navigation guidance law with the same navigation gain to realise salvo attack in the second guidance phase. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to clearly validate the theoretical results.
Directors’ Duties in Singapore: Law and Perceptions
Authors: KOH Pearlie , TAN Hwee Hoon 
Published: May 2019

AbstractIt is trite that the law on directors’ duties is an important part of corporate governance. It is therefore unsurprising that a large part of extant research in the area is focused on understanding what the law requires, and how it applies or should apply in any particular situation. Such research is however largely reactive. In our research, we set out to look at duties from the perspective of the directors, with a view to appreciating how Singapore directors understand the law as it applies to them. The impetus for this is three-fold: first, to assess the depth of awareness amongst directors of the law on directors’ duties; second, to ascertain if there is any divergence between the law’s conceptualization of what is in the company’s interests, and the director’s own view as to how he or she would act in fact; and third, and flowing from the preceding, to assess the need for providing or improving knowledge enhancement courses targeted specifically at company directors. To collect the necessary data, we reached out to registered company directors of both listed companies and private companies to complete a survey. We released the survey online, and also conducted face-to-face interviews. Our article presents and analyzes the results of the survey.
Design, implementation, and evaluation of PINDAR, a novel short program on GCP for academic medical center principal investigators conducting human subject research
Authors: Plottel Claudia S. , Mannon Lois , More Frederick G. , Katz Stuart D. , Hochman Judith S. 
Published: May 2019

AbstractThe Principal INvestigator Development and Resources (PINDAR) program was developed at the NYU-H+H Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) hub in response to a perceived need for focused good clinical practice (GCP) training designed specifically for principal investigators (PIs) performing human subject research. PINDAR is a novel 6-hour, instructor lead, participatory, in-person course for PIs developed de novo, piloted, and implemented. One hundred and seventeen faculty PIs participated in PINDAR from November 2016 through September 2018. All obtained mutual recognition for ICH E6 GCP training from TransCelerate Biopharma. PINDAR was well received by participant PIs, and feedback surveys have revealed a high degree of satisfaction with the program. Other CTSA hubs and research-intensive health systems should consider adopting a similar course focused on GCP for PIs.
Addressing the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials: Developments and Challenges within the Canadian Legal Landscape
Authors: HARRINGTON JOANNA 
Published: May 2019

AbstractWith 2018 marking the twentieth anniversary of Canada’s Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, an opportunity presents itself to take stock of both developments and challenges for the legislative scheme. As demonstrated by a review of the parliamentary record, the desire to enact legislation to criminalize the offering of an inducement to a foreign public official to secure a business advantage was decidedly international in nature, with Canada aiming to bolster the efforts of others to create a level playing field for companies operating abroad. Yet, despite good intentions, as well as amendments to strengthen the Act in 2013 and the passage of additional transparency obligations in 2014, Canada’s legislative scheme has not kept pace with the international and multi-jurisdictional realities of the problem to be addressed. Renewed interest needs to be paid to the demand side of a foreign bribery transaction. In addition, the confiscation or forfeiture of any ill-gotten gains must become a priority, with the touting of success in securing the voluntary payment of sizeable fines failing to provide for a sufficient accounting for the wrongs done, particularly if the victims of corruption, even as a class that needs clearer definition, are to be made a true concern of the Act. The challenges posed by matters of immunity and the need to improve matters of multi-jurisdictional cooperation also need further attention.
The effect of electoral autocracy in Egypt's failed transition: a party politics perspective
Authors: Resta Valeria 
Published: May 2019

AbstractAlthough the failed democratic transition in Egypt following the Arab Spring is unanimously held as a poster child for the stubbornness of authoritarianism in the MENA region, its determinants remain disputed. Contributing to this debate, this article focuses on the noxious effects of past electoral authoritarianism on the transitional party system. More specifically, through quantitative text analysis, the article demonstrates that transitional parties’ agency is largely the by-product of the way in which political competition was structured under the previous electoral autocracy. On the one hand, the uneven structure of opportunity upholding previous rule is central to the lack of pluralism. On the other hand, the previous regime's practice of playing opposition actors against each other through identity politics is at the root of the absence of common ground among the aforementioned parties during the transition.
Seven decades of uninterrupted advance of Good Friday Glacier, Axel Heiberg Island, Arctic Canada
Authors: MEDRZYCKA DOROTA , COPLAND LUKE , VAN WYCHEN WESLEY , BURGESS DAVID 
Published: May 2019

