Overview on the synthetic routes to nicotine nitriles

The biological and medicinal properties of nicotinonitrile and its analogues have prompted enormous research aimed at developing synthetic routes to these heterocyclic. This review highlights the different synthetic routes to nicotine nitriles.     

Mutagenic, antimutagenic and antioxidant activities of a new class of beta-glucoside hydroxyhydroquinone from Anagallis monelli growing in Tunisia

A new skeleton of an O-heteroside natural substance named zinolol, the first representative of a new class of aminated hydroxyhydroquinone, has been isolated from the whole plant Anagallis monelli. Its structure has been established by one and two dimensional NMR spectroscopic procedures. Antioxidant, mutagenic, antimutagenic activities were realised and positive results were recorded.     

Chemical composition and antioxidant activity of Borago officinalis L. leaf extract growing in Algeria

The aqueous and hydroalcoholic extracts of borage (Borago officinalis) leaves from Annaba region (Algeria) were preliminary analyzed for their phenolic profile (total phenolics, total flavonoids, total flavonols, total tannins and total anthocyanins). These extracts were evaluated for their antioxidant properties by different methods such as DPPH radical scavenging, test NBT and total antioxidant activity. The two extracts have exhibited a high antiradical capacity. Indeed, the ethanolic extract showed the lower IC50 values and the highest amount of phenolics (94.09 ± 1.72 mg gallic acid/g dry extract). Using LC-MS/MS analysis, it was possible to identify phenolic acids, flavonoids, sterol and for the first time oleuropein was identified in the aqueous extract of the plant. The obtained results have demonstrated that phenolic compounds are the major contributor to the antioxidant activity of plants.     

Hysteresis Behaviour of 51CrV4 and Viscoplastic Modeling Aspects

In this work we investigate the material behaviour of steel 51CrV4 in classical uniaxial strain controlled tension tests of different strain rates interposed by relaxation steps, in which the equilibrium stress observed is significantly smaller than the stresses seen in slowest strain rate test. Also, some cyclic experiments with different strain rates and amplitudes were done to analyze the hysteresis behaviour of the material. Against this background of experimental data the modeling possibilties of two models are explored: the Lion model and the Chaboche model with kinematic hardening ansatz. (© 2011 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Tailoring the porous hierarchy of titanium phosphates

First hierarchical titanium phosphate (TiPO) materials with multiple porosities of different lengths (meso-macroporous and meso-macro-macroporous) were synthesized by the self-formation process. The further tuning of the porous hierarchy by using the poly(ethylene oxide) surfactant technique was demonstrated. The macroporous structure (50-160 nm in size) of TiPO with mesoporous walls could be self-formed in the absence of any templatable agents, including surfactant molecules. On the basis of spontaneous structurization, the addition of a small quantity of nonionic poly(ethylene oxide) surfactant (e.g., 5%) led to an improvement in macroporosity in abundance and in regularity with a slight enlargement in macropore sizes to 80-250 nm. Interestingly, a secondary, larger macropore system with parallel channels 500-1000 nm in size was generated when the synthesis was performed with moderately increasing the content of surfactant (10%), giving rise to an unprecedented trimodal meso-macro-macroporous structure. A uniform three-dimensional co-continuous macroporous structure with accessible wormhole-like mesoporous walls was synthesized by using the higher content of surfactants. This is a direct demonstration of tailoring the porous hierarchy of different lengths integrated in one solid body by fine-tuning the self-formation process and the participation of surfactant. The synthesized hierarchical titanium phosphates possess interesting optical and acidic properties, which should be significant for large application potential from catalysis and separation to electrochromic devices, fuel cells, and bioactive materials.     

Deterministic solution of the kinetic theory model of colloidal suspensions of structureless particles

A direct modeling of colloidal suspensions consists of calculating trajectories of all suspended objects. Due to the large time computing and the large cost involved in such calculations, we consider in this paper another route. Colloidal suspensions are described on a mesoscopic level by a distribution function whose time evolution is governed by a Fokker–Planck-like equation. The difficulty encountered on this route is the high dimensionality of the space in which the distribution function is defined. A novel strategy is used to solve numerically the Fokker–Planck equation circumventing the curse of dimensionality issue. Rheological and morphological predictions of the model that includes both direct and hydrodynamic interactions are presented in different flows.     

利用原位红外光谱与微分电化学质谱联用技术研究在Pt以及PtRu电极上发生的甲醇氧化反应

利用电化学衰减全反射原位傅里叶变换红外光谱与微分电化学质谱联用技术,在流动电解池环境以及恒电位条件下研究了Pt电极和Pt电极通过表面电沉积Ru形成的PtRu电极(Pt_xRu_y)上发生的甲醇氧化反应(反应电解质溶液为0.1 mol/L HClO₄+0.5 mol/L MeOH). 在0.3～0.6 V(参比电极为可逆氢参比)实验用到的所有电极上,CO是唯一能从红外光谱观察到的与甲醇相关的表面吸附物;在Pt_0.56Ru_0.44电极上可以观察到CO吸附在Ru原子形成的岛上和CO线式吸附在Pt电极表面红外波段,而其他电极上只能观察到Pt表面上线式吸附的CO;甲醇氧化活性按Pt_0.73Ru_0.27>Pt_0.56Ru_0.44>Pt_0.83Ru_0.17>Pt的顺序递减;在0.5 V 时,甲醇在Pt_0.73Ru_0.27电极上的氧化反应的CO₂电流效率达到了50%.     

Performance analysis of spectral-amplitude-coding optical CDMA systems with new subtract exclusive OR detection (SED) using vectors combinatorial (VC) code

This paper investigates the performance of vector combinatorial (VC) code for spectral amplitude coding optical code-division multiple-access (SAC-OCDMA) system using a newly proposed subtract exclusive OR detection (SED) technique. VC code is constructed using Euclidean vector and algebraic ways. One of the important properties of this code is that the maximum cross correlation is one, which means that multi-user interference (MUI) and phase induced intensity noise (PIIN) are reduced. The weight for the VC code can be any positive integer number. The system performance was evaluated by comparing the theoretical studies using related equations and simulation results taken from the commercial optical systems, “VPI? TransmissionMaker 7.1”. Significant improvement in system performances has been observed when the proposed SED technique employing VC code was applied compared to other codes that utilize conventional balance detection techniques for spectral amplitude coding.     

66 W average power from a microjoule-class sub-100 fs fiber oscillator

Performance scaling of passively mode-locked ultrashort-pulse fiber oscillators in terms of average power, peak power, and pulse energy is demonstrated. A very-large-mode-area fiber laser in an all-positive group-velocity-dispersion ring cavity configuration with intracavity spectral filter, mode-locked by nonlinear polarization evolution, emits 66 W of average power at 76 MHz repetition rate, corresponding to 0.9 μJ pulse energy. The pulses are dechirped to 91 fs outside the cavity with an average power of 60 W remaining after the compressor. The generated pulse peak power is as high as 7 MW.     

Ligand expansion in ligand-based virtual screening using relevance feedback

Query expansion is the process of reformulating an original query to improve retrieval performance in information retrieval systems. Relevance feedback is one of the most useful query modification techniques in information retrieval systems. In this paper, we introduce query expansion into ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS) using the relevance feedback technique. In this approach, a few high-ranking molecules of unknown activity are filtered from the outputs of a Bayesian inference network based on a single ligand molecule to form a set of ligand molecules. This set of ligand molecules is used to form a new ligand molecule. Simulated virtual screening experiments with the MDL Drug Data Report and maximum unbiased validation data sets show that the use of ligand expansion provides a very simple way of improving the LBVS, especially when the active molecules being sought have a high degree of structural heterogeneity. However, the effectiveness of the ligand expansion is slightly less when structurally-homogeneous sets of actives are being sought.