Synthesis of manganese dioxide by homogeneous hydrolysis in the presence of melamine

A new selective method for the synthesis of nanocrystalline manganese dioxide (α-, β-, and γ-MnO₂) based on the reaction of potassium permanganate with 2,4,6-triamino-1,3,5-triazine (melamine) under hydrothermal conditions has been proposed. Effect of synthesis conditions on the phase composition of the products has been revealed. A new manganese-containing phase with layered structure has been prepared.     

A high performance MQ encoder architecture in JPEG2000

In this paper, a novel architecture for an MQ arithmetic coder with high throughput is proposed. The architecture can process two symbols in parallel. The main characteristics are eight process elements for the prediction of probability interval A, the combination of calculation units for the code register C with the Byteout&Flush procedure, and the use of a dedicated probability estimation table to decrease the internal memory. From FPGA synthesis results, the architecture’s throughput can reach 96.60 M context symbols per second with an internal memory size of 1509 bits, which is comparable to that of other architectures and suitable for chip implementation.     

Rapid development of scalable scientific software using a process oriented approach

Scientific applications are often not written with multiprocessing, cluster computing or grid computing in mind. This paper suggests using Python and PyCSP to structure scientific software through Communicating Sequential Processes. Three scientific applications are used to demonstrate the features of PyCSP and how networks of processes may easily be mapped into a visual representation for better understanding of the process workflow. We show that for many sequential solutions, the difficulty in implementing a parallel application is removed. The use of standard multi-threading mechanisms such as locks, conditions and monitors is completely hidden in the PyCSP library. We show the three scientific applications: kNN, stochastic minimum search and McStas to scale well on multi-processing, cluster computing and grid computing platforms using PyCSP.     

Stable Pyrrole-Linked Bioconjugates through Tetrazine-Triggered Azanorbornadiene Fragmentation

An azanorbornadiene bromovinyl sulfone reagent for cysteine-selective bioconjugation has been developed. Subsequent reaction with dipyridyl tetrazine leads to bond cleavage and formation of a pyrrole-linked conjugate. The latter involves ligation of the tetrazine to the azanorbornadiene-tagged protein through inverse electron demand Diels–Alder cycloaddition with subsequent double retro-Diels–Alder reactions to form a stable pyrrole linkage. The sequence of site-selective bioconjugation followed by bioorthogonal bond cleavage was efficiently employed for the labelling of three different proteins. This method benefits from easy preparation of these reagents, selectivity for cysteine, and stability after reaction with a commercial tetrazine, which has potential for the routine preparation of protein conjugates for chemical biology studies.     

Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network harvester improvement for efficient open-data collection and management

With the recent increase in data disclosure, the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), which is an open-source data distribution platform, is drawing much attention. CKAN is used together with additional extensions, such as Datastore and Datapusher for data management and Harvest and DCAT for data collection. This study derives the problems of CKAN itself and Harvest Extension. First, CKAN causes two problems of data inconsistency and storage space waste for data deletion. Second, Harvest Extension causes three additional problems, namely source deletion that deletes only sources without deleting data themselves, job stop that cannot delete job during data collection, and service interruption that cannot provide service, even if data exist. Based on these observations, we propose herein an improved CKAN that provides a new deletion function solving data inconsistency and storage space waste problems. In addition, we present an improved Harvest Extension solving three problems of the legacy Harvest Extension. We verify the correctness and the usefulness of the improved CKAN and Harvest Extension functions through actual implementation and extensive experiments.