ABSTRACTPrevious studies reported that Good Friday Glacier had been actively surging in the 1950–60s, 1990s and again in 2000–15. Based on observations of terminus position change from air photos and satellite imagery, we fill the gaps between previous studies and conclude that the glacier has been advancing continuously since 1959. Ice surface velocities extracted from optical and synthetic aperture radar satellite images show higher flow rates than on most other marine-terminating glaciers in the region. This behaviour contrasts with the regional trend of glacier retreat over this period. Possible explanations involve a delayed response to positive mass-balance conditions of the Little Ice Age, or a dynamic instability. There is, however, insufficient evidence to attribute this behaviour to classical glacier surging as suggested in previous studies. Based on present-day ice velocity and glacier geometry patterns in the terminus region, we reconstruct the evolution of ice motion throughout the advance, and suggest that what has previously been interpreted as a surge, may instead have been a localised response to small-scale perturbations in bedrock topography.
On the retrieval of sea-ice thickness using SMOS polarization differences
Authors: GUPTA MUKESH , GABARRO CAROLINA , TURIEL ANTONIO , PORTABELLA MARCOS , MARTINEZ JUSTINO 
Published: May 2019

ABSTRACTArctic sea ice is going through a dramatic change in its extent and volume at an unprecedented rate. Sea-ice thickness (SIT) is a controlling geophysical variable that needs to be understood with greater accuracy. For the first time, a SIT-retrieval method that exclusively uses only airborne SIT data for training the empirical algorithm to retrieve SIT from Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) brightness temperature (TB) at different polarization is presented. A large amount of airborne SIT data has been used from various field campaigns in the Arctic conducted by different countries during 2011–15. The algorithm attempts to circumvent the issue related to discrimination between TB signatures of thin SIT versus low sea-ice concentration. The computed SIT has a rms error of 0.10 m, which seems reasonably good (as compared to the existing algorithms) for analysis at the used 25 km grid. This new SIT retrieval product is designed for direct operational application in ice prediction/climate models.
Global Euler obstruction, global Brasselet numbers and critical points
Authors: Dutertre Nicolas , Grulha Nivaldo G. 
Published: May 2019

AbstractLet X ⊂ ℂn be an equidimensional complex algebraic set and let f: X → ℂ be a polynomial function. For each c ∈ ℂ, we define the global Brasselet number of f at c, a global counterpart of the Brasselet number defined by the authors in a previous work, and the Brasselet number at infinity of f at c. Then we establish several formulas relating these numbers to the topology of X and the critical points of f.
Signs of development: photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda
Authors: Vokes Richard 
Published: May 2019

AbstractThis article contributes to recent scholarship on an emergent public political visual culture in Africa. Through an ethnographic study of political billboards and other government-sponsored public political imagery in Uganda, it argues that this new visual culture is primarily characterized by African states’ extensive use of post-photographic techniques as a means for projecting fantastic visions of their future development goals. However, drawing on recent insights from the ‘material turn’ in visual theory, it finds that – in Uganda's case at least – the potency of these new public visual artefacts may stem less from what theyshowthan from how they invoke in their citizen-viewers an embodied sense of future possibilities. Once generated, this affective response can be mobilized by the state and its agents in the ‘here and now’, for political gain. The article looks at how this worked in the run-up to Uganda's 2016 presidential elections, when, in the context of major new spending on national infrastructure projects, the images and artefacts of this new visual culture served to greatly amplify the sense that all citizens would benefit from an emergent global capitalism. This inflated aspiration was mobilized in turn by the National Resistance Movement government as an integral part of its election campaign, and played a key role in returning the government to power.
Natural Knowledge, Inc.: the Royal Society as a metropolitan corporation
Authors: MOXHAM NOAH 
Published: May 2019

AbstractThis article attempts to think through the logic and distinctiveness of the early Royal Society's position as a metropolitan knowledge community and chartered corporation, and the links between these aspects of its being. Among the knowledge communities of Restoration London it is one of the best known and most studied, but also one of the least typical and in many respects one of the least coherent. It was also quite unlike the chartered corporations of the City of London, exercising almost none of their ordinary functions and being granted very limited power and few responsibilities. I explore the society's imaginative and material engagements with longer-established corporate bodies, institutions and knowledge communities, and show how those encounters repeatedly reshaped the early society's internal organization, outward conduct and self-understanding. Building on fundamental work by Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Lisa Jardine and Jim Bennett, and new archival evidence, I examine the importance of the city to the society's foundational rhetoric and the shifting orientation of its search for patronage, the development of its charter, and how it learned to interpret the limits and possibilities of its privileges through its encounters with other chartered bodies, emphasizing the contingent nature of its early development.
Criteria for classification of protein–energy wasting in dialysis patients: impact on prevalence
Authors: Gracia-Iguacel Carolina , González-Parra Emilio , Mahillo Ignacio , Ortiz Alberto 
Published: May 2019

AbstractMalnutrition is highly prevalent in dialysis patients and associated with poor outcomes. In 2008, protein–energy wasting (PEW) was coined by the International Society of Renal Nutrition and Metabolism (ISRNM), as a single pathological condition in which undernourishment and hypercatabolism converge. In 2014, a new simplified score was described using serum creatinine adjusted for body surface area (sCr/BSA) to replace a reduction of muscle mass over time in the muscle wasting category. We have now compared PEW–ISRNM 2008 and PEW-score 2014 to evaluate the prevalence of PEW and the risk of death in 109 haemodialysis patients. This was a retrospective analysis of cross sectional data with a median prospective follow-up of 20 months. The prevalence of PEW was 41 % for PEW–ISRNM 2008 and 63 % for PEW-score 2014 (P&lt;0·002). Using PEW-score 2014: twenty-nine patients (27 %) had severe malnutrition (PEW-score 2014 0–1) and forty (37 %) with moderate malnutrition (score 2). Additionally, thirty-three (30 %) patients had mild wasting and only seven patients (6 %) presented a normal nutritional status. sCr/BSA correlated with lean total mass (R0·46.P&lt;0·001). A diagnosis of PEW according to PEW-score 2014, but not according to PEW–ISRNM 2008, was significantly associated with short-term mortality (P=0·0349) in univariate but not in multivariate analysis (P=0·069). In conclusion, the new PEW-score 2014 incorporating sCr/BSA identifies a higher number of dialysis PEW patients than PEW–ISRNM 2008. Whereas PEW-score-2014 provides timelier and therefore more clinically relevant information, its association with early mortality needs to be confirmed in larger studies.
Solidarity in Three Acts: Narrating US black freedom movements in China, 1961–66
Authors: DUAN RUODI 
Published: May 2019

AbstractThe political campaigns and events that comprised the US civil rights movement, as well as the urban race riots that coloured the 1960s, garnered widespread public attention and press coverage within the People's Republic of China (PRC). In the years between the Sino-Soviet Split in 1961 and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, China strove to substantiate its commitment to US black liberation in three key respects: consistent news reporting, sentimental receptions of visiting black activists, and local gatherings that publicized up-to-date information on US anti-racist struggles and featured ordinary citizens sharing notes of empathy. This multidimensional Chinese engagement of US black freedom struggles helped to cement both intra-national and international solidarities. The party state, its mouthpieces, and everyday students and workers echoed Mao Zedong's dictum that racial discrimination was a matter of class struggle. Embedded within their observations was a critical analysis of African American history and social movements in relationship to US capitalism. Their narrations of black resistance and Afro-Asian solidarity, while intimately bound up with nation-state interests, shed light on the intricate nexus of race, revolution, and international class struggle that defined the global Cold War.
An Overview of Nosocomial Infection Control in Brazil
Authors: Pannuti Claudio S. , Grinbaum Renato S. 
Published: May 2019

AbstractBrazil is the largest country in Latin America, with a population of 146 million people. The socioeconomic development and the distribution of population and health services varies widely within the country. There are approximately 1.2 million hospital admissions per month, 80% of them paid by a government healthcare program that follows the diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) model. The Ministry of Health has been trying to establish a nationwide nosocomial infection control program since 1983. Most Brazilian hospitals now have some kind of infection control activity, but only a few of them have complete programs. Infrastructural deficiencies, the scarcity of well-trained healthcare workers, and the widespread occurrence of multiresistant Staphylococcus aureus and gram-negative bacteria are some of the challenges faced by Brazilian hospitals in the control of nosocomial infection.
Population axiology and the possibility of a fourth category of absolute value
Authors: Gustafsson Johan E. 
Published: May 2019

AbstractCritical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Total Utilitarianism which can avoid both the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion in population ethics. Yet Standard Critical-Range Utilitarianism entails the Weak Sadistic Conclusion, that is, it entails that each population consisting of lives at a bad well-being level is not worse than some population consisting of lives at a good well-being level. In this paper, I defend a version of Critical-Range Utilitarianism which does not entail the Weak Sadistic Conclusion. This is made possible by what I call ‘undistinguishedness’, a fourth category of absolute value in addition to goodness, badness, and neutrality.
The emigration of British lacemakers to continental Europe (1816–1860s)
Authors: Bensimon Fabrice 
Published: May 2019

AbstractBetween 1815 and 1870, thousands of British artisans emigrated to the continent. Among them, hundreds of lacemakers from the East Midlands went to work in northern France, especially Calais. Thanks to the ‘bobbin-net’ technology, they had a competitive lead. By emigrating, they could sell in French markets without paying duties or smuggling costs. They maintained close connections with the East Midlands, where they bought machinery and cotton thread, hired their workforce, and obtained first-hand information on patterns and techniques. These migrant artisans played a decisive part in boosting continental industrialisation and in creating a unified zone of production in north-western Europe.