Inherent electrochemical activity of TiO2 (anatase,rutile) enhances the charge capacity of cathodes of lithium-sulfur batteries

Journal of Solid State Electrochemistry - The addition of nanocrystalline titanium dioxide (P90) to a cathode of Li/S cell enhances its voltammetric charge capacity by 19%, from which only a small...     

A characterization of sets in ℝ2 with DC distance function

Czechoslovak Mathematical Journal - We give a complete characterization of closed sets F ? ?2 whose distance function dF:= dist(·, F) is DC (i.e., is the difference of two convex...     

A sharp inequality for the variance with respect to the Ewens sampling formula

Lithuanian Mathematical Journal - We examine the variance of a linear statistic defined on the symmetric group endowed with the Ewens probability. Despite the dependence of the summands, it can be...     

Evaluation of education scenarios for acquiring digital competences of secondary school students in Slovenia

Central European Journal of Operations Research - Digital competences are among the most important competences in modern society, with the education system playing a key role in the acquisition of...     

The Universality of an Absolutely Convergent Series on Short Intervals

Siberian Mathematical Journal - Under consideration is a Dirichlet series depending on a parameter and absolutely convergent in the right half of the critical strip. We prove that...     

On Joint Universality of the Riemann and Hurwitz Zeta-Functions

Mathematical Notes - In 2007, H. Mishou proved the universality theorem on the joint approximation of a pair of analytic functions by the shifts $$(\zeta(s+i\tau),\zeta(s+i\tau,\alpha))$$ of the...     

Periodic Golay pairs and pairwise balanced designs

Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics - In this paper we exploit a relationship between certain pairwise balanced designs with v points and periodic Golay pairs of length v, to classify periodic Golay...     

The Estimation of Parameters for the Tapered Pareto Distribution from Incomplete Data

Lithuanian Mathematical Journal - In this paper, we consider estimation of unknown parameters of the tapered Pareto distribution, which belongs to the class of semiheavy distributions, by a sample...     

Sensitive CE-MS method for monitoring of riociguat and desmethylriociguat levels in human serum

Riociguat is novel antihypertensive drug for treatment of pulmonary hypertension. As such, it is still being tested in many clinical and pharmacokinetic trials. Existing methods that determine serum riociguat and desmethylriociguat (DMR) are based solely on liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry. Therefore, we present a novel capillary electrophoresis with mass spectrometry method (CE-MS) for their determination in human serum as alternative method for ongoing trials. Complete resolution of both analytes was achieved by means of pH optimization of ammonium formate background electrolytes that are fully compatible with ESI/MS detection. Simple liquid-liquid extraction was used as sample pretreatment. The calibration dependence of the method was linear (in the range of 10–1000 ng/mL), with adequate accuracy (90.1–114.9%) and precision (13.4%). LOD and LOQ were arbitrarily set at 10 ng/mL for both analytes. Clinical applicability was validated using serum samples from patients treated with riociguat in pharmacokinetic study and the results corresponded with reference HPLC-MS/MS values. Capillary electrophoresis proved to be sensitive and selective tool for the analysis of riociguat and DMR.     

Cytotoxic dimeric half-sandwich Ru(II), Os(II) and Ir(III) complexes containing the 4,4′-biphenyl-based bridging ligands

A series of dinuclear half-sandwich Ru(II), Os(II) and Ir(III) complexes [Ru₂(μ-Lⁿ)(η⁶-pcym)₂Cl₂](PF₆)₂ ( 1 , 4 ), [Os₂(μ-Lⁿ)(η⁶-pcym)₂Cl₂](PF₆)₂ ( 2 , 5 ) and [Ir₂(μ-Lⁿ)(η⁵-Cp*)₂Cl₂](PF₆)₂ ( 3 , 6 ), based on 4,4′-biphenyl-based bridging Schiff base ligands N,N′-(biphenyl-4,4′-diyldimethylidyne)bis-2-(pyridin-2-yl)methanamine (L¹; for 1 – 3 ) and N,N′-(biphenyl-4,4′-diyldimethylidyne)bis-2-(pyridin-2-yl)ethanamine (L²; for 4 – 6 ) is reported; pcym = 1-methyl-4-(propan-2-yl)benzene, Cp* = pentamethylcyclopentadienyl. The complexes were characterized by relevant analytical techniques (i.e. elemental analysis, FT-IR, NMR, ESI-MS), and their in vitro cytotoxicity was assessed at six cancerous and two non-cancerous (healthy) human cell lines. Overall, complexes 4 – 6 , containing the L² bridging ligand, revealed higher cytotoxicity as compared with 1 – 3 and, thus, they were studied in greater detail. The best-performing complex 6 exceeded at least twice the in vitro cytotoxicity of cisplatin and showed high selectivity towards the cancer cells over the normal ones, including the primary culture of human hepatocytes. In contrast to cisplatin, complexes 4 – 6 did not induce the cell cycle modification of the treated A2780 human ovarian carcinoma cells (studied by flow cytometry and Western blot analysis). High levels of superoxide anion were induced by complexes 4 – 6 at the A2780 cells. The levels of activated forms of Caspase-3 and Caspase-8 at the A2780 cells treated by Ru(II) complex 4 were comparable with cisplatin, while complexes 5 and 6 had only a minor effect on activation of these caspases.