Highly efficient widely tunable subpicosecond double mode-locked laser

A high average power (≈150 mW) subpicosecond (0.5 ps) passively double mode-locked dye laser is described. Two synchronized cw pulse trains are generated which are independently tunable over broad wavelength ranges (≈600 Å).     

Singular spectrum analysis and Fisher–Shannon analysis of spring flow time series: An application to Anjar Spring,Lebanon

In this study, the time dynamics of water flow from Anjar Spring was investigated, which is one of the major issuing springs in the central part of Lebanon. Likewise, many water sources in Lebanon, this spring has no continuous records for the discharge, and this would prevent the application of standard time series analysis tools. Furthermore, the highly nonstationary character of the series implies that suited methodologies can be employed to get insight into its dynamical features. Therefore, the Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) and Fisher–Shannon (FS) method, which are useful methods to disclose dynamical features in noisy nonstationary time series with gaps, are jointly applied to analyze the Anjar Spring water flow series. The SSA revealed that the series can be considered as the superposition of meteo-climatic periodic components, low-frequency trend and noise-like high-frequency fluctuations. The FS method allowed to extract and to identify among all the SSA reconstructed components the long-term trend of the series. The long-term trend is characterized by higher Fisher Information Measure (FIM) and lower Shannon entropy, and thus, represents the main informative component of the whole series. Generally water discharge time series presents very complex time structure, therefore the joint application of the SSA and the FS method would be very useful in disclosing the main informative part of such kind of data series in the view of existing climatic variability and/or anthropogenic challenges.     

Cycloaddition of Aroyl Isothiocyanate: A Novel Synthesis of Triazine,Oxazine, Pyrimidine,and Pyridine Derivatives

A simple and direct synthetic methodology for a novel series of azines and their annulated systems was performed. Heterocyclization of acyl isothiocyanate 2 with urea or malononitrile gave s‐triazine 4 and 1,3‐oxazine 7 derivatives, respectively. The reaction of heteroallene 1 with acetylacetone tolerated 2‐thioxopyridine derivative 9 . The latter compound underwent heterocyclization with urea, hydrazine hydrate, or phenyl hydrazine to give the annulated pyridines 10 – 12 . Pyrimidinethione 14 was resulted from reaction of acylisothiocyanate with enamine 13 . Condensation of compound 14 with hydrazine hydrate, phenyl hydrazine, urea, and 3‐nitrobenzaldehyde in the presence of ethyl cyanoacetate or sodium hydroxide afforded 15 – 20 , respectively.     

Nonlinear Optical Switching in Regioregular Porphyrin Covalent Organic Frameworks

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) have garnered immense scientific interest among porous materials because of their structural tunability and diverse properties. However, the response of such materials toward laser‐induced nonlinear optical (NLO) applications is hardly understood and demands prompt attention. Three novel regioregular porphyrin (Por)‐based porous COFs—Por‐COF‐HH and its dual metalated congeners Por‐COF‐ZnCu and Por‐COF‐ZnNi—have been prepared and present excellent NLO properties. Notably, intensity‐dependent NLO switching behavior was observed for these Por‐COFs, which is highly desirable for optical switching and optical limiting devices. Moreover, the efficient π‐conjugation and charge‐transfer transition in ZnCu‐Por‐COF enabled a high nonlinear absorption coefficient (β=4470 cm/GW) and figure of merit (FOM=σ₁/σ_o, 3565) value compared to other state‐of‐the‐art materials, including molecular porphyrins (β≈100–400 cm/GW), metal–organic frameworks (MOFs; β≈0.3–0.5 cm/GW), and graphene (β=900 cm/GW).     

Cetyl‐alcohol‐reinforced hollow fiber solid/liquid‐phase microextraction and HPLC–DAD analysis of ezetimibe and simvastatin in human plasma and urine

A new cetyl‐alcohol‐reinforced hollow fiber solid/liquid‐phase microextraction (CA–HF–SLPME) followed by high‐performance liquid chromatography–diode array detection (HPLC–DAD) method was developed for simultaneous determination of ezetimibe and simvastatin in human plasma and urine samples. To prepare the CA–HF–SLPME device, the cetyl‐alcohol was immobilized into the pores of a 2.5 cm hollow fiber micro‐tube and the lumen of the micro‐tube was filled with 1‐octanol with the two ends sealed. Afterwards, the prepared device was introduced into 10 mL of the sample solution containing the analytes with agitation. Under optimized conditions, calibration curves plotted in spiked plasma and urine samples were linear in the ranges of 0.363–25/0.49–25 μg L^?1 for ezetimibe/simvastatin and 0.193–25/0.312–25 μg L^?1 for ezetimibe/simvastatin in plasma and urine samples, respectively. The limit of detection was 0.109/0.174 μg L^?1 for ezetimibe/simvastatin in plasma and 0.058/0.093 μg L^?1 for ezetimibe/simvastatin in urine. As a potential application, the proposed method was applied to determine the concentration of selected analytes in patient plasma and urine samples after medication and satisfactory results were achieved. In comparison with reference methods, the CA–HF–SLPME–HPLC–DAD method demonstrates considerable potential in the biopharmaceutical analysis of selected drugs.     

Michael addition of 1,3-dicarbonyl compounds catalyzed by iron oxide nanoparticles

Several iron oxides nanoparticles (Fe₂O₃@Fe₂O₃, Fe°@Fe₂O₃, GO@Fe₂O₃ and calcinated Fe₂O₃) have been assessed as catalysts in the 1,4-addition of a cyclic β-ketoester onto methyl vinyl ketone under neat conditions. It appeared that calcinated Fe₂O₃NP are efficient catalysts at 1?mol% loading for the Michael addition of 1,3-dicarbonyl compounds onto various enones.     

Quantitative Prediction of Rate Constants for Aqueous Racemization To Avoid Pointless Stereoselective Syntheses

Racemization has a large impact upon the biological properties of molecules but the chemical scope of compounds with known rate constants for racemization in aqueous conditions was hitherto limited. To address this remarkable blind spot, we have measured the kinetics for racemization of 28 compounds using circular dichroism and ¹H NMR spectroscopy. We show that rate constants for racemization (measured by ourselves and others) correlate well with deprotonation energies from quantum mechanical (QM) and group contribution calculations. Such calculations thus provide predictions of the second‐order rate constants for general‐base‐catalyzed racemization that are usefully accurate. When applied to recent publications describing the stereoselective synthesis of compounds of purported biological value, the calculations reveal that racemization would be sufficiently fast to render these expensive syntheses pointless.     

IoTScal‐H : Hybrid monitoring solution based on cloud computing for autonomic middleware‐level scalability management within IoT systems and different SLA traffic requirements

Wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies have enabled ubiquitous sensing to intersect many areas of modern day living. The creation of these devices offers the ability to get, gather, exchange, and consume environmental measurement from the physical world in a communicating‐actuating network, called the Internet of Things (IoT). As the number of physical world objects from heterogeneous network environments grows, the data produced by these objects raise uncontrollably, bringing a delicate challenge into scalability management in the IoT networks. Cloud computing is a much more mature technology, offering unlimited virtual capabilities in terms of storage capacity and processing power. Ostensibly, it seems that cloud computing and IoT are evolving independently on their own paths, but in reality, the integration of clouds with IoT will lead to deal with the inability to scale automatically depending on the overload caused by the drastic growth of the number of connected devices and/or by the huge amount of exchanged data in the IoT networks. In this paper, our objective is to promote the scalability management, using hybrid mechanism that will combine traffic‐oriented mechanism and resources‐oriented mechanism, with adaption actions. By the use of autonomic middleware within IoT systems, we seek to improve the monitoring components's architectural design, based on cloud computing‐oriented scalability solution. The intention is to maximize the number of satisfied requests, while maintaining at an acceptable QoS level of the system performances (RTT of the system, RAM, and CPU of the middleware). In order to evaluate our solution performance, we have performed different scenarios testbed experiments. Generally, our proposed results are better than those mentioned as reference